Why I Ride - John Ray
John Ray is a Texas transplant who now calls Fayetteville, AR home. John is the Co-Founder of Abide Collective, a local organization focused on building homes for families in need, leading immersive life-changing experiences in the outdoors, and providing spiritual wayfinding to people of all backgrounds. John loves people, laughs easily and often, and loves to craft a great story. Most days you can find John riding the Oz Trails and the gravel roads of the rural Ozarks with friends and a smile on his face.
Why I Ride or, You Can’t Outrun Grief, So You Better Get a Bike.
My wife Jane was the first one to figure it out.
She would take her old Giant Iguana out and ride the trails that formed the NWA Greenway in its earliest days. On her bike, she could cry, cuss, scream, or just...be. Dark sunglasses and the noise of the wind concealed the real reasons for her ride.
Those were brutal days, the first weeks and months after our youngest daughter Olivia was struck and killed by an impaired college student just a mile from our home. Grief is more than mental; it’s a physical thing. In those days it constantly threatened to overwhelm us if we didn’t work it out, and find a way to physically release it. As I said, Jane figured out before I did that the simple act of riding a bike was an effective way to work through the weight of overwhelming grief. Following her lead, I soon unearthed my outdated, undersized Schwinn 5.11 and took the first painful pedal strokes myself. Before long, we were both pushing farther and riding longer. Then we sold one of our cars and bought two new Cannondale hybrids from our friend Ben at the Bike Route. Soon we began looking forward to riding as more than just a grief-management strategy. It helped us begin to feel alive again, to explore our forever-changed world in a non-threatening way. Bikes and gears and routes all became tools we could use to relate in a healthy manner to a world that had stopped making sense. It gave us an experience to orient to, and from.
Look, it wasn’t a magic pill that fixed everything. There was so much more, so many other people who carried us through, but the bikes hold a special place in the midst of it all.
It’s been over ten years since those first small ventures out, and both of us continue to ride. Biking is now a primary form of transportation for me. I’ve logged around 30,0000 miles to date, mostly on the NWA Greenway and the soft trials of Oz. I’ve ridden when the temps hovered around 10 and when they scorched up over 100. I’ve ridden through snow and storms. I’ve nearly collided with just about every form of humanity and wildlife that populates NWA. I’ve made a host of friends in the restaurants, coffee shops, parks, and bike stores along the route. I’ve learned so much about myself, this area, biking for recreation, transportation, and therapy.
All of this is why I ride and why I hope to keep riding far into the future.