Wednesday 25 September 2013

The man with no endorphins

You'll no doubt have noticed that I'm a bit keen on bicycles and at the latest count, i.e just now and in my head, there are now 14 scattered about the house. They aren't all mine, they aren't all fit to ride and some of them are just waiting to be given away when the right person turns up. As I also walk about a lot one of my habits has been to recover abandoned bikes, or whatever good is left of them, and then produce a working bike out of the bits. 

The frame, and most of the parts, of one of these found bikes was recently ridden by my son when, last month, we rode the middle hilly section of the first stage of next year's Tour de France where it runs through the Yorkshire Dales. The bike that I rode to accompany him may legally be mine but I was given it in the will my old friend John Wilson and as far as I'm concerned it's still John's bike. 

We're lucky here in Scarborough to have delightful places to go for bike rides. If I've got a spare hour I often nip up onto Oliver's Mount and ride around the motorcycle racing circuit. The road surface is good, there isn't much traffic and there are plenty of different routes you can choose that either go around the top or up, down and around the sides of the hill.

Now whilst Oliver's Mount is generally quiet, as are most of the roads that lead up into the North York Moors or over the Yorkshire Wolds, riding around town or on major roads is a different matter. Despite a recent increase in popularity, cycling remains a minority pursuit and the attitudes of many other road users often leave a lot to be desired. In one of my earliest posts, Dispositional or Situational, I looked at the role our social identity plays in determining our attitudes to each other. As far as many motorist are concerned people on bikes are not only part of an out group, as opposed to the in group of fellow motorists, but also a minority out group, a group that doesn't fit in with the prevailing social norm. Hence when people on bikes end up in direct conflict with those in cars, trucks or vans there isn't always a meeting of minds*.

However, and this gets me to the point of this post, if or when I've been carved up by an inconsiderate motorist, and actually get the opportunity to let them know what I think about it, it's a stressful situation all round. My heart rate is elevated, there's a rush of fat and glycogen into my bloodstream, all in all a classic flight or fight response

In the aftermath of one of these incidents, when I'd been dangerously overtaken as I was coming off Oliver's Mount, and as I was retrospectively rehearsing what I should have said in the heat of the moment, I remembered a book that I'd read many years ago by an American science writer James Gorman. The book was just a reprinted series of essays that had been published in Discover magazine and carried the title The Man with No Endorphins. Now whilst this was about the evolutionary fact that we'd evolved a natural pain killing mechanism, endorphins, for traditional sources of pain such as long distance running or getting bitten by fierce creatures, there was no mechanism for dealing with modern sources of "pain" such as that of a computer that freezes or of getting stuck in a traffic jam. 

So, whilst I was getting an adrenalin rush so too was the driver of the vehicle but, while I was busy working this out of my system with a post dispute burst of physical activity, for which the response had evolved, he was stuck sat behind a steering wheel stewing in a flush of inappropriate hormones. 

*It seems that the drivers of red vans are much more considerate of cyclists than those in white vans. A plausible explanation is that a good proportion of red vans in the UK are Post Office vans and a lot of Post Office workers still use bikes


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