It's getting better.
Lessons on riding through rain with the delightfully unflappable Lael Wilcox.
I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday weekend! Please enjoy this *tuesday mantra because recreational substack writers need days off too…
Mantra: It’s getting better.
“I think it’s getting better.”
I heard those words at least a dozen times as we traversed in the fog across the famous seven sisters road on Mount Tamalpais. It was unclear if, in any of those moments, the weather was in fact getting better. But it didn’t really matter. Lael Wilcox was delightfully unbothered.
When we had pedaled off into a relatively sunny San Francisco morning an hour earlier, there was no talk of throwing rain jackets or arm warmers in our pockets. It was California, after all! And this looked to be a fabulous day.
But as we crossed the bridge and climbed up into the fog, it was a different story. The fog became rain, the wind whipped our faces and the visibility reduced to the few feet beyond our front wheels.
This was certainly not what I had in mind when I’d planned to come up to the city to take my friend on a scenic coastal tour of my home roads before she took off on her big trip. I looked over at Lael sheepishly, her bare arms covered in goosebumps and kit soaked all the way through.
She was beaming.
“I think it’s getting better,” she said, “and either way, I’m just happy to be out on my bike.”
It hit me in that moment that, whether on not the fog was lifting and the clouds were parting, this mindset was the right one.
So often, it is not what is happening in the moment that causes us to spiral into negativity. It is the prediction that things might get worse. The expectation that things might get colder and windier and wetter, and that all will be lost.
That mindset is one we come by honestly as human beings, a characteristic of the mind psychologists call a “negativity bias”. Evolutionarily speaking, paying attention to negative information more than positive information helped humans avoid danger and survive longer.
But in a world where we are no longer regularly being chased by tigers and bears, our negative mental framing is not always useful to us. Lael’s words reminded me that while there was a good chance we were going to be very cold, the likelihood of imminent death was far lower than my amygdala wanted me to believe. When I came back fully to the present moment, it really wasn’t that bad.
In fact, it was getting better.
Those words become more of a mantra than an observation as we continued along the ridge. We did not talk about the long cold descent ahead of us, the rain jackets we should have thrown in our pockets or our frozen fingers struggling to grip the brakes. Instead, we focused on the patch of blue sky in the distance and the promise of a bakery stop along the coast.
Eventually, the weather did shift. We dipped below the clouds and stopped to sip warm coffee by the coast just long enough for the feeling to return to our fingers. By the time we made it back across the golden gate bridge, we could see the sun trying to peek through.
“I think it’s actually getting better,” I said somewhere along the way.
Lael turned to me with a cheeky grin.
“It always does. You just have to keep riding long enough.”
P.S. The fabulous Lael (@laelwilcox) will be heading off in less than two weeks to attempt to set a record for riding her bike around the world - for a second time. I’ll say that again louder for the people in the back: she is riding her bike around the world AGAIN. Faster. Much faster.
Lael will try to take 30 days off her 2025 record to go after the overall fastest circumnavigation ever completed by a man or woman. This will involve averaging roughly 240 miles per day for almost three months. And knowing Lael, she’ll probably be doing it all with a big smile and a relentless focus on what could go right.
Join me in cheering her on as she the film from previous record here:
Message: better take the only way out….
Musing: start telling a better story…
Are you struggling more with what is happening right now - or with the story you are telling yourself about what might happen next?
Lael is a national treasure.
It's getting better somewhat relates to The Parable of the Two Arrows as Buddha explained to his student- In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional. All of life revolves around impermanence but it is that we forget a lot of the times that these long endurance activities we pursue or do thrive on being adaptable skills and more so keeping the uptempo at its peak while going through obstacles or whatever it is.
Also as Viktor Frankl famously said- Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.