On Refusing to Earn Your Way Into Joy

Cassie McClure
Fri, 01 May 2026 23:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

When I first met my husband, he ran through the standard get-to-know-you questions, one of which was, did I like to bike? As he was, and still is, very handsome, the answer was a swift, "Of course!"

I lied.

It's not that I was anti-bike or didn't know how to ride; I just wasn't an avid cyclist, which is what he sounded like at the time. That turned out to be also a slight hyperbole from his end, but much less than mine.
Updated: Sun May 03, 2026

When I first met my husband, he ran through the standard get-to-know-you questions, one of which was, did I like to bike? As he was, and still is, very handsome, the answer was a swift, "Of course!"

I lied.

It's not that I was anti-bike or didn't know how to ride; I just wasn't an avid cyclist, which is what he sounded like at the time. That turned out to be also a slight hyperbole from his end, but much less than mine.

I bike as I hike, and sometimes, how I write, in the past tense. I enjoy the end of the ride, the trail behind me, the parking lot in view, and the carefully edited, published piece glowing on the screen.

However, I am also quite the Taurus who allows myself to be lured to do uncomfortable things with the promise of a coffee or pastries dangled in front of me. When I tell colleagues that I'll show up for food, they'll give that small talk chortle, but I'm not joking and will judge you for leaving the pastries in the plastic clamshells from the store. That's amateur hour. Tell me you picked it up from that new little place, and we'll both know you're lying, but it's about the effort.

But effort shouldn't become a barrier, as it often is in many athletic hobbies. You showed up for the group ride on the hundred-dollar Walmart bike, not the four-thousand-dollar specialty bike? "That's," they say slowly as they gaze at your jeggings, "still fine." And you'll know it's not fine, and they'll ride so fast that the sweep rider in the back sighs every time you stop pumping the pedals. You wonder when this becomes a fun activity.

In one of my more recent physically fit years, I tried to ride the desert with a women's group advertised as beginner-friendly. Maury wouldn't need to pull anything out of an envelope to determine that it was a lie nearly at the start of the ride, especially when some of the women leading the ride wore handmade sandals.

I tried to keep a chipper attitude for as long as I could, but the explicatives came hard and fast after the first few hills. I learned, however, that if there's a hell, one level is you yowling about how it's not a beginner ride as lithe bikers stand on a hill waiting for you. Once you reach the crest, red-faced and making bellowing noises while inhaling, they'll proclaim that they're all ready to continue.

A more friendly acquaintance in the biking community, after another desert ride where I had a moment of joy on a downhill and yelled a decidedly uncool, "wee!" gave the most pragmatic take: Had the grueling uphill climb been worth the thrill of the downhill, even if it didn't last nearly as long?

My take: What's at the end of the downhill? Is it coffee or just another hill? It was still a wee bit lacking in joy. I realized that for a long while, I didn't allow myself to take joy in the way I wanted: a ride on a predictable, even path where I could look at the sky, the trees, or the roadrunners darting through the nearby field.

Not every ride needs to be a test, and not every hobby needs to become a personality. Somewhere along the way, we decided that to belong, you have to be good, or fast, or at least visibly improving. That you need the right gear, the right stamina, or the right suffering.

With so many barriers to entry in life, let me argue that you can still enjoy certain things without the compulsion to be all in.

I'm not interested in earning my way into enjoyment anymore. If I ride a bike, it will be slow, probably with the wrong clothes for the occasion, but with a clear destination involving caffeine or sugar. I will not apologize for stopping and catching my breath. I will not pretend to enjoy hills. I will not be shamed into thinking it only counts if it hurts.

Sometimes the people who love a thing the most don't always make it the easiest to enter, but I'll still show up on the same roads, riding along my own path.