My mother was worried that I wouldn’t be able to have children due to the amount of cycling I do. There is zero economic output in telling her otherwise, because her findings are from native intelligence, which supersedes scientific intelligence.
It is for the same reason I don’t stand around someone seated, because then you will be sucking their blood, and for the same reason I don’t wear red when it is raining because I will be struck by lightning. It has never happened, ut why tempt fate?
I started cycling after I handed my heart to a girl with a bell for an ass, and she returned it to me a few years later, torn and tattered, ensuring that every woman after her I would love a little less. My then counsellor said I needed to add weight; I was a small guy, certainly smaller than the big-fisted, chest thick with hair, the kind of guy that I sensed my erstwhile lover’s eyes moving to when we were together. My boys don’t know this version of the story, and they don’t need to. Apparently, I also had something called a core, and it could do with being, well, stronger.
So I bought a bike. And the Luhya blood in me has this thing about owning a baiskeli, which is as much a rite of passage as the Omukhebi, that traditional surgeon, dismembering the tip of my manhood with his lukembe knife, and in one shwaaa, turning it inside out, launching me from an unsullied boy into full-blown manhood.
Cycling has been good for me; my calves are elite, and I look good in jeans. I have been told this by women, but I am not one to stare a gift horse in the mouth. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. Thus, it was only a matter of time before my younger brother joined, and trust the hombre to notch it up a bit. Man has been cycling to Narok and back, just for fun. My ageing lungs and tattered heart struggle to keep pace—despite my lack of sideburns accounting for about 20 per cent aerodynamic advantage.
As these things go, eventually, everyone asks if I want to be a pro, you know, like Lance Armstrong. And I tell them Lance Armstrong actually cheated his way to the top. Don’t trust these big-fisted, thick-hair-chested guys. Okay, maybe I don’t tell them that. But I do think it. The implication is if I’m passionate about something, I should also be proficient. I say thanks, but I’m happy being a below-average cyclist. Just like they are Sunday Christians. I also don’t tell them that.
Maybe it’s why many men don’t have hobbies. Wasting time without feeling like time has been wasted. A night of partying, smelling of whiskey and stale cigarettes and bright lights loses its sheen after a while, and you just want to do something perfectly normal like summitting Mt Kilimanjaro. Or winning a triathlon. It seems like the most unlikely load of narcissism on this side of the Kalahari. But one man’s narcissism is another man’s self-awareness.
Look, I blame our Physical Education (PE) teachers. Unlike in the British curriculum with progress reports, our teachers were never really invested, if they were there at all. There was nothing physical about that education, and the educational part contained no physicality. We were ships floating at sea, no rudder, no captain.
We used to run to the field and do a couple of star jumps or frog jumps before some eager teacher on attachment asking us to raise our hands in the air like we were descendants of Moses and “call the rain”. Wait—that’s not even the worst part. On some days, a Maths/Chemistry teacher would hijack the lesson and commandeer the rest of the afternoon to drill in the Haber Process and get us into the Alliances and Lenana and Starehes. And you wonder why millennials are always angry.
As an overachiever, I went ahead and asked myself: what hobbies do our presidents, the symbol of national unity, have? They told me the first president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s hobby was hosting traditional dancers and listening to choirs at home. My friend. There is no point in asking what Moi’s hobbies were: alifuata nyayo. And Ruto? Well, he was a chicken seller, and I am a chicken eater, but I don’t eat as a hobby. It feels derogatory. I could be wrong, though I suspect I am not. What is our national pastime activity? It’s not drinking; Uganda takes the erm, bottle, on that one, but you would drink too if your president was also drunk on power.
This is not about living your life in the gym, but maintaining an active lifestyle, something to take you away from the “hustle culture” that equates busyness with success, that leads to the expectation that our precious spare time should be spent honing our skills or increasing our output. No. Yes, the gym can’t make you smarter, richer, or funnier. You can’t deadlift your income. You can't add plates to a bar to increase your charisma.
Or squat your way into being witty. Those are things you still have to work on, but is there anything more interesting to break the ice with than telling someone you joined a jiu-jitsu class? Or ran a marathon, willingly. Bird watching. “I walked up a very large hill for several hours and then walked back down” sounds insane until you call it hiking.
And the best part is, if the thing is worth doing, it is worth doing, even if you do it poorly. The pointlessness of the whole thing is the point.
