Early Morning Bike Ride

A good hard cycle ride is my chosen way to start the day. At six o’clock there’s no-one about on the tow path that runs along the banks of the River Lagan where huge work horses used to tow barges to and from Belfast. The barges are long gone, but the path has been maintained, and walkers and cyclists make great use of it now.

At about 5.30 I disentangle my ready, anxious limbs from those of my soft, warm wife, careful not to waken her, and I tiptoe out of the room. There’s usually a debate going on in my stomach as to whether I should eat anything before I go out, but I more often don’t, the call of the cold outdoors is too compelling.

I cut onto the path where it runs close to my house and follow the river for a couple of miles or so towards the city. The early morning sunshine is a treat, gentle and still without any great heat built into it. Excellent cycling weather. I have to chase up through some parkland before I get to the riverbank, and by that time I’m warm. I set the gears so that I’ll feel the effect of the incline hard enough in my legs to make the ride qualify as exercise, then it’s downhill for a while to the river itself.

There’s usually no-one around, certainly no families with children and dogs darting off in all directions, interrupting my stride. I cycle along the flat path through woods and past swampy fields that thankfully no-one will ever be able to build on. The route is familiar enough to me to let me relax my concentration without ending up in the river or the bushes. I’ve come to know every twist and turn, and I take time to notice the fields, the trees, the river, even the sky.

May and June are good months for watching birds. Families of ducks and swans take no notice of me and wander around the river bank, playing, squabbling and sometimes kicking up a terrible din in the process. Some of them will fly off and then come in for a splash landing further away, leaving a lengthening v shape behind them in the slow-moving, black water, and I’m conscious that I’m the only one there to see it all. Solitary herons and cranes suddenly stand out from the background of reeds when they make a move on a fish.

Sometimes I stop for a while on a bridge that crosses the river and I spend a quiet moment just looking along the narrow reach of the water, noticing fish and listening to all the other more common birds twittering away in the trees. And there are cows. Farmers graze cattle in most of the fields, and I remember that some time ago, even just 50 years away, this was rural Ireland, not just a leafy suburb of a city that has outgrown itself.

I have a favourite log, the remnant of a huge oak that fell or was felled a long time ago. It lies alone in a field, far from any other trees or bushes. Cows graze on the lush grass around it, and that’s where I choose to sit and enjoy the cool movement of air on my neck. I read aloud to myself, knowing I’ll not be heard. I usually read a Psalm.

“O Lord my Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth”.

Till this moment man is only evident in the building of the path, the bridge and in the shadow that I caste on the ground as I cycle along, surrounded by such a luxury of nature, but it’s not too long before the first “plane arrives from London. Already hanging ominously low in the sky with the airport only a mile or so away, it announces itself with a harsh roar.

I cycle on for a bit before the first houses rise up from the bushes. The path finds its way down into the dockland, through narrow gaps between the river and the houses and factories, but I leave it at Stranmillis, just where countryside becomes town. I cycle uphill for a few miles against the flow of city-bound traffic. The city is awake by then. Children and workers are propelled reluctantly along communication corridors in cars and buses, no doubt some with sleep still in their eyes, but I”m awake and hungry, feeling the strain in my thighs and my calves.

I cycle on, ever uphill and I enjoy it. I exult in the mild pain I can sense in my legs, the sweat and the prospect of a freezing cold shower, and I rejoice that I am alive, that God has seen fit to smile upon all this magnificence, this glorious combination of man and the rest of creation.