Mind is the Ride

Submit your story on our new Stories feature for a chance to win one of two copies of Jet McDonald’s excellent book ‘Mind is the Ride’. Submit before Friday 2 August to enter. UPDATE: Congratulations to Graham S. from Macclesfield & Matt B. from Farnham, who won a copy each!

Does riding a bike make you smarter? Reading Jet McDonald’s new book ‘Mind is the Ride’, we’d be tempted to say: Yes!

Jet is pursuing ideas about what bikes can do to us when we ride. So when he cycled 4,000 miles from the UK to India and back, he didn’t want to write a straightforward travel book. Instead, Jet takes the reader on an imaginative journey from West to East through the philosophies, cultures and people he meets on the way.

illustrationof bike pedals

In his quirky and exciting style, Jet shares great bits of wisdom, funny moments from the journey and ideas about what riding does to us (and our minds!).

Each chapter is dedicated to a bike part and beautifully describes how it relates a specific philosophy but it’s always done in an engaging and entertaining style. Such as when he describes Freud’s ideas about alpha and beta males when he meets a group of drunk hooligans in Vienna!

Illustration of touring bike

Mind is the Ride is an exhilirating story about the joys of riding bikes and we’re delighted to giving two copies away.

Read the extract below and share your bike Story with us before 2 August 2019 to enter the prize draw.

“The bike itself, in the form we know it, has only been around for 150 years. But there is something so right about the way that a bike connects to a human being that there must be a timeless notion of what it means. ‘Bikeness’ may have less to do with the object itself than with how we connect to it. The first roll down a hill on a bicycle, balance intact, is the joyous swallow dive of youth. Before the bike existed we had no learning-to-ride feet-off-the-ground epiphany, because there was no pedal to push, and yet that moment seems familiar, ageless and universal now because it is a part of being human. Our bodies long ago evolved to ride a bike, it’s just the mind had to catch up to invent it.”

Mind is the Ride is published by Unbound.