For a few years in my early 40s, people introduced me as the cyclist. Not a cyclist. The cyclist. I rode every day, everywhere (most often at my beloved Boom Cycle in London), in whatever the weather was doing, and at some point without my noticing the description attached itself to me and stayed there. They were the happiest years of my life, and I did not realise how much of me lived in that one word until I had lost it.

I have been thinking about labels because I have just watched one fail to stick.

The marathon that was never mine

I was training for the Amsterdam Marathon on 18 October. At registration time in early September I looked at the data, and the data was blunt: I could not run 10 km. So I made the sensible call and did not sign up. I am not going to pretend that was hard. It was the right decision and I would make it again.

The stupid part came afterwards. I did not just drop the marathon. I dropped everything else along with it. Three weeks of no running at all, back in the pub, a handful of turbo sessions that were more about guilt than fitness. The marathon had been a goal-shaped identity, and when the goal went the habits went with it, because they had only ever been there to serve the goal.

Looking back, “marathon runner” was a label I was trying to buy with a single event. One race, one medal, and then I would be the sort of person who runs marathons. That is not how any label I have ever worn actually arrived. Nobody called me the cyclist because of a ride I did once. They called me the cyclist because they saw me on the bike on Monday, and again on Tuesday, and again in the rain on Wednesday, until the description was simpler than the alternative.

How you lose one

The research on athletic identity puts a phrase on the thing I felt without knowing it. Athletic identity is the degree to which you identify with the role of an athlete, and for people active in sport it is a large part of the self-concept. Studies of injured athletes describe a “perceived loss of identity” when the role is taken away. The role goes, and a piece of the self goes with it.

I was not injured. I moved north to Liverpool, and I let it slide. That is the whole story, and it is a worse story than an injury, because there was no moment at which anyone, including me, noticed. You do not lose a label the way you lose a wallet. Nobody stops introducing you as the cyclist on a particular Tuesday. They simply stop mentioning it, because it stopped being true, and one day you are a man of 156 kg who used to ride a bike. Past tense. The past tense is the tell.

How you get one back

James Clear draws a distinction I keep returning to, between three layers of change: outcomes, processes, and identity. Most people start with outcomes (lose the weight, finish the race) when they should start with identity. His line for it is short: “Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.” Motivation, he argues, is not something you can rely on, and the early results matter less than the proof.

That maps onto what happened the first time round, when I was not trying to become anything. Frequency did the work. So the plan now is frequency, and I am suspicious of everything else.

I have just finished building Race2Ride, a personal app that pulls all my fitness and weight data into one place, and I am going all in on cycling again. Six months of winter base work. From a peak of 156 kg I am down to about 96 kg, on the home stretch to 78 kg, which will be exactly half of what I was. A multi-day ride across Europe in spring 2027. Even if the big ride never happens, I want weekends on the bike somewhere in Europe rather than expensive city breaks spent sat in restaurants. I have done enough of those. I would like the next few days abroad to involve a saddle.

But I have listed those in the wrong order, and I know it. The numbers and the spring ride are outcomes. They are precisely the sort of thing that carried the marathon, and precisely the sort of thing that collapses when the plan does. The label does not come from any of them. It comes from the rule underneath: ride every day, however short. Twenty minutes counts. Round the block in the dark counts. The point is to be the person who was on the bike today, and then to be him again tomorrow.

The bike is not a reward

I keep a copy of Juliana Buhring’s This Road I Ride within reach. She first rode a bike at 30, in 2011, in the middle of grief, with no athletic background and no sponsorship, and in July 2012 she left Naples to ride around the world. The subtitle says it: Sometimes It Takes Losing Everything to Find Yourself. What I love about the book is that it refuses the usual order of operations. She did not get herself sorted and then earn the bike. The bike was where the sorting happened.

I am not comparing my situation to hers. I am heavier than I want to be, three weeks out of any routine, and I have just abandoned a marathon. By the normal logic I should get fit first and then start. The book says the opposite, and the book is right.

What it’s actually about

This is not a post about training, and it is not really about cycling. It is about the quiet way a version of yourself becomes past tense, and about the fact that the only way back is the way in: do the thing, often enough that it stops being an occasion.

And today I cued up a new playlist on Spotify, blocked out an hour in the calendar, and got on the Trek on the Wahoo in the lounge, back into the routine that served me so well a decade ago. Same again tomorrow? You bet.