A 40 mile bicycle ride on car-free roads, through all five boroughs of New York in early May weather, seemed like a dream way to support a charitable cause, when I signed up back in January  for Bike New York’s TD Five Boro Bike Tour.  Anticipation and excitement started to slowly build up, as I started training for the tour in the weeks preceding the event. I started splurging on biking gear much to the displeasure of my annoyed wife.  And then, most unexpectedly, the Boston Marathon bombers struck right on home territory.

The attacks were shocking and horrifying. However, the deaths and injuries reported graphically in the media had little impact initially on my bike tour plans. When my friends enquired if I was still going to do the bike tour, I was not bothered.  Excessive exposure to media coverage of the Boston events has obviously scared them, I thought. However, as the days progressed, the seeds of fear and doubt planted in my mind by these questions began to slowly sprout until they bloomed into monstrous weeds ready to destroy my entire garden of biking dreams. At first, it was a passing awareness that the Five Boro Bike Tour is also a sporting event, as the Boston Marathon is, and so could be a terrorist target. Just a transient thought to be dismissed, I told myself.  But, wait.  The Five Boro Bike Tour is not just any sporting event – it is a high profile event, the largest cycling event in America with 32,000 cyclists participating in it.  To make things worse, it is in New York City, the favorite target of terrorists. The negative vibrations continued to gather more of their kind and began snowballing into a clamorous cacophony of thoughts highlighting why doing this bike tour is a guaranteed one-way path to doom.  A huge crowd of cycling enthusiasts congregated in one place would be a bull’s eye that terrorists can normally only dream of.  The tour starts near the World Trade Center and isn’t the anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden also around the same time as the tour? What if a suicide bomber with explosives rigged into his hydration pack mingles among the cyclists? Television images of the Boston Marathon victims added fuel to the fire. Am I willing to accept the lurid prospect of living without one or both legs? Who will take care of my family if I am killed?

A fun proposition slowly deteriorated into a source of terror, all thanks to two misguided individuals in Boston who decided to violate the sanctity of a sporting event with their evil plot of terror. As fear slowly started taking hold, my resolve to do the bike tour started weakening. I bought time by telling myself that I will defer the final decision on doing the tour till the last moment, but I will continue to train for the event just in case I decided to go. However, instead of focusing on the training, my mind started digressing into estate planning. If I decide to do the tour, am I prepared in case something untoward happens to me? Do I have a will? Do I have a health care proxy if my wife needs to make health care decisions on my behalf? The long postponed and dreaded chore of estate planning suddenly assumed a disproportionate level of importance and urgency.  Fortunately, one of the benefits provided by my employer is a legal plan that includes free estate planning. This eliminated the need to justify the sudden expense of estate planning to my wife. However, initiating the estate planning process infected my wife with some of my feelings of terror.  The patience and silent encouragement for the bike tour that I had received until now slowly morphed into occasional “Do you really need to go?” suggestions.

As D-Day approached, my resolve to go had weakened considerably, but it was not completely dead. Tiny sparks of courageous insight worked to rekindle the flame of resolve. I told myself that the risk of a terrorist attack was always present, even before the Marathon attack. The events in Boston only served to make me aware of the risk – they did not by themself increase the risk of a terrorist attack. In fact, the Marathon bombing actually reduced the possibility of an attack during the Bike Tour, since law enforcement will be more prepared this time. Also, the event is in New York, a city that is well-equipped to track and intercept terrorists before they can attack. Bike New York has introduced special security measures, and also turned this event into a fundraiser to support the victims of the Boston attack. So I will actually be riding for Boston!

I left for New York City a day before the ride. My friend in New York invited me to join him that evening to a performance of his devotional music group at the Hindu Temple in Flushing, New York (the first Hindu Temple built in North America). Going to a Temple at this point seemed like a good idea. Perhaps, I might get some providential guidance on whether I should abandon this risky and foolhardy mis-adventure.  Some enlightenment did dawn on me, in the form of an inspiring analogy between the bike tour and a Hindu pilgrimage.  In Southern India, there is a popular annual pilgrimage to a Temple located in the Sabari hills in Kerala. This pilgrimage involves a risky trek across difficult and dangerous terrain inhabited by plunderers and wild animals.  A pilgrim first makes a firm mental resolution to do the demanding trek, observes strict spiritual disciplines for over a month to strengthen the mind, plunges into the trek drawing on his faith in the divine Lord of the Sabari Hills to deal with any challenges that may appear, and proceeds with single-minded devotion until the the goal of reaching the shrine is realized.  One way to view the pilgrimage is that it serves as a spiritual exercise in setting a difficult goal and realizing it with determination and purity of mind. Eureka. When I registered for the Bike Tour, I resolved to do it. I then trained for over a month.  I now need to plunge into this seemingly dangerous endeavor with faith (in Mayor Bloomberg and powers much higher than him) and proceed with single-minded concentration to complete the tour.

Enlightened thus, I woke up early the next morning and proceeded to the start line. At the start line, images of chickens waiting for their heads to be cut off flashed in my mind, and I was automatically scanning for onlookers with backpacks stuffed with pressure cookers.  However, as the cyclists started pedaling forward, the fears melted away and were replaced by the joyous spirit of the fellow cyclists, and I was filled with a sense of pride at having withstood the onslaught of my fears.  I did complete my pilgrimage successfully, all 40 miles of it, and came out thoroughly invigorated and spiritually purified. I rode for Boston!

PS: Please click the following link to read a Wall Street Journal report and slide show on the bike tour. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826804578465383630022020.html

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