In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor antaprotagonist Hazel Motes blinds himself, wraps his torso in barbed-wire, and walks around with pointy rocks in his shoes in attempted atonement for, well, we’re not exactly sure. Hazel has done some bad things, including killing somebody, but most folks wouldn’t go to quite the extreme Mr. Motes does in trying to make up for it.

For instance, quite a few actual humans who ride bicycles pursue their own forms of atonement for various sins, many revolving around chocolate chip cookies and flour tortillas instead of corn. “Exercise bulemia” is just one of many sin/atone actions and reactions some/many/almost all cyclists replicate and endure. But unlike O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, we’re all cheating in our search for redemption.

What am I talking about?

Maybe you’re a strictly road cyclist. Do you tend to seek riding with the skinniest tires at the highest PSI possible? Do you spend way too time and sometimes way too much money buying lighter bikes with lighter components, even as you more than gain the weight back through chocolate chip cookies and flour tortillas?

The trend I’ll call “cheating” extends to all cyclists in all kinds of cycling in all kinds of terrain. Your humble blogger has always been one of the worst, and my new ebike has upped my faux atonement exponentially. And I can’t tell ya how good it feels to sin without redemption.

Or maybe I can.

Let’s take yesterday’s ride as a Las Vegas-sized example of cheating. Riding buddy and I rode our ebikes all the way up from near UNM to the Sandia’s Embudito Trailhead, pretty much the highest point of High Desert Place, a road which winds through High Desert subdivisions east of Tramway including, but not limited to, further subdivisions “Highlands at High Desert” and “Chaco Ridge at High Desert.”

In other words, “high.” Way up there at 6,200 feet or so, having come from just under a mile up. Serious ebike vertical cheating. To enhance our cheating experience, we then turned off the ebike motors and pretty much coasted down along the route outlined above, a route carefully created to be as absolutely flat, when not downhill, as possible. We’re talking heart rates well below even the slowest and/or most fit of the approximate 5,280 hikers we saw around us at Embudito and nearby trailheads. Like sitting on a La-Z-Boy watching the commercials during a Cowboys game kinda heart rates. Low.

Then, for added sinfulness without pointy rocks in shoes, we coasted back down all the way back down to around UNM (and actually lower/beyond). Heck we even turned the ebike motors back on for that.

All of which is to say that riding buddy and I are going to Hell, if admission/placement to Hell actually is determined by silly things like whether you cheat while cycling. As noted above, if the rules are that silly/strict, we’re all going to Hell.

I hope they have ebikes down there. Carbon-fiber ebikes.