Explanation: Chronicling the Kilometers
By: Matthew St. Amand
Tags: Cycling, Pandemic Diaries, Mental Health, Fitness, Outdoors

Photo credit: Matthew St. Amand

An unintended pandemic project quickly turned into an obsession. Cycling.

It was intended to be an outlet for exercise and alleviating anxiety during the lockdown that occurred at the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Soon, it became a preoccupation.

Photo credit: Matthew St. Amand

After my original department store broke in half during a ride, I went out and purchased a sturdy, quality mountain bike. Riding was such a pleasure, I found myself expanding my routes to increase my ride-time. That’s when the word “kilominating” came to me: a self-created term that means “accumulating kilometers by any means necessary.” A person who “kilominates” is a “kilominator”.

After kilominating more than 10,000 km in 2020, I decided to start a cycling blog called The Kilominator Chronicles. It’s not that I suddenly think I’m an expert — in fact, I’m all too often the poster boy for “Don’t Do This”; map-maker of every pitfall, wrong-way and blind alley to be found along a particular route — but just to share the story.

Mornings in May and in June, setting out before sunrise, sparse traffic on Front Road, wending my way down the King’s Highway, Ojibway Parkway, snaking around the Lou Romano Water Reclamation Center onto Sandwich Street. Along the abused and creviced road, riven as the scales on a dragon’s back, beneath the looming hulk of the Ambassador Bridge, to Riverside Drive. The sun only cresting the horizon at that point, like a sleeper’s eye peaking above a blanket. The riverfront path sullied with goose droppings. Biking past the inert figures of the Sculpture Garden. The Detroit River flat a coin, silvery, beautiful in the early light, inviting. Along the snaking path past the pumping station, past the old site of the Holiday Inn hotel and attached movie theatre, The Odeon, where I saw The Muppet Movie in 1979 and Rambo II in 1985. Slaloming around the memorials at the foot of Ouellette Avenue, then along a path that is only feet away from the river water, a rare glimpse of actual shoreline, decorated with large, imposing rocks. And then, finally, the path’s termination point: Hiram Walker & Sons distillery, its yeasty hangover stink permeating the air like the memory of bad drunks. So few cars. No pedestrians out, yet. Like a bicycle-borne Charlton Heston in Omega Man, I traverse the empty city, rolling along the empty expanse of Walker Road. A sight to behold. Jammed with traffic in ordinary times, empty as a rural switchback in pandemic days. On to the service road running parallel to E.C. Row Expressway, heading west, through a tunnel beneath the expressway, onto the service road’s twin on the other side, still heading west, taking the road as it curves around behind the Devonshire Mall, where the hulk of defunct Sears department store looms, empty, desolate, not much different than the rest of the city at this moment in time. There is always another turn to make. Another road to travel. Every lane, today, is the road less traveled. At moments, I feel like I’m on patrol. David Brin’s Postman. Reminding Windsor its citizens are still here.

For me, cycling is about exploration, taking unknown roads, making ill-advised turns.

At the outset, I got lost quite often on the concession roads, got myself stuck in storms, wiped out on a few occasions, or sometimes took on too much with an exceptionally long ride. In 186 rides (as of today), only once did I call my wife for a ride, to pick me up at my parents’ house after a 75 km ride, and that was pretty much because we were going over for our first social distance visit, anyhow.

There are no answers on the bike, only questions: Where does this road lead? Why don’t they fix this road? Who would live way out there in the middle of nowhere? Why am I doing this?

I do it because I love it.