Paper short abstract:

Long distance cyclists use their bodies in order to activate diverse elements in the natural and cultural environments they are mobile in. It is suggested that here not only new experiences of the roads and bodies but also a sense of route is suggested which reveals also changing socio-cultural worlds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will look at question of 'being there' in case of experiences of cycling long distances in alternating natural and cultural environments and between the different modes of being mobile which cycling practices seem to entail and integrate. Cycling, as a form of physical exercise hardly allows one to omit the interrelationship between the experience of movement and the expressions of meanings emerging from such motility. The basis for discussing the phenomenology of cycling is formed by autoethnographic materials as well as ride-alongs with diverse groups of cyclists in regions often regarded as cultural and political borderlands in Finland, Sweden, Poland and Germany where this type of mobility is not very commonplace (arctic region) or is a rather recent phenomenon due to changes of borders. What is at stake here is the way that cycling provides a context for people to deal with familiar and less familiar environments in ways that may also challenge socio-cultural worlds in the borderlands. Here also GPS based technologies are used for tracking the cyclist hybrid. The ideas of movement as an original way of knowing the world become suggested, e.g., as a group of cyclists becomes transformed along the routes they undertake. Here the demands of the practice (e.g. speed, danger, fatigue) are essential part of the experience of movement and the construction of meaning by the researcher and the co-cyclists.