Pezcyclingnews: Athletes As Artists: Using Creativity

Being creative is synonymous with thinking & doing “outside the box”. Never one to penned him himself, John Howard explores how exploring, expressing, and nurturing our creativity can also make us better cyclists.Serious competitive cyclists, like many other dedicated athletes, often end up one-dimensional, a side effect of intense training and racing. Although this extreme focus can be personally confining, it need not limit the individual to a single field. The athletic mindset has the potential of expanding into the creative arts. Rush Hour by Doug DaleThe training and racing process parallels the process of creating a work of art, as both processes require passion, focus, dedication, energy, and action. When recognizing these similarities, the athlete can direct his already highly developed skills into the field of creative expression, which will benefit from his/her nature of controlled intensity. About the same time I began racing bicycles I started another career path as an eager 18 year-old art student at Southwest Missouri State University. The creative process was a pursuit of personal expression that titillated all the senses: visual, tactile, aromatic and auditory. I saw myself as a landscaper of ideas, & eager to plant, shape and cultivate those ideas. I defined my art forms in terms of ever expanding environmental potential. My partially fulfilled goal was to outrun the confines of the traditional studio with pure kinetic energy, more so than through a learned technique. The vast realm of artistic exploration constantly overlapped my cycling with boundless parallels of expressive...

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