New Essay from Breakaway GM Andrew Young: The Messenger as athlete
/Let me start this essay with a seemingly contrarian statement:
Many very successful bicycle couriers are not athletic.
If you live in a dense urban environment where the bike messenger exist, or you watch messengers darting across your tv screen, or even just occasionally contemplate the idea of what this job might be like, your first thought might tend towards the physical. And it is certainly true that the job at its core is what I would term manual, physical labor. Now you might make a seemingly logical jump from the physical to the athletic and embed in your mind an idee fixe that messengers are athletes. This essay will attempt to explain why this is not necessarily true.
If you have been watching the Travel Channel “reality” show Triple Rush you are seeing a group of couriers who are mostly under 30, trim and fit looking. This group of couriers is in fact a small demographic reality of a march larger whole that in New York and at Breakaway encompasses a much more diverse group of people across a wide spectrum of class, age, gender and ethnicity. This was a something that Triple Rush did not have time to highlight in season one, (in fact we urged them to cover a typical rookie class) but that I hope will be conveyed in season 2….if there is one.
It is worth asking how it is possible that a bike messenger could not be an athlete? I have a twofold answer and will expand on each. First, I will look at who really works as a messenger at Breakaway and secondly, I examine the larger question of who really rides a bike in this world.
In many cities where there is a bike messenger industry that industry is a small insular world that tends towards the Hipster clubhouse atmosphere I discussed in an earlier essay. But in New York the amount of positions available for bike messengers combined with a large, diverse population over a wide economic disparity helps create Breakaway’s working crew of messengers. That crew encompasses around 80-100 couriers at any time that range in age from 20-60. As of this writing 10 of these couriers are women, 25 of them are immigrants from various parts of the word…10 of them are in their 50s… 15 of them in their 40s, and 30 of them fit the Hipster Doofus range of mid 20s and early 30;s.
This broad demographic implies a broad range of physical abilities and levels of fitness. If you spent a day or two around the Breakaway office you might be amazed at the different types of people doing the job. They come in all different shapes and sizes and many of them have never done anything remotely physical before in their life. Even after 20 years in the business I am constantly surprised at who can do the job well. What I have realized is that because of the density of Manhattan a courier does not need to be really athletic as long as they are consistent in their efforts over the course of the work week. The desire and ability to work hard is the only thing that good couriers have in common. In fact we usually prefer the tortoise to the hare. The hare is more likely to exhaust themselves or get in a small accident that prevents them from working compared to the slow and steady effort of the tortoise. As a sidelight it is always fascinating to watch a person who has never had a physical job work their way into excellent condition by being on a bike for hours at a time. They loose weight and start to think about themselves in a way they never had before and exude a physical confidence that had not been present when they first applied for the job.
We can now examine the broader issue of who rides a bike in this world and why.
Humans are born walkers and runners; we are quite literally movers and shakers. It is what we do. Did you know that over a 40 mile race a human will beat every other animal on earth? The invention of the bicycle which increases the efficiency of self propelled transport exponentially has to be considered nearly as important as learning the secret of fire. Millions of people commute or travel by bicycle everyday around the world. How many of them are athletes? Almost everyone can ride a bike and in most societies outside of the US it is a basic form of transportation and work for everyday needs. The US is the exception and our exurbs and suburbs are built around the use of motor vehicles. This may be seen as one cause in our current obesity epidemic. Americans have forgotten that we are born to move our bodies physically everyday. The couriers at Breakaway have found their long dormant ability to propel themselves. It is often a great awakening.