I never planned to become a cyclist. Five years ago, as the pandemic loosened its grip on the world and I closed the door on a long career, I found myself standing at the edge of an unfamiliar kind of freedom — the kind nobody warns you about. Retirement doesn’t come with a manual. It comes with time, and time, I quickly learned, can feel like both a gift and a void.I bought a bicycle almost on a whim. I told myself it was for exercise, something to keep the body from stiffening into old age. I had no idea it would become the axis around which an entirely new chapter of my life would turn.
My first real tour was along the coast — salty air, long empty stretches of road lined by coconut palms, the rhythmic hum of tyres on tarmac. There is something about cycling that other forms of travel simply cannot replicate. A car moves too fast to notice the way morning light changes the colour of the sea. Walking is too slow to cover real distance. But a bicycle moves at exactly the speed of attention — fast enough to carry you somewhere new, slow enough to actually see it.
I began pedalling along India’s coastline in short stretches at first, then longer ones, then entire seasons planned around it. Over five years, the coast became less of a route and more of a companion — familiar in its unpredictability, generous in what it revealed. Fishing villages waking before dawn. Temples, churches, and mosques worn smooth by centuries of monsoons. Strangers who fed me, sheltered me from sudden rain, and asked nothing in return except a story or two in exchange.
What surprised me most wasn’t the cycling itself . It was everything cycling opened the door to.
The long, meditative hours on the road did something unexpected to my mind. Thoughts I had buried under decades of deadlines and responsibilities began to surface. I started writing about the rides, first just as notes to remember a particular sunrise or a conversation with a roadside chai vendor. Those notes became blog posts. The blog posts became the scaffolding for something bigger — my first travel memoir, which I’ve now published (The Roads Along the Sea: The Malabar and Coromandel Coasts eBook : Nair, Ayyappan: Amazon.in: Kindle Store https://share.google/mxGgEo3CdZfge7Ttw) or (https://a.co/d/03gDO9uB)
Cycling also reignited an old, dormant curiosity for history. Every coastal town had a past — a fort, an ancient port, a colonial ruin, a fisherfolk legend — and I found myself reading deep into regional histories just to understand the ground I was rolling over. What began as casual curiosity became genuine study.
And there was photography — a passion I’d carried quietly for years but rarely had the time or stillness to pursue properly. On a bicycle, you’re forced to slow down and notice: a heron standing motionless in a backwater, light breaking through casuarina trees, the exact blue-grey of the sea before a storm. Nature photography became a natural extension of the ride itself, each day’s journey yielding its own small gallery.
Strangely enough, the miles also gave birth to fiction. Something about the solitude of long-distance cycling — the rhythm, the isolation, the sheer amount of unstructured thinking time — nudged me toward writing science fiction, of all things. I’m now preparing that manuscript to send out to literary agents and publishers.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe how much unfolded from a single decision to get on a bicycle. What began as an outward journey along a coastline gradually became an inward one — a slow, unhurried transformation that, five years on, feels almost like a dream I’m still living inside.
Cycle touring gave my body movement again, but it gave my mind and soul something far more valuable: room to wander, to notice, to create. It let me see humanity through a different lens — unhurried, close to the ground, dependent on the kindness of strangers, attentive to small things that a faster life would have blurred past.If retirement is meant to be an ending, mine turned out to be something else entirely — a beginning disguised as one. And it all started with two wheels and a coastline.
It's never too late 