Time, as experienced on a fixed gear bicycle, is not merely a matter of clocked minutes or scheduled arrivals. It is not the quartz precision of a wristwatch or the cold inevitability of timetables and transport apps. Rather, time becomes viscous, affective, and embodied. To ride a fixie is to enter a different kind of temporal experience, one that is cyclical, recursive, and irreducibly lived. We might call this fixie time.
In ordinary discourse, time is assumed to be linear, progressive, a sequence of evenly spaced instants flowing forward like a conveyor belt. This conception echoes the Newtonian worldview: time as an independent, absolute dimension within which events occur. But as Henri Bergson pointed out in Time and Free Will, this linear clock-time, temps, is an abstraction. The real time of lived experience is durée (duration): a qualitative, continuous unfolding that cannot be broken into measurable units without doing violence to its reality.
The Inescapable Cadence of Now
On a fixie, the rhythm of the cranks becomes a metronome, not imposed from without, but generated from within. Every rotation is a commitment. You cannot coast. You cannot pause. You are temporally tethered to the forward motion of the machine, and the machine to your legs. In this forced continuity, the illusion of temporal autonomy, so easily maintained on a geared bike or with freewheel coasting, vanishes.
Instead, one becomes acutely aware of time not as an abstraction but as effort, resistance, and momentum. A rider descending a steep hill with an overly tall gear ratio will find themselves spinning at cadences well above their comfort level and start to feel control ebb away. The clock may read five seconds of descent, but the legs report an eternity. Likewise, ascending a gradient without the ability to switch to lower gears causes time to collapse into suffering; each crank rotation demands its own reckoning, with each lasting what feels like an eternity.
We begin to understand time in muscle memory and lactate accumulation. We begin to measure it in knee angles and chain tension. Fixie time is not evenly distributed. It pulses with exertion and releases with grace. It compresses in moments of emergency braking via a skid, and expands in long, unbroken stretches of meditative cadence.
Track Standing and the Illusion of Stillness
Track standing—a technique by which the rider maintains balance at a standstill by making micro-adjustments forward and backwards, offers a paradoxical insight into the temporality of stillness. To the untrained eye, the rider appears motionless, suspended in the urban environment and time like a statue at a junction. But within the rider’s awareness, there is no stasis. The pedals are in subtle motion. The front wheel shimmies. The body tenses and releases in tiny, rhythmic negotiations. This is dynamic stillness, an oxymoron that only makes sense within fixie temporality.
Track standing, then, becomes a metaphor for the fixie rider’s time-consciousness. Even when not progressing through space, the rider is deeply engaged in temporal management, anticipating changes, maintaining tension, awaiting the green light not as a passive observer but as a spring coiled in time.
It is in these moments that Bergson’s critique of spatialised time finds visceral confirmation. Clock time says: “You’ve been stationary for 3.2 seconds.” Fixie time says: “You’ve been alive in muscle and balance for a small eternity.”
The world does not tick; it flows.
Duration, Flow, and the Affective Landscape of the Journey
The fixed gear journey, often romanticised in films, Instagram stories, and YouTube montages, presents a unique landscape of temporality. Consider the following situation: a ten-kilometre ride through New York at rush hour. The journey might objectively take thirty minutes. But from the rider’s perspective, it may feel like a disjointed symphony of rhythmic accelerations, held-breath near misses, moments of flow-state bliss, and existential reflection at zebra crossings.
On a geared bike, one might coast through this experience with intervals of disengagement, moments of thoughtlessness enabled by mechanical delegation. On a fixed gear bike, there is no such refuge. The pedal stroke is ongoing. The road is relentless. The mind cannot wander far without being recalled by the necessity of action. The result is an intensification of duration: not in length, but in depth.
Riders frequently report entering states of flow, wherein the sense of time evaporates altogether. Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow frames this state as a union of high challenge and high skill, resulting in total absorption in the task. The fixie commute can be precisely this, a task just difficult enough to require focus, but not so difficult as to overwhelm. Each decision is a micro-game: do I hold this line? Can I make that gap?
In this state, time is not something to be managed or feared. It is not a countdown to a meeting or a delay to be endured. It is not even felt as time at all, but as motion.
Flow, on a fixie, is not conceptual, it is rotational.
Circular Time and the Ontology of the Loop
In many traditional cosmologies, time is cyclical rather than linear. Hindu, Buddhist, and certain Indigenous temporalities understand existence as a loop, a repetition with variation. The fixie rider subtly echoes this ancient insight. The cranks never stop. The chain circles endlessly. The wheel revolves. One’s temporal experience on a fixie becomes less about progress and more about repetition.
This is not a futile or Sisyphean repetition, as in Albert Camus’ vision of the absurd, but a lived cyclicality in which repetition becomes meaningful. Each rotation of the pedal is not merely the same; it is subtly altered by terrain, mood, intention, and fatigue. Like a mantra in meditation, the repetition of the pedal stroke serves not to hypnotise but to deepen awareness.
There is a philosophical richness to this looping temporality. It resists the capitalist logic of productivity, in which time must always lead somewhere. On a fixie, time does not necessarily mean progress. It means presence. Whether on a long road with no end in sight or in a criterium race where laps blur into one another, the fixie rider learns that being-with-cadence is its own form of existence.
The Temporal Edge of Skidding
But not all the time on a fixed gear bike is serene. There is also the time of kairos, the critical moment. In ancient Greek, kairos referred to the opportune or decisive instant, in contrast to chronos, or sequential time. The fixie rider encounters kairos most vividly in the emergency skid.
Imagine a car door opens in your path. A freewheel cyclist might brake and swerve. A fixie rider must act now, with the body. There is no abstract deliberation. The body knows before the brain. You pull up on the front pedal, push down on the rear, and initiate a controlled slide, perhaps locking the rear wheel entirely to bleed off speed. The rear tyre screeches; your heart races. You thread the needle between chaos and control.
This is a moment of compressed time. The objective duration may be one or two seconds. But the subjective intensity stretches it into a vast theatre of sensation. Here, again, Bergson triumphs over Newton. Time dilates in crisis.
And when it is over, when the skid ends, and you’re upright, heart thudding, you find yourself returned to the rhythm. The cranks keep turning.
You are back in the circle.
Ethics of Slowness
Lastly, we might ask: what kind of moral temporality does the fixie suggest? In a world of acceleration, of 5G networks and same-day delivery, the fixie insists on slowness, not always in speed, but in conscious engagement. The fixie cannot be hurried. It must be felt. It resists automation, even as the world around it increasingly automates itself.
This ethics of slowness has affinities with the Slow Movement, which is a cultural shift toward mindful consumption, deliberate living, and the rejection of speed as an unquestioned good. The fixie’s mechanical simplicity and rhythmic cadence foster an attentiveness to self, to machine, to city, and to time itself.
To ride a fixie is to refuse the tyranny of the urgent. It is to say: “I will arrive when I arrive, but I will know that I have arrived.”
The fixie is not merely a mode of transport; it is a prosthesis of time perception. Much like clocks externalise time, the fixed gear bike embodies it. It renders time tangible, muscular, lived. It turns temporal flow into bodily exertion and attentional intensity.
The fixie does not just carry the rider through space. It carries the rider through time, and not always smoothly. It teaches resistance, friction, the cost of forward motion. It is a teacher of tempo, a pedagogue of pacing, a stern but fair mentor in the school of now.
Fixie time, then, is not a luxury. It is a discipline. One that, when practised attentively, might even reveal something of the structure of consciousness itself.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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