Friction
I stopped riding in June because of Achilles tendonitis. Severe enough that I could not push through it, which is saying something given my history with pain. By the time I accepted that the season was over, I had not been off the bike this long in years.
I had been riding clipless pedals. This is what serious cyclists do. You lock your feet into the pedals for power transfer and efficiency, and you twist your ankle to release. It is the standard. I adopted it years ago because it was the standard, and because not adopting it would have meant admitting that the standard did not fit my body.
I cannot rotate my ankles. The congenital condition, the surgical fusion, the structural limitations I have written about: they make the twist motion that clipless pedals require biomechanically challenging and all too often unavailable to me. So I compensated. To unclip, I rotated my entire leg. Every stop, every intersection, every moment of instability: a full-leg rotation instead of an ankle flick. It worked, at least much of the time. I fell more often than I should have. I accepted that as the cost of doing it correctly.
The friction was there the entire time. Every ride. Every clumsy dismount. Every fall I explained away. The signal was constant, and I treated it as something to manage rather than something to hear.
I was trained to think about systems this way: that resistance is inefficiency, and the goal of design is to remove it. Smooth processes, frictionless interfaces, seamless experiences. When something slows down, optimize it away. I have spent most of my career in healthcare, where this assumption quietly produces the worst outcomes. The processes that generate complaints, the controls that people work around, the workflows that slow down in specific and repeatable ways: these are almost never the problem. They are the system telling you where the design does not match the reality. The organizations that treat friction as a defect build systems that shatter under load. The ones that treat it as information build systems that last.
I did not apply this to my own body. I adopted a standard that did not fit my constraint. I ignored the signal. The signal escalated. The system failed.
I am writing this from Asheville, during the holidays, seven months into the longest stretch off the bike I can remember. The tendonitis has resolved. The room has been diagnosed. The body is still carrying the weight and the pain and the consequences of years of designing around a constraint for which I should have actively been designing.
I am not building for flow. I am building for durability. They are not the same thing.
Ken Wake is the author of Thinking Design (forthcoming) and a Professor and Entrepreneur in Residence at Georgetown University. His work explores systems, technology, design, and meaning. Tour de Ken is his weekly log.
