The Pedals I Chose, and the Body for Which I Have to Design
These pedals look like a small equipment choice. They aren’t. They reflect years of injury, adaptation, and learning what it means to design around a body that does not behave like the ideal case. This is a story about safety, constraint, and choosing truth over optimization.
To most people, these probably look like pedals.
Nice ones. Purple ones. Components.
To me, they represent something far more specific: a commitment to designing for the body I actually have, not the one I remember or wish I still did.
I cannot comfortably ride clipless pedals.
That sentence alone carries more weight than it should.
For most serious cyclists, clipless pedals are not a choice; they are a given. They signal legitimacy. Intent. Belonging. But for me, they are also unsafe. Years of foot deformity, chronic pain, and a surgical fusion have left me with limited mobility and delayed reaction in my left foot. Clipping out quickly, reliably, under fatigue is not guaranteed. In ultra-distance riding, that uncertainty becomes risk.
And risk compounds.
So I chose flat pedals.
Not as a concession.
As a design decision.
This is what rebuilding a life looks like when you take constraints seriously. Not abstractly. Not symbolically. Physically.
The hardest part of long recovery is not pain; it is identity drift. You spend years knowing exactly who you are, and then one day your body stops cooperating with the story. You can either chase the old narrative harder, or you can slow down and redesign.
Flat pedals force a different relationship with the bike. With effort. With precision. With fatigue. They demand constant attention. They make you honest about power, positioning, and limits. They also let me ride safely, confidently, and for long stretches without fear of being trapped in the wrong moment.
These pedals are not about compromise.
They are about alignment.
Design thinking often fails because it ignores lived reality in favor of elegance. This is the opposite move. It is inelegant. It is specific. It is grounded in a body that has scars, limitations, and a future worth protecting.
Every small choice like this commits you to a direction. Not a destination, but a trajectory.
These pedals tell me something important every time I look at them:
I am not trying to become who I was.
I am building who I can be.
And that distinction changes everything.
Designing for Friction, Not Flow
Not all resistance is a failure of design. Some friction is protective, instructive, even necessary. This essay explores why designing for smoothness often breaks under real-world constraints—and why the right kind of friction can make systems, bodies, and decisions more resilient.
There is a persistent fantasy embedded in modern design culture: that the best systems are frictionless.
Smooth. Elegant. Effortless.
We celebrate flow states, seamless interfaces, and invisible infrastructure. When something resists us, we assume it is broken. When something slows us down, we assume it needs optimization.
I no longer believe that.
Training again, with a body shaped by injury and adaptation, has forced me to confront a harder truth: some friction is not a flaw. It is information.
My body offers constant feedback now. Not always politely. Pain, fatigue, hesitation, imbalance. These are not signals to be ignored or engineered away. They are constraints that must be designed with, not around.
This is as true in physical systems as it is in organizations.
Many of the failures I’ve seen in healthcare, technology, and social systems come from mistaking resistance for inefficiency. We design as if people are abstractions. As if context is noise. As if the real world should behave more like the model.
It never does.
On the bike, friction shows up immediately. You feel it in your feet, your cadence, your breathing. You cannot intellectualize your way past it. You must respond. Adjust posture. Change pacing. Choose differently.
That is what makes it honest.
I’m beginning to see this phase of my life as a deliberate reintroduction of friction. Not to suffer for its own sake, but to recover sensitivity. To rebuild judgment. To regain trust in feedback that cannot be gamed.
Design that ignores friction creates brittle systems.
Design that listens to it creates resilient ones.
This is what I’m practicing now. On the bike. In my work. In the quiet restructuring of my days.
Not chasing flow, but learning when resistance is telling me something essential.
Ken Wake is a designer-philosopher, entrepreneur, EIR and Professor at Georgetown University, and founder of Watershed LLC. He is training for the 2,745-mile Tour Divide before he turns 50.