The Pedals I Chose, and the Body for Which I Have to Design

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

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.

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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.

When Your Environment Stops Matching Who You’re Becoming

Last week I posted a photo of my office: cables everywhere, stacks of papers doing their best impression of geological sediment, guitars half-hidden behind clutter. I said I’d clean it and share an “after” photo in seven days.

I kept my word. The office is cleaner. Surfaces exist again. The floor is visible. The Zwift bike is no longer wedged between competing piles of entropy. The guitars look curated instead of trapped. The room feels like it’s breathing again.

But something else happened… something I didn’t expect.

Cleaning the office didn’t make me want a tidier office.

It made me want a different office.

Because once I cleared away the noise, I could finally see the underlying system. What I thought was a mess was actually a design problem. A room that had evolved through convenience, not intention.

Long before I became an operator, before I taught, before I began writing Thinking Design, I spent years studying the semiotics of the built environment: how space communicates meaning, how architecture shapes cognition, how physical form influences the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

In grad school I even designed my own electives around the philosophy of architecture. I worked as a docent at the National Building Museum. For a while I seriously considered applying to Harvard GSD or MIT to study architecture formally. Space—and the messages it sends—has always mattered to me.

So when I cleared my desk last week, it didn’t feel like tidying.
It felt like uncovering the underlying logic of a system.

The room wasn’t messy; it was misaligned.
It reflected a previous version of me, not the one I’m actively building.

And suddenly the question shifted from
“How do I make this room neater?”
to
“What space do I need to become the person I’m trying to become?”

It landed with surprising force.

I’m training for the Tour Divide—an unreasonable ride that demands transformation. I’m writing a book about design and the way shallow understanding leads systems astray. I’m re-architecting my career and identity after a long stretch of chronic pain and constraint.

Why wouldn’t my environment need to change too?

Spaces are not neutral. They shape how we think, how we work, how we see ourselves. They reinforce our habits or resist them. They either expand our capacity or shrink it.

My current office was built for a Ken who no longer exists.

The new one needs to reflect:

• A writer who is building a book

• A systems thinker who values clarity of environment

• An athlete-in-progress rebuilding a body

• An operator who needs calm, focus, and intentionality

• A person who is choosing the long arc rather than the short fix

So yes, the office is clean now. But that was just the threshold—not the destination.

The real work begins with transformation:
New layout.
New palette.
New lighting.
Zones for deep work, creative flow, and training.
A space designed, not drifted into.

A space that supports the life I’m building, rather than reminding me of the one I’m leaving behind.

Sometimes a small act—even cleaning a room—reveals a deeper truth:
you’re not just reorganizing your environment; you’re reorganizing yourself.

If Tour de Ken is about designing a life capable of crossing 2,700 miles of mountain passes, then the place where that design work happens matters too.

The office is next.

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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.

Why I’m Riding the Tour Divide Before I Turn 50… and What It Has to Do With Redesigning a Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about thresholds lately. Some thresholds you choose; some choose you. A year ago, I was limping through airports with a cane, navigating chronic pain from a pair of malformed ankles and a surgical fusion that seemed to have traded one problem for another. Walking hurt. Standing hurt. Most days, just being upright hurt.

Cycling—the sport that once shaped whole chapters of my life—was something I watched other people do.

And then something shifted. Not in a Hollywood moment of inspiration, but slowly, like a tide turning. I realized that if I wanted the next decade of my life to belong to me, I had to design it. Not dream about it. Not intellectualize it. Design it. With constraints, with embodied reality, with the physics of the world and the mechanics of my own body fully acknowledged.

So I decided to train for the Tour Divide: 2,745 miles from Banff, AB to Antelope Wells, NM on the Mexican border. Mountains. Weather. Bears. Isolation. A race so brutally indifferent it never cares who you were before you started.

It’s an unreasonable decision. That’s the point.

Rebuilding a Body, Rebuilding a Self

I’m doing this at 49, after gaining over 100 pounds, after years of chronic pain, after losing the athletic identity I once took for granted. I’m not supposed to be doing this. My ankles aren’t supposed to tolerate it. My schedule doesn’t allow for it. My life is full: family, work, teaching, writing, building companies.

But here’s the deeper truth: I need a project that demands everything from me—physically, mentally, emotionally—because those projects reforge identity. They give you the chance to become someone you haven’t met yet.

Training for this race has already forced me to rethink capability. Systems. Constraints. Time. Energy. Pain. Failure. Motivation. The physical becomes philosophical very quickly when your body becomes your primary design material.

The Tour de Ken Is Not Really About Cycling

This blog, Tour de Ken, isn’t a cycling diary. If it were, I’d have no interest in writing it and you’d have no interest in reading it. This isn’t an homage to gear ratios or wattage.

This is a chronicle of long-arc design, of what happens when you choose a target far enough away that you must become a different person in order to reach it.

The Tour Divide is the spine of the story, but the story is about:

• Self-authorship after a period of loss and limitation

• How systems thinking looks when applied to a body in motion rather than an organization on paper

• Identity reconstruction

• Endurance as a philosophy

• What it means to pursue something wildly hard, purely because you want to see who you become on the way

Why Start Writing Now?

Because journeys only feel linear in retrospect.

Right now I’m in the middle of the messy part: losing weight, rebuilding fitness, learning how to manage pain, rediscovering discipline, figuring out how to train with a full life.

I want to document the reality—the wins, the setbacks, the theories, the data, the discipline, the doubt—not because I have answers, but because I’m committed to the process.

This blog will cover:

• Training updates, honest ones

• Reflections on identity and embodied design

• Lessons in systems thinking from the saddle

• How I’m re-architecting my life to make room for this

• And the intersections with my other major project right now: writing a book about the failures of design thinking and what a more situated, rigorous practice looks like

The Journey Ahead

In 2027—the summer before I turn 50—I plan to stand at the trailhead in Banff, look south, and start pedaling. My goal is simple: to finish. To hug my family and my four dogs at the end. To prove to myself that I can redesign a life from first principles, starting from a place that once felt nearly impossible.

If you want to follow along, subscribe. Or don’t… I’m doing this either way. But if you’re here, I’m glad. I hope something in this project sparks something in your own.

Because the truth is, every one of us is riding some version of our own Divide.

And this one is mine.

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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.