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.
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.
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.