The Whispering Roads of Pszczyna

The asphalt is not inert. It dreams. It remembers. It drinks in every vibration from passing tyres, cataloguing each story in a memory far older than the riders who touch it. Some call it pavement. Others know better.

This afternoon, I rode 31.86 kilometres—or so the app insists. The clock insists it took 1 hour, 48 minutes, and 37 seconds. But the road and I know those numbers are polite fictions. In truth, time twisted and folded, and I may have been riding for minutes… or for centuries.

They speak of “personal records” as though we only contend with our younger selves. But today, I realised the records belong not to me, but to the road. And the road plays favourites.

On the sprint into Pszczyna, the trees melted into a liquid smear of green. It felt faster, but perhaps it was only the road pulling me forward through a pocket of compressed time.
On Rurociagi’s concrete veins, where I ranked third, I wondered about the two riders above me. Their names glow on the leaderboard, yet I have never seen them here. Do they ride at night, when the road exhales mist? Or do they ride only in another century entirely?
On the Czechowice–Zabrzeg stretch, I broke another record—just as the wind fell silent near the Waryńskiego factory. That silence was too complete, as though the air itself were listening.


The numbers hum their own strange music:

  • 31.86 km, or 19.8 miles.
  • 99 metres climbed, or 324.8 invisible steps taken by someone not quite me.
  • 1,087 heartbeats, or one heartbeat repeated over and over until the ride ended.
  • 78 watts, just enough to keep the light alive in a place that prefers shadows.
  • 888 calories burned—a number that turns up in dreams, in superstitions, and in warning signs written in languages I can’t read.
Why do we carve the road into named segments? Who marked these invisible thresholds, and why are they the ones that matter? The stretch near Zapora where I surged—was it my legs, or something matching my cadence from behind?

The ride began and ended in Czechowice-Dziedzice. But I cannot shake the sense that I never truly returned. The road may still be riding me.

It takes what it wants, and leaves you with what you think you’ve earned.

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