While it’s quite possible you spend little or even none of your exercising time on a bicycle, it’s also quite possible you’ve said what a former 10,000-miles-a-year rider said to me after I said to him that I hadn’t seen him out on the roads in quite a while.

“My motivation comes and goes.”

That’s the way it normally works. For a while, you feel psyched about even the thought of breaking a sweat, and doing so is something you enjoy.

And then ... not so much. And then “not so much” becomes your truthful answer when someone asks you how often you’ve been exercising recently.

If truth be told, though, that never needs to be your answer. If you always do, that is, whatever you need to do to keep whatever form of exercise you choose to do interesting.

Since we’re being so truthful, let me admit that for the most part the statement above comes from a book — and that it’s not about exercise, but “living your best possible life.” So what comes now is this long-time exerciser’s advice to you after he’s taken some from Lorraine Besser by way of The Art of Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It (Hatchet Book Group, 2024).

With that said, consider this. That the typical view of what exercising’s supposed to do for you — besides the bevy of good it does for your body — is a bit misguided. That you shouldn’t be exercising in a search for happiness, pleasure, or even fulfillment.

Though that is not to say you won’t experience all three while working out from time to time.

What it is to say is that all three of those emotions are short-lived and elusive — and get even more so when you seek them out. So what you should be seeking out to keep exercising is what Besser calls “the interesting.”

A how-to on how to do so, however, will not come next. For I believe something else Besser believes and makes clear by her view on books in general.

That there’s no single printed work we all find interesting because a book’s a thing and “no thing is inherently interesting. What’s interesting is all about how we experience a thing.”

So let me share a six-month experience with a biking thing: indoor virtual riding. For those unfamiliar, that means that six months ago I took off the front wheel of a road bike, attached the rest of it to a Wahoo Kickr Smart Trainer, purchased the cycling app Rouvy, and started riding all around the simulated world once or twice a week.

Which is something most other serious cyclists started doing about a dozen years ago, often when inclement weather forced them to ride indoors.

But Besser’s book partially explains my late start to the virtual cycling world. Our minds are “full of beliefs and expectations built from past experiences” and are “less open” as we age.

So for the longest time I was content to stare at an attic wall and whale away on a bike rusted fast to a circa 1999 indoor trainer. Doing so had made me successful and I also thought it made me hardcore.

But what it really made me was comfortable, mentally lazy, and to eventually lose my motivation to ride indoors.

That’s when I accepted the gracious offer of a Wahoo Kickr Smart Trainer from my boss at RoadBikeRider.com (thanks, again Lars) and, lo and behold, did I ever find virtual riding motivating.

But climbing 4,711 feet in 11.94 miles to reach the summit of the Col du Tourmalet in France is not pleasurable, though using the 12.43 mile descent to Khau Pha in Vietnam afterward generally is. Completing the 21.25 miles and 4,734 feet of climbing of the Furka Pass in Switzerland only leads to happiness and a feeling of fulfillment if I set personal records in functional threshold power and average wattage, the odds of which are lessening because I’ve done the route so many times.

The total package, however — creating a plan to regain some of the pedaling power I’ve lost from aging and sustaining five really serious cycling injuries, selecting that day’s ride or rides to best do so, and competing sometimes against real and virtual riders — certainly creates an interesting experience. According to Besser, interesting experiences are what’s needed to live a “psychologically rich life.”

Which makes engaging in regular exercise the ultimate “twofer” — provided you can maintain your motivation to engage in it.

So to close, remember the words of my one-time rival. That his motivation comes and goes, and when it goes, he’s not going bicycle riding.

And if — or should I say when? — you feel yours going, seek out the interesting. Make some change to your workout so that it not only engages your heart, lungs, and muscles but also your mind.