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As I stood there sweating in the driveway, it occurred to me that under normal circumstances, in any other year, I'd be about halfway through my Milton course, giving my lecture on the question of free will and predestination and the Miltonian understanding of it. Free will, I would be telling the students, is the ability to make a choice between two actions. You have the free will to choose to jump off a cliff or not. Once you make the choice to jump, you can't stop falling.

M
EGHAN IS A
medic in the Canadian army stationed in Colorado Springs to look after the sizable Canadian contingent of soldiers stationed there because of NORAD. Actually, she's an obstetrician, but if you were to meet her—say in downtown Denver, say on the sixteenth floor of an upscale apartment building at a cocktail party that you've been dragged to by a colleague to celebrate the launch of a local poet's work—that is precisely how she would put it. She would say “medic” and then wait while her interlocutor got a faraway look in his eyes as he pictured her darting selflessly between foxholes, kneeling down in the dark, muddied earth, staring into the despairing eyes of a soldier.

“Really,” I said. “A medic?”

“Actually,” she said, “I catch babies.”

Her tone was dismissive. I thought: this is what it's like when you are a soldier. Babies aren't born. They're caught. Then back to the battlefield.

“What's a medic like you doing at a poetry reading like this?”

“A girlfriend of mine is a girlfriend of the girl who copyedited the book,” she said. She held in her hand a glass of white wine. Stemless, untouched.

“I teach English,” I said.

“So you're a writer?” she said.

“I teach the Renaissance,” I said. “There is a difference.”

“Still,” she said, “it's literary.”

She raised the glass of wine to her lips and took a small sip.

Instead of a glass of wine I realized that I held in my hand a paper plate stacked with cheese. The reason: I'd been standing in front of the cheese plate when it dawned on me that the colleague with whom I'd come that night was more interested in the mediocre local poet whose book was being launched than she was in me. Of course she was somewhat younger than me, but I had believed, however foolishly, that a connection was possible. This realization was followed by a wave of dismay and it was then that my eyes alighted on the cheese.

Under normal circumstances—in a less fragile state—I would not be the sort of person who would ever do such a thing. But I was not quite myself. Meghan seemed to perceive this—to see something my colleague had not—and looked at the cheese on my plate for a long moment. I prepared myself for a negative reaction but it did not arrive. She winked, reaching out to take a single cube of cheddar, lifting it to her lips to take a single bite out of its corner. A discreet, tiny dent.

Then she replaced the piece of cheese on my plate. Her eyes were locked with mine the whole time. Without breaking my gaze I took the cube she'd bitten into and swallowed it whole.

“You want to get out of here?” she said.

It was, simply, a very forward thing to say. I was taken aback. I have grown used to such things. That is Meghan. She moves quickly.

The next thing I knew we were out in the hallway, in an embrace, but the elevator turned out to be broken. I pushed the button, then hit it again. Nothing. I was prepared to go back into the cocktail party, if only temporarily. The host would make a call and technicians would be dispatched. Meghan, however, was undeterred. “Catch me if you can,” she said, and ran toward the exit sign at the end of the hall. She pushed the door open and ran down the stairs.

I sprinted after her, calling out for her to slow down. She did not. Below me I could hear her heels clicking against the concrete. I realized she was serious. If I didn't catch up to her—if I didn't catch her—before she reached the ground floor, she'd be out the door and I'd never see her again. Now with real desperation, I quickened my pace—I was running, jumping down two and three sets of stairs at a time. I was gaining on her, I believed, though it was hard to tell. Meghan is fast. And thin. Looking at her undressed what strikes you is the way the bones of her shoulder blades protrude upward, as if they had at one point considered extending out into wings. She was a swimmer originally—200m IM—but in her thirties she turned to triathlons. If we had been moving in the other direction, I would not have stood a chance. But gravity was on my side. I was gathering momentum and by the time we rounded the corner on the third floor, I could see the blond of her hair flashing, hear her laughing.

“Stop,” I called out, winded. One floor remained. It dawned on me that I was not going to be able to catch her, and was about to give up when I tripped. I felt my left foot hit against my right calf and then, suddenly, I was airborne. I flew by her, smashing into the exit sign above the doorway. The last thing I remember before the back of my head hit is the look on her face as I sailed by her. I'd beat her down; she was impressed.

She rode with me in the ambulance and we were married a couple of months later. It was good, for a while. For almost three years. Then she met Smith Barnard. I imagine they both had protein powder in their hands at the time, or else not quite yet. Perhaps they were both standing in front of the protein powder section, making the kind of obscure deliberations that one makes when buying protein powder.

Colorado Springs: city, so called, of champions.

T
HOUGH MOST OF
the photographs of the horrific bike accident involving Carl “Kip” Filmore have been suppressed by the family, there were witnesses and many of them used their phones to photograph a scene that would soon become almost mythic. Filmore, it seems, after braking, went over the handlebars and skidding along the pavement. It was his face that hit the ground, and on which he skidded, for some thirty meters. This is how fast he was going, the velocity required to maintain his standing as KOM on Strava.

Doubtless the gruesomeness of what happened is part of the reason why the incident has achieved such notoriety. It is hard to look at the photographs of the faceless, clearly screaming dead cyclist. All it took was an unlooked-for car pulling out a little too suddenly. It could happen to me, you find yourself thinking. It could happen to anyone.

When Meghan arrived home from catching babies that evening she was surprised to learn about Smith Barnard putting Strava on my phone. She was pulling her biking shorts over her lean legs, and seemed confused about what exactly had happened.

“He made you give him your phone?” she said.

“He installed it
himself
.”

“That's pushy,” she said.

“
He's
pushy.”

“He's intense.” She didn't look at me. “It's part of his training, he's that person.”

“Don't you think it's strange he's not married?” I said. “I mean, in his office there are no pictures. Not of anyone. Not even a girlfriend.”

“Why would anyone put pictures of his girlfriend in an examination room?” she said. “I don't have a picture of you in my office.”

“A guy like that?”

“What do you mean a guy like that?”

“He's Ajax,” I said. “Seriously.”

“Ajax?”

I took a breath and started to explain but she raised a hand. “I'll get the footnote later,” she said. Then she sighed. “Maybe he's just waiting for the right person.”

“To catch up to him, you mean,” I said.

Meghan was tying her shoes and said nothing.

“That was a Strava joke,” I told her.

“Got it,” she said. Now she was putting on her bike helmet.

“He's already following me,” I said. “On Strava. He follows you, but you know that.”

“He follows a lot of people,” she said.

“Why didn't you say anything about it?”

“About Strava?” She gave me a frank look. “Why would I tell you anything about Strava? You haven't got off the couch in three months.”

“I
have
a bike,” I said. “I went for a ride today. Two miles, two hundred calories.”

“The calories thing is always exaggerated,” she said.

I told her about the ancient tires inflating. “Isn't that amazing?”

“It is,” she said, though she had clearly stopped listening to me. The last thing she did before leaving the house was pick up her iPhone off the kitchen table and open Strava. “You're following me?”

“You have to accept it though,” I said. “You have to agree to me following you.”

“I know how it works,” she said.

“Maybe we can go for a ride together sometime,” I said.

She tapped her phone. “There,” she said. “Happy?”

T
HOUGH IT DOES
not appear in the pages of the
OED
it is generally accepted that the word
gamification
makes its first appearance in the English language around the year 2002. Coined by a British computer programmer named Nick Pelling who designed a number of early video games—including Invader and Hedgehog—it refers to using game thinking and game process to solve problems and improve performance. If you think you're playing a game, you perform at a higher level than if you think you're working.

“Even if you have hundreds of friends on Facebook and you told them about your great ride today,” Michael Horvath—one of Strava's creators—is quoted as saying, “only a handful of them are going to care about it in the level you described. Strava gives you a way to really focus in on the friends in your life, the people that you are following, or the people that are following you, and to share this important part of your life with them.”

A
FTER MEGHAN LEFT
the house, I opened up Strava and looked at her profile. Here is a list of the things I learned about my wife:

1. She owned
   three
   bikes: a “Focus Izalco Pro 2.0” (on which she had ridden 1,208.8 miles), a “Gary Fisher Hifi Deluxe 29er” (420 miles), and a “Stumpjumper FSR Comp” (233 miles).
   
2. She rode about five rides a week, averaging sixty miles a week though often exceeding that.
   
3. Her longest climb was 1,345 feet.
   
4. She “and one other” scored a KOM on a section of road called Sunrise Decent.
   
5. Sunrise Descent is a stretch of road two miles long that Meghan (“and one other”) had covered in just over two minutes' time. This means she had been going almost sixty miles an hour.
   
6. As fast as she had been going, the “one other” she was with had been going just a little faster. She seems to have eased up at the end, at the steepest part of the descent. He did not. If anything, he accelerated and, consequently, scored the KOM, not her.
   
7. The “one other” was Smith Barnard.
   

O
NE OF THE
many factors contributing to Strava's popularity is that it enables you to “track your effort” with precision. In addition to the duration of your ride, the distance covered, and the calories expended (however inflated), you can
also
track your “Energy Output” (“a factor of how much you're pedaling,” says the Strava website, “how fast you're pedaling and how much force you're exerting on the pedals”), your “Average Power” (“expressed in W,” Strava will tell you, “a measure of how much energy you are placing into the pedals”), and your “Suffer Score,” which is an analysis of your heart rate data (“By tracking your heart rate through your workout and its level relative to your maximum heart rate,” Strava says, “we attach a value to show exactly how hard you worked. The more time you spend going full gas and the longer your activity, the higher the score. The more time you spend coasting, or resting, the lower the score”).

In other words, if you stop pedaling—if for any reason you get off your bike—Strava knows. Looking at my own abortive rides I could see clearly the moment when I gave up each time. When I failed to get up the mountain. As humbling as it was to see my inadequacy catalogued with such digital accuracy, my humiliation was tempered when I noted that Smith Barnard—and Meghan—habitually did the same thing. Though capable of meteoring down Sunrise Descent they almost invariably paused—sometimes for a significant interval—on the way up. This is the sort of data that Strava provides you with.

I will admit that I am no stranger to humiliation. Indeed, there is nothing easy about having been made to take a mandatory leave of absence. There are the endless hearings, the repetitions, the reiterations of who said what and the implications. By the end of the process a great relief descends. Much of that relief has to do simply with not having to tell the story any longer, to make any further admissions. A colleague, yes, and yes there was a tenure process involved, a romantic attachment also, yes presumed, yes now in the past, and yes I accept full responsibility.

And at some point one has to tell one's wife.

“What did you do?” said Meghan. This was a Friday. She'd just got back from a ride and was in the process of taking off her biking helmet. As usual she was flushed.

“It just happened,” I said.

“What happened?”

“The fact is,” I said, “I don't know where to start.”

“Start at the start,” she said.

It might have been over then. I can see that now. Three months pass and she comes home from Natural Grocers. “I found you a new doctor,” she will tell you.

“I'm fine,” you tell her back.

“I'm worried about your inertia,” she'll say. That's her word for it.

A
KEY ASPECT
of Strava's functionality is a mapping function which allows one to plan rides in advance and follow the rides of others. According to Strava, there are two routes that Meghan (now my ex) traveled, on bike, from our driveway to Sunrise Descent. The first, less direct, less arduous route is a ten-and-a-half-mile climb at a moderate-level thoroughfare known as Gold Camp Road. The other is an almost impossible climb up Bonne Vista Drive. I had driven up it a couple of times—most recently with Meghan's parents (she had been driving)—to show them the views from the top of the Cheyenne Mountain. Though I labored mightily, I soon gave up and I thought to turn off Strava, but didn't. There was nothing to be ashamed of, I told myself, even Smith Barnard and Meghan had had to rest—often for a substantial interval.