It doesn’t seem like so long ago when I would race a bicycle more than 30 times in a year, and standing atop the podium afterwards was extremely important to me.

So important that I led a life that a few of my racing buddies found too extreme. And some of those extreme measures I now see as unhealthy.

But they’re not the real topic today.

Motivation is. Specifically how to increase yours to exercise as well as do all the other things needed to optimize your health.

I had an absolute excess of motivation way back when, which is why I willingly woke up at 4 a.m. on workdays to work out and, so I could be an early riser, willingly went to bed by 8 p.m. on weeknights. I took my own food to family and social get-togethers and shunned not just fast food but restaurant food also.

I even did the final half of a hill-interval bicycling workout in that infamous Berks County hailstorm 10 years ago that caused millions of dollars’ worth of car and home damage.

I didn’t think twice about any of it, but I’m pretty sure I know what you think about of all it. So it’s only mentioned because I recently read a question-and-answer bicycling column where the concern was a lack of motivation.

It took me on a trip down Memory Lane, which detoured onto Radical Road.

For those interested, the article can be found in Issue 138 of RoadBikeRider.com and is titled “How can I stay motivated on solo training rides?” Stan Purdum’s answer to that question did what good writing so often does. Expands my mind, allows me to see links between things I didn’t see before.

Like how, when it comes to the matter of motivation, knowledge can be a double-edged sword.

For what I now know would’ve kept me from adhering to an early bedtime, inside during hailstorms, and my healthy foods at home is what those who text type as TMI. The too much information in this case, as far as I’m concerned (or AFAIC as I’ve been told by one cell phone owner), is the knowledge of how it is all going to turn out.

The antisocial sleep schedule. The diligent dieting. The rigorous training.

And especially the results of races.

If the outcomes of each would not have been a big mystery, an unsure experiment — if there would’ve been a specific way to eat, a certain way to train, or even a certain pill to take that would’ve insured I’d stand atop the podium after every single race — I know my desire to do so would’ve evaporated instantly. I would’ve done far less riding, even less of it intensely, and maybe, just maybe, started going to McDonald’s for a Big Mac and fries and the Outback Steakhouse for Bloomin’ Onions, and the 22-ounce Melbourne Porterhouse steak.

Knowing the outcome: It’s why so many of my former cycling companions are hardly cycling and certainly not cycling hard. They know they’re at an age where the point to riding hard or long is not to get better, but delay getting worse.

Mike D, the guy who asks the lack-of-motivation question in the aforementioned article, never mentions his age, however, so I don’t know if it plays a role in the lack of his.

What I do know is, regardless of age, it can be a bit of a struggle — sometimes a supreme one — to exercise. But I also know most times after I get started, I feel the same joy and contentment that Purdum writes about finding almost every time he’s riding a bicycle.

And that the previously mentioned expansion of my mind from reading his article (thank you, Stan) has caused me to remember what the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote about the “unresolved in your heart” and apply to the lack-of-motivation problem.

Rilke believes we should learn “to love the questions themselves.”

Now you don’t have to be a bard or from Bonn to do this, just an inquisitive exerciser. One who sees both life and exercise as a big mystery, an unsure experiment, and is willing to conduct all sorts of personal research.

Now it’s time for an ease-my-mind epilogue.

During the aforementioned historic hailstorm, the area in which I was riding didn’t get hit with the baseball-sized stuff that did the worst damage. I did, however, get hit with a few the size of golf balls and yelped “Ouch” more than once before I was done.

I still shun fast food and restaurant food and intend to continue to do so. Therefore, the “just maybe” about ever consuming a Big Mac or a porterhouse steak was a mix of hyperbole and dramatic license.

I’ve been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 1979, and though I have considered eating meat from time to time, if I ever do so again, I would only consume wild game.