The goat listens to the White Album on a Sunday morning, all four sides, start to finish, nothing else going on. Ninety-three minutes. He does not check his phone. He does not get up during "Revolution 9," which is the part that separates the people who say they listen from the people who do.

Then he changes into the spandex.

The spandex is immaculate. This is the detail I keep coming back to. Everything else about the goat suggests a man in the middle of something — the helmet is a size too big, the bike is fine but not nice, he has the specific unbothered posture of someone who took up cycling in his forties and is not going to pretend otherwise. But the kit is spotless. Washed after every ride, hung, not tumbled. In a life that could go either way, the goat has decided that this one thing will be clean.

He rides the East Bay Bike Path. Providence to Bristol and back if the day allows, the Seekonk on one side and the marsh smell coming up through the gaps in the boardwalk, past the old rail bed where the ties still show through in places. There are faster people on that path. He is not racing them. He is training for a half marathon, which he will finish, and which nobody has asked him about.

The Block

2 3 4 5 6 8 9 11 12 14

I have looked at that list a lot. It builds sensibly. It has a rest structure. A coach would sign off on it. It also never once touches 1, 7, 10, or 13, and if you sit with it long enough — and I did, on a bench outside the bakery, for longer than I want to admit — you notice that the numbers he runs and the numbers he doesn't are sorted by a rule that has nothing to do with running.

I have never mentioned this to him. I am fairly sure he doesn't know. I am also not completely sure, and the not-being-sure is the whole thing.

During the week the goat is Head of People at Seven Stars. This is a real job with real weight to it — hiring, scheduling, the conversations nobody wants to have, in a bakery where the ovens start before four and half the staff are twenty-three. He is good at it. People trust him. He is the person you tell the thing to.

So: a man who spends five days a week holding other people's difficulties, one morning a week sitting completely still inside a record, and the rest of it moving in immaculate spandex along a decommissioned rail line, on a schedule that quietly refuses four numbers out of fourteen.

There is a version of this where the goat is a joke. He isn't. He's the most organized person I know, and the organization goes all the way down past the part where anyone can see it. What looks like a bit is just a man who has found the arrangement that works and declined to explain it to anyone.

I asked him once why he does the same ride every week instead of finding new ones.

He said the path doesn't change, so he can tell what does.