The Stressful Commute
Usually, my commute takes me about 15 minutes each way. It’s only 3.6 miles, but there a bunch of red lights and stop signs. Today, it took around 50 minutes each way. A little over triple the usual. Why? Because I didn’t take my car. After putting on the new seat on my bike this morning, I decided to take the plunge. For someone whose sum biking experience was essentially the 20 minutes I spent riding around the parking lot yesterday, I feel like I did okay.
There were a couple of almost-wobble-into-traffic incidents, a couple of almost-fall-over incidents, and a somewhat frightening 4-way-stop-with-turn-lanes incident. I didn’t bike the whole way. I probably walked 1/3 to 1/2 of the distance where the bike lanes were non-existent, but that ratio will probably shift more towards the bike front as I gain more confidence. I’m still pretty wobbly, but it’s kind of like kayaking or driving. If you focus too much on what’s right in front of you, you’re going to wobble a lot more. If you focus a hundred feet in front of you, it’s a lot easier to go straight.
The bike I got off craigslist is a road bike, and it’s got some kind of abrasive grip tape wrapped all around the handel-bars. Leaning on that for as long as I did, my hands are by far the sorest thing on me. Followed closely by my poor ass. Third would be the feet–the new shoes are great for biking, but not made for walking. On my right calf, I’ve got a nasty scrape from where I rammed the left pedal into the back of my leg while walking the bike through some construction. And, to top it off, is the general fatigue from biking 7.2 miles when I haven’t exercised in a couple of months.
All in all, I’d call the bike-to-work experiment a rousing success!
[…] Though I keep telling myself not to make frivolous purchases, this is a product I’m so familiar with that it’s a necessary luxury. While I don’t like gas grills at all, I probably could’ve made do for the first summer with just a little Weber for $100 or so. Those tiny little grills are best suited for hamburgers and hotdogs, though, and having a real cooker out back sort of opens up the arsenal of what I can grill. At least that’s what I’ll be telling myself all summer long. I did a Boston Butt on it the night we got it home, then hotdogs + burgers + corn for a crowd of around twenty on Memorial Day. With around $1300 worth of grill/table sitting on my back patio now, though, talking myself into my next big purchase is going to be an even tougher sell. When I first moved to California and started my new job, my apartment was 4 miles from my office. I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was around eight years old, so four miles seemed pretty intimidating at the time. In the end, though, I talked myself out of an electric (it was ONLY 4 miles…), grabbed a cheapo off of craigs list, and dove right in. It was such a success that I upgraded bikes in a few weeks and continued biking in to work a few times a week… until I busted my ankle back in January. The ankle was just getting healed enough to ride in again (okay, it was probably good enough about a month before that) for me to bike in to work one last time before moving. I’ve done some weekend biking since we moved, but the commute (now 9 miles, with a few fairly steep grades) is just a little too intimidating. Even at four miles, I’d come in drenched in sweat. If only there were a way to take that 9 mile one-way commute and shrink it down… […]