Bike Commuting

I have been a bike commuter now for two weeks. Every morning as I tuck my right pant leg into my sock, strap on my helmet, and head off for work, I feel so metropolitan and environmentally conscious. I quietly give myself a pat on the back, even though the truth is I could not drive if I wanted to--if you live in student family housing, you aren't allowed to buy a ridiculously expensive campus parking permit.

The ride to work (which will be exactly the same as the ride to school) is between ten and fifteen minutes, depending on which way I'm going. The way there, for some reason, is quite a bit more difficult and thus slower. The majority of the ride is on a paved bike trail and if there's an incline it's visually imperceptible, but each morning as I ride to work my legs burn and I feel like the wheels are dragging. Perhaps it's the direction of the wind, or the condition of my legs in the morning as opposed to the afternoon, or simply the fact that in the afternoon I'm done with the day, on my way home, and thus feeling lighter.

Regardless of the reason for the difference between one way and the other, I don't manage to keep up with the other bikers going either way. This is due to a combination of the fact that I hadn't owned a bicycle in about fifteen years before moving to Seattle and the fact that I don't wear tight little biker shorts. Everyone knows that tights make you faster. Maybe after I've been riding a while I'll get in better shape so I can go faster and feel confident enough in my physique to wear tights in public.

The problem now is that all this might have become moot this afternoon. I was running late to get to work so I asked Foxy J to drop me off--a mistake, as we realized as soon as we saw the unmoving cars lined up along 45th Street. She ended up dropping me quite a distance from the library, but I still made it to work much faster than if she had tried to drive me any closer. I was only about a minute late, in fact. If I've lost you by now you should know that the last three sentences are a tangent. The point is that I didn't have my bike, so I walked home from work. It took me less than fifteen minutes.*

So now do I continue making a ten-minute bike ride to campus every day, only to spend five minutes on each side strapping up and down, tucking in and out, and locking and unlocking, or do I just take the fifteen-minute walk? Riding a bike is good exercise, but walking is nothing to shake a stick at. The advantage to biking is that I will likely get faster as I get used to it, while walking is walking is walking. I'm as fast a walker now as I'll ever be. The advantage to walking is that I wouldn't have to worry about finding an open space on a bike rack, or repairing flat tires, or running over squirrels.

Any thoughts from the blogosphere?


*If you're wondering why it takes me just as long to bike as to walk, just picture the very big hill that I ride around the long way on my bike but have no problem going up or down on foot.