The four stages in a bike riding career

1) No other cyclist is allowed to pass you or even to linger in your slipstream. All are vanquished.

2) You can confidently hang with anyone else you see on the road, as long as they don't mind your drafting off of them

3) You realize the innate value in finding and maintaining your own personal pace on rides

4) Cyclists no longer blow past with an "on your left", but rather, slow down to say, "it's so nice that you still manage to ride!"

Who is this for?

I mean, it seems to me than anyone driving a car on the CCT is unlikely to be deterred by a sign. Even if it is in an unusual and arresting shade of yellow.

Dark

I love riding in the dark, the way it opens up in front of you and closes up behind you, and all the rest of the time you’re as good as invisible. I suspect that one of the things I like deep down about bike commuting is that for half an hour every morning and evening I move through a busy and crowded world without altogether being a part of it. Biking to work is the next best thing, I think, to being able to fly 15 feet off the ground.

Anyhow, dark enhances this illusion. Remarkably, my fore and aft lights don’t diminish it much, perhaps because even with them I’m only a bright dot at a hundred yards or more.

Unsettling seductiveness

It’s February 28 and today I rode to work in shorts and a summer jersey. At mid-morning, it’s 71 degrees. Ten days ago temperatures reached the high 70s here, a record, and I was overdressed riding home in wool.

I really enjoy shedding my heavy and cumbersome winter riding clothes, and feeling for the first time in weeks the wind and sun on my arms and legs. Still this weather gives me the creeps; it’s frightening to contemplate what it may foretell. When it’s said and done I’d really prefer another month of crummy, gray, dreary – but seasonable – weather.

Weather immunity

Regular bike commuters enjoy a liberating indifference to weather. Take rain. A pedestrian caught without an umbrella is forced to wait out the storm or dash from awning to awning until they reach the protection of the Metro, bus shelter or parking garage. And even with an umbrella, their clothes below the waist are quickly soaked. The cyclist by contrast doesn’t care. There is only one weather metric on a bike: warmth. If you’re warm, you’re fine. And staying warm on a bike is usually pretty easy. (On perhaps the 15 hottest days of the year, the opposite holds – if you’re cool, you’re fine. Those days, drink a lot of water and ride slowly.)

In summer rainstorms, all you get is wet. And you quickly discover that wet, by itself, isn’t unpleasant at all. (One long day in the rain in 1995 revealed this truth to me.) The warm air, plus the heat you generate by riding, are usually enough to keep any chill at bay. In the cooler air of spring and fall, add a rain jacket or perhaps another insulating layer on rainy days. And of course no matter how wet you may get on the bike, when you get where you’re going, you peel off your wet bike clothes and climb into a dry set of duds. (The ordinary commuter by contrast has little choice but to wear the day’s weather until merciful evaporation completes its work.)

Staying warm in winter is largely a matter of the right clothes. With good layering and proper cold weather selections (like special lobster gloves and a balaclava), you can ride for half an hour or 40 minutes in temperatures down to 10-12 degrees Fahrenheit and honestly pronounce the weather merely “chilly”. Snow is not much of a problem because it doesn’t make you wet. The worst days are rainy ones right at or just above freezing, and I confess that I don’t really look forward to them. But even they aren’t that bad, and I ride in them too.

After a while at this you really do begin to believe you possess a special, personal kind of immunity to the weather. A couple of years ago I had to spend eight weeks in Chicago in October and November on business. I couldn’t ride to work so I deliberately chose a hotel about a mile from the office so I could at least get in a little walk each day. I know what Chicago weather is like that time of year but in packing I completely neglected to pack an umbrella, raincoat or hat. Only later did I realize I had come to believe that weather was just not something that I ever needed to worry about in travelling between home and office - having completely lost sight of the fact that this was thanks only to the bicycle and was not some superhuman trait. Luckily, taxis are abundant in Chicago even in the rain; I spent enough time in them that month.

. . . because all their lives men have been telling them that this – [---------] – is 9 inches!

And so it is in cycling as well - many things are not as substantial as one might imagine or wish them to be. I've already noted how hard it is to achieve 10,000 hours in the saddle, which turns out literally to be a lifetime accomplishment for the non-professional cyclist. Another surprising figure is how little money one actually saves on gasoline by riding instead of driving. At 25 mpg and $3 / gallon, my 2,500 bike commuting miles works out to a gasoline savings of a modest $300 / year. Of course I avoid many other costs (e.g., DC's confiscatory parking lot fees; auto depreciation) which may be even more substantial, and there’s no question that bike commuting is a money saver. But I’m not going to put my kids through college on the difference. Hell, I could save more than I do on gas simply by giving up my second cup of store-bought coffee each day.

10,000 hours?

Malcolm Gladwell (“Blink”, “Outliers” and other best sellers) says that true, world-class mastery of any discipline – be it athletics or computer programming or musical proficiency – requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. The TimesOnline UK has a nice summary of this 10,000 Hour Rule, if you’re not familiar with it. Link here.

I’ve ridden more than 60,000 miles since I started keeping serious track in 1987. That’s more than 2,600 miles per year, every year, for almost a quarter of a century. A lot of riding, right? Well – it doesn’t even get me close to 10,000 hours. 60,000 miles at an estimated lifetime average of 15 mph is – do the math – 4,000 hours. Not even half.

The upside I suppose is that "expert cyclist" must be a satisfying thing to accomplish when you're 80.

Eat your vegetables

Over the years I’ve noticed that a lot of bicycle / bicycle commuter advocacy sites try to encourage new bike commuters with a list of virtues, reasons that people should forego their cars in favor of their bikes – it’s “greener”, your carbon footprint is smaller, you save money, it’s “one less car”, and so forth. Here are a couple of examples: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments; Washington Area Bicyclist Association . These are all indisputably noble and true but probably about as effective in persuading people to ride to work as “it’s full of vitamins” is in getting kids to eat their peas or spinach.

Virtue may be its own reward but it’s even truer of fun. Bike to work if you enjoy it. If for some reason you need to maintain a certain level of social consciousness cred, just pretend that you don’t.