Why

It was a gorgeous day to bike downtown to work today. Not even the scary (super-scary) potholes on Heron could dampen my spirits. And because one of my jobs has meant I get to bike to work less (it's 40 km from my place: not really manageable by bike) I treasure the days I get to ride even more.

On my In Town and Out interview this week I talked about commuting by bike, but I never feel like I've really gotten across why it's so darn good. This, though, was posted by a friend on Facebook the day after the interview, and I think it sums things up pretty well:

Giacomo asked me, in the In Town and Out interview, about how I got started riding, and in ten seconds or so I tried to say something about that. But it's hard to be clear when you're thinking on your feet in front of a microphone, and I think it bears saying again that I didn't do it to save the world or to be an athlete. I will admit that a part of my decision to see if I could actually bike to work every day was based on the fact that I had recently gotten back into rock climbing, and thought that pretty much anything that made me stronger, faster, or built up my endurance would be good for my climbing game. But more important was the fact that if I biked the 7 or 8 miles to and from work each day, I didn't have to buy a $90 monthly bus pass. I didn't have a car: it was bus, transit or beg a ride for anything I wanted to go to. And I was broke and trying to save money.

And as I mentioned in the interview, I quickly discovered that what had been an hour and fifteen minute bus ride, on average, was a 35-40 minute bike ride. I started out by telling myself there was no option: ride or nothing. Because it was actually faster to bike, that was easy: if I dawdled in the morning, as I was very likely to do, eventually my only choice would be to ride, because I'd missed the bus I needed. My own habits helped me out, there. After a while, I forgot that bussing - anywhere - was even an option.

And I arrived at work so much more awake and alive. Sure, I might arrive ranting about an idiot who'd cut me off on Montreal Road or blazed past me on Bank, but I had also been able to spend 40 minutes of my morning pedaling along, checking out the sunshine and the wildlife along the Rideau River, getting my pulse up, listening to some tunes in one ear, doing some thinking and organizing and planning in my head, and bringing my heartrate up a little. After a while, I started riding in the rain, too, once I had rain gear. And then after a year or two, I stopped turning in the bike and standing in line for the bus pass in October or November, and started riding through the winter. And discovered how much fun a quiet cold street can be in January when you're the only cyclist you've seen all night. Frozen dry pavement and a scarf covered in built-up frozen breath can be fun too. Even riding back from a night out with friends through a driving ice storm. 

Giacomo asked about people worrying about not looking 'cool' if they don't have all the road-bike gear, and I wish I'd said that most of the time, the coolest I feel is when I come rolling up to my apartment building at the end of the day, swing off, and pick my bike up to carry it up the stairs to the lobby. Sure, Mike's a cheap, second- or third- or maybe fourth-hand beater, but that's actually pretty cool in itself. That's how I roll: on a beat-up old mountain bike. Pretty much every time I pull up at my building and get off, I feel badass. Rain, shine, snow, sleet, good traffic, bad traffic, whatever: when I hit the brakes at the end of my trip, I think, "yeah, that's the establishing shot for the next scene in the movie someone's filming of my life."

And also, everyone has a different sense of "cool." My own sense has changed over the years I've been riding. All sorts of cyclists strike me as "cool" now. This afternoon I cruised through the south end of Centretown behind a girl with short hair, a messenger bag, high handlebars, a straight-backed posture, fully tattooed calves, and a music player mounted on her bike playing "Love Will Tear Us Apart." I had to pull up and hit the brakes behind her for a while because she was slower than me, but I didn't mind one bit. She was cool. 

A little later on, I found myself behind a grey-haired, balding and bearded man with his seat too low, in a suit, on a hybrid, rolling down a main artery. He was cool too. Someone at Billings Bridge had parked a mid-range road bike in black and acid green. That was cool. Someone downtown this morning had a bike with one of those curved metal fenders strapped, for some reason, to the top tube. Also cool. I think freaky cargo bikes are cool, and collapsible folding bikes. I think single-speed cruisers are cool, and trial bikes, and super hardcore mountain bikes, and ultrasleek road bikes. I even think STOOPIDTALL is cool, although it scares the crap out of me. And check this adorable Twitter pic.

So I suppose what I think is cool is that bikes can be an extension of your own style, and an extension of your life. Lots of things about my life have changed because I ride, sure, but  I also feel like the way I ride has developed because of who I am. And sunny early summer days like this one get me kind of effusive about the whole thing.

15 minutes of fame

Just a quick note: I'll be appearing on CBC Radio's In Town and Out tomorrow (Saturday) at 8:15 am, talking about Bike to Work Month with Giacomo Panico, who I'm happy to get to meet IRL (there are so many people I know from the online community that I haven't actually met in the real world.) I'll post the link here when the interview's online sometime tomorrow. For now, In Town and Out's page is here.

Random encounters

I was heading up Bank Street south of Billings Bridge this afternoon on my way home from a meeting. Up ahead of me, on the sidewalk, there was a slightly sketchy-looking guy riding on the sidewalk, on a mountain bike with big fatty tires - more than 2 inches, I'd say. As I stopped at a red light, he stopped at the intersection as well and got off his bike, I assume to walk it across the road, or maybe he was just getting tired of the climb.

Then he called out to me. "You need air in your tire."

I looked up. "I know," I said, and I did; before leaving the house I'd noticed the tires were flabby but was running too late for my meeting to dig out the pump. But after a second I thought that sounded a bit too brusque - the guy was just being helpful. So I added with a laugh, "I can definitely tell when I'm on a hill," and then the light changed and I rolled along on my way.

But it also occurred to me that it's kind of amazing that he'd seen, and noticed, that my tire was a little deflated. From that distance. As I was cranking along on the road. I stopped later to take a picture of my tire, with my weight on the seat. This picture up and to the left is it.

This guy saw that my tire was low on air from a good twenty-five feet away. Now that's a guy with an eye for bikes.

Proper spring

I was out looking for photos for the
Centretown BUZZ. Found this.

Today was probably the first taste of proper spring. It's gritty and wet (my back fender fell off a couple of days ago, because the zip tie holding it on broke: left the house without it today and regretted it within five minutes when I had a soggy, gritty patch on my ass.)

Oh, but, but...Gritty, wet, sure, but it was above freezing. I could wear my helmet without a toque underneath it. There were patches of dirty snow creeping out into and across the bike lanes, but I rode along, way out in the lane to avoid the potholes and puddles, taking up my space like a boss and thinking, "There's hope for the universe yet."

Spring always does that to me. Somehow riding your bike when you're not bundled up, head and torso immobilized by coat and scarf and hat and shoulders hunched up against the chill - riding when you can loosen up and let down the defenses against the elements - the first day you really get to do that in the spring is so liberating. It's like you have so much more room, control, grace, power. You're not carrying around a ton of tension, prepared for black ice, slippery slush, that hidden pothole, the car bearing down from behind, and shrunk into yourself because it's -20 out there beyond your eyelids... nope. Not anymore. Now you're a lane-taking, curb-hopping, pedal-cranking machine, with your head on a swivel just because it finally can be.

Or maybe it's just me.

Long live the first yawns and stretches of spring.

Jaw dropped, for two reasons

Out of the internet ether comes this crazy bike fact: 

There was once a bike that went 127 miles an hour. 

It looked like this:

And it went like snot. It was ridden in 1962, in Germany, by a crazy bastard named José Meiffret. It's worth reading the full story, which I stumbled upon via ThumbShift and Grist.com. Everything about this bike and the ride strikes me as having a sort of inspired, delirious madness about it. 

And while we're marveling at inspired craziness from the past, here's some from the present: I was on the way home tonight when I heard CBC's As It Happens running a story about Boris Johnson's cycling initiatives, announced this morning. Boris Johnson, in case you don't know, is the mayor of London, England. I've posted a video on this blog of him riding a "Boris bike" with Arnold Schwarzenegger when they got instated (incidentally, the Boris bikes are actually the Bixi bikeshare system, bought from Canada). I knew he was a cycling supporter. 

But to the tune of 913 million pounds? That's how much he'll be spending on infrastructure to prioritize bikes, get more people cycling and relieve traffic, according to the Guardian. There will be a 15-mile "crossroad for cyclists" - a fully segregated bike freeway, co-opting parts of existing motorways. There will be three "mini Hollands" in the suburbs - areas where bikes will supplant cars for internal transportation almost entirely.

As Jeff Douglas said on the show, "If you're a regular cyclist in a Canadian city, you might want to plug your ears and hum loudly for the next few minutes. Because this story may make you a tiny bit envious. Or unbelievably, unbearably envious."

Yeah, Jeff. You nailed it. 

A bike made of cars

I've stumbled across another cool (if somehow hipstery) video. This is a bike made out of junked cars. There's a lovely sort of metaphor in that. Also, blowtorches are cool.

It's that magical time...

When potholes spring up out of nowhere! Like daisies! Or possibly fungus!

But to bring a little joy into a pothole-ridden day, I have just discovered a total gem of the Interweb: there is a website called www.pothole.info. There really is. I found it because I wanted to look up something on how potholes form (because it seems to me like they're worse on higher-speed roads and I was looking for some sort of explanation for that). Go. Click it. It's really entertainingly written.

Anyway, the pothole report from here: there are days when I feel, as I turn in to my driveway, that just getting home unharmed was an achievement for the day. And I feel a little badass as I put on the brakes in front of my door and pick the bike up to bring it inside... that's right, I just made it home. UNINJURED. What have you done recently?

I was on the way home today and ran into this nightmare: this is on the way south on Bank, near the intersection with Randall, I think. The problem here is the high snowbanks on the side of the road which eat the bike lane (while it lasts) and then do a quick duck further into traffic where the bike lane ends. By the time you've made it through all that, you're a little sketched about the speeding cars on your left. And you're climbing a hill. Then you encounter this:

Note the snowbank.

Anyway, I started taking pictures.

The thing about potholes of the size and grandeur of Bank and Heron potholes is, at least they push you to take up space. It's scary to get out there into the lane when you can hear the cars coming up behind you, and I have to remind myself over and over that I'm actually safer with my tires a metre or so out from the edge, rather than hugging the side, taking up as little space as possible, the Apologetic Cyclist. "Nuts to that! Take up space!" I tell myself. But it's really hard to actually do. It's so easy to hear the car coming up behind you at speed, and cringe sideways. And every time I do, and the car passes close to me and I flinch, I'm actually madder at myself for cringing than at the car for buzzing me.  . .

Anyway. There are spots on Heron that sort of force you to merge left, or face disaster. Like this:

I mean, it's almost magnificent. Just look at the sheer extent of it! I actually did have to ride (slowly, and standing on the pedals) through that mess on the left, because there was double-barreled traffic coming by and I couldn't swerve into the lane. Slammed on the brakes instead. I'm happy I ride a mountain bike.

There's also this one, just in front of Saint Patrick High School, which has been there a while. It's almost an axle-breaker, and I know that a couple of weeks ago, while I was walking past, I got drenched when a car went over it:

I'm going to have to break out my Pothole Rating System (TM) soon, I think. It's only going to get more interesting.

The thing is, like I just said about them forcing you to take the lane, they do kick your awareness, and your bravery, up a notch. Potholes make you ride more skilfully. In case you're looking for a silver lining to that late-winter-early-spring-riding cloud.