Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I have ridden to work. First I had a sore back, then the bike needed a service, and then it rained a lot. This was also my first ride with cleated pedals, which was very exciting.
These two factors resulted in my slowest ride to work yet, but I didn’t crash and am a little more confident with the cleats now, which has to be a good thing.
I’ve done the commute three times now (it’s been really wet the last couple of weeks), and now have the ride down to 21 minutes, which is nice.
This morning was my first bike commute to work ever. Not just to my new American job, but ever (I’ve always lived too far from work until now — being a bike ride away from work was one of the criteria for the apartment in the US). The ride was rather pleasant, and involved very little on the road stuff (just getting onto the bike path near the apartment) — 27 minutes, 7.7km, maximum speed of 33 km per hour.
There is a lot of room for improvement here — we didn’t go the most efficient way, I am relatively unfit at the moment not having ridden for a month, and Andrew is learning how to use cleats which made for a bit of laughter.
A nice ride though, and I’m pretty happy with how it went. I’ll be riding more in the future.
And 31km travelled. Not too shabby given I couldn’t breathe and had goo coming out of my head. I feel quite unfit riding now though, so I need to put some work into getting back into things.
James talks about commuting to Google, which is currently of interest to me so I’d like to hear more about the practicalities of commuting in Mountain View if possible. For instance, are their off road bike paths, do American drivers try to kill you, and how far is Jame’s commute on the bike each way?
I’m not sure I really care if commuting to work by bike is cheaper, I only want to own one car in the US if I can (I have two here), and I like the idea of living close enough to work to be able to ride there.
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At the start of last week I set myself the goal of riding 100 kilometres during the week. Despite a couple of rainy days and being busy, I made it… I’m very proud of my little self now.
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It would have been more, except I was away on the weekend. I haven’t gone riding yet this week — it’s been too wet.
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I went about 50km this last week… I can only say about because my bike computer just reset itself while I was down at the shops — losing the odometer along the way (it said about 190km). Oh well. All of that riding was errands and travel to and from uni, with only one 13km pleasure ride.
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This is a boring post, so I’ll keep it short. 30.81km, max speed 45.9 km per hour, 1 hour 52 minutes ride time. Around lake Tuggeranong and so forth.
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I’ve been feeling agitated all week, and really quite stressed out. This could be because of:
But I’ve put it down to being because I hadn’t been for a bike ride since Saturday, so I just went for a 12.14km, 41 minute, ride around ANU and the edge of the lake. Now I feel better, if more sweaty.
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Not as much riding as I had hoped for over the weekend, as I ended up with yet another headache this afternoon. The frequency of them is decreasing though, so I think I am getting over whatever bug is causing them. Anyways, 12km yesterday — a ride from Dad’s house to my house, and then a couple of test rides when playing with the gears on my brother in law’s bike.
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