Loved stuff

This week I became something that I haven’t been for 13 years… a cyclist.

Having totally failed at my recent gym visiting attempt (stats: three visits / seven months / £640 = £213 per visit [ouch]) I was inspired by a cyclist colleague in the office to get on a bike.  With the prompting of inspirational colleague my business has joined the government cycle scheme (you get to deduct the tax) and three of us have now bought bikes and have the all the paraphernalia that goes with it (and cost as much as the bike!).

Now as some of you may know I am a car lover and have been lucky enough to have to avoided the dreaded Tube to get to work for years now by driving.  I have been in my silver Merc bubble for a long time and get to indulge my other love of listening to BBC Radio 4 (especially Today in the morning and the comedy shows at 18:30).  This week I have been got in my car a total of zero times.

I have cycled to and from work through sunshine, wind and rain (we have been having a typical London summer).  I have huffed and puffed my way to and fro.  I have arrived at work with a weird pale and blotchy purple pallor, as well as slightly damp looking hair… I have absolutely loved it.

It takes exactly the same length of time to cycle the four and a half miles as it does to drive, and I think that with time as my sluggish (to non-existent) fitness improves I will be able to do it quicker.

Now cycling is dangerous and the cyclist is an unloved road user (check out this excellent post from willc.me), but given a bit of care and planning the risks and level of interaction with other traffic can be minimised.  Chad prompted me to look up a route on the Transport for London Journey Planner – you put in that you want to cycle from X to Y and hey presto a route is recommended.  I now have a lovely cycle to and from work through the quiet and very gentrified (totally untouched by the credit crunch) streets of St John’s Wood.

The Chad prompt was stimulated by the fact that on my trip back from the bike shop to home with my sparkly new bike and zero fitness I went via Swiss Cottage Roundabout.  Now if you know this delightful road intersection I appreciate that you will have just gasped at my stupidity.  If you don’t know the roundabout then think Arc de Triomphe in Paris (three /four lanes of fast crisscrossing vehicles) and you aren’t far off.

As I approached the roundabout I thought ‘this is a bad idea’ and guess what, it so totally was.  I pulled into the traffic as fast as I could and then started squealing as I attempted to cross two lanes with a car almost touching my back wheel with horn blaring.  Anyway, I lived to tell the tale and will not, under any circumstances, be doing that again.

So the bike looks like it is going to work out and hurrah and hurray I might have found a way to get exercise back in my life. Cyclists might be despised (especially by mean arse bus drivers) but the liberation that you feel on a bike is fantastic and is why so many people are revisiting life before they were seventeen and got their driving licence: when your bike was your escape pod to adventure.