Littlest Finch

Last summer, I mentioned that I was interested in getting a bike and my Aunt Mary mentioned that she had one. So one weekend after she was up north, she stopped by Boston on her way back to her home in Connecticut to drop the bike off – a dark fuschia 1976 Schwinn Le Tour II. I got it tuned up and as of about a month and a half ago, I’ve ridden my bike to work about three days a week, sometimes more, depending on the weather. I could never have guessed how good it would be!

I get to work and guess what? I’ve already gotten 30 minutes of cardio for the day. I start the day off on the right foot – it carries through the rest of the day. It also has cut my commute down to 20-30 minutes, depending on the traffic. If I take public transportation, it can take anywhere from 40 minutes to nearly an hour. It’s only ever less than that when I manage to immediately get a train and a connecting bus which happens once in a blue moon.

The biggest change? NO MORE STRESS OF BEING ON THE TRAIN. I don’t know about you, but I’m not big on the invasion of personal space that comes with being on the train. I also don’t like the constant stops and starts when standing and tend to get motion sickness very easily. It’s a nightmare on the Green Line in particular, with all the street-level stops.

All of these things are sort of “well, duh”, but you don’t really think about it that way when you’re trying to get up the willpower to actually bike to work that first week or starting a new exercise routine or whatever it might be. Once you get into the swing of things, it gets easier because you’ve been doing it for such a long time, but it’s still a nice feeling to realise that I’m doing something good for myself that’s spilling out into all these different parts of my life. I had no idea how I’d feel after biking to work. I was expecting to be miserable the entire time, but I’ve gotten back that sense of being a kid a little bit and the health benefits as well.

It’s also “National Ride Your Bike to Work Week”, so, if you’ve got one and it’s possible? What the hell – it starts out as a day, a week, pretty soon you’re nearly on two months of biking to work.