Chapter One. Why you should ride a bike.
Why should you ride a bike? Well, you should ride a bike for at least two very good reasons: because it is good for you and because it is good for the planet. It is what the Americans call a "win-win" situation.
It is good for you because you get fit, and you help to save the planet while you are doing it because you are reducing the amount of carbon you are using just to get about the world around you. Cycling is carbon neutral - you are powering the machine on which you travel. Your body is its engine, and only you and your legs are pumping away (well, and your lungs and the rest of your body too) and are making the machine you are riding work.
I heard somewhere that the bike is the most efficient machine mankind has ever invented - that is to say, I suppose in terms of what you get out for what you put in. I don’t know if that is true, but it strikes me as being highly likely. Especially when going downhill: you go very fast for absolutely no effort at all. It is exhilerating, fun and pleasurable to be moving without effort and, almost in silence with the world around you flashing past. Of course, it isn’t always so easy, it’s not all downhill, but on the flat or up a hill, gearing makes it possible to progress with relatively little effort on your part. Relatively...speaking here as someone who had to get off and walk up many even slight gradients a year ago when I started cycling in earnest.
I don’t think you and I need to know much about gear ratios to appreciate the fact that a big ring on the front and a little ring on the back, connected by a chain - means that every time my legs turn the ring at the front round, the ring at the back moves the wheel round several times over. We don’t need to go into gearing ratios just now, but in my opinion the principle of gears is one of the core features of the bicycle, coming in only a close second to the reason the bike or bicycle has its name in the first place, the defining feature of being a two wheeled thing (bi = two, cycle = circles) which gives it its fundamental shape.
It has just occurred to me, reading this over that in an age when fixed wheel bikes are back in fashion some cyclists would not agree that gears are necessarily an essential part of a bike. And I guess they would be right, and I must try one out sometime to see what they are like. But I am a middle aged man with a cartilage operation to a knee behind him. I need every gear I have got on the bike to get up some of the hills around where I live in the Midlands, and it’s a comparatively flat part of the country.
There's at least a third other very good reason why you should ride a bike: money. While getting fit and saving the planet- and remember getting fit has all sorts of benefits we will go into later - you also save money. Your money. And nowadays, with the sky high prices being charged by companies for the privilege of transporting you about, you can save a significant amount of money by doing it yourself, under your own steam. Charging about like this in the early 21st century costs a lot of money: and few of us have enough of it to spend it simply traveling from A to B.
Of course, having a bike and using it regularly isn’t going to spare you entirely, I can’t promise that there will be no more standing at the petrol pump watching the pound signs racking up frighteningly quickly on the counter. Or no more costly train tickets to buy if you want to travel anywhere by rail. But if you start using a bike regularly and become confident in using it around town, then I can promise there will be no more getting on the bus to go into town. No more standing around at the bus stop looking at your watch. No more frustrating waiting for that number 35 to come around the corner - no more praying the driver is going to stop. Because that’s another problem. Traffic is holding everything up. You pay a lot of money to be moved about the heavily congested city...Slowly.
If it was fast and efficient it would be fine. That is what the Underground is supposed to do - whisk you from location to location as if by magic. But for those of us who live in cities without this seemingly wonderful (but still essentially Victorian) invention, we have to move around on roads on the surface. Slowly.
Another thing I have heard, and perhaps it is an urban myth put about by evangelical cyclists, is that it is as quick to travel round London today as it was in Victorian times. It is said that journey times by car nowadays are no faster than journey times were by horse and carriage in the 1880s. It’s probably an exaggeration, but when you are stuck in a stationary bus watching pedestrians overtake you, it doesn’t seem much of one. Because that's the issue - in modern cities, traveling can be both really really expensive and really really slow. We have all experienced this at rush hour - sitting in a traffic jam, crawling along one congested street after another, either in a car or on a bus, as the journey gets slower and slower and takes longer and longer. It can often take an hour to get home. About an hour to get the few miles from the city centre to the suburbs. It can often take longer than if you had started out walking in the first place, and definitely longer than if you had jumped on a bike and pedaled off.
Chances are wherever you live in the city, you will get to your destination on your bike in about 25 minutes. Because you can cover about 4 or 5 miles in 20 minutes. That’s not an optimistic figure, based on super fit lycra clad bikies, it’s the normal everyday kind of speed you will be able to achieve just by being on the bike - and it will be made up of a mixture of effort - no effort freewheeling down hill, pedaling along pretty easily on the flat, and puffing (to varying degrees) when you come to an uphill bit.
In a way, you are saving something else as well as the planet, you are saving energy - you are saving your energy by using a highly efficient machine to make yourself more efficient. It becomes easier and quicker to get about. The short trips which make up the vast majority of the journeys we make nowadays to get to the shops, take the kids to school, pop out to the local shops for a newspaper (or bottle of gin for that matter) are ideally suited to being on a bike.
Research in Liverpool has shown that in fact most of the daily journeys we make, the comings and goings of regular life we make as we criss cross the towns and cities we live in, are usually about 1-2 kilometers in length- around the 1500 meter mark. If you walk this distance at an average walking speed you will probably get there in about fifteen to twenty minutes. That’s at an average speed of three to four miles per hour. Sprint off on the bike for this short distance - and because it is short, you can sprint - and it will only take a fraction of this time. It will be at least three or four times faster. I guarantee you will be traveling at a speed somewhere between fifteen to twenty miles per hour. Do the maths for yourself. It’s going to take you four or five minutes max. And this advantage doesn’t factor in the fact that you as you get fitter, you will actually get more energy.
Energy is something you can make more of. If you are ill or poorly, you don’t have much energy. When you are feeling fit and well, you do. It’s as simple as that...and of course, this renewed energy is going to feed into all aspects of your life. You will have more energy for other things you might want to do: gardening, playing with the kids, doing some DIY. You get the picture, the list is endless.
In modern terms that has got to be pretty quick by any standards - and that's another reason why you should get on a bike: time. You can save time as well as everything else. Your precious time. Time is money. Perhaps - as you get older - time will come to seem more precious even than money to you. There isn’t enough of it to go around, and you can’t make it. You can only save some of it. It is like electricity: you can’t store it up and use it later, and it has to be used now. And if you don’t spend it wisely, it is gone before you know it. That has got to be another good reason to add to the list.
So far then, the list is : One, you get fit. Two, you save the planet. Three, you save money. Four, you save energy and five, you save that most precious thing, time. That thing you don't have infinite amounts of it, that thing you want to use to do stuff with - to make money, or to make friends, or to make love, or to make handbags, pots, pictures or whatever it is that you have to do in the time you have to spend. Whatever it is you want to do, you don't want to sit in a traffic jam. No one died saying they wish they had spent more time sitting in traffic.
On the bike, you are going to be relatively immune to this disease. Relatively: you will have to weave your way through the traffic, taking care not be get mashed by the cars and lorries around you, but this is a small price to pay for the relative freedom you will achieve from this oh so common universal curse of modern life.
Let’s go back to you and your body, as it is first on the list of good reasons to cycle. Cycling will be a benefit in its own right, even without all the other reasons I have advanced, because you will be getting fit. All the while as you pedal about, you will be getting fitter. You will be using your body, and as long as you take it sensibly, you will be improving it without putting too much stress and strain on it. You don’t want to bring on an injury, and if you take it carefully at first, this is unlikely. Because in cycling, or at least the kind of cycling I am recommending to you, less effort is best. Less strain. It’s not going to be a picnic, it’s not like sitting back in your favourite armchair to watch the latest episode of your favourite soap opera. It’s still hard work, but it’s not meant to be painful.
Take my word for it, having started to cycle in my mid to late 50s, I haven’t got enough in the tank to go hose piping it about. My energy is precious. I need to save my energy at the same time as I get try to get fit. Let’s assume for a moment that the fitness effect on your body is a given - a good thing which will take place, and we will talk about later, because I want to mention one other massively important reason for being on that bike. Your mind.
Let's think about your mind and the effect your healthy body is having on it. Quite apart from the healthy body thing, there's the rest of you to consider- your consciousness, your personality, your state of mind. Because I am going to claim that it isn't just your body which is getting healthier and fitter : the same thing is also happening to your mind. It is also going to become healthier. Getting fitter. Even perhaps, getting better... although that’s a quality judgment which will take more time defining.
"A healthy mind in a healthy body" may be a bit of a joke Victorian saying, but there is a lot of truth in it nonetheless, particularly when your middle aged body is starting to let you know it won’t be up to scratch like it used to be (if it ever was), and will need some taking care of in the future. For the purposes of my argument, mind and body are effectively one. We all know it instinctively, and all the doctors agree. Use it or lose it - a much more intelligent catchphrase than the much abused “No pain, no gain” mantra I have experienced at the hands of physiotherapists. But let’s not go there for the moment, let’s stay with the benefits of cycling for the mind.
Apparently, one of the best things to do if you are, or you become depressed, is to take exercise. All the doctors, all the experts, the psychiatrists and the self-help pundits put exercise right at the top of their list of things to do to help yourself get out of a state of depression. The effects may be gradual,and hard to see as they take place a little bit day by day, week by week, but slowly they will have a good effect upon your state of mind, and your self image. It’s right up there along with making lists, celebrating small achievements, and telling your inner voice - that one which tells you you can’t do this, or aren’t good enough for that - to shut up. It is good to take small decisions, to find something which takes you out of yourself.
That sounds an interesting condition: something which takes you out of yourself, and stops you thinking about yourself for a few moments...in my own case, cycling did this, taking all the little decisions you have to second by second to deal with the road in front of you, was enough to use up all my processing powers, to keep me busy thinking about what gear to be in, and what line to take around a corner that I stopped thinking about myself, and my problems, and my lack of confidence. I forgot about all those worries - I didn’t have the time for them, because just staying alive on the bike was taking up all my time. Then I realised I had started to enjoy not feeling that way. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not claiming it’s as easy as that. It didn’t happen over night. It wasn’t an immediate thing: get in the saddle, depression over. Oh no. I can still recall vividly what it feels like to be on a bike while being depressed. It’s bloody hard work, you seem to be working twice as hard just to keep up with the person in front of you.
And the chances are there will also come a eureka moment, one of those special moments which will demonstrate to you how good it is to be on your bike when you are lifted out of whatever frame of mind you are in into a state of happiness. A state of bliss. Oh, they are rare, but so worth the effort. For me, the first time i got this feeling was on a bit of road just out of the city.
There is nothing particularly special about Dyer’s Lane, it is not strikingly attractive or offers delightful views. It is only just out of sight of the M42 motorway on one side (but not out of earshot) and passes alongside one of the first fields as you leave the city on the other. It was Springtime. It was a nice enough day: the sky was blue(ish) the sun was shining. It was not raining etc., etc. But it was special.
It was the effortlessness of moving through the landscape apparently without effort which I became aware of. Suddenly I became aware that I was traveling through the landscape with almost no effort on my part, that I was moving without drag, seeming to glide along- keeping at a constant speed with only the slightest circling of the legs circling round to keep the wheels turning.
What I began to realise as I cycled along this bit of road was that Dyer’s Lane was a beautiful stretch of flat tarmac, a well made road with a surface which made it almost effortless to travel on. A good stretch of well laid tarmac is a wonderful thing to a cyclist, and I have come to appreciate one with a passion. I blessed whoever it was that had laid this surface, and wondered if they had been aware as they were making it of how much pleasure they were going to give to someone in the future. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the road surface changed. Coming to the brow in the road, which proved to be an old canal bridge, the road surface broke up into cracked and pitted strips, the handlebars juddered painfully and that was the end of that. And they can turn up in the strangest places...
I have realised now (having become more aware of how winds affect you on a bike) that I must have been helped by a barely noticeable tailwind, but at the time I wasn’t conscious of it. I had been enjoying the benefit of the cyclist’s friend, a gentle helping hand which helpfully
I am beginning to wonder how long this list of reasons for getting on a bike is. I am already losing track myself of it myself. I should probably stop at ten. That would make good sense. Let’s go over it again, you:
get fit
save the planet
save money
save energy
save time
I am not quite sure how to put this, but perhaps it is get happy
Make friends
Have something to talk about
I am beginning to wonder how long this list is going to be. You will notice I have just added another couple of reasons: making friends and having something to talk about. It has just occurred to me you can join a cycling club and meet other like minded enthusiasts if you want. I think I might do this in the next few weeks. I have looked at the web sites of two local clubs for starters. It seems you can go out on group rides which will give you the experience of riding in a bunch, (officially called the peleton, French for a ball or pack) and keeping out of the wind. It looks as though cycling clubs usually have several rides for club members of varying distances and speeds suitable to your stamina. Most weekends (usually on Sundays starting about nine) there is a 60-70 mile ride at an average speed of @ 16mph for the fit/elite riders, a shorter one at an average speed of about 13 mph for the average rider, and one with an average speed of about 10 mph for beginners. You can usually go along to the latter un-announced and find out if you like it. And if you do, there’s all the stuff that goes with being a member of a club if you are the ‘clubbable’ type: social evenings and fund raising events, training rides for youngsters etc.
And friends? Well, like anyone who becomes interested in a subject, you will enjoy talking to other people about it. Your enthusiasm will be infectious, and you will find a ready listener, and someone ready to share their own experience with you.
From the conversations I have had with other cyclists, the chances are you will find common ground immediately talking about the motorist: a dangerous entity whose life is in their hands, and worryingly, an entity whose personality changes alarmingly with the time of day from the just worrying to downright terrifying. The motorist is especially dangerous at rush hours when s/he is rushing to and from work or school, on the daily commute or the kids run. At other times of the day the motorist is more likely be relaxed, and if you are lucky, be considerate of your presence on the road, or at least not malicious or vindictive. The considerate motorist will slow down before overtaking, and hold back when approaching a crossroad to allow you to signal your intentions of turning right or left. But every cyclist will have a store of terrifying experiences of coming in contact with the motorist who has no time for the cyclist who s/he perceives as at best a nuisance, at worst an unwanted and unacceptable figure who should be driven off the road, shouted at and generally threatened.
I think I have come to the end of my list of reasons why to get on a bike. Perhaps everyone will have their own unique list, or if not, they will certainly have a different emphasis or order. I have just googled the question “Why should you ride a bike?” to see what the rest of the world says about this. It seems there are about 230,000,000 results, so there are a few to go at.
Right at the top of the first page is 5 reasons from the American site About.com cycling,. It recommends you should ride a bike 1. for your body: and cites cardiovascular fitness, increased strength, increased balance, flexibility and endurance as some of the benefits 2. for your state of mind: cycling being a ‘proven stress releaser’ and ‘fun’ 3. is charming, because it is for your community: because you can still engage in human interaction - such as calling out, or waving to neighbours, and such like exhibitions of bonhomie and general social wellbeing 4. for convenience generally - saving you sitting in traffic and spending time looking for a parking space, and 5 for your pocketbook - it reckons if you cycle to and fro work every day- averaging 16 miles per day - you can save at least four hundred dollars every year.
Another site, Teen advice.about.com gives 20 good reasons for teenagers why they should cycle. Top of the list is ‘you don’t need a license to ride a bike’. Other semi-comic reasons are clearly designed to appeal to those young Americans with raging hormones such as (in at number 10) the advice that ‘Going for a bike ride with your boyfriend or girlfriend makes for the perfect summer date.
A third site, Fit sugar.com says “Whether you're a biking newbie or a seasoned urban biking vet, I can give you plenty of reasons to ride. It's fun, it's good exercise, and it's an eco-friendly way to get around.” That is vet as in ‘veteran’ not that unique modern civic ameliorant, the cycling veterinary surgeon who comes to treat your sick pet on a bike in the same way that the district nurse arrived to deliver babies in 1950s post war welfare state Britain.
If you ask the same question of exclusively British sites by adding the suffix uk it is clear from page one that bikes to the British means motorbikes. Most of the sites on the first page is given over to characteristically British sets of rules and regulations you need to fulfill to be allowed on the road, whether on bike or motorbike.
As for our kind of non-motorised bike bikehub.co.uk explains that in the UK Bicycles are, ‘in law, carriages (as a consequence of the Taylor v Goodwin judgment in 1879) and should be on the road not footway. (Technically speaking, a ‘road’ is a ‘carriageway’). One of the sensitive issues here in the UK is whether cyclists can use the pavements (aka sidewalks) or, in British legal parlance, footways. Apparently, ‘Cycling on footways (a path at the side of a carriageway) is prohibited by Section 72 of the Highway Act 1835, amended by Section 85(1) of the Local Government Act 1888. This is punishable by a fixed penalty notice of £30 under Section 51 and Schedule 3 of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988’. So now you know, that’s the English for you..hundreds of years without a constitution, but thousands of common law cases to throw at you for every conceivable situation to demonstrate that you are breaking the law whatever you do.
What of other nations? Are they as rule bound I wonder? Surely not - surely the naturally libertarian Italians don’t allow their cycling to be so regimented? I begin to wonder fancifully if perhaps cycling is as characteristic of nations as languages are. For example, would a Frenchman put the convenience of cycling to visit his “cinq a sept” mistress near the top of the list of good reasons why he should use a bike? Not to mention the advantages to his lovemaking which would undoubtedly accrue from his increased stamina? When I put the question to google ‘Why should a frenchman ride a bike fr?” not surprisingly, nothing like such an answer comes up, but I am immediately attracted to one of the links on the page which sends me off in another direction. This is wikipedia’s page on bicycle touring which has some reference or other to a French touring cyclist. Scrolling past several paragraphs on the origins of cycle touring, I come to the paragraph on Voyages, where it says (and I quote) “Bicycle touring can be of any distance and time. The French tourist Jacques Sirat speaks in lectures of how he felt proud riding round the world for five years – until he met an Australian who had been on the road for 27 years.”
It goes on to mention that “The German rider, Walter Stolle, lost his home and living in the Sudetenland in the aftermath of World War II, settled in Britain and set off from Essesx on 25 January 1959, to cycle round the world. He rode through 159 countries in 18 years, denied only those with sealed borders. He paid his way by giving slide shows in seven languages. He gave 2,500 at US$100 each. In 1974, he rode through Nigeria, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Ghana, Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Guinea. He was robbed 231 times, wore out six bicycles and had five more stolen.”
There’s plenty more stuff like this, and you could go on and on. Well, why not just start reading yourself and see where this thread takes you? It’s fascinating: cycling has a history, a sociology, a psychology, which can lead you to think about biology, an d any number of “-ologies’ of many different kinds. Biology? Yes, really. The English geneticist Steve Jones has written that we have probably stopped evolving as a species, at least in the way Darwin used the term in Origin of the Species, since the invention of the bicycle brought about the diversification of the gene pool by making travel.
That’s the beauty of taking an interest in something: you get interested in it, and suddenly there is a vast field of knowledge out there for you to take an interest in. Being interested in something - anything really, it doesn’t particularly matter what - has this effect. I am not claiming it is a socially useful occupation - if you want this then you should turn to penal reform, or education in the under fives, the causes of social inequality. All far more worthwhile, but like all of these, cycling will lead you into a world of knowledge which will suddenly open out in front of you and your interest will lead you on.
It brings me back to reason number 8: have something to talk about. Get a hobby, have something to interest you, something you can talk to others about. It is all part of staying in the goldilocks zone of mental health- neither too manic nor too depressive, but somewhere in the middle where life is reasonably interesting and entertaining.
I know I have left out some reasons that some people (men) would advance for getting on a bike - you can race people. And beat them. I am not going there: if you want to prove a point on a bike, fine - go ahead. There are plenty of books about this type of cycling, competitive sport cycling: a world of extremes and superhuman endurance. Instead, I want to talk about how you get your old bike out of the shed and start using it, which will be the subject of my next chapter, because then we can move onto some other fascinating things such as how your perceptions of the landscape will change as you get fitter - the world becomes flatter (in a good way) - uphill gradients seem to become almost flat, what were hills become noticeably less steep, and shorter...but before that I want to talk about cycling Utopia.
