Your mind’s made up? Let’s go shopping.

You may have considered the idea of cycle commuting to work, and if you haven’t tried it before, or don’t ride a lot, the whole idea probably raises a lot of questions in your mind. I think there are lots of articles that you can read that suggest the long list of health and wealth benefits of commuting by bicycle, so I’m not going to get into that. You have your own reasons if you’re even contemplating this. But here are some key areas you’ll want to consider to get yourself ready:
- A bike. You’ll need one of those for sure.
- A helmet. The bad news, most of them look dorky and make the person wearing them look even dorkier. The good news, in many jurisdictions they’re required by law, so at least we can all look dorky together.
- Clothes and accessories. You don’t need a lot of special stuff to get started, though I wholeheartedly recommend bike gloves. You’ll know why if you ever take a spill, or that is, an “unscheduled dismount”.
- Your physical condition. I’ve seen people smoking as they ride, but come on. That just makes you look like you’re riding because you’ve had your driver’s license suspended.

BIKES
There are lots of types of bikes to choose from. Consider the terrain, and notice what other cyclists are riding. After riding over the Knight St. Bridge on my 10-speed, I decided to go with something different. Riding on the sidewalk over that bridge, I have ridden over or around:
- a ladder
- kitchen cabinets
- buckets
- work gloves
- 2×4’s (usually with nails sticking out)
- plywood
- panelling
- nails
- more nails
- assorted car parts
- lots of loose sand
And on a rainy day in Vancouver, the water collected at the southwest end of the sidewalk as you came off the bridge such that the pathway disappeared under water, and I would ride through this mess (which for some reason often had chunks of Styrofoam floating in it) with the water coming up past the bottom of the chain and bike frame. Wet feet kind of went with the territory. I decided a mountain bike with knobby tires was what I needed. These days I ride a “comfort” or hybrid bike, a Gary Fisher Capitola. The seating position on my old hardtail Specialized Rock Hopper II was causing some numbness in the fingers, and in Kelowna the riding I do is generally much flatter than Vancouver, so a more upright seating position is OK.

HELMET
I recommend getting one with a visor. It doesn’t help much, but it looks slightly cooler. Don’t buy a used one. It may have damage you can’t see, and this piece of gear could mean the difference between a happy, healthy future and you spending your life answering every question with “I’m an excellent driver”. Seriously, don’t leave home without it.

CLOTHES and ACCESSORIES
OK, first the clothes. If you’re like me and your cycle commute takes more than fifteen minutes, you will probably be much more comfortable riding your bike in riding clothes and then changing when you arrive at work. Where I worked didn’t have a shower, but I was able to leave a clothes bag there. My clothes bag included:
- two or three shirts
- two pairs of pants, one belt
- one or two pairs of socks
- underwear
- one pair of shoes
- Ziploc bag with soap and deodorant
- one towel
My riding clothes evolved and changed with the weather. Basically, layers are your friends. The toughest time to dress right was winter-to-spring and fall-to-winter, because the riding conditions in the morning can be much different than at the end of the day. Eventually my clothing arsenal included:
- padded baggy cycling shorts, worn over either plain cycling shorts or lined tights, waterproof over-pants
- slim running shoes, sport or thermal socks
- long or short-sleeved T-shirts, fleece vest, sweater, neon-green riding jacket, scarf, fleece skullcap, safety vest
- full-fingered riding gloves, as well as open finger style gloves
- goggles, plain and tinted

As for accessories, my bike evolved into a full-on commuter-mobile:
- fenders fore and aft
- panniers. I ditched the backpack because it was hard on my back and I sweated like crazy underneath it.
- lights fore and aft
- air pump
- spare inner tube (note, I used to carry a patch kit, but I got a few flats on the bridge, and the noise from the traffic was so loud you couldn’t possibly hear where the air was escaping to make a repair, so the solution was to simply rip out the tube and replace it so you could patch it later)
- 25 cents to make a phone call for help if I had a major mechanical problem
- latex gloves, for putting the chain back on without getting all greasy
- small bicycle tool kit
- bike bell (ding, ding)
- toe clips
- Kevlar liners, to fit between the inner wall of the tires and the outer walls of the tubes. These were a great investment and drastically reduced the number of flats I got riding across the bridge.
The idea was to be self-sufficient if I had a minor mechanical breakdown of some kind. I got great info off the internet about how to change a tire and replace an inner tube, and I tried it at home so I knew how to do it.

PHYSICAL CONDITION
I didn’t have much going on in that department when I started, but after a couple of seasons of riding from one to five days a week, I developed some definite muscle tone. It feels great to ride, your body will enjoy it, trust me. The other big benefit for me was that when I ride, I have to be totally in the moment. When you drive a car, sometimes we arrive at our destination and we don’t even remember parts of the journey because we were thinking about other things. Riding a bike, you’re focused on staying upright and not being killed, so there’s not much of a chance to let your mind wander. And being in the moment for a full half-hour stretch or whatever your commute takes is a real refreshing exercise for most of us.

So let me sum it up—if you think commuting by bike is really hard, I’m here to tell you it may not be as hard as you think. If you plan for it, do a little research, and take little steps and set modest goals, you can do it. No one ever accused me of being a jock before I started cycle commuting (or since), and there is definitely a sense of accomplishment when you realize you are helping yourself, your community, and the planet. If more of us can manage to ride even a few days a month, it does make a difference.

Can I really do this?

Once I decided to seriously consider cycling to work, the first thing I did was ride to my workplace on a Sunday (we were closed on weekends), just to see if I could even do it. I had a 10-speed bike that I’d had since I was 16. It got me there and back home in about two hours, and I got some sense of the distance and physical demands. It was kind of tough, but not enough to deter me.

The next thing I did was buy a ten-session pass from a gym that had been built near where I worked, and on some days after work I went there and rode the stationary bike. I didn’t do any other training, and I figured after ten sessions I’d start commuting. For me, it was important to set small goals so that the prospect of this commute didn’t overwhelm me. I figured I could contribute to making the world a better place if I could manage to cycle to work one day a week, at least to start. That didn’t sound too bad, because 80% of the time I’d either be commuting in the cup-holding sanctuary of my minivan or my sometime carpool buddy’s K-car.

I needed some way to take a few things to work, so a backpack was pressed into service. My workplace environment was sort of office casual, so I could potentially ride in my work clothes. And so I began.

I learned lots from doing it, and I surfed the internet and looked for advice. In Part Three, I’ll cut to the chase and provide some ideas for the novice cycle commuter, based on the lessons I learned.

PART ONE
The 40-year old novice commuter cyclist

Have you ever found yourself sitting alone in your car, stopped in traffic, looking around you at all the other individuals in their cars, and thought “I’m part of the problem here, not part of the solution.” It happened to me one day, on the Knight St. Bridge.

The Knight St. Bridge connects Vancouver to Richmond, BC. It’s a busy four-lane highway, arching across the Fraser River. Traffic merges onto it from multiple lanes at both ends, and the north end features a few additional ramp choices to and from Mitchell Island. Concrete dividers run down the middle of the bridge, separating the two northbound lanes from the southbound ones. More dividers at the curb protect the sidewalks that hang out on each side of the bridge. A metal rail fence on the very outside of the sidewalk prevents pedestrians from being blown off into the might Fraser, way below. Cyclists are also obliged to share the sidewalk with pedestrians, as the roadway shoulder is narrow.

The Knight St. Bridge is what you might call a blue-collar bridge. It has none of the architectural appeal of the Alex Fraser Bridge that connects Delta to New Westminster, or the old world charm of the Burrard St. Bridge, or the modern, crisp feel of the Cambie St. Bridge. It is strictly functional, built to handle loads of trucks and waves of commuters in their automobiles. But as Vancouver and Richmond have grown, those waves of commuters often become not so much a wave, as a standing pool. Driving across the bridge at rush hour is what the perky radio ‘copter-riding reporters might call “stop ‘n go”.

Sitting in my minivan one morning, in the stop ‘n go, I noticed a cyclist ride by on the sidewalk. He looked hardcore—helmet, sunglasses, fluorescent-coloured bike jacket under a beat up backpack, army green shorts and black leggings, and riding a stripped down mountain bike. Over the next several minutes a few other hardy souls rode by as I inched along. “Man”, I thought, “those guys are crazy”. I could not imagine myself ever doing that.

That night I woke up in the middle of the night, with a chest pain. I’d heard of 40-year old guys like me dropping dead of heart attacks. Was I having a heart attack? I waited, kept breathing and seemed to be OK. But I had more nights like that, so I went to my doctor. She figured it was stress, but just to be safe she sent me to get an ECG. “If there’s any problem, I’ll phone you, otherwise everything’s fine.” The next morning when I arrived at the office, there was a message waiting from my doctor. She was sending me to a heart specialist, pronto. Uh-oh.

The specialist got me on a treadmill, wired me up, and then nearly killed me running on the thing for 30 minutes. I got off, drenched in sweat and with a burning sensation in my legs. I was gasping for air, and feeling sorry for myself. The result was I had a heart arrhythmia. Maybe I’d had it all my life, no way to tell. But he did tell me I needed to get going with some cardio exercise immediately. This desk-jockey was going to have to get physical.

I took up running. Well, jogging, really. The problem was, I hated it. And when you hate something, you resist doing it, right? So I decided to try something I had really enjoyed as a kid—riding a bike. Recreational riding was fun and I got into it, and eventually I started to think about those nuts commuting to work.

The headline worried me: “Bank slashes rates as markets crash”. Slashes? Crashes? Like, the Bank of Canada suddenly, unexpectedly dropped the prime lending rate by a full percent? Like, my RRSP mutual funds have tanked? Um, no, turns out the Bank of Canada cut the rate by the usual increment when they change the rate up or down—a quarter of 1%. Oh, so that’s a “slash”? OK, so the USA cut their rate by .75. That is approaching “slasher” territory in my view. But a cautious .25 is barely newsworthy, let alone justifies the worrisome headline. As for the crash, well, the main Canadian index was actually up today, but whatever.

Are we really so saturated with information that a simple .25 cut story needs to be presented as a five-alarm fire? Well, not everyone reported it that way. In fact, for some BC pundits, it was almost good news.

Now, I don’t know how I can explain this without sounding like a flake; maybe I’ll just have to sound like a flake. But here it is—if we all believe the markets are going to crash and economic woe is heading our way like a runaway train, well, guess what—that’s what we’ll get. I am not advocating ignoring financial realities, of course, but I am saying we need to think for ourselves and dig a little deeper, because if we just read the first slash and crash article and took it at face value, we’d probably be looking for some rope and an exposed rafter right about now. If we all believe that we can muddle through together and find ways to create a sustainable future, I think that’s exactly what will happen. We can choose what we want to focus on, if we can just filter the media hype down a couple of levels.

Is the US economy in trouble? Depends who you ask; sort of like climate change, in that respect. My view, based on my financial experience as someone who has a mortgage and knows how to balance a chequebook, is that you can’t take on huge debt, run a deficit, and keep spending money, forever. You just can’t. The people you borrow the money from are eventually going to say no more. Let’s just say whoever wins the presidency in November is going to need more than a few energy-efficient light bulbs in the White House to find some black ink on the national balance sheet.