Books, Breads and Bikes: February 2020

Back in 2008, when I had a job as an overnight baker, a guy I worked with used to watch me biking home at 6:00 AM, sometimes through the snow, and he'd say, "I have to see this shit!!"

I think about that sometimes. More than ten years later, I get the same response from people.

I can't say I've ridden every day of the year, or what number of days ridden during the winter qualifies as having earned enough credit to call myself "a year-round cyclist", but I don't think it matters. When I sold my car it wasn't to save the environment or to influence people into advocacy. I wasn't trying to address the infrastructure of city planning or earn a merit badge in any glorified scout group.

I simply couldn't afford a car.

So now, when people try to encourage me by telling me how I'm somehow ethically better than the truck driver who cut me off, or the distracted woman who veered into the bike path, or the bystander who gapes in slack-jawed bemusement at my conundrum because I don't need a car, because I make ends meet without relying on fossil fuels, because I somehow cheated the system out of a stressful car ride into a daily workout that benefits my mental health and the environment, I remind myself I live in a city populated with more cyclists, more boutique cycling studios, more nationally recognized cycling wholesale distributors and more Tour De France champions than any other city in America.

It's not a responsibility as much as a privilege, and dealing with the expectations of that is as much a learning process as learning how to change a flat tire at 8:50 in the morning when you have a scheduled 9:00 AM breakfast meeting two miles away.

Anyway, this is my February 2020 winter cycling update.