I’ve been pretty religious about biking to work every day this past four or five weeks; I only missed a couple days when my bike was in the shop.  Not bad, all in all.

And I got some positive reinforcement; a third party with no attachment to me whatsoever commented “Looks like you’ve lost some weight” over the weekend.  So – so far, so good.  I feel much better after the ride every morning; biking to work is a natural lift to the day.  Part of it is just the blast of exercise.  Part of it is the adrenaline from the existential threat from some of the drivers out there.  Either way, it focuses the mind.

But I have to wonder about something.

I’ve noticed that there seem to be four types of bikers on the road in the morning.

1. The serious bikers; the ones in the yellow jerseys and biker shorts and streamlined helmets, with legs like tree trunks – kinda like mine were, when I was a serious biker, between about 1980 and 1990.  Most of them are visibly serious about their biking (kinda like I was); focuses, concentrated, and very, very fast.  Some of them boggle the mind; one guy sailed past me a few weeks back on an oval bike – a single speed bike with no coaster gear on it, meaning you have to pedal all the freaking time when you’re on it, and you can’t change gears on hills.  I’m in awe.
2. Guys you can pretty much tell are there because they got their third DWI.  They’re usually dressed like they dress at work – work boots, jeans, coveralls, whatever.
3. Bikers like me; guys and gals in workout duds grinding out the commute to work, or grabbing a morning jaunt before heading into the office.  I wear pretty much what I wear to the gym; whatever T-shirt I was wearing the day before, my gym shorts, my sneakers.  I put my work clothes in a backpack (my christmas present to myself will probably be a rear rack of some kind), and take a shower in my office’s locker room before going to work because I figure even my little six mile commute is gonna make me sweaty.  And who needs that?
4. Bikers like the guy I drafted for a while this morning.  Let me explain.

The guy was fiftysomething, with a neatly-trimmed gray beard, he wore a helmet, a dress shirt, khaki Dockers, black socks and loafers – in other words, dressed for work at an office job.  He carried a shoulder bag that looked like it was full of notebooks, not clothes.

Now, it was pleasant this morning, but kinda muggy.  I was sweating; I’ll chalk a lot of that up to the fact that I’m still a ways away from being in shape, but I also have a pretty solid rhythm (one of the keys to distance biking is just getting your legs in a rhythm and keeping it, not stopping for anything, even coasting as little as possible; the cooling down of your muscles actually causes more fatigue than keeping your legs moving.  And yes, I realize the absurdity of calling my six-mile commute “distance biking”, but then you try it when you’re 44 and haven’t biked seriously since 1990.  But I digress), so I don’t waste a lot of energy, either.  This guy was working up a bit of a lather, too; decent rhythm, but he was standing on his pedals up hills and out of stoplights, which tends to exert one.

I have to wonder – how do these people get through the workday without smelling like a bear that’s just come out of hibernation?

I noticed that the guy this morning – like many of the guys I see who bike to work in their work duds – pulled into a government building at the end of his ride.  Government employees, please spill the beans – do your offices reek, or what?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 5:51 am and is filed under Biking, Geekery, mitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.