Transpo

[darkemeralds]

I've never been able to stick to an "exercise program," (bleh) so changing my transportation mode from passive to active was perhaps the greatest stroke of genius I've ever had.¹

For the last four and half years, my daily eight-mile bike commute to and from work has been what gets me off my ass--the only thing. I was a little worried that retirement, in removing my biggest transportation need, would find me slowly melding with my armchair, never to budge again.

Instead, I've discovered that I'm riding my bike more than ever.

First of all, I have time to bike to destinations that, when I was working full time, would have taken too long. I have time to figure out a safe route to a new place, to get a little lost², to go in daylight, to choose my weather.

And second of all, I don't have to get everything done in one go on Sunday. I can make multiple trips, any day of the week. Whoops, forgot toilet paper? Four miles round trip to Fred Meyer. Return a book? Branch library across town. That fabric store that's out in the semi-urbs? Worth a shot.

Today I rode clear out past the ring of freeways to an acupuncture appointment that has always previously been a train trip. From there, since I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by my sister's--the one I don't see as much of because she lives "out there"--and pedaled home again in the gathering dark, for a 19-mile day.

View Bike to Lynne's in a larger map

¹ Selling my car was an important part of everything. Side note: my driver's license has expired and I should probably do something about that. I could ride my bike to the DMV. :D

² Sometime since I first starting biking, Google has added voice navigation to the bike layer of its maps, and it's awesome! Now I just need an app that has Paul Bettany's voice saying, "In six hundred feet, turn left onto the I-205 Bike Path. No, left, madam. The other left. That's it..."

Comments

[hunningham]

Commuting does make a difference, doesn't it. I used to walk to work (ten minutes there, ten minutes back) and when I started working from home this made a big difference. And I cannot do a regular exercise thingat all.

[darkemeralds]

It really does! I would imagine that your twenty minutes' daily walk didn't seem like much at all till you stopped doing it. I've found that it's the regularity of exercise, rather than the intensity, that's important. No one day's effort is much of a thing, but cumulatively it makes a huge difference.

[hunningham]

I put weight on. Slowly, but over a year it made a difference. And I was surprised.

[darkemeralds]

There's a lot of discussion (and some science) about the imperfect correlation between calorie consumption, calorie burn, and body weight, but I've found for my own body that the correlation is very clear and precise. Your experience sounds similar. It's amazing, isn't it, that if you add or subtract one small factor from habits that are otherwise quite steady, it makes a measurable difference.

For me, the problem is that I will always naturally tend to "eat up" my exercise (I bicycled daily for two years without losing a pound), so I have to apply controls at both ends of the process by tracking both burn and consumption.

Time to get back on that...