Cycling partly to work¶

Tags: thehealthagency, cycling

I live some 50 km from my work as the crow flies. Well, as the cyclist cycles. Well, as a theoretical cyclists cycles: I haven’t done that yet. I assumed it would take too much time.

I’m back from my annual cycling holiday and debated some points in my head:

• I hardly get any exercise done apart from swordfighting on thursday evening.

• I need exercise. It is just plain stupid to let my body degrade into a chair-behind-desk lethargy. Unhealthy. Unwise.

• 50 km? I have a recumbent bicycle (Dutch: ligfiets, M5 28/20). Some people get an average of 30 km/h out of good ones on a daily commute basis. I did 15-18 km/h for long stretches during my holiday (with luggage and one kid connected to my bike). So 25 km/h ought to be theoretically doable.

• 50 km divided by 25 km/h equals 2 hours. Hey, that’s not much worse than my current 1h 35m tram+train+train+legs commute.

I do want to try out cycling that whole 50 km to my work on a regular work day once. At least once in my life :-) After some map-staring I came up with an alternative: cycling to a different train station instead of going by tram. Dutch: van Nieuwegein met de fiets naar Woerden en daar de stoptrein naar Rotterdam.

• 18.5 km of cycling, I can do that in under an hour. With my current condition and pretty poorly maintained cycle.

• 46 minutes of train, followed by 5-10 minutes of walking.

• That’s some 1 hour 45, provided I judge my arrival time at the station right. Not much more than the current 1 hour 35.

So I cycled 18.5 km this morning and back in the evening. 55 minutes this morning, with a 20.1 km/h average (including stopping for traffic). This evening it was 20.0 km/h. Not too bad, but I expected myself to be a bit faster, say 22. And with getting the bike out and storing it in the station’s bike shed it took 1 hour 55 in total.

To do: do it more often; really clean the bike’s gears; become reliable in just catching the train; finish cleaning the old flevobike bike to see how fast that one is.