Archive for September, 2008

Since I moved in May, my bike riding has fallen drastically. Since moving in mid-May, I’ve taken exactly one trip to Diana’s office and back (~8 miles round trip) and another trip to Stanford and back (~8 miles round trip) about a month later. That’s it. Sure, my office is still only about 9 miles away from the house… but that would’ve been a stretch goal even when I was biking to work two or three times a week. I could bike to the train station (~2 miles) and then to work (~2 miles), but the trip spans two separate zones. Even though it’s only a 6 or 7 mile trip, that means it would be $4 each way, while driving their and back only takes a little over one gallon of gas. Not an ideal solution. I started tracking my mileage on Zealog to further motivate myself, but clearly that wasn’t doing much either.

Instead of biking TO work, then, today I tossed the bike in the back of my car and took it with me. There’s a Subway about a mile and a half away from the office that we go to at least twice a week, and sometimes three times a week. Why drive? Today, I biked to lunch instead of driving. It only takes about 10 minutes longer than driving, and while it’s not exactly a massive undertaking, any little bit helps. Three miles of exercise is certainly greater than the zero exercise I was averaging before.

Now the task shifts into finding restaurants that are the optimal distance away. Google doesn’t really have the capacity to give you search results for “restaurants at least three miles away from point XYZ,” so it took a bit of creative guesswork to find some likely candidates. Unless I remember to lug the bike home on Fridays, this means I won’t be able to do any recreational rides on the weekend–but considering I’ve only done two of those in the last 5 months, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.