I am biking again
While I was living in San Gabriel, I biked a lot less than I thought I would. Part of that was due to the relatively unforgiving streetscape, but part of that was honestly because I was walking distance to food and coffee in San Gabriel. (Acquiring coffee is one of the main things I do with my bicycle on weekdays, to be perfectly honest.)
The other issue was that we no longer had to bike to get to public transit - we were close to a very convenient bus route that goes from San Gabriel direct to Union Station along the freeway. So that took care of our other big motivation to get on bikes! It was a weird case of convenience probably being worse for us, in a certain way.
Now that I'm back on the west side, though, I'm once again in a kind of weird transit desert, so I'm back on my bike. I've been biking more this week and it's absolutely kicked my ass!! I do feel much, much better after biking, though. I am regrettably one of those people on whom exercise does unfortunately work...
Several years ago, I was repairing one of my bikes at Bikerowave, a west side bike co-op, when a young woman came in to buy a bike. She asked some of the longer-serving volunteers about seat comfort and one of the guys there simply told her, "You gotta bike every week so you develop like a butt callus. You get, like, bruises on your bones. Bone bruises. So you gotta bike every week. If I go two weeks without biking then my ass hurts because my bone bruises go away."
I thought this was an incredibly funny thing for someone to say to a prospective customer, but I guess it worked, because she bought the bike!
Anyway, my ass bruises are gone and I need to build them up again. The hardest thing I have to do, though, is rebuild my strength for sprinting up the steep hills that lie along my most commonly-traveled routes. I have a grade steeper than 8% along my most frequent route and it absolutely destroyed me every time I did it this week. Compared to the bone bruises it's a much more pressing issue for me at the moment.
I will admit, there was a part of me that was worried I would lose the mental drive to get on my bike?? Luckily, though, that doesn't seem to have happened. Biking still rules and this is still the best part of the city to do it in!