About three years ago I bought an old bike. My wife and I had moved to the country side in small village and with our first daughter getting older biking around was somehow making more and more sense. This was the first bike I owned in more than 10 years… as you can imagine, I was not exactly what one would call a bike fanatic at that time.
A few months after I bought that bike I happend to chat with one of my good friends who occasionally bikes to work. He asked me, joking as he knew how much I disliked biking at that time, why I wasn’t trying it out. That’s when I actually thought about biking to work for the first time. After thinking about it for a short period of time, I quickly dismissed the idea. The ride to work would have been roughly 19km which I then thought would be way to far for me to bike to.
Not long after that, I started to drive in to work with two of my colleagues as I started to grew waery of driving to and from work alone in my car. The growing awareness of my negative impact on our environment by using the car was one iof the major reasons for that. While sharing a ride was fun for a while, being dependent on other peoples schedule was too limiting for me and I slowly got back to driving my own car more and more.
Then, I think it was around july 2017, I met one of my colleagues who happens to live in the same village I used to live in at that time. He told me about his biking habbits: he was biking to work all spring and summer long up into autumn (as long as temperatures weren’t hitting lows below 10°C) and how he loved doing that.
The thought of biking to work came back and grew even more now that it had had after first talking to my friend. He was doing it with apparent ease and he has around 15-20 years on me. So if he was able to do it, why couldn’t I to it?
So in august I hopped on my old bike and biked to work for the first time - ~38km both ways.
I started by biking to work once or twice a week, maybe three times on some occasions. To be honest: it wasn’t that much fun in the beginning but I enjoyed challenging myself and after a few weeks, I slowly started to enjoy the ride itself.
The ride took me along the small river Dreisam, where I got to see differnet animals and the beauty of nature, up into Freiburg and back. At the beginning, it took me around 50 minutes to get into work and the same time back. If you compare this to the 25ish minutes it used to take me by car on a good day, ~30 on regular days and ~40 minutes on bad days, this wasn’t too bad. Especially when taking into account that I was also exercising during that time.
Then winter came and my motivation to bike into work quickly disapeard. Winter here isn’t that cold compared to other reagions of our beautiful world but it’s raining a lot and it’s around 0°C most of the time. So I went back to driving my car, alone.
I never forgot about biking to work though and when spring came, I hopped agin on my bike on a few occasions but my initial motivation was mostly lost. To add to it, after a few rides I banged my wheel so that it wasn’t rolling smoothly anymore and this gave my motivation the rest…
But then, during summer 2018 our second car, a beautiful Saab 9-3 1.9TiD, started troubling us. It sometimes wouldn’t start on the first few tries and later also completely stopped while driving. A check at the mechanics brought us the news that a repair (replacing the control unit) would cost around 2000,- Euros and the repair guy wasn’t even sure it would fix the problem… for a car that was roughly worth 2000,- Euros.
After thinking about it for a while I decided to try to bike to work full time. We sold our Saab before it would cost us more money and invested the money in new bikes for my daugther and myself. I also baught bike gear for rainy and colder days.
This was in september 2018, my, then new, bike has since then taken me through all four seasons. It’s been enjoyable and nice most of the time but it has also been rough on hard winter days or, and those are the worse, on windy days! I had flat tires and other problems but I do not regret making that decision at all. I since then have managed to drop my ride time to around 40 minutes on average per way which, for me, is a good time compared to my old transit time by car. My love for biking has grown so much that it’s now such that I really hate it whenever I have to take the car for some reason.
I truly now love riding my bike. We have recently moved to our new place which is now 22km away from work but I still absolutley enjoy the ride through wine yards, fields and forests, above the Tuniberg and the Rhine river. Even though we own a second car again (my mother in law gave her old Opel Corsa to us), I’m still biking to work most days. Whenever there is no good reason to do otherwise.
Before I leave you with my closing lines, I have to thank my wife!
She’s been incredibly supportive of my plan from the beginning up to now with no exception!
To you, Irene: thank you!
My hope is that my bike adventure can motivate others to do similarl things and take on the challenge with they inner self. Keep pushing yourself to do things you want to do and feel a right, even when in the beginning they might look too hard to do.
See you on the bicycle lane!
Olivier