The T won. That hill looms large in my commute. Cold? I've been colder. (I used to live north of the Adirondacks.) Ice? Snow? I can cope. It's hills and wind... no, the prospect of hills and wind that gets me every time.
But as I got off the T in town, what did I see on my walk to work? Inspiration: I saw 9 bikers. From 8:25 too 8:40 am on an average but sunny day in late January. And on campus (Northeastern), full bike racks. I looked longingly at an Xtracycle outside the law school. It was outfitted with a space-age childseat.
Boston bikers are an inspiration. They'll go out in anything. I even saw a few on Monday, the day we got 2 inches of rain. Not a day goes by that I don't see a few hardy bikers in town.
It was a half-day of work for me, so I'd planned an afternoon of errands, which, inspired by all those bikers in Boston, became an afternoon on the bike: Bank, post office, home to get the trail-a-bike, and then the school to pick up offspring. What a lovely afternoon!
Proof: biking encourages biking. I see other bikers, and instead of teetering towards car, I teeter towards bike. I realize I can do it, too. I'm reminded that instead of tired after the 8 mile trek up hill and down dale, I'm energized.
How would my day have gone if, while looking at my closet in the morning, I'd happened to see a biker going by on my street?
Inspire me, Newton bikers! (Suburban Bike Mama's been inspiring me lately, but she doesn't live in my neighborhood.)
3 comments:
:-)
So true so true. I live on a hill and sometimes it's just the idea of that hill that get's me down. And it's true that seeing other bikes out there get me motivated to keep getting back on.
that beacon st hill scares me for sure. I've never biked it, but someday I hope to.
we're almost half way to spring!
There you go, inspiring me again!
Those fixed gear aficionados don't have to deal with hills like our Chestnut Hill. We do, and its definitely a barrier. E-bikes, I really believe, will transform biking by opening up routes to some for whom the barrier is too large. For others, the barrier is more psychological. We can do it but its plodding and unpleasant. My mind takes me back to a 3-week period in Panama where I had to carry, on a backpack, a very heavy deep-cycle battery up a very steep hill every day to recharge it - a very Sisyphean sentence. After the first week, strangely, I got into it, into a kind of a zone, maybe the wall that marathoners reach. I became Sisyphus. I can't say I regularly achieve that on my rides up and over Chestnut Hill, but once in a while as I am plodding away the feeling comes back...
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