Just Take the Bike

A thousand-euro trainer, forty angry Redditors, and one dog on a leash

I told people to take the bike and go wash their armpits. They stoned me for it.

The base came from general advice and from a fascinating discovery I made. I got extremely fit, but also extremely happy, from using the bike to commute.

I was tired of watching people on r/cycling say the same thing over and over. No time to train. Can’t keep up with the group. Always the same complaint, always the same excuse. A lot of times it didn’t seem like they wanted a reply, just to vent. But then one day I thought, why not just post the recipe on Reddit instead. I did. 7.6K views, forty replies, almost all of it in the first hour. Negative upvotes, and I made some people genuinely angry.

Before I get into any of it: this isn’t a lecture. Please don’t feel attacked. It’s your God given right not to use a bike to get to work. You don’t owe me an excuse, and you don’t owe me the real reason either.

But let me give you a sandwich. Best reason first, worst reason last.

The best one: a guy got hit by a truck. Cracked his helmet. Almost broke a bone. Thought long and hard about whether to keep riding. He’s still commuting.

The worst one: someone can’t bike to work because sometimes there’s a dog walker on a long leash, and the dog and the person walk far apart, and that blocks the path.

And one I genuinely don’t have an answer for: women with long hair arrive with it soaking wet from the ride, and there isn’t much time before work starts to deal with that. I get it.

Rain

I’m lucky. It barely rains where I live. I used to cycle through it anyway, no excuse. Once I fell and actually hurt myself, and I still kept riding in the rain after that. These days I don’t want to get wet anymore. I got lazy. It doesn’t rain often here, and I can work from home on the days it does.

Time

Someone said I left time out. Said some people with busy lives, kids, demanding jobs, can’t afford a bike commute over an hour plus the cleanup after.

My old commute was 16.5km each way, 300 meters of climbing. Untrained, starting from nothing, that was an hour. But the question isn’t bike versus some fantasy where the trip is free. It’s bike versus car, versus bus, versus metro. Downhill it took me thirty minutes, against public transport that was often an hour or more the same direction. Uphill home, untrained, it took maybe a little longer than the bus would have. That’s it. Not free time lost. Time that was already being spent, just spent differently.

Showers, lockers, secure storage

I worked in a WeWork, twenty-two floors, over 1,500 people in the building on a peak day. Showers, lockers, secure bike storage, everything anyone could ask for. Maybe thirty bikes actually parked there on any given day, across the whole building.

Inside that same building, my own company: on a good day maybe ninety people came in. Two or three of us actually rode to work. Same infrastructure everyone else had access to, same result at a smaller scale. I don’t think it’s the shower.

Smell

This is the one that got me buried. I said wash your armpits, use deodorant, done. People told me that’s not true.

I thought, hold on. What do we do at home? We have a shower, we put soap on, and that’s how we stop stinking. What the fuck else are people expecting, do they want to sit in a washing machine?

Then it clicked. Clean skin, dirty fabric. The shirt already dried once with the sweat in it. Wash yourself and put that shirt back on, and you’re going to smell regardless of how much deodorant you used. Change the shirt and it’s solved.

Or somehow I provoked them and they saw blood.

Traffic

Back when I started commuting I posted videos of near misses with cars, and I built up a decent following of cyclists off the back of those clips. Reading their comments, I noticed two different reactions. Some were angry at the drivers, same as I was. Others just kept saying take the lane, take the lane.

I was scared. I’d say look what’s happening to me, look how close that was. But after hearing take the lane thirty or fifty times, I thought, let me actually try it.

It works. There’s a steep hill near my home where I’m doing 5 to 15 km/h, and cars used to come past at 60 km/h. Terrifying. Now I take the lane and I don’t care if they pass close, because they always have to brake and slow down first before they can get around me.

Reddit as a training ground

Posting this taught me as much about Reddit as it did about cycling.

The real thing happened in r/cycling. Forty comments, most of the views landing in the first hour, plenty of it nasty. Some of that’s a room full of people with real training identities, structured plans, Strava KOMs, and “your commute replaces that” doesn’t land soft there. Some of it’s just that “done” isn’t a word you use on someone’s problem.

Before trying r/bicycling, I’d also posted in r/bikecommuting. They downvoted me too, but they were human about it, real reasons instead of just anger. Then r/bicycling, where I got completely destroyed.

Part of that one’s on me. I went in already complaining about how r/cycling had treated me, basically asking if this room would be nicer. I framed it as a wound looking for sympathy instead of a question looking for an answer. I didn’t do that with r/bikecommuting, and that’s the thread that gave me something real.

The best comment of the day

Someone pointed out that in countries where cycling is genuinely normal, kids just get on the bike and ride to school, year-round, and keep doing it as adults if work isn’t too far. No excuses, because there was never a decision to make in the first place. You just do what you’ve always done.

That was the best comment I got, out of all three threads.

Why it hit a nerve

I think a lot of the hostility, especially from the US, comes down to this: cycling there is mostly a sport, not a way to get somewhere. Where I’m from, it’s both, and I never separated the two. I don’t put my bike on a rack on the back of a car to drive somewhere and ride it. That would go against everything I am. I go on group rides too, but I ride to the start point, even if it’s 20km out. The bike is how I get to work. That it also happens to be the best training I’ve ever had is almost beside the point.