When I bought my bicycle last year, I had a couple of goals for the new year. The amount of driving I was doing had gone down dramatically since moving to Tokyo, so it didn’t seem too ambitious to aim for cycling more kilometres than I drive by car. <\/p>\n
I also wanted to cycle a weekly total of at least 100 km, a nice round figure. If I achieved that minimum and assuming I would sometimes do more than the minimum, a goal of 6,000 km for the whole year didn’t seem too ambitious. That would be a monthly average of 500 km. As it turned out, my monthly total was only significantly below 500 km in three months of the whole year.<\/p>\n
After getting into longer rides (100 km or more) in February, I ended up doing at least one long ride every month except August, including 16 rides over 100 km and 11 of those over 160 km. The longest ride was a 300 km brevet<\/a>. I am not fast, but I like to start early and to keep going.<\/p>\n While the year is not quite over yet, my total cycling since January comes to 7250 km (excluding any rides under 5 km which I don’t log), while our car this year has clocked up about 4,000 km being driven by my wife and me. About 1\/4 of that driving distance was actually due to bicycle races that my son Shintaro competed in.<\/p>\n While cycling more than driving is not a realistic option for everyone, once you get used to it, the bicycle is a viable alternative more often than you might at first think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I bought my bicycle last year, I had a couple of goals for the new year. The amount of driving I was doing had gone down dramatically since moving to Tokyo, so it didn’t seem too ambitious to aim … Continue reading