Earth Day & Biking to Work

April 23 is bike to work day in the Seattle office. Someone taped up signs saying so on the office door, which is official enough for me.I haven't biked to work in perhaps a decade, when I lived and worked somewhere else. I'm pretty out of shape and (cough) older, too. Still, I like to support a good cause!

I normally walk to the bus stop in Kenmore, my home town (a suburb of Seattle perhaps 5 miles form the city) and ride to downtown Seattle, then catch a bus uptown to the Belltown neighborhood and the Seattle office. The Kenmore to Seattle bus has a bike rack, so a nice compromise is available: ride the bike to the bus stop in Kenmore, then when I get off down town don't bother transferring, just bike on uptown to the office. Total bike distance is maybe 1.3 miles, bus distance is close to 9 miles.

So I rode my bike to work today. It rained, and riding North up the bike lane on 4th Ave. in downtown Seattle leaves something to be desired - construction has it ripped up all over the place, so you're forced out into the lanes of traffic. Not too bad, but between the traffic and the rain I was a bit out of my comfort zone. Got to work fine. If the weather cooperated more that would help, and I should consider starting earlier so that there is less traffic downtown. Definitely got into the office much more awake than normal - breathing moderately hard, heart going faster than if I'd been walking.

So that made me feel virtuous - even though in green terms, I rode the same bus and biked rather than walked, so it didn't really cut down emissions or anything. What it mostly did was got me some good aerobic exercise and got me to work 45 minutes faster - walking I'd have missed the bus, catching the next one 30 minutes later, and lost more time waiting for the transfer. I feel better for it, and I like the extra time. Definitely worth repeating as the weather improves.

So feeling virtuous already, I figured it was time to look into Cisco's Volunteer Match program. I think I'll blog about that in a separate post...