Forgive the long story here. I'm apparently feeling verbose today. If you get bored, just skip to the end.

I consider bike commuting to be my "normal" form of transportation to and from work, but I have other options and I'll drive or take transit if there's a reason to prefer that. In the past couple of years, I've been aware that I'd fallen off the wagon a bit. I guess I've lowered the bar for what will have me choose another mode of transportation.

More recently, I've made a decision to transition from whining a lot about how much my fitness has fallen off to actually riding more and trying to get back the fitness I once had, such as it was. I'd made the decision and I was doing better, but I was still kind of a slacker.

Then last week I went on a ride with some guys from the C&V forum and one of them posted this picture.



That's me looking like I'm hiding a Thanksgiving turkey under my jersey. (In fact, I don't eat turkey so it's really pizza and cheeseburgers under there.) Now I'm not into body shaming and I long ago accepted that I'll always be more bulldog than greyhound, but that picture finally got me thinking I need to do something about the direction my health is headed.

So, this week, assuming I don't fold in the face of rain this evening, I've biked the full 20 mile round trip every day. I knew it had been a while since I'd done that, and I track my riding so I decided to look and see when the last time I biked to work every day for an entire week was. It had been just over three years! Worse yet, I kept browsing through my history and discovered that I really haven't been even marginally consistent about biking to work five days a week since 2009. In an unfortunate coincidence (?) that was the year I turned 40.

Well now I really want to persuade myself to be a dedicated bike commuter again. I just need to find a way to sustain the motivation.

So, if you've made it this far (or if you just skipped to the end), that's where you come in. If you ride to work every day, what keeps you going? I know some of you are car-free and might say you have no other choice, but to my way of thinking being car-free is a result not a cause. At some point you made the choice to be car-free.

What are your secrets?