What keeps me motivated for daily bike commuting? Not wanting to be fat like the average American driver. That and not owning a car.

Well, we're getting a reprieve from the rain here in the PNW this week, so motivation can be expanded to taking advantage of it while we can!

Looking at the traffic jams is enough to keep me motivated to keep on riding my bike.

The beautiful weather has indeed been very nice motivation! It's nice to have the option of riding a bike without fenders.

A story from Reader's Digest decades ago: A college type student in a Cambridge, MA Supermarket wheels a fully loaded shopping cart to the Express 10-items-or-fewer checkout line. The cashier says, "Are you from MIT (Mass Institute of Technology) and can't read, or from Harvard, and can't count"?

My motivation? That bottle of hoppy beverage that I can enjoy at the end of the day, without any guilt. In fact, it's more like, "Yeah, I have earned this one"

Just a quick update.... I'm now up to 21 consecutive work days without skipping a bike commute. I logged 504 miles in May, 380 of which were commuting miles. So far, this is going better than I would have expected. Thanks to everyone for your encouragement.

I don't ride to work everyday because sometimes I have to go other places during the workday or pickup the kids on my way home.

On the days that I can ride to work, I have to get over my morning mental fog and remind myself how much better I feel by the end of the day. My mental motivation problem is compounded with the knowledge of the long and steep hill that I have to tackle on my way to work. I just have to remind myself that the ride home is always a hoot and it only takes me half the time to get home as it does to get to work!

More than anything, though, is that I always feel much better on the days that I ride to work!!

Congrats! This is a great community we have here and I think it is fair to say that we are all behind you and want you succeed. You're doing great!

Well done.

-Shin

Fresh air and the feel of pedaling. That and I live car free.

Well, you were a bit long winded in your post, so I'm going to take the same liberty. I biked every day for a year solid, I live in PA, so I had a winter bike with studded tires, my work at the time was 7 miles from home, or 10 miles, depending on which building I was in. I did it, I felt great, I have a bit of an obsessive personality, so I was biking all the time, and feeling great. Then my job changed, and I started doing it just a little less, but hey, I was still doing it, so that's all that mattered. Then it changed again, and I was doing it less. Then I got a different job, and my distance went from 7 to 10 miles to 20 one way. When I was cycling every day I would have LOVED a 20 mile each way ride, but when I switched jobs, and tried the commute, I found that I was far, far out of shape, oh, and look at that, I had gone from hanging around 230-240lbs (which was the result of many many miles of bicycling, being as when I started I was 299) back up to 270. Well, I started the new job, it was just tooo hard to bike in, and I had other constraints, blah blah blah.

So, here we are today, I started back by doing some park and rides, where I would drive a little over halfway, then bicycle in. Now just this Tuesday I did the whole ride, and it felt awesome, I was in a great mood all day, biked home, and I loved the ride home all but the last about 3 miles. For those 3 miles I said all kinds of NSFW words, and my legs tried to pull themselves from my body with the intention of kicking me till I learned my lesson of what a stupid idea this whole biking thing was. Then I got home, and my entire body decided to forgive me. I felt great again, and had zero regrets. I plan to do the complete ride again tomorrow, and hopefully next Monday as well. Soon I'll be back to doing that ride more often than not.

I can't exactly tell you how I went from getting over 3,000 miles a year for 4 years straight (one of those years getting 4,600 miles) to getting less than 500 last year. I'm not really sure what the hell happened, but I can say now that I'm back at it, I plan to do my best to keep remembering how great it makes me feel, and hopefully I'll be back down in the lower half of the 200's soon in weight. I'm currently hanging around 276, so not as bad as where I was when I started, but still a far cry from where I'd like to be.

I hope this helps, you're not the first guy to gradually just fall out of it, neither am I, and we won't be the last ones either. What we can all do is make sure we keep coming here and helping one another to not have that happen again.

Happy pedaling!


Joe

I hear that. My commute is 95% flat, but I live on a hill that is either a quarter mile at 15-20% or half a mile at 8-14% depending on which side I choose to go up. It's not long, but that steepness can be daunting. My solution has been to just accept that it's OK to walk up the short side if I don't feel like grinding.


Today was a test for me because my knee was feeling a little sore on the way home last night and the forecast called for rain (which we got) this morning. I briefly thought about taking a day off from riding, but instead I walked the hill at the end of the ride yesterday, loaded up the rain bike this morning and just took it easy on the ride in. As usual, I arrived at work feeling great. The rain is supposed to continue through the weekend, so I'll take a day off on Saturday.

Ugh, after a great month of May, just had 3 consecutive non-commuting days. Late start one day, a conference the next, and 20 mile backup on 128 today.

Might try to get a ride in after work today. I can feel the difference, mentally.

Thanks for sharing your story.

I think mixed mode commutes are a great solution when the distances is longer than you want it to be. I do that in the winter when we're expecting rain (which is basically every day in the winter) to cut my commute down from 10 miles each way to 6 miles each way and give myself the option of taking the light rail back to the Park and Ride if the weather is worse than I want to deal with on the way home.

I'm not fast enough to do a 20 mile commute in a reasonable amount of time, but if I had the right route I'd love it.

I'm only 5'9" and I weighed around 235 pounds before I started biking again (in 2007). I got down to 180 pounds at one point but had slowly crept back up north of 220 by this spring. As of today I'm at 206 and heading in a better direction. Yesterday the BMI charts said I was obese. Today I'm just overweight.

I'm back to riding every day after spending the winter riding the bus. I had to stop riding because I was getting too pissed off at the a$$hole drivers parking in the bike lane. I was stopping to report at least one each way every single day. I was about to fill my handlebar bag with rocks and start throwing them at cars.

But that bus ride is not great. The traffic is terrible. If you are in Seattle, you know the phrase "Mercer Mess." On a bike I get home faster and I am a slow rider. The 4.5 mile journey was averaging 45 minutes and on some really bad days it was an hour and a half.

I honestly can't imagine sitting in that mess in a car every day.

Do away with all other means of getting to work.

I sold the last car and motorcycle in 1989.

I bike to work and rent cars for weekend getaways which often involve cycling or skating at a distant location, Rail-Trail etc.

Get a full length mirror, strip down, and stand in front of it facing it. If you don't like what you see, you will be motivated (unless you just get depressed). If you like what you see, you will be motivated. For instance, about 7 months ago I quit eating all refined sugar and everything that contains it (that is humanly possible). I was never overweight to my reckoning, but I dropped 15 lbs and got ALL of my abs back. Now, when someone shows up with doughnuts or other temptations at my workplace, I go into the bathroom, fact the mirror, lift my shirt, admire my abs, and don't eat the junk. I keep a supply of whole wheat pita bread on hand in case I positively have to jam something into my mouth. Dry, cold, pita will not cause a grazing spike I assure you.

Diet and exercise. Can't make any headway unless you do both.

New to the forum, born-again biker, reformed runner here. I'm also a schoolteacher, so no commute for me until August. When school starts back, however, I hope to ride to work as much as possible. Daycare logistics will be my main hurdle as we have two children in two different facilities.
I just wanted to chime in and say I am loving this particular thread. It's heartening to hear everyone's experience, particularly the OP's.
Cheers!

I don't really aspire to that kind of physique. I know the limits of my self-discipline and that's well beyond those limits. I'm not sure if I'd actually live longer if I stopped eating pizza and donuts, but I'm certain that it would seem longer.

Besides my wife actually complains that I'm getting too skinny when I drop below about 190.

I finally got my commuter bike done up to take my kiddo to daycare (bike seat, big cassette) and it's been hit and miss. Four ago was yay, it all works! Three ago was the call of shame due to a massive pinch flat, two ago he was sort of not into it but we made it and I found a route with less climbing, today we got rained out. I think I'm getting more use out of it than he does.

You could still eat SOME of that stuff if you commuted every day. But setting reasonable goals is certainly a good thing when it comes to fitness.

Gotta keep Wifey happy. In my case, my wife is already a gym rat. When all of my 6-pack magically returned (didn't do ONE sit-up or crunch) she hired a personal trainer to catch up. I am not complaining.

Just a footnote for the rest of you (guys only): If you are trying to attract women into a long term relationship, DO NOT get yourself looking like a "Men's Fitness" cover model. Most women are so self-conscious about their bodies to begin with that ripping up only hurts your chances of hooking up long term ESPECIALLY middle age dudes like me. Thankfully I'm covered already.

Keep eating the pizza if your wife digs you as is!

Amen, bro! All my fitness roads lead to a beer and some pizza.

Obviously we all live in different places and have different jobs and our approaches to commuting differ accordingly.

My commute is about 60 miles, which would be a horrendous drive (which doesn't stop a lot of people doing it every day) but for me it's a bit over 6 miles by bike and an hour snoozing on the train.

I don't need inspiration to ride, since I don't have a car. I could get one, and I certainly could borrow my wife's car most days, but driving to the station still wouldn't make much sense. Parking is expensive ($155/month for an unreserved spot, $195 reserved; in contrast, my bike locker costs me $7.50/month) and navigating the garage would eat up most of the time savings anyway.

So... I realize what works for me is just what works for me. But even so, my advice is: make driving more difficult. Sell the car, or park it in the garage behind all the bikes, or park it at work, or... I don't know what works for you, but you get the idea.

One thing that motivates me lately is noticing that I have a better day at work when I ride in. I think all the breathing nourishes my brain.

The exwife is a CPA who weighed more and then less at different times during our marriage. I found her laying on the couch drinking wine one time instead going to the gym for her usual work out. She said she'd done the math, figured the extra time exercising was a wash as far as extending her life and was going to take the easy way out and skip exercising. That was about 20 years ago, and she had a stroke last fall before even reaching 60. The 2 may or may not be related, but why risk it?