My first week biking to work

After having a rather unfortunate accident in my car about 3 weeks ago, I have now been forced to find an alternative method to get to work everyday until the insurance company sorts everything out.

For this alternative method of transportation I have chosen my trusty old bike as I'm not really within walking distance of where I work and as far as I know none of the public transport services go anywhere near it.

My work is quite close to where I live as the crow flys, which is useful because there is also a bike route between my house and work that is near enough the same distance. In the car I think the trip would work out to be about 5 miles, where as on my bike it's probably nearer 2-3.

The first day was most definitely an experience. I currently do no exercise what so ever, some people say this and what they really mean is they do a little but not as much as they should. When I say it however I really mean it. Up until this week the most exercise I've done is walking from my car to the office and back again, so as you can probably guess cycling into work was somewhat of a shock to my body.

The route to work is perfectly fine it's just the route home that's painful. There is what in my eyes is a mountain to climb on the way home, I wouldn't say it's a particularly long stretch of road but one thing is for sure it's damn steep. So steep in fact that my highly unfit body requires me to add at least 5-10 extra minutes onto my journey time to get up it. Apart from that though everything else is fine.

Because of the more direct route I can get into work in a couple of minutes over what it took me in the car. I must say that it isn't as stressful as driving, and it's quite nice to get a bit of exercise in the morning before work.

Most importantly though is it's both saving me money and having less of an impact on the environment and it's for these reasons that I'm thinking of making it a permanent affair.

I was spending roughly £50 a month on petrol with slightly more than that on insurance, which now after the accident will have risen sharply. If you also put the cost of tax, servicing and other eventualities on top of that it soon starts to add up.

On the environmental side of things, I used to drive about 6000 miles a year with probably around half of that to do with work. So if we just take my getting to work mileage, if I keep cycling in I'll be saving just short of a tonne of CO2 a year. Also the other half of the mileage will be done in my girlfriends car which has a much lower CO2 output.

The big question is though even with all the savings I could be making will my body and my mind stand up to cycling to work everyday? I'd like to say yes, but we'll just have to see what happens when I'm up against some really nasty weather. Currently I'm still nursing some slightly arching legs, hopefully it'll get easier next week.