My favorite cycling day of the year, without a doubt, is Bike-to-Work Day. It is a celebration not of bike racing, but rather bike commuting. My own commuter bike might just be the love of my life. Since I don’t own a car, we go everywhere together. For the long hauls, we sometimes use my bus pass. For the big hauls I take along my Burley trailer. With those two tools, I am confident we can conquer anything. When I get home from a race, I can’t wait for our reunions. Obviously I’ve been riding a bike, but nothing compares to adventuring with my old friend. I have a lot of strong general feelings about the importance and benefits of bike commuting, but I’ll restrain myself and spare you that lecture – for this post at least.
On Bike-to-Work Day, from 6:30 to 9am, free breakfast stations pop up at businesses all over the city. My friend Lindsay and I have a tradition of starting at the opening bell with a mission of hitting as many stations as we can, filling up our backpacks with free snacks along the way. We have decided the feeling we have the night before Bike-to-Work Day is a little like Christmas Eve felt as a kid.
Regardless of the lure of free breakfast burritos, it is genuinely incredible to see so many people out celebrating bicycles early in the morning. Some come in costumes. Some companies will organize groups or challenge their workers to ride – mini-pelotons of co-workers assemble to ride together. In that way, the event achieves its true aim – getting new riders out and creating commuting habits that weren’t there before. From my perspective, it’s a pretty good sell – it is tough to argue with fresh air and a summer sunrise lighting up the mountains.
