Jewels of Wisdom

Keith Gates says if he can ride to work, you can, too.  By Emily Furia

Nine years ago, Keith Gates took up cycling because of a guitar. "I threw the strap over my shoulder, looked down and couldn't see the strings," says the 34-year-old systems analyst from Olathe, Kansas, who weighed 245 pounds at the time. "I started Weight Watchers the next week." He also started riding on weekends--once around the block at first, then on a local rec trail. Before long, "weekends just weren't enough," Gates says, so he began riding to work a couple times a week. "Eventually, I realized I hadn't filled my car with gas in three months." The Commuter Dude was born.

Today Gates, who has lost nearly 100 pounds, commutes 22 miles round-trip and is on a mission to help others do the same--by dishing out advice and shooting down excuses at his website, www.commuterdude.com

Here are five of his best tips for getting started.

NO MORE SWEATY BACK:  "Messenger bags are great, but if it's 95 degrees outside, you don't want one on your back," says Gates. His canvas Carradice saddlebag (carradice.co.uk) easily attaches to his bike's seatpost with a quick-release.

TAPE YOUR FRAME:  The first year Gates commuted, he noticed that "more cars were cutting in front of me as the days got shorter. At first I thought 'What jerks,' but then I realized that they probably couldn't see me." In addition to -using front and rear lights, Gates recommends applying easy-to-remove electrical tape to your frame, then sticking reflective tape to the electrical tape.

USE YOUR EARS:  "You can often tell by the pitch of the tires and engine whether or not a driver sees you," Gates says.

AVOID BURNOUT:  Commuting can leave you over trained, especially if you also ride on weekends, says Gates. "I used to feel guilty about taking a day off, but we all need a break every once in a while."

JOIN THE CLUBS:  "I try to support as many of the local bike clubs as I can," says Gates, who rides with several Kansas City-area groups and uses his website to publicize their advocacy efforts. "You never know what they might be doing that will benefit your riding, even if you don't commute."


 

Jerry Edelbrock is one of the rare breed of U.S. cyclists who regularly pedals to work. It's good for the planet-but better for him.  By Mark Riedy

Monday morning, 7:35 a.m. On the 101 South, a gray clot of cars, buses and trucks inches its way toward San Francisco. "If I were riding the bus," says Jerry Edelbrock as he begins pedaling out of the town of Corte Madera and past the gridlock, "I'd feel drugged by the time I got to work."

Maybe showing off a little for his seatbelted audience, Edelbrock bobs up a 500-foot grade instead of taking the nearly flat option that runs hard beside the highway. You have to wonder which sight most dazzles the creeping, cranky auto commuters: the workweek's first sunshine striking the top of Mt. Tamalpais, or the bright, vintage jersey dancing up the hill.

Edelbrock, 53, is a slight, graying man with a prestigious job at odds with the general public's notion of bike commuters as kooks: vice president of the Yosemite Fund, a not-for-profit group that raises roughly $5 million per year for preservation and restoration in the 700,000-plus acre park.

He began the day around 7 a.m. with coffee, and a bowl of Quaker Oat Squares with bananas and currants in soy milk. Then he slipped on a backpack he'd stuffed the night before with socks, underwear and a few homemade cookies, grabbed a NiteRider battery from the kitchen counter where it had been recharging, and headed to the garage to hop on his Bianchi Axis cyclocross bike. On the way down the drive, he coasted past the family's red 1999 Audi A6 wagon.

Edelbrock is one of the lucky few who have discovered how easy commuting can be. In defiance of the national odds, where the 42.5 million cyclists in America (roughly 15 percent of the population) make less than 1 percent of all trips by bike, Edelbrock has commuted by bike nearly every workday for 13 years. For the past 3 years, he's ridden 16 miles into San Francisco's financial district. He finds it easy to get on the bike even in downpours or the occasional cold snap: "I just think about how I'll feel if I ride the bus and how I'll feel if I pedal across the Golden Gate Bridge."

Bike commuting long ago ceased being a struggle for Edelbrock; now it's an opportunity-to add hours of play to his day, grab a twice-daily dose of serenity and pour steel into his thighs. Today, he rides past two wetlands filled with American coot, long-billed curlew and great blue heron; past the east peak of 2,600-foot Mount Tam; past the storied view of San Francisco from the bayside city of Sausalito; through the Presidio, a 225-year-old former Army post; past the North Beach Italian district, where he savors whiffs of garlic and espresso; and along the 220-foot-high deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, an experience that, even after 13 years, he still finds breathtaking.

At 8:49, about an hour and 10 minutes after leaving home, Edelbrock pushes through the door of his building on Montgomery Street and wheels into a freight elevator as co-workers pile into a pair of polished wood elevators on the left. "The first day I rode to work, the building's management said I couldn't bring my bike in at all. I had to promise I wouldn't take it to my office."

The freight elevator shudders him down to the basement, a hive of wire storage cages about 6 feet by 4 feet. Edelbrock strides to the cage designated "The Yosemite Fund," keys the lock, then begins his transformation from commuter to middle management. If he's sweaty, he cleans himself with baby wipes before changing into khakis or a suit, a dark tie and oxfords. Edelbrock keeps a dozen sets of shirts and pants, along with shoes and spare socks, in the cage. He has them cleaned at ABC Laundry just around the corner. "Isn't it cute how he has his clothes all hanging up, and his socks all neatly folded, in a cage," his wife, Jeri, teases.

Just a tick before 9, Edelbrock breezes through the door of his 11th floor office. He might have just stepped off the train, except for his reddish cheeks and the smile plastered on his face. "When he walks through the door, he's bubbling," says his boss, Bob Hansen, who admits some envy. "While I'm riding under the Bay on a train full of people, Jerry is up there flying across the Golden Gate Bridge."

Edelbrock sits down to begin the workday. As the clock ticks toward 5, he might stoke himself with one of the Clif Bars stashed in the lower right-hand desk drawer, while checking the Web's weather forecast for his ride home. His evening commute might be one as magical as the one during last month's full moon, when he almost didn't need his NiteRider. Or maybe he'll hook up again with a few of his superfast commuter buddies (who the local cops have been known to keep an eye out for) and they'll motor right past the strolling tourists in Sausalito, along the chilly marshes in Mill Valley, and then Edelbrock will drop down the Corte Madera grade with only his headlamp as company. If his ride home is fast, he'll burst through the door just in time to snag one of Jeri's homemade cookies still warm from the oven.

"When I ride," says Edelbrock, "I look forward to going into work as much as coming home, and I feel good about whatever I have to face. Also, because I essentially train all week, I can do long rides or runs or ski on the weekends better than I could when I was young. And," he says, "the moonlight over the water is emblazoned in my memory. It's unbelievable."


 

For Dave Kingsbury, the trip to the office is as much a reason to work as the paycheck.  By Joe Lindsey

Most people judge a good commute by how smoothly it passes. My friend Dave Kingsbury uses different measures: seeing the pasqueflowers bloom one switchback higher on the trail each day in the spring, or having calm water for the canoe portion of the trip. Colorado's Front Range has long been home to people who, like Dave, choose to live in the natural beauty of the foothills. But the price they pay for living in paradise is a hideous commute to work in Denver or Boulder. Dave's 26-mile drive involves a precipitous descent on partly unpaved mountain roads, and then a crawl across Boulder in heavy traffic to nearby Gunbarrel, where he's a cognitive anthropologist for advertising firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky. One way, it's easily 45 minutes in good weather and more than an hour of white-knuckle driving in bad. But Dave doesn't drive; at least, not often.

Instead of drudgery, each commute is an adventure. He's linked together dozens of routes to and from work, all the while relishing the way clouds get bright, puffy edges on cold mornings or the sight of 70 elk running through a field, moments he chronicles in a blog (themongoliachronicles.typepad.com). "It brings a level of intimacy I'm not sure how you'd get otherwise," he says. Last year, to capture spring, he took a photo every morning in May of the same meadow.

Dave's been commuting by bike (or skis) at least three days a week, year-round, since he moved to the foothills west of Boulder in 1990. And while advocates love to make the case for bike commuting by listing its many benefits--improving health, saving money and helping the environment, for example--those weren't the reasons Dave decided to start commuting by bike. "It was a sanity thing," he says. Eighteen years and four jobs later, it still is.

Life at CP+B is the typical big-agency routine: long hours, lots of stress. Shimano is a client, as are Volkswagen North America and Burger King. "This place is insane," Dave says. "It goes 24/7." Ad agency work, like most jobs, involves frustrating setbacks: plans change, projects get killed, months of hard work are lost. "You can work your ass off on something and there are a hundred factors you can't control," he says. Riding's simplicity counters that: "You pedal and you get there."

Commuting, for Dave, is a filter that diffuses life's trials, large and small. "I'll go through 12 different states of mind on the ride," he says. "By the time I get home, I'm in a very different place." One night, he arrived home to find his wife, Shenna, "ready to kill someone" after an afternoon of watching two neighbor kids and their own two-year-old, Quinn. "I walked in, cracked a beer and took Quinn up to the bath for an hour," he says. "That's heaven. If I'd driven, I couldn't do that. I'd still be stressed from work."

Sometimes, the commute dispels stress through sheer effort. After particularly rough days, Dave often finds himself charging across town at top speed for no reason; he has plenty of time to catch the bus he uses for part of his ride home. Most of the time, though, the trip is slower paced, with deliberate meanders--to a meadow filled with flowers, or a rocky outcrop where he can watch the sunset. He also devises more creative journeys, like the canoe-and-bike commute he calls the Canute.

Dave admits that his commute can be a source of stress sometimes--dressing properly for subzero days, for example--but even these experiences give him perspective. Office politics, a challenge at many workplaces, are "just annoying," he says. "But double flatting and pushing my bike home through 5 inches of snow, that's hard."

The Canute is a hybrid commute--Dave Kingsbury rides to Gross Reservoir, paddles his bike across in a canoe and then descends Flagstaff Mountain to Boulder. It started as a lark with a friend who lives on the other side of the reservoir. "Christian can get lost in a paper bag, so I'd describe a place to meet for the ride and he wouldn't show up," says Dave. But Christian owned a canoe (the S.S. Bottomrider, which nearly sank on its maiden Canute) and they could meet at water's edge. It's now a treasured routine, with a new boat (the Winona Ride-her).

One day last July, I joined Dave for the return leg of the Canute. We rode through Boulder, chatting. Conversation turned sparse on the 45-minute climb up Flagstaff Mountain. Just past the summit, a summer squall dumped rain. We took shelter in a thicket of brush as Dave snapped photos of the water cascading down the road. When the rain lightened, we continued on to the water, packed the bikes in the canoe, a disassembly that Dave now has down to a science, and paddled off. At the center of the reservoir, we took a break and I pulled two bottles of beer out of my pack. He produced a sandwich he'd brought as a similar surprise. We were alone on the lake; the only sound was a distant airliner passing overhead. We finished the beer and picked up our paddles. It would be getting dark soon.