You're viewing a single thread.
Buy a bicycle that makes you want to ride it. If you get to the point where you no longer want to ride it, trade it in for another one that you do.
I can't overstate how important it is take care of your mental and physical health. In fact, I would say that this is far more important than buying a house. Your mind and body are your primary home.
I miss riding a bike. I used to ride or [inline] skate or skate[board] everywhere as my primary modes of transport.
My oncologist told me that my osteopenia and osteolytic lesions mean that I must never ride a bike again, or skate, or even jog, in case of pathologic fractures.
If you have any suggestions, they’d be welcome.
No suggestions because I'm not your doctor and have no idea what would or would not be a potential risk. Just wanna say that damn, that sucks. I really feel for you.
You should definitely ask a qualified expert. I would think swimming might be a good option though. As well as being good exercise it can also be really pleasant and relaxing to just float and play in the water.
Always follow yourdoctors advice. There is a lot of snake oil out there that sounds good but will kill you.
To put a finer point on it, riding a bike is incredibly important for all sorts of economic and lifestyle reasons, not just for your health.
Or at the very least avoid car ownership and overuse:
When you use a 3500-pound car to transport your 150-pound self around, 96 percent of the weight of that clump of matter is the car. You’re moving 25 times more junk around than you need to, and thus using 25 times more energy to do it.
Imagine that you’re hungry for lunch, so you go to a restaurant. But you don’t just order yourself a blackened salmon salad for $15.00. You order twenty five salads for $375.00! Then, you eat one of them, and leave the other 24 blackened salmon salads, $360.00 worth of food, to get collected by the waiter and slopped unceremoniously into a big black garbage bag. All that fine wild-caught Alaskan Salmon, lovingly seasoned and grilled. All the fine crumbles of feta cheese, the mango salsa, diced green onion, shaved peppers, rich zingy dressing, and everything else the chef worked on for hours – plopped into the slimy garbage bag. This is exactly what you are doing, every time you drive!
Of course, a lot of people, especially in North America, don't really have an alternative, and they'll be financially and bodily worse off for it.
It’s time for this silliness to come to an end. You must ride a bike. We all must. It’s not a weird fringe form of transportation that only people in Portland and Colorado do. It’s just simply the way we all get around for moderate intra-city distances.
Ah yes, because we all live in areas where everything we need to access is a moderate intra-city distance away.
Nobody except you said "everything".
I could change it to “anything” and still make the same point.
You're literally responding in the context of someone who wouldn't ride (heck, or even walk) 800 metres to work. Driving that short a distance is inconceivable to me. And it should be to any sane person.
Sounds like a personal problem. Maybe you should move somewhere that doesn't suck and isn't actively killing you by forcing you into a financially ruinous and unhealthy lifestyle.
I’m neither financially ruined nor unhealthy, so…
A better critique would be lack of ability or safe routes, since many workarounds are needed to allow kids and those physically less able to get around by two wheels.
The vast majority of adults travel within 10km of their homes for most errands, which is definitely possible to hit with an analog bike. Ebikes can enable making double that distance easy.
That being said, even in actually rural areas where you are biking on a narrow shoulder with 50kph+ traffic next to you 20km each way in 0°C temps, many that don't have other options still bike, so really it's a preference for comfort/safety not lack of ability stopping most.
I am seriously waiting for the cold season to end so I can ride my bike again.