My self-powered commute

People tell me I’m crazy. Maybe. But this is the only way I’ve found to consistently fit exercise into the hectic schedule of my daily life with two young kids.

I live in Brooklyn about 10 kilometers (6 miles) away from the Google office in Manhattan. Here is my commute:

Commuting by bike is a pretty normal thing to do in New York. But running… not so much, and that’s where the crazy adjective comes into play I guess.

No subway? That’s right! No subway involved at all, which is a relief considering how awfully unreliable the NYC transportation has become over the last few years. Seriously, it’s not funny. Self-powered commutes are fully predictable time-wise. Subway commutes mean buffering 20 extra minutes to be on time anywhere, e.g. to pick my son up from daycare.

How much exercise is that? Done right, this routine totals around 40km of running and 60km of biking per week. If wheather and time permit, I try to fit something else in the weekend, but it’s rare. Tough… but not enough. I’ve got a spot in this year’s NYC TCS Marathon (OMG, I know, and my first ever!) so I’ll have to spice the running up a little bit; 40kms a week are not that many.

How are the logistics? Complicated but I’m lucky to have showers and lockers at work. On the bike-to-work days, I carry enough clean clothes for that day and the following one. On the bike-home days, I carry everything back for washing. No backpack for running—just a little waist bag. Things are extra complex because on Tuesday evenings I have Korean lessons in Midtown, which means I have to pack a super-heavy lock and a book for Monday and Tuesday’s rides.

Is this every week? I try to make it. The above is the ideal however. In reality, cold and wet weather gets in the way quite frequently during the winter season. When that happens, I look at the forecast and try to reschedule by prioritizing the runs over the bike rides (e.g. by dropping Wednesday from the schedule and moving the other paired days). But last year was pretty consistent.

Why this post? Just because. In migrating the blog to Hugo last week, I encountered the archive’s time machine. I skimmed through posts from almost 14 years ago to see what I had to say at the time. In doing so, I came across the Do you run? entry that I wrote when I was getting started with this thing… and the discovery compelled me to write this as a follow-up.

Anyway, this schedule works. Last year I ran 1,920km and biked 1,870km. I also ran my first half marathons without dedicated additional training. But as a friend said to me, the crazy thing is that these two metrics are similar.