Biking: Part One (of many installments)

I've been a bike commuter for over twenty years, from my days in medical school in Boston, to my work with the Banana Slugs of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to my current home of Columbus, Ohio. I admire my friends who bike recreationally.  I don't.  I have never ridden a "century," or rode in a bike race, a criterion or a tour.  I commute.

I enjoy bike commuting for many reasons.  I enjoy the health benefits, and the ease (and cost:  free!) of parking when I reach my destination.  I also enjoy being in nature, as opposed to being enclosed in a car.  I partake of a similar feeling I think to what some of my motorcyclist friends describe as the experience they enjoy on their 'bikes'; you can feel the elements:  the wind, the rain, the coolness that lingers in a dip in the road on a morning ride.  And I do so without the gasoline expense.

The pace of a bike ride is, as well, special.  You can cover miles much more easily than you can walking or even running, but the speed of course is still much less than a car. So, you can actually experience the neighborhoods you bike through in a much more intimate way than when driving, and you can see much more of the community than you could if you were just walking.  What's more, you're not allowed on the interstate on a bike, so by necessity you must go through the neighborhoods, the back roads.  I have, when moving to a new community, learned the lay of the land much more easily on a bike than in a car.

I was biking to work today and thinking about this community Kit, Momo, Claire and I moved to a year and a half ago. It's an urban environment with potential for kids and families to be active, but it's still far too structured around the car.

There's a reasonable number of bike routes in this community, that I use to go to clinics downtown and in Westerville.  There's a pretty nifty one I access to get across town to take my public health classes at Ohio State.  Some of these routes incorporate sections that are truly bike paths, but the bulk of the routes are signed roads.  There's a stretch on Sunbury Road, as I take the road section of the Alum Creek trail up to Westerville, where I have flashbacks of Renee Zellwegger's character in Jerry Maguire:

Driving us out to Manhattan Beach.
All those tiny streets.
Playing chicken with the traffic.
Your life flashing before you.

I'm looking forward to when the southern and northern part of that bike path hook up, and I can stay off the roads entirely.

And back to the pace of a bike commute.  On my way home, I travelled by a sign teaching me about an athlete of another generation I never knew before

Marshall "Major" Taylor was an American cyclist who overcame discrimination, as so many African-American athletes have in history, to win the world one mile track championship in 1899.  A four mile stretch of the Alum Creek trail is dedicated to Taylor, who grew up in the midwest.  I never knew of him before I biked past this sign.

In terms of the medical research I like to discuss in this blog, there
is too much about biking to review in one posting; hence I anticipate many installments, as this post's title indicates.  One article I did want to mention is a 2005 study from Denmark where children and adolescents were evaluated for their physical activity levels and their physical fitness levels.

Physical activity and fitness are different constructs, the former
assessing for calories burned and the latter for ability to perform
physical tasks at moderate to vigorous levels.  In many studies of children, physical activity will be measured with pedometers or accelerometers, devices which the children can wear and which record for instance the number of steps they will take in a day.  Physical fitness is typically measured in the lab, with different tests available to determine an individual's V02 max.

Active travel to school is a fantastic way for kids to get, well, active, and is one this generation uses far less frequently than mine did.  Whether it's on foot or by bike, kids' commuting to school on their own is wonderful.  And as far as measures of sheer physical activity go, this study found that biking or walking will give similar results.  However, the study went further, to look at measures of physical fitness, an outcome not typically evaluated in these studies.

The study authors looked at a large group of children (529 individuals with an average age of 9.7) and adolescents (390 individuals with an average age of 15.5 years) and measured their V02 max on a maximal cycle ergometer.  They gave these same individuals a questionnaire about their typical mode of travelling to school, and validated the results of this questionnaire by quantifying their physical activity level using accelerometers (done in 531 of the participants).  This validation is useful since it has been found that for these types of questions people might overestimate their activity level using only a questionnaire.

Compared with walkers and kids using passive transport (i.e. cars/buses), bicycling kids were significantly fitter, and were nearly 5 times as likely to be in the top tier of fitness than their counterparts.  This stands to reason, as you will typically drive your heart rate to higher levels on a bike than you will when walking.

So, the message for our kids should be walk or bike to school.  They are both great! But if you have a goal of getting fit for a sport, bike commuting rules!