Cycling is like life. Cycling with no goal is meaningless. What meaning is there cycling in circles? Or living aimlessly? Meaning comes from direction and destination. Join me in my life's journey on a mountain bike :)

Blogging since 2003. Thank you for reading :))

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Back to the old way

Jul distance travelled: 157 km

To Choa Chu Kang Road, 60 km. The journey to the west is a pleasant, hard ride. Traffic is light and the hills, rolling. I hardly sweat as the rain falls. A falling branch misses me with less than a second to spare. I cycle like the wind to make up for the two months I've been running instead of cycling, and mull my experience of the two.
- Cost: running shoes and cycling shoes costs about the same, but what good are cycling shoes without the bicycle
- Speed: hard running at 10km/h, cycling at 35 km/h (cruising speed on slicks on flat road)
- Transmission: "automatic" for running, manual for cycling (single speed excepted)
- Terrain: off-road and on-road for both
- Danger: low for running, high for cycling, with metal monsters and flesh-bound fiends to deal with
- Injuries: high impact for running; low impact for cycling unless I crash. I hurt more running than cycling; with the latter, my pains disappear.

Back home, I fail to remove stains from my new jersey. I think about someone who says cycling clothes stay clean in the rain. My consternation is how strong conviction can be borne out of great ignorance.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Segregation

To Rifle Range Road, 46 km. The Bukit Timah Nature Reserve is mostly reserved for people on foot, not on wheels. Trails criss cross the area. They would be a mountain biker's heaven, but the pearly gates are open only to those on foot, to protect them from bikers. However, mountain bike trails are often traversed by those on foot, with no protection for bikers, who have shed blood to avoid collision with those who are slow-footed and who quickly think that bikers can levitate like in the movie ET.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Personal bests


To Hua Guan Avenue, 51 km. This month, I run the furthest I've ever run in my life in a day: 8 km. I started jogging about a month ago; after leaving the army, there was no real need to run (except to catch elevators and trains), and I was told not to run after knee surgery in 1996. Today, I also cycle past the 35,000 km mark (since I started keeping count). Quite fitting that I spend some of the time in this pretty rich, pretty part of Singapore.