Balancing Life with Cycling

From my own personal experience, I have found that cycling can lead to a person being somewhat greedy as far as time is concerned. Getting out for a quick ride might take 1-2 hours, and long ride could span 4-5 hours. With bicycle touring, all of a sudden you are looking at a full weekend, or perhaps dipping into your vacation time. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with any of this, but when you start mixing in friend and family commitments, precious weekends start to disappear.

Over the years, I've learned to compromise and find ways to involve cycling with other activities. For instance, my girlfriend loves to go on overnight backpacking trips on the weekends, but also loves riding. The simple solution there is to load up our backpacks and camping gear into a trailer, and bike to the trail head. Once at the trail head, we lock up the bikes and trailers, switch from cycling shoes to hiking shoes, and start hiking.

For other ideas, maybe you could plan a bike tour around a family event, such as a reunion or wedding. Riding out to a sporting event or festival can also be a great way to involve friends and/or family. However you choose to make it work, it is a great way to introduce people to cycling, and introduce yourself to some new experiences as well.

Photo by Josh Tack

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TOURING GEAR AND TIPS is written by Joshua Tack of Adventure Cycling's member services department. It appears weekly, highlighting technical aspects of bicycle touring and advice to help better prepare you for the journey ahead.

Source: http://blog.adventurecycling.org/2011/07/balancing-life-with-cycling.html

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