Solution: Dorky Pants

Started: 2008-03-25 21:40:53

Submitted: 2008-03-25 22:17:15

Visibility: World-readable

After acquiring a bike last week, I managed to get out last Thursday, between work and Hacking Society, I biked twenty kilometers (according to my GPS receiver) around Boulder's bike paths. I averaged twenty kilometers per hour; to make my twenty-seven kilometer daily commute practical, I need to increase my pace a bit. (This seems entirely possible, since I spent most of my ride winding on bike paths, not cruising down the shoulder of a straight highway.) I also wore my exercise heart rate monitor, which concluded that I burnt roughly 400 calories in an hour, roughly on par with my normal hiking pace. On Saturday afternoon, I headed out from home, scoped out one plausible way to get across Longmont, and biked all the way to Niwot, not quite half the way between Longmont and Boulder. I ended up biking forty kilometers at an average pace of twenty-five kilometers per hour. Next weekend, I hope to actually ride all the way into Boulder to get a better feel for what it will actually entail.

As Scott Adams noted, the problem is that bicycle seats are hard. I have no doubt that I could profit from adjusting my bike seat (which I intend to do), but I also expect to profit from real cycling pants. The Internet revealed to me that I have two options for cycling pants: the traditional skin-tight pants worn while touring (riding road bikes for long distances) and baggier, less disturbing pants with similar padding for mountain biking. I visited REI this evening and found a suitable pair of the later, which I haven't yet had the opportunity to try but seem to fit my twin goals of having more comfortable cycling pants and not becoming a ludicrously-attired cyclist.