Today I decided to concretize and consider the excuses of people who would like to ride a bike, but for some reason refrain from doing so.
To be honest, I myself sinned with this, because I had a desire to sit on a bike much earlier than I realized it. I was also afraid of something, I found reasons why this hobby would not suit me.
Let’s move on to the excuses themselves.
Bicycling is an expensive hobby, I don’t have extra money.
A bicycle, if we are talking about it as a hobby, and not as an object of worship or sports equipment, is one of the least expensive hobbies. You need to spend a certain amount of money, and then you can use the bike for many years with almost no investment. If there is no money for a bike, you can easily earn it at Casino Greece Online.
All inexpensive bikes are junk that will fall apart in a month.
This is not true. If you buy at the end of the season (in autumn) and take last year’s model, then within 10,000 rubles you can choose a fairly reliable bike suitable for non-extreme riding. Seize the moment of discounts, stores sometimes get rid of stagnant horses at cost, and maybe you can even meet 8K. In order not to buy real junk for this money, read my article on choosing a bike for a beginner.
In addition to the bike, you need to buy a lot of additional accessories that can cost more than the bike itself.
Purchasing accessories is far from mandatory and can take years as you get deeper into your hobby. In fact, all you need to buy right away with the bike is: a helmet, a spare tube, mounting paddles and a portable pump. All together it will cost 1500 rubles, if you do not get carried away with brands.
I have no time to ride, I leave for work at six and arrive at ten.
Sadly, if all life is spent at work, something needs to be changed. Maybe start by cycling to work? It will just take the time that you spent in transport, but in the morning you will get a charge of vivacity. Yes, this option is very difficult, given our roads, climate, mentality and the lack of a parking space for a bike.
But if you really want to, you can come up with a safe route along secondary roads, you can buy a folding bike and hide it under your office desk. Although sorry, the following excuse comes into force.
Bicycling as a hobby is not prestigious. My friends and colleagues will laugh when they see me riding a bike to work.
If someone thinks that I introduced this item for the sake of laughter, then you are mistaken. According to public opinion in the post-Soviet space, and of different classes, both workers and office workers, a bicycle is for freaks who are unable to take a worthy place in life. A normal man would never ride a bike and wear tight clothes, in their opinion.
In reality, the opposite is true, people who are passionate about cycling belong at least to the middle class segment, almost everyone has or will have a higher education and the average income per capita of cyclists is higher than the national average.
I note that sometimes the cost of a bicycle ridden by amateurs approaches the cost of a used car. Therefore, do not worry about the fact that cyclists cannot realize themselves in life.
Strong people spit on the opinions of others and do what they like. After a while, this opinion adapts to such people, and their activities suddenly become fashionable. In Russia, it will still be prestigious to ride a bicycle, you will see.
We have absolutely no cycling climate. If I lived in Spain…
Yes, the climate let us down, but not everything is so dramatic. Even if you do not take the extreme degree of passion, when people ride studded tires in winter, our cyclists consistently have seven months for their hobby. This is not so little, considering that you can still fall into that category of “extremely enthusiastic.”
Of course, these seven months in our latitudes are mostly windy, rainy and no sun, but there are clothes for any weather. If you really want to ride a bike, you can overcome the discomfort of our climate.
The cycling hobby is generally strongly tied to overcoming something – a difficult road, long kilometers, oneself. However, what is hard is given, and leaves a mark on the soul. I recall with nostalgia precisely those trips and rides in which it was not easy.
I have nowhere to ride. I live in a residential area, there are no bike paths or parks.
It’s not a problem at all. Only in the eyes of a motorist or a pedestrian, there is nowhere to ride a bike in the city. In fact, for a mountain bike, you still need to look for an area in which there would be no roads for it. Learn a technique called the bunny hop (leap the whole bike over an obstacle) and curbs, potholes and holes will no longer be a stop factor for you.
In addition, an ordinary bicyclist considers the riding area only within a radius of five to seven kilometers from home, while even the weakest cyclist travels at least 30 km. And in this limit, parks and bike paths can easily be found.
Bicycle and Russian roads are incompatible concepts. Every day the news is about accidents with drunk drivers. I don’t want to play the lottery with my life.
There is some truth in these words. But still, even the terrible news about fatal accidents is a statistic. Take Moscow and the Moscow region – several dozen cyclists are killed here on the roads every year. But if you look at the proportions of deaths in ordinary car accidents and downed pedestrians, then it seems to me that the probability of being hit by a bicycle does not seem so huge.
For some reason, we don’t think, leaving the house every day, that we can also be hit by a drunk driver on the sidewalk, die in a minibus, and so on. Simply because it is almost never mentioned in the news anymore (only if something out of the ordinary happens). Nevertheless, up to 30,000 people die on the roads every year, and about 300,000 more are injured of varying severity. Therefore, I do not think that cycling in Russia is something particularly risky. Everything connected with the roads is dangerous here.
But if the road phobia is not overcome, then there are parks and forests at the service of the cyclist. They can be reached by car or train. If you work out a route through the countryside, you can improve your local history knowledge. For example, just starting to ride a bike, I really got to know the outskirts of my city, usually by car I did not move away from the highway.
Cycling is dangerous to health. Starting with a deterioration in potency and ending with a chronic runny nose due to our climate.
I have already written about the influence of a bicycle on potency, and I can only repeat: there is an influence. Positive. And as for the common cold, acute respiratory infections and other colds, it is cyclists who are the least susceptible to them. Despite the fact that we ride both in the wind and in the rain, we often get wet through and freeze, diseases bypass us. This is not only related to hardening.
The fact is that with accelerated blood circulation, the temperature of the blood is increased, and many viruses simply do not have time to develop. Arriving home, we immediately climb into a hot bath, boil tea – thus reducing the negative factors to nothing. I don’t remember ever getting sick after a cold ride, although I rode for hours in cold rain, soaked to my diaper. But having stopped riding in the winter, I raked all these flus and acute respiratory infections to the fullest.
I am a very distant person from sports, I will quickly get tired on a bike.
If you knew how far from sports I am. But it’s not about sports, we’re talking about cycling. For this, you do not need to train in the literal sense. Adaptation will happen on its own, you yourself will not understand how it happened that, not being an athlete, you calmly drove a hundred kilometers in a day.
Well, I convinced the doubters that all your excuses have no real basis? If not, then we will continue the explanatory work on the site.