When I moved to Oregon and started working at Tektronix my friends took me to the bike store to get a good road bike. I wasn’t yet commuting, more evening and weekend rides into the country. A few years later I replaced that with a modern “entry-level racer” after the frame cracked on a ride to the Oregon coast. A riding buddy reminded me that you don’t have to be a racer to appreciate a bike as athletic equipment.
When I left Tektronix a colleague and I at Wyatt Software starting riding daily at lunch. Not yet a commuter, I kept my bike in my vanagon, I started putting on big miles. I rode seven centuries one year. I never enjoyed the last 10 miles of a 100 mile ride, but the habit made 60 miles on a Saturday no big deal.
I started my own consulting company and devoted a lot of time to exploring the internet. This was the period when wiki was born. I thought I would bike to my office but it was only two miles away and hardly worth the time it takes to put on bike shoes.
A few jobs later I was working for Eclipse Foundation in borrowed office space downtown. My partner there was a committed commuter and talked me into that habit. I now built out a second bike as a commuter, with fenders and lots of lights. I found that commuting 15 miles a day didn’t not make big miles easier so that was the end of the long rides.
Another job later my car was stolen with my bike on the rack. That is when I started buying more bikes: another entry level racer, and a now popular fixed gear which I grew strong enough to ride over the hill between work and home. This was probably my favorite bike ever.
With a single speed bike, cadence is velocity.
I spent a year commuting to Venice Beach, California. There I kept a Venice made fashion bike, single speed with a coster break, no cables, beautiful in its own way. When in town I stayed at a surfer hotel on the beach in Santa Monica and commuted to work by beach each day.
Ten years pass. Now I ride mostly an electric bike. Now and then I ride more difficult loops I was once strong enough to right and enjoy on an athletic bike. My favorite country ride has filled up with mcMansions with three and sometimes four or five car garages. Weird. I wish I stopped and took a picture of that five car setup.
Four more years pass. I keep my Specialized ebike and Linus single-speed in good repair but ride them less and less. My travel radius is only a couple of miles now which I often reach on foot. More than once I had arrived only a half-mile away to discover I left my lock on the other bike. This becomes a burden I am happy to shed.