First bicycle commute for this season.

What I knew but had sort of forgotten:

How sore my sitting bones will be after the first few rides.

How much time with my own thoughts this gives me. It takes me roughly the same forty-five minutes to get to the office by train or by bike. By train, the trip is chopped up and full of distractions. I don’t experience it as a forty-five-minute period, but as a sequence of small stretches of time. Ten minutes to the station, wait a few minutes, find a place on the train. Read for ten minutes. Get off, get through the tangle of Stockholm central station. Repeat the above on the metro. Walk one last bit. Going by bike, in contrast, there is a lot of just… time passing while I move forward. Time to think. Or to not think.

How much energy it takes, when I haven’t been doing this for a while. I can’t really bike slowly. Not if I’ve got 13 km to go. It’s not that I go all out, but I definitely arrive with an elevated pulse. Do that twice a day, and in the evening I’m not up to much more than lounging in the sofa.