I Need Some Exercise

So, almost two months later (after moving to the Bay Area) I decided that I was long overdue for a little physical activity. My preference has always been to excercise in the morning, because I’m too tired and in no mood after a day’s work. Unfortunately, I also am not one to wake up very early. This was perfectly fine in grad school, when I could occasionally show up to work just before noon; however, this kind of schedule is usually frowned upon in most real-world jobs.

I finally had the bright idea to combine getting to work with excercise, finally putting my bicycle, which has been sitting patiently on my porch, to some good use. The problem remained to find a way to bike to work without getting killed by pre-coffee over-aggressive commuter drivers. The last time I tried to bike to work in the South Bay, a lot of my route was on Central Expressway, at the suggestion of my ex-bike-messenger friend Andrew. Frankly this scared me to death, and I was especially eager to find a way to avoid “sharing the road” with cars running at 3-4 times my speed.

With a lot of web searching and assembling various web sources of bicycle-friendly lanes and paths, I found the John W. Christian Greenbelt [1] which lies in a straight line along the path from my house to work, is about 3 miles, and is a bike / pedestrian path only–no cars. Score! The following picture was made with http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/, an excellent website for creating maps with routes using google maps.

I decided to try biking it today, and it’s a really nice ride. And it appears that any day now, there will be a pedestrian/bike bridge past Manzano Way over Calabazas Creek. (The eastern edge of the greenbelt.)

I’ll leave you with a picture of me enjoying a well-deserved Jamba Juice at the Mercado Center in Santa Clara after almost 10 miles of biking.

If I look a little bedraggled, remember I am totally out of shape. Also, I was up dancing until 4:30am last night–maybe San Francisco is that much more fun than the South Bay…

(For more Bay Area biking info: http://bicycling.511.org/routes.htm, http://bicycling.511.org/maps.htm, City of Sunnyvale Bike Maps)