Bike To Work Week

It's bike to work week and Zac, one of my coworkers, decided to try commuting by bicycle on Thursday. He has been talking about riding to work for a while but had never done it before. He doesn't ride much, if at all, but he has a bicycle. It is a mountain bike with knobby tires so it is not ideal for commuting, but he can always upgrade later. The commute is about 9.5 miles one way.

He doesn't live that far from me so I offered to ride to his house and then ride with him to work. Since this was his first commute, he was a little disorganized. He couldn't find his water bottle. I told him that we could stop on the way and get some water but he didn't think that it would be necessary. Since his bike doesn't have a rack, he has his change of clothes in a backpack.
After the first block, I told him to stop so that I could pump up his back tire. It was almost completely flat. The front wasn't much better so I pumped that one up too. There were two hills that Zac was worried about. The first one cam at about the 2 mile mark. He slowed down but he made it up without stopping.

After about 4.5 miles Zac said that he needed to stop and get some water. We pulled into a gas station and he bought a bottle of water and we rested for a bit. I offered to carry the backpack for the rest of the trip and he handed it over with much resistance.
We stopped to rest before the second scary hill. We had just gone up a fair sized hill and we had a decent downhill before "Mount Sappington". Zac wanted to carry as much momentum as possible from the downhill. Zac was a little worried about making up the hill but I assured him that he could do it. It was an effort, but he made it. We stopped at the top and Zac nearly collapsed. We rested a while and finished off his water.

We weren't done yet, we still had a couple of miles to go. There were some rolling hills remaining but we were past the worst of it. When we finally pulled into the parking garage, Zac was quite happy to be done.

I didn't reset my bike computer when we got to Zac's house so I don't have his exact stats. I'd estimate 9.5 miles in about 50 minutes rolling time.

The interesting thing about this ride is that Zac is where I was just a year and eight months ago. The 9 mile commute nearly wiped me out that first day. When I first started riding, I was intimidated by the hill on Sappington Rd. That's why I named it "Mount Sappington". Looking back at that it amazing to me how far I have come in less than 2 years.