{"id":18501,"date":"2020-03-16T19:08:47","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T19:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/pegasus\/?p=18501&post_type=story"},"modified":"2020-03-18T19:44:05","modified_gmt":"2020-03-18T19:44:05","slug":"why-i-ride-a-bike","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/pegasus\/why-i-ride-a-bike\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Ride a Bike"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spring 2020 | By Jeff Kunerth<\/em><\/p>\n

[lead]A writer I admire equates reading to travel: No matter where you are, no matter what you are reading, it takes you to a different place.[\/lead]<\/p>\n

\"Jeff<\/p>\n

I equate riding a bicycle to freedom: No matter what you ride, no matter where you go, you are getting away.<\/p>\n

My love of bike riding began as a child. Learning to ride extended the range of my world growing up in Ames, Iowa. I was beyond the reach, sight and influence of my parents. I rode from the familiar to the unknown. The bike took me places far beyond the range of my feet: all the way to downtown Ames and beyond where the houses ended and the cornfields began.<\/p>\n

Bike riding as a boy was all about independence, never about fitness.<\/p>\n

As an adult, cycling is my favorite form of exercise. It\u2019s my ride to a healthier lifestyle. But it is still about freedom. A car can get you where you want to go faster, but it can\u2019t go farther than a bike. It\u2019s possible to ride across a state \u2014 which I have \u2014 or the nation.<\/p>\n

My home state is host to RAGBRAI, or the Register\u2019s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, a seven-day, cross-state bike ride organized by The Des Moines Register<\/em> that annually attracts 10,000 cyclists.<\/p>\n

You can drive a car across Iowa\u2019s 310 miles in about six hours. But what you miss are the small farm towns spaced about 10 miles apart, the distinct Iowa downtowns, the way cornfields wave in the wind, and the genuine hospitality of Iowans. Along the RAGBRAI route, Iowans offer you homemade rhubarb pie, free water, fresh fried pork chops. The money raised by RAGBRAI riders funds high school senior trips to Washington, D.C., volunteer fire departments, and small Methodist churches with their fine spaghetti dinners.<\/p>\n

The distance between overnight host towns varies from 50 to 80 miles with a 100-mile option available during the ride. To many people (including my sons when they were young), riding a bike 80 miles seems more like a punishment than pleasure. But for me it is pure freedom: freedom from work, freedom from bills; freedom from habit and routine; freedom from television, computers and the internet; freedom from obligations, responsibilities, duties and chores.<\/p>\n

Long-distance cycling distills life to what is important in the moment: the next mile, the next town, reaching the final destination. There is an acute awareness of which way the wind is blowing. You hear from parts of your body you did not know existed. When all you have to do that day is ride a bike, life can seem pretty simple.<\/p>\n

RAGBRAI, now in its 50th year, begat other cross-state rides. I\u2019ve cycled across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Because of my bike, I know the roadside version of those states through the vistas of hills, fields, woods, farmhouses, small towns and cities.<\/p>\n

As a transplanted Iowan, I was involved in the Orlando Sentinel<\/em>\u2019s bike ride across Florida in the 1980s, which lives on \u2014 40 years later \u2014 as the Florida Freewheelers club\u2019s Florida Bicycle Safari.<\/p>\n

Through the years of biking across Florida, I\u2019ve gained a closer relationship with a state that is unfriendly, if not hostile, toward cyclists. According to a 2019 report from AAA, Florida is the deadliest state for cyclists, and the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, Jacksonville, Orlando and Miami claimed the top four spots for deadliest metro areas in the nation. In exercising your freedom here, you may jeopardize your life.<\/p>\n

The antidote to potentially getting run over by a car is to use the growing number of paved bike paths throughout the state. I\u2019ve ridden them all while compiling a book, Florida\u2019s Paved Bike Trails<\/em>, which includes 76 bike paths from Pensacola to Key West. More paved trails are on the way, including plans to link existing paths from Titusville to St. Petersburg in the 250-mile Florida Coast-to-Coast Trail.<\/p>\n

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[photo id=”19023″ title=”Jeff-bike-riding-cropped-small” alt=”” position=”center” width=”612px”][\/photo]<\/p>\n

麻豆原创 lecturer Jeff Kunerth has ridden all of the state’s paved bike paths and wrote a book, Florida\u2019s Paved Bike Trails<\/em>, which includes 76 bike paths from Pensacola to Key West.

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One of those many bikes paths, the Seminole Wekiva Trail, passes near my home. I can ride my bike on it from Altamonte Springs to Lake Mary and cross a bridge over I-4 to the Cross Seminole Trail that takes me through Winter Springs and into Oviedo. From there, I can ride the Cady Way Trail, which runs through Winter Park to join the Orlando Urban Trail that ends \u2014 for now \u2014 in downtown Orlando.<\/p>\n

A ride like that takes all day. You end up exhausted but exhilarated, tired but stronger.<\/p>\n

Over the course of my life, I\u2019ve ridden my bikes thousands of miles. These days, while I\u2019m still working, I get out a couple of times a week \u2014 never less than 20 miles and seldom more than 50.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s one thing I\u2019ve noticed: The older I get, the better, lighter, more expensive bike my body needs \u2014 it\u2019s easier on the legs and needs less effort to go longer or faster.<\/p>\n

Freedom, as they say, isn\u2019t free.<\/p>\n

[divider][\/divider]
\nJeff Kunerth is a lecturer in journalism<\/a> at 麻豆原创. He joined the\u00a0faculty after 41 years as a reporter with the <\/em>Orlando Sentinel,\u00a0where he won numerous awards including being named a\u00a0finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":19014,"template":"","categories":[1000],"tags":[1440,1319],"class_list":["post-18501","story","type-story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-why-i","tag-jeff-kunerth","tag-nicholson-school-of-communication-and-media","issues-1462","issues-spring-2020"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Riding a Bike is an Ultimate Form of Freedom<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jeff Kunerth, a lecturer in journalism at 麻豆原创, shares the life perspective he has gained from riding his bike thousands of miles across the United States.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/pegasus\/why-i-ride-a-bike\/\" 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