By Steve Rauch

During the second week of August, I marked my 100th commute to work by bicycle. I finished the year having ridden to work 176 days. My round trip commute is just four miles, mostly on bike lanes. My riding weather and distance would draw little notice from those Seattleites pursing the coveted Soaked to the Gills Trophy.

People sometimes ask if I have ridden a century or ridden over the Monument yet. My answer is no. Some seem surprised, I think they assume that anyone who rides to work so often must be a serious cyclist, or maybe everyone assumes cycling is more a recreational activity than an activity of daily life.

I began to consider the reasons I do ride.

A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that active commuting was "positively associated with fitness in men and women, and inversely associated with BMI, obesity, triglyceride levels, blood pressure, and insulin level in men". The health benefits of active commuting are certainly one reason I ride.

Bicycling is also efficient, even moreso than walking. An article on human power finds that the calories that would move a cyclist three miles would only move a car 280 feet. The efficiency and speed are certainly another reason I ride to work.

But my prime reason for riding is something else altogether. Nearly every day I ride, I exchange a hand wave with another rider, say hello to dog-walkers and exercisers, or even stop my commute to talk with a man walking his dog who wants to tell me about the heron he has just seen over at the irrigation pond. How many times have you turned off your car during your morning commute, gotten out, and greeted someone you don't even know? I have stopped to watch a mother duck herding her ducklings across the path and to make eye contact with a deer ravaging the tomato plants in a home garden. I arrive at work in a better mood than if I had driven.

The real reason I ride was best given voice by Henry David Thoreau in Life Without Principle. The second last sentence of that essay is: "Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning?" No matter how you get to work, or when, may your morning always be ever-glorious.