Thursday, May 19, 2011

By Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I’ve been biking to work at the PG since figuring out, 13 years ago, that I could climb over the railroad tracks in lower Greenfield and sneak onto this strange new unopened path to the city called “the jail trail.”A city supervisor there occasionally would spot me, offer a stern look, then smile and give me his blessing.

Till then, I had mostly been a mountain biker terrorizing the trails in Frick Park. (I have a messed-up collarbone from the old slag heaps to prove it.) I would come home from work every night around 7 and want that bike ride real bad.

Then I started having more kids, and it got harder to get my wife’s smile and blessing on that.

The solution was to transition to the streets and start riding to work. That way, exercise, commuting, adventure and cheap living were all rolled into one.

Fortunately, from Squirrel Hill, it’s largely downhill and not much of a sweat going in, even though there is almost always a west wind in your face. For the first several years, I used the Jamis mountain bike — like jogging in hiking boots, they say — before switching to a flat-bar road bike, which isn’t nearly as fast as those expensive drop-handle varieties whizzing past me.

What I didn’t account for was how addictive it would become.

Read the rest of this article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette