Cycling in a Time of COVID-19

A diagram of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19 

I am interrupting my series on high intensity workouts for two reasons. 1) Along with virtually everyone else in the world, my life has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. That disruption has made it harder for me to finish the third and final post. 2) On the other hand, the impact of that disruption on my cycling is something about which I wanted to blog. Thus, I promise to finish that series "real soon now", but for now, I am interrupting it with a post about my experiences cycling during the pandemic.

As I have confessed many times on this blog, I am a card-carrying member of the medical establishment. The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked the same partisan debate as has virtually every other issue in our society and I am not going to be a part of that. I am committed to following the guidelines of the medical establishment, partisan debate or no, but I do confess that is easier said than done. In the first place, there are a multitude of voices speaking for the medical establishment and few of them are immune from partisan influence. Medical professionals have been fired by government officials for expressing their opinion on COVID-19. In the second place, there is a great deal the medical establishment does not yet know about COVID-19. Almost all their advice at this point is their best guess based on fragmentary data and a lot of it is just best practice and common sense behavior for any infectious disease (e.g. washing hands.) Under these circumstances there are going to be legitimate differences of opinion, especially when you get to rather peripheral issues like the wisdom of cycling during a pandemic, even the best of governments are going to disagree. In Spain and Italy, recreational cycling is banned entirely. Fortunately for me, my state (California) and local (San Mateo County) governments have taken a different view, they explicitly allow and even encourage recreational cycling, albeit with some restrictions. The official restrictions are that social distancing should be maintained while riding and that rides should be taken locally, within five miles of home.

I am very reluctant, as a follower of the medical establishment and as someone who tries to be a good citizen, to engage in behavior that is less strict than what is recommended, but I do occasionally use my best judgement to decide to be a bit more conservative than the official recommendations, for example, on social distancing. The official government position is that social distancing while cycling involves keeping a six foot distance from other cyclists. There have been controversial studies and common sense discussions arguing that six feet is too close, that because of the motion of a bicycle and the wind generated thereby, virus might spread much further than six feet behind a cyclist. Because I mostly ride by myself, it is easy for me to sidestep this controversy and simply continue that behavior. Perfection, is, of course, impossible, so when other cyclists pass me or on the very rare occasions when I pass another cyclist, I get closer to them than I would like but I comfort myself that this is all about probabilities, so the fact that such encounters are short lived minimizes their harm.

Because most people cannot go to work, the amount of recreational walking, running, and cycling has increased dramatically. Before the pandemic, I would rarely see a runner or a walker or another cyclist while riding and now I see many more, such that encounters with all three of these groups has become more common. This has impacted my choice of routes. The Bay Trail, a favorite of mine, is simply too crowded for my comfort these days.

Due to an abundance of caution, I initially limited my cycling to my immediate neighborhood. However, this got boring after a while so I undertook the somewhat laborious process of making a snapshot of Google Maps and drawing a circle with a scaled radius of five miles around my home and found that most of my usual rides fit within this constraint. As I was doing this, I was cursing my outdated programming skills, thinking how much easier this task would have been had I been able to automate it, and of course, almost immediately found that someone already had. There is at least one site that allows you to enter your address and the desired circle radius in miles and draws the relevant safe riding circle for you.

"But why risk cycling at all?" many voices on the Internet ask. "Why risk an accident that will increase the burden on an already overwhelmed medical system?" Many of these same voices were questioning cycling long before this pandemic, arguing the same safety issue, and my response also remains the same: the real risks of an accident are outweighed manyfold by the improvement in my health that results from cycling. Sure, this argument is true in the long run, but is it really true in the short run, in the midst of a pandemic? Well, my local governments think so, and so I am going with that. That said, I am trying to adjust the cost-benefit in the face of the short-run conditions. I am always a very cautious cyclist, but I am even more cautious now. And I am also trying to take things just a bit easier. Long term, occasionally pushing myself to exhaustion can be a good thing, but in the short term, such all out efforts temporarily suppress my immune system, so I am trying to cycle enough to stay healthy but putting off any big pushes until COVID-19 is under control.

Stay healthy, wash your hands, and socially distance. See you on the other side of the pandemic.