I Rode My Bike Without A Grown Up

Just like Goldilocks, it felt right the first time I sat on it, a blue cruiser-style. I sat on lots of others, but kept going back to the blue one. With a little fear and a fair amount of trepidation I quickly got on to a back street and was home in about 15 minutes, my heart pounding.

I propped it on its stand in the carport, feeling childishly giddy and out of breath. I rode again the next day to meet a friend for coffee, a minute ride each way.

A few days later I rode for 40 minutes around a nearby lake, along a shared pathway. I am awake early today. At 5am the air is still and has the freshness of dew in it before the humidity of the day steals it away. The Harvard Health website says cycling is good for our heart and muscles, that it will improve our cardiovascular fitness if done regularly. It may improve how we walk, balance and climb stairs. When cruising around on my bike, I notice things that I never have before: Last Christmas I even rode through the snow up an Italian mountain.

I cycled everyday while pregnant, then when my kids were toddlers I rode with them in a trailer and now, excitingly, they ride their own bikes. And they say exercise has been shown to boost self-esteem, reduce depression and anxiety, more effectively than medication, and alleviate and reduce the risk of dementia. While a study reported in the Harvard Business Review shows that the stress-reducing benefits of exercise can help you manage your work life balance by making you productive.

But how else does cycling win over other forms of physical exercise? When in major cities, such as London, the fact you can use cycling to commute is a huge factor. Two thirds of Londoners list public transport as the most stressful part of living in the capital.

I have zero commute stress. Recently the iconic British folding bike brand Brompton teamed up with the Stress Management Society to show how commuters who cycled to work were 40 per cent less likely to be tense in the first hour of work than those who drove or took public transport.

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A Brompton spokesperson said: Cyclists are in control of their own journey and feeling in control, alongside the benefits of exercising will dramatically decrease the stress of a commute. For me cycling made living in a phenomenally hectic city such as London not just bearable but actually very pleasurable. Some facts and figures about the positive effects of cycling:. Chris Bradley, a sports psychologist at Loughborough University tells me one clear benefit of cycling over other physical exercise, such as a gym workout, is that you do it outside.

Unlike swimming or running you have less restrictions on your speed, so you can experience the adrenaline of going fast and that can be quite addictive. Plus you get the emotional satisfaction of completing tough rides. It helps you stop thinking about normal life.

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Research is increasingly showing that keeping fit while pregnant can make you less likely to experience problems in late pregnancy and labour. And though doctors often caution against sports in which you might fall and harm the baby, I found cycling during both my pregnancies a massive benefit to me physically and especially mentally, with the distraction it provided playing a massive part.

The felony charge, pleaded down to a misdemeanor, impeded Brown's ability to get an apartment, forcing him to move in with relatives. Brown was shuttling from one home to another one morning a few weeks ago in North Tampa, towing all of his belongings on his bike, when another officer stopped him for riding in the middle of the street.

The officer checked his identification and flipped his bike to look at the serial number. It bore a sticker: God's Pedal Power Ministry.

How I fell in love with riding a bike

The scenario has become cliche in these parts, where kids as young as 12 describe the same dance grown men recall from growing up in Tampa. Just stand in front of my cruiser. Your friend's riding by. Your reverend might be riding by. Now, you've got to go to church. The pastor's going to be like, 'What happened, son? Last year, officers stopped a man in Belmont Heights after he ran a stop sign on an unlit bike.

They searched year-old Artis Hancock, and when he tried to flee, a scuffle ensued. Hancock wound up on the ground as an officer punched, kicked and choked him to unconsciousness. The officer said Hancock reached for his Taser. A public defender later argued the search was illegal and that Hancock's charges, including drug possession, should be dismissed. In Hillsborough Circuit Court, Judge Samantha Ward listened to the officers try to justify their suspicion that Hancock may have had a weapon on him, which they said prompted them to search Hancock without consent.

Riding a bike

T ampa officers' emphasis on bike stops is a logical extension of the department's crime fighting philosophy. Instead of waiting to respond to calls, officers now look for ways to initiate contact with potential lawbreakers and head off crime before it happens.

It creates trust that must be the foundation of our relationship with our citizens," she said. This power must be used wisely and only when necessary. Experts say the trust Castor references is not helped when communities feel they are being targeted by practices like Tampa's bike citation efforts. Police departments can — and have — gotten in trouble when proactive policing leads to racially lopsided enforcement of the law. A federal judge in declared New York's "stop and frisk" program unconstitutional and ordered reforms. And this year, the U. Justice Department declared illegal certain biased tactics used by police in Ferguson, Mo.

In their investigation, officials highlighted the percentage of citations police wrote to blacks in Ferguson. They got 90 percent of tickets even though they make up only 67 percent of the population. In her written statement, Castor said the high number of tickets written to black cyclists in Tampa had nothing to do with their race.

As evidence, she cited the racial breakdown of people arrested in Tampa for driving drunk.

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Last year, 76 percent of them were white men. The same applies to bicyclists. B ike stops have led to enough arrests that some Hillsborough County judges have begun to notice the racial disparity. Typical of their defendants is year-old Antonio Barnes, who sped home past the broken windows of Belmont Heights a couple of years ago, hoping to return borrowed headphones to a relative before the last bus of the night. He pedalled his unlit bike as fast as he could until he felt the spotlight of a police cruiser. Almost instantly, the cops were out of their cruiser, ordering him to get off the bike, get his hand out of his pocket, tell them his name.

Antonio couldn't even remember that. He was out of breath, soaked in sweat, staring at the light like a deer in traffic. Circuit Judge Rex Barbas ultimately dismissed the case because officers didn't read Antonio his rights before questioning him. Most often, though, the cases stick, because officers can stop people for one reason even if they have another.

Barbas spent three years hearing juvenile cases. He couldn't remember a single white kid arrested after a bike stop. E ven if a stop amounts to no more than a bike ticket, it can still have lasting consequences. Children as young as 11 have been ticketed and reported to collection agencies, the Times found.

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Eric Davis, who grew up in one of the zones patrolled by the Bicycle Blitzkrieg squad, racked up 13 bike tickets as a teen. The unpaid tickets triggered a driver's license suspension, which landed Davis in jail when he was caught behind the wheel of a car. Now 23, he has been deemed a "habitual traffic offender," even though he never got a single ticket for bad driving.

Davis said he didn't understand the implications when he got his first ticket at Despite the thousands of hours spent by police, court clerks, public defenders, prosecutors and judges on enforcement of bicycle laws, it's hard to tell what Tampa gets out of them. Even though was one of the department's highest ticketing years, bike crashes still rose the following year by 20 percent. Bike thefts, too, climbed 15 percent. Ticketed bicyclists are being arrested mostly for small drug busts or for misdemeanor charges that stem from their interaction with police during the stop, the Times found.

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Castor said many people guilty of serious crimes are not issued a bike ticket during a stop. For that reason, the Times' analysis would not capture them.