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Five bicycle tips for a better ride

Here are five ideas to ensure that your bike, your route, and you are ready for every ride.

4. The best wheels for you

If you are new to cycling, or haven't updated your bike since you took off the training wheels, here are a few suggestions for finding a good bike near you.

When buying a bike, either new or used, be sure to have someone fit you to the bike. Pay special attention to frame size, seat design, and the angle of the handlebars and seat when shopping for a bike. Always ask for a test ride to make sure the bike fits both you and your riding style. Consumer Reports offers a bike buying guide with tips for shoppers. Once you purchase a bike, do not forget to register your bike in order to help identify it as yours in the case of a theft.

If you aren't interested in owning a bike, check to see if there is a bike-sharing program near you that allows you to pick up a bike at a designated location and ride it for as long as you need it, for a fee. Boston, San Francisco, New York, Washington, and Boulder, Colorado, are among the US cities that offer bike- sharing programs. Bike sharing can be a good option for visiting a city as well, with many bike-sharing programs offering single-ride or day rates for visitors.

Still need some inspiration? People for Bikes, a cyclist-rights organization in the US, has a series of YouTube videos dedicated to professional cyclists talking about their first bikes.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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