Old Man on a Green Bike

What if you could spend hours and hours doing what you love and then get all those used-up hours returned to you at the end of your life? In other words, spend an hour and get another hour for free?!


It sounds like a new-age delusion or a financial scam. Romance languages don't even have a word for "saving" time. The whole notion of time is that you cannot stash it away and save it for a rainy day, or a dying day. Time slips away, and there's nothing we can do about it. But 2015 research from Holland published in The American Journal of Public Health tells us that "Cycling prevents about 6500 deaths each year, and Dutch people have half-a-year-longer life expectancy because of cycling."

About an hour of extended life, per hour of cycling!

By the time this Dutch research made the headlines, Mark had been commuting and vacationing by bicycle for nearly two decades. Without imagining or caring that it might be life-extending, these commutes and excursions invigorate at the moment they occur. But cycling is not just invigoration and rejuvenation, it's also liberation...

As you will come to appreciate in the subsequent pages, it's not a simple question of dumping the car, getting on a bike, and achieving long-term liberation. Mark confronts formidable obstacles: manufactured, geographic, societal, logistical, biological, meteorological, psychological, and chronological, all of which are part of his story. Along the way, he made more than a few mistakes, whose lessons may help save you from falling into similar traps. Mark also makes the case that no amount of technological advancement will stop pollution or curtail global warming without a central role for self-serving human energy.

Mark began writing Old Man on a Green Bike 19 years ago when he first set out to do all his commuting and much of his vacationing on a bicycle. A bicyclist for decades, along the way, Marc Cramer fell in love with the journey. Realizing the manifold benefits of choosing two-wheeled transportation (for utility or recreation), Old Man on a Green Bike is Mark's invitation to you. From the politics to the practicalities of conscious bicycling, Mark inspires us to take to two wheels for our own sake, and maybe also the good of the planet.