The coolest thing in road cycling right now isn't spending 10 grand on a carbon-fiber racing bike, training yourself into the ground using a Tour de France-worthy power meter and becoming a super Fred, or doing trackstands on a fixie to confuse Google's self-driving cars.
What's hot is picking a destination to ride to — someplace far — pedaling there, and then taking the train home.
With an assist from the train, multimodal cycling lets riders go out farther since they don't have to pedal back. And while it's hardly a new thing to take your bike on a train — multimodal commuters have been doing it for ages — many road cyclists we know are doing more big one-way rides like this, with several using apps like Strava and RideWithGPS to help them find new routes and plan distant outings that normally might be out of reach.
Tim Johnson, a New England-based professional cyclist and bicycling advocate, mentioned one such adventure in New York recently on Instagram, and Business Insider caught up with him to talk more about how he loves getting a group of friends together, planning a challenging ride somewhere far, and then taking the train home.
An escape from New York City
A recent post on Tim Johnson's Strava account shows a one-way bike ride from New York City to Cold Spring, New York. Johnson and a group of friends rolled out of lower Manhattan and pedaled north for more than five hours, on a planned route of 80 miles with 4,700 feet of elevation gain. The train back to the city took about an hour and a half.
"Multimodal is so hot right now," he wrote on Instagram after.
"We had 20 people riding with us and only two had done a version of that same route," Johnson tells Business Insider. "And now that we did it together, a lot of the guys were talking on the way home about how they wanted to do it again."
Have train, will ride far
A big draw of multimodal cycling is that it allows more riders of varying abilities and fitness levels to get out and ride to points farther out than they normally could.
"You do a 50-mile ride in one direction, it means you have to ride 100 miles," Johnson says. "If you do a 50-mile ride with another form of transportation, it's still a 50-mile ride, and a lot of people feel that's in their realm of possibility. But a 100-mile ride becomes almost an impossibility unless you're in an organized ride.
"If we had done a 75-mile ride from Manhattan, you'd have to go up and over the George Washington Bridge, and you might be able to get up to Nyack, and then you're probably pretty smoked," Johnson adds.
"And then you do the bridge again, and you do the West Side bike path again. It's great, but it's still kind of tough. And when you ride a route like that so often you get burned on it, even if it's the most beautiful route in the world.
"In my experience, no one has time, but there's always going to be that yearning for something special or different."
The draw of multimodal
For Johnson, there are a few reasons multimodal has become more popular in recent years.
"One is just straight information," he says. "People are hearing more about it, so it's more accessible. They can look at a photo, they can look at a Strava file, they can look at a social-media post to get a little closer to it.
"It's one thing look at a photo and be inspired by the action in a photo. It's another thing to look at direct evidence of someone else doing it. That makes it more likely for you to do it. It's a lot closer for you, a lot closer to touch.
"Also, it's more and more in the realm of possibility for more people. You have the hardcore people who are creative without route finding or who are forced into using different forms of transport, because they don't have a car or whatever. They were always the ones doing these rides. Now that it's more accessible, more people are doing it.
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"When you try different roads and branch out, it's awesome. When you get to tell the folks who just ride three times a week when it's nice out, they're the ones you want to tell, 'Hey, try this route. It's a bit longer, but it means this, this, and this.' That's one of the cool things that have come down from some of the Strava tools and the route-finding stuff. It gives people ideas. And this kind of multimodal stuff is really the same kind of thing.
"The first time you take your bike onto a train is really cool, and something that definitely opens your eyes as to what's possible."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider