Is riding an e-bike as good for you as riding a normal bike?

There is an article in today's Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6001373/Riding-electric-bicycle-just-healthy-pedalling-normal-bike-researchers-say.html) that reports on work done at the University of Basel in Switzerland that has shown similar improvements in fitness amongst overweight unfit patients riding e-bikes as those riding normal bicycles. The addition of the motor allowed longer rides.
The only niggle I would have with the article is that the photograph accompanying the article shows a man pedalling a non-electric Klapprad.

Ciclovia Alpe-Adria-Radweg

Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will have noticed that it has not been published recently. I was in hospital receiving treatment for a blood disease. In my experience every time I meet the medical profession they discover something new and nasty in addition. In this case it was noticed my heart was only working at about 30% efficiency. I had noticed a tendency to breathlessness when climbing hills on the bike or on foot but put it down to colds, allergies and old age. If you feel the same way it is worth popping into your local cardiologist and having a check up. Once my heart had been repaired the oncologists could start giving me a cocktail of chemotherapy drugs. One of the side effects of my blood condition has meant that I  have a fracture of the spine because my lymph nodes are swollen and one these is too close to my spine. In this situation I need a little something to keep me cheerful. Unfortunately I am now too old to flirt with the nurses, so I have been looking at a cycling holiday next year. Whether I need a new electro-bike to help the heart or a new electro-trike to not only help the heart and offer support for my back is not clear, but I have found a suitable route: The Alpe-Adria Cycleway: www.alpe-adria-radweg.com. This runs from Salzburg down to Grado on the Med between Triest and Venice, and one can take a train through the Alps. The first question to be answered is will the Drs recommend that I cycle, at all? I have looked in various forums without becoming much the wiser.

The first problem to be solved is how do we get to Salzburg? We can take a direct train from Mannheim. The e-bike would be no problem. DB German Rail accepts e-bikes.  Most long distance trains do not take trikes or tandems, however. Three manufacturers: AZUB, HPVelotechnik and ICE offer folding trikes which mean not only are they cheaper to transport, but you can get them onto a train, possibly with difficulty. Folded bikes go free of charge when folded. I am going to assume that the same applies to folded trikes.

The second possible problem is getting back from the coast after the trip, but it turns out that this just costs money. We can use a minibus with trailer option from Grado back to Udine, Villach or even Salzburg (www.alpeadria.bike). 

It is a gentle occupation looking at various websites about the areas along the route, hotel accommodation and the railway connections. It is probably the modern day equivalent of reading Cooks International Timetable and a good Atlas, which always struck me as some of the most interesting literature in the world.

Mannheim powers through

I have been rude about Mannheim in the past and its relationship to cyclists, but some thing that has impressed me is the "Mannheim gibt Kette" app (https://www.mannheim-gibt-kette.de), part of a programme to encourage people to cycle to work. Just about every national cycling club and health insurance organisation has a programme of this type, offering the chance of winning small prizes for cycling to work. The Mannheim app for the inhabitants of MA and the employees of the city council sums the distance cycled each day and propels one on a virtual journey along the Iron Curtain Trail from Kirkenes, Norway to Carevo, Bulgaria, offering tourist and geographical information and photographs of the areas covered. There are chances underway to answer questions to double one's daily kilometres for five days. The app is well designed. It is written by "GEVIO - Gesundheit und Prävention", 67256 Weisenheim, Germany (http://www.gevio.com/softwareloesungen/business-bike-contest/). A company that offers packages of measures to improve employees' health. Unfortunately the information on the web is in German but an email to the company's contact address: support@gevio.com will bring information in English.

We have cheated, although we live just over the border in the small Hesse town of Viernheim and no longer work, we joined the game just to see how it functions. In our case we are largely not replacing car journeys by bike journeys, but trips by public transport and on foot. If we win anything we will come clean and send the gift back. The main prize is a trip to Amsterdam. Whether we will achieve the twenty days cycling necessary to be entered in the lottery for the big prize is debatable anyway.
Does it work? Yes! Since we have joined we have tried to cycle about 18 or 19km through the local woods on every day we can. Other teams have finished and we are still virtually cycling through the Finnish woods and actually cycling in Viernheim. Will we make Latvia before the cutoff date? We will do our very best.

Why should I ride a bike regularly and leave the car at home?

There are all sorts of reasons:

• Financial Reasons: Bike riding is cheaper. An expensive bike costs five thousand Euros. You can purchase a new reasonable bike for between five hundred and a thousand Euros. A decent two or three year old second hand car will cost you a lot more. 
• Cycling is as quick: Bike riding is as quick as a car over shorter distances, if not quicker, if you take the time to find a parking space for your four wheeled vehicle in to consideration.
• Health Reasons: Bike riding is healthier. 
• Environmental Reasons: Bike riding is better for air quality because you are cleaning the air rather than filling it full of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitric and nitrous oxides, lung clogging unburnt tar particles, etc. etc. However you should then try to get out of town now and again to give your respiratory passages a chance to recover.
• Patriotic Economic Reasons: Motor cars and bikes need oil to power them. Although Britain does still have North Sea oil, it has imported more oil than it has exported since 2003, so if the country can reduce its appetite for oil, it will spend less money abroad and so improve the balance of payments. Cyclists don't use much oil, so every kilometre you can ride on a bike or walk instead of sitting in a car is good for the nation.

Copenhagenize your cycle touring instantly

There is an excellent website about cycle way design based on experience in Copenhagen called http://www.copenhagenize.com. It is almost heavenly to cycle in Copenhagen, but it has taken 40 years of hard graft to get to the point where over a third of all journeys in the Copenhagen metropolitan area are made by bike.
We and well over a hundred others managed to achieve this nirvana this morning. The German Cardiologists Society met in Mannheim this week and today there was a cycle ride as part of a campaign to popularise exercise as a way of keeping heart problems at bay. Our cycle club, the ADFC supplied experienced cyclists to ride with the group. We were amongst these and left the Mannheim Congress Centre with about 100 others. When I heard the route described which included riding along Mannheim's ring to the then dive under the railway lines to reach the Rhine, I was not happy. However we had four police motorcyclists with us and they blocked off traffic on any road joining that could have given us problems. This is a cheap and simple way of finding out what it is like to cycle in Copenhagen, but it might be difficult to arrange for a Sunday club run.

Protecting your banana

Like a lot of cyclists and walkers we enjoy eating bananas when underway.  They give a quick boost of energy, are fibre rich and less sugary than energy bars as well as being a good source of potassium, although there are better sources: See (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/potassium-foods-banana_n_1898078.html). Surprisingly these include squash, potatoes, beans and dates. However eating a baked potato or a plate of beans on the road might be difficult when powering over the Alps.
The big problem with bananas is that although they come ready packed, the packaging disintegrates under pressure. You are quite likely to end up with a soggy mess at the bottom of a rucksack or in the rear pocket of your expensive cycling jersey. Protection is called for and the best banana packaging we have found is called Banana Guard (bananaguard.com). Banana Guards are plasticiser-free and dishwashable. There are retailers all over the world. We bought ours from Lakeland Plastics in the UK: http://www.lakeland.co.uk/10380/Banana-Guard.
The one thing we don't understand is that the Banana Guard company is Canadian and can only think that it is so difficult to grow bananas in Canada that somebody felt it necessary to develop protection methods for the fruit.

You are paying a pound for a bottle of drinking water? Are you off your trolley?

If any teacher had told us at school 50 or so years ago that people would pay serious money for the stuff that came out of the tap for almost nothing we would not have believed them. It now happens all the time in Germany. Even people on basic social support payments (Hartz 4) buy the stuff at the start of the month when they have been paid. The mind boggles. We went on a two day course last weekend and most of the group slurped commercially bottled water for much of the time. Some of these bottled waters are just filtered tap water, anyway. Why one needs to drink so much water when sitting about listening to a lecture on First Aid we have no idea. We were not powering up Mt Ventoux in summer and in urgent danger of dehydration.
Then it seems that a plasticiser used in many of these bottles to improve their flexibility, can leach out into the water. This compound resembles a hormone. The long term health effects of absorbing synthetic compounds that resemble hormones has yet to be established. It is however probably better to avoid them if possible. There are plastic bottles available that do not contain plasticiser, such as water bottles from Dopper, Klean Kanteen, and Sigg, for example.
We were much impressed by the Dopper water bottles we saw at VELOBerlin. These are stylish, plastic or steel bottles that come with an integral drinking beaker. Two sizes are available: 500ml (plastic) and 800ml (stainless steel and plastic). The plastic used is inert without the addition of plasticiser. Unfortunately the stand only had  the 500ml variation on offer and these are too narrow to fit in a bike water bottle holder. They are ideal for a rucksack or even to carry on a belt while jogging. They normally cost €12.50. The steel bottles cost €27.50 which is about par for quality steel water bottles. We like the concept of the integral cup which means that one can offer others a drink without them slurping our bugs down or adding to the bugs in the bottle.
The other thing we liked about Dopper is that these guys are serious about water. They support a Dutch charity in Nepal bringing clean water and decent sanitation to a particular region and have also set up a foundation to try to educate people about the misuse of plastics and the problems of plastic litter in the oceans and lakes of the world. Having both helped in our town's annual volunteer clean up of the woods and roadsides we think a German foundation would be an excellent idea as well. When we return to the UK we notice unfortunately that as in the slogan of our youth: "The litter lout is still about!". Much of this litter in the UK is plastic drink bottles.
Price wise the quality bottles in steel are much of a muchness. I reckon around €30 buying them mail order. A thought experiment suggests that if you go out on club runs at weekends and have a two week cycle touring holiday you will probably get through at least 32 750ml bottles, i.e. 24L annually. Bottled water bought from supermarkets costs between 20 and 50 cents a litre. Bottled water from a kiosk or bakery on a railway station will cost at least €1 for 500ml. Within two years your steel water bottle filled with tap water will be saving you money and will continue to do so.
Dopper offers an app to help you find a source of drinking water when travelling. What the app does not mention is that most villages in Switzerland have drinking water fountains in the main street. We also look for public toilets, in cemeteries and sports fields in France and Germany, where the wash hand basins have water taps. The words to look out for are Kein Trinkwasser (Germany, Switzerland) or eau non potable (France) - Not Drinking Water. Obviously Trinkwasser and eau potable are drinking water. What we often do as well is fill our bottles in the toilets/restrooms of cafés after we have had coffee there.

Good Ideas for Bikes in Cities: Cycling after illness

In the West at least people are living longer, but not always that healthier, so there is a need for new and modified bicycles and tricycles to solve problems caused by disability.

• Heavy Pedals Lastenrad Transport- und Verkauf OG in Vienna (www.heavypedals.at) construct a cargo trike that will carry a wheelchair. The company offers courier services in Vienna and sells and has a range of cargo bikes and trailers for hire. 
• Anton Wiegers builds recumbent bikes and tandems, including the Janus Tandem where the captain and stoker face in different directions. He also constructs kits (Opus 3) to modify bicycles to be used as tricycles in cases where illness has removed balancing capabilities. He usually has a number of bicycles available that can be hired for a (half) day trip. If you fancy especially whizzing around quiet country roads backwards give him a call to book an appointment and to ensure that the bicycle of interest is available. Altena-Bike, Anton Wiegers, Korn 19, 4271 BM Dussen, NetherlandsT: 031 (0)416-391420 Email: info@altena-bike.nl Web: www.altena-bike.nl (In Dutch but much of it is understandable)
• In about a months time SPEZI Special Bike Show in Germersheim will be opening its doors (26-27 April 2014). The exhibition is good place to talk to experts about special bikes or trikes. Many of the major constructors are present. 

An excellent article on cycling in cities

can be found under: http://mosaicscience.com under "City cycling: health versus hazard".