This is an excerpt from a larger list, where I give various activities a Sober Fun rating of 1-10. Entries from this list are scattered throughout my website, or you can find that complete list HERE.

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BICYCLING: 10

Biking is as much a part of my sober routine as is GOING TO THE GYM, and both I would consider to be invaluable tools in any newly-sober person’s toolbox. Aside from rainy or wintry days, there was rarely an evening, that first year of sobriety, that I didn’t either bike or jog. In fact, I made a point to place my evening rides squarely over the time slot that would have normally been my happy hour. Additionally, I would sometimes go on impromptu, spontaneous, rides whenever I had an especially powerful urge to drink or get coke. Which was all the time, so that first year I was biking and jogging constantly, sometimes both in the same day! And that’s in addition to the gym as well.

These are three things— jogging, biking, and going to the gym— that I have done my whole life. I did not do them drunk or concurrently with alcohol, but always contemporaneously with drinking and drug use. For example, a normal day would often involve an hour at the gym in the morning, followed by an hour of biking around the lake; at which point I was then good to drink for the entire rest of the day, and it was barely even 9:am! Yay me! I had a mental deal with myself that I wasn’t allowed to drink on days that I didn’t work out, so surprise! I worked out daily, usually seven days a week.

I had intended to make the statement that I never biked while drunk, but no sooner had I written that sentence, soooooo many people started randomly bringing up times when we did exactly that: biked drunk. Damn my selective memory!

But yes, yes… we biked drunk in San Francisco, drunk in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Austin.... we biked drunk (and high) in Amsterdam, and then the worst one of all, the one I can’t believe I forgot, we biked absolutely shit-faced all over downtown Paris. I suspect we were probably even more reckless than we realized. Which is upsetting, because I felt pretty darn reckless at the time. A tad scared even, what with all that constant horn honking. Man, do French people love to use their car horns! Especially when you HIT THEIR CARS WITH YOUR BICYCLE.

I am tempted to say that drunk Paris biking didn’t count, though, because I feel like we were tricked. No one made it clear when they started serving wine on the boat we had biked to (sober), that there was going to be more biking after the boat!

Oh, and also there was drunk biking in Quebec and also now that I think about it, drunk biking in VERSAILLES, too.

Never mind, I’ll stop this. There’s been lots of drunk biking in my life. (Oh! Also, the summer I lived in Alaska— I forgot about that too, which is odd, because that biking was quite memorable. It often happened in the middle of the night, but still in broad daylight, since the summer months had 24 hours of sunshine. We’d leave the one gay nightclub in Anchorage at about 2:00 AM, and walk or bike home drunk with sunglasses on. I don't think we had a car for some reason.)

Which reminds me, I also occasionally biked drunk in Dallas the whole summer I was attending community college but had no car, because I’d wrecked it, driving drunk.

Wow, sorry. Writing about biking didn't go where I thought it would. Whoops.

So in conclusion, drunk biking is bad (as is DRUNK DRIVING), but sober biking is wonderful and saved my sobriety on more than one occasion. You can do it for as long or as little as you like, which is one of the many reasons that it gets a very high Sober Fun rating of 9.

But I'm going to be scandalous here and say that not even drunk biking is as dangerous, absurd, or lame as RECUMBENT BIKING.