When we left the Nook on Tuesday, my housemate and his girlfriend got in to their car and I straddled my bike. As we sat at the first traffic light, I realised that I needed my headlamp was in my bag, so I fumbled for it and put it on. As I did, he yelled out the open window “get a car, hippie!” I took this as an invitation to race.

I knew I’d have a tailwind and that if the lights behaved I had a chance. I roared down Hamline, almost keeping pace with traffic at 28 mph. At Saint Clair, I rolled to his left to take a left as he waited for the light to change, tapping his windows as I rode by. He yelled the name of a baseball player we’d been trying to remember (Nick Swisher, a current Yankee mentioned in Moneyball, which he is reading) and, with no traffic at 10:30, I hung the left and made for home.

One stop sign later, I rolled to a stop at our corner, pumping my fist as I did so as he was still half a block away from home. The moral of the story: cars may have some advantages over bikes, but they are not necessarily always faster.

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