My friend Zeke had a vision. He had a vision to make workouts fun and accessible to guys who don’t usually work out and who generally don’t really like working out. He had a vision to blend exercise with exploring. Zeke (and the other founding members of the group) made his vision into reality with a small (but growing) bike club call “Fat Guy Cycling Club.” The group does weekly (weather permitting) bike rides around central and downtown Austin, usually followed by a pretty manly lunch. Downtown Austin Blog loves his concept, and asked him to write a very short blurb on his group….
Some buddies and I decided to take a random bike ride on a Sunday morning in the Summer of 2009. It only took four miles down Lake Austin Boulevard to make it clear to us just how out of shape we all had become. We may have moved at a snail’s pace and stopped every half mile to catch our breath, but we had a blast. Fat Guy Cycling Club was born.Our main goal was to make our rides fun – we didn’t want to be intimidating to anybody; we figured this would be easy because nobody could be worse than us. We typically ride on the weekends, but we’ll sometimes get out there on a weekday if it’s too beautiful a day to stay in the office.
The rides are generally concentrated in the downtown-area mainly because it’s convenient as most of us work in the area and keep our bikes in our office buildings. Rides through downtown, campus, the east side, or along the lake are all great. We try to maintain a balance between getting a good workout while keeping it laid-back. There is an inherent beauty to experiencing our city up close while bike riding. The beauty of downtown Austin’s sites and sights, sounds, smells, people, businesses and weather is so much more enhanced on a bike rather than through your car’s windows.
As we ride through downtown, we often find ourselves making stops along the way. You may find us at Whole Foods taking a smoothie pit stop. The guys over at Austin Bikes have been nothing but great to us when we need to stop by to make repairs or to check out the new carbon fiber bikes that we have no business riding. Our favorite route is our “East Austin Taco Crawl”; we stop at 3-5 different spots along the way to get our early-morning breakfast taco fix. I know it sounds counter-productive… and it is, but we feel a little bit better about it knowing we had to sweat to get there. If you’re driving down the road and you see a group of guys that are slightly larger and slower than you would normally see cycling, chances are it’s us. Give us a honk or better yet, come and join us.
– Zeke and the guys of The Fat Guy Cycling Club.
Website: http://fatguycyclingclub.com/
Facebook (“Like” them!) : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fat-Guy-Cycling-Club/189888552413
