While it’s not technically correct to say that a number divided by zero is infinity, in a certain sort of intuitive way it is true. How many miles will I bike before I burn through a gallon of gasoline? Well, I can bike forever and not one drop of gasoline will be consumed. Therefore, I get infinity miles to the gallon. Q.E.D.

The good mileage is not the main reason I’ve gotten so into biking lately, but it is certainly a bonus. Neither are the health benefits my main motivation, though they also are profound. No, the main reason I’ve been riding all over and around the capital of our fair nation is that it’s fun as hell.

These days, though, I’m catching myself getting just a bit smug on my daily commute. It takes me about 30 minutes to drive to work in traffic, though it’s only a six mile drive. Lights and traffic make it a chore, partly because DC has never heard of traffic sensors. Every single light is on a timer. Even if no car has approached 16th street from some minor side street in seventeen hours, that side street a green light every 45 seconds anyway. The 65 cars lined up on 16th street wait the 30 seconds, just in case a driver should happen to drive down that street someday, and then they continue on their way until they hit the next red light a couple of blocks down. Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait. I hate driving in this town.

I can bike to work in about 35 minutes. Part of that speed comes from being able to blow off red lights and stop signs when no cars are coming, as God intended for us all to do, and part comes from being able to hop up on the sidewalk and circumvent the long lines of cars waiting at stoplights. I’m usually the first vehicle at the intersection even if I pulled up last. Sometimes I have private moments of gloating when the same car passes me at several sequential stop lights. “See, buddy?” I find myself thinking, “You should ditch the car and ride with me. It’s just as fast and a hell of a lot less annoying.”

Now with gas prices as they are, I have another reason to gloat. As the poor souls who bought Lincoln Navigators and Ford Expeditions trudge down the road, watching the gas gauge dip visibly every block, I pedal along for free. I’ve filled up my car once since the beginning of June. It’s due for another sometime soon, but not until I next get in it, which could be late next week or even later. It only needs a fill-up now because I made two trips to and from Dulles airport a couple of weeks back. Instead of burning expensive gasoline, clogging up the air with my exhaust and clogging up the roads with a 1.5-ton,15-foot by six-foot steel contraption that transmits but a single piece of human cargo, I zip along on a 21-pound, two-foot by six-foot vehicle that runs on body fat. What’s not to love?

I’ve been riding for a long time, sort of intermittently. In high school it became my main mode of transport, since I didn’t have a car. Well, to clarify, I didn’t have a car until my senior year, when my mom burned out the flywheel in her 1981 Mustang (not as cool as you think—it was basically a Pinto, four cylinders with automatic transmission) and let me drive it “until it’s dead,” as they said. I made quick work of that. I got in trouble for driving through Hurley Gardens (that means over the curb and on the grass, weaving among the trees), but I never got in trouble for slaloming back and forth over the grass median divider on Hawthorne Boulevard. It would only shift into second gear, which you could push as high as 30 mph, so it got me around town, if loudly. It got me off the school bus my senior year, but that was not enough to rescue my coolness factor. I had way too many other factors working against me. Eventually, even second gear was lost. I couldn’t go more than 10 mph, and my dad made an executive decision one Saturday when I was out on my bike that the best EOL scenario was for a tow truck to come and remove the eyesore from the driveway. I was bitter, but it was probably the right decision.

I had the good fortune of growing up about a mile from the Illinois Prairie Path, a miles-long rail-to-trail path that runs among Chicago’s western suburbs and connects to several other area trails. It’s possible to ride several different configurations of 40 to 60 mile loops, crossing very few roads, and without ever retracing your route. It became a summer pastime for me to set off on many mornings into the interstitial green spaces of the suburban sprawl around me.

In the summer of 1994, having dropped out of school the second time, I was living in rural Illinois, working as an apprentice cabinet maker for my older brother and, probably due to feeling trapped and hopeless in many aspects of my real life, I fell in love more than ever before with the limitless freedom I could achieve riding along the slick straight flat black country highways for hours. At the end of the summer, just a couple of weeks before I’d planned to set out on a two-week ride from Polo, Illinois to New Orleans, I was hit from behind by a car while out riding near dusk. I broke a vertebra and ruptured a disk in my back. My bike was mangled and one of the pedals was completely sheared off. Given that the driver was doing 45, and that I wasn’t wearing a helmet and for most of the 50 feet I rolled my head was above pavement, it could have been much worse. Nonetheless, it completely derailed my travel plans and about a year of my life. But I told that story already, a couple of years ago, one evening after a long ride on the road between Brno and Vienna.

And then, four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC. For the first three of those years, I don’t think I got on my bike more than twice or thrice each summer. I’m not sure what I forgot. It’s equivalent to loving ice cream, or golfing, and just forgetting to eat ice cream or golf for three years. I have no idea what happened.

But this year, it has all come back. Part of it was meeting a retired Canadian couple on a ferry from Sardinia to Naples in May. We were traveling Italy by train and Ryanair; they were doing it by bicycle. They had just ridden down the western coast of Sardinia, and were on their way to ride another week or so on the Amalfi coast. C was really inspired by them, in a way I haven’t seen her inspired by very many things. I was too, but only to the extent that it reminded me how much I love doing exactly what they were doing.

Immediately after we returned to DC, C left for Arizona for the summer to study Navajo. I started riding my bike to work, but the 13 year-old Trek was simply not cutting it for me. It made things a chore. Plus they have these things called hills here, a feature conveniently removed from my native northern Illinois landscape by the movement of glaciers ten thousand years ago or so. And several large examples of these hills have been placed between my house and the building where I work. So one Saturday in early June, I headed over to City Bikes on Connecticut Avenue to see what’s on offer these days. I didn’t mean to buy anything; I just wanted to window shop and do some test driving.

Unfortunately, I fell in love with a Jamis cyclocross bike that was just too much fun to ride. Compared to my huge heavy old Trek hybrid with the rear pannier rack, this thing was slick, small, nimble, and quick. I spent four hours test driving other bikes that were more reasonably priced. It went on so long that I had to take a lunch break from my bike shopping. But every few bikes, I would take the Jamis back out and head a mile or so down the Capital Crescent Trail just to see if it still felt so right. And it did. So I took it home. We’ve traveled 300-odd miles so far and we have many more to go.

The hills, they are nothing to me now. Soon I will conquer mountains. And soon after that, the farthest reaches of outer space. There are no limits when you get infinity MPG.

Dude, that's awesome that your bike can go to outer space! I have to get me one of those. Must be a bitch riding in a spacesuit, though. . .