BellaOnline Forums Sports Cycling Bike Trails Near your Home?

Are there any bike trails near your home? I'm trying to find a compromise for me and my boyfriend so he can have "pavement" and I can have "no cars". Right now there's only a short trail nearby which isn't long enough to really bother with. I'm having to go scour the web to find something under 2 hours away that we can ride on.

Do you have trails in your area, or do you ride on a non-official bike path?

Here's a link to the official "Rail Trails" website, with a search function to find trails near you -

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we're very fortunate that we live very near a great bike trail. It is quite lengthy too. It goes though two or three cities. Very popular with all the cyclists. I've always wondered, while it's a great exercise in general is it something that you should do if your main goal is to lose weight? I once had a cyclist tell me weight loss this way would be very slow.

I'm sort of having that debate myself. I am doing interval training on my exercise bike, aerobic dancing and so on to lose weight and build up muscle. My boyfriend is very out of shape and has dropped his "sports" activities to play darts - so I am trying to get us to bike together to get him losing some weight. But he doesn't want to mountain bike (i.e. "hard biking") - he wants to do just minimal impact road biking. So to me while that's better than nothing, I don't see it being a high calorie burning exercise. Maybe if you rode at top speeds for several hours, but I don't see us doing that.

Can anyone else more familiar with biking chime in on this?

I think that if you want to lose weight (i.e. burn calories) you should get an old clunker one-speed bike! These wonderfully efficient modern bikes are just too easy to ride. They are actually the most fuel-efficient way there is to cover ground, even walking the same amount of time burns more. I DO think that riding a bike will tighten up your muscles, though, which is a good thing. I have to put my bike in the car to get to any real trails, but can ride a lot on back roads in my neighborhood near the edge of town.

I definitely don't want to ride a one speed bike But I feel like I get much more "reward" by doing a tough climb up a mountain on the mountain bike vs whizzing along a road on a smooth road bike. Maybe I'm just not going fast enough