Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Cycle to work @ 2013 Pre-World Car Free Day ride

We won the battle...

Eddie "niceguy" Chua, my colleague whom I have known for more than two decades had drafted a letter which he managed to get the top man at The Star to lay his signature.
The content stated that a few of us are cycling to work and wanted to bring our bikes to our workplace.
Our big, big, boss agreed. 
He sealed the deal and there are no more controversies about bringing a bicycle to the workplace.
Eddie did not agree to park his bike in the loading bay and since it was a folding bike, there were no issues having it at the workstation as it does not get in the way.

Far and few in between

I cycle to work whenever I need to.
On a few occasions, I had no choice but to cycle because my car was in the workshop.
To do so, I must give myself at least one hour head-start to slowly make my way from USJ 26 to the Federal Highway motorcycle lane.
This is roughly about 10km from where I live.
And for the record, I am the only guy from The Star who cycles to work regularly.
Now, with the permission granted to do so, I do plan to do more often.

Living up to a tradition...

Cycle to work was initiated by Star Two Assistant Editor Andrew Sia back in 2011.
He wanted to do an article about commuting to work with a bike.
I obliged by cycling from my home in USJ 26, Subang Jaya, covering a distance of 43km on a round trip.
Last year, I continued the tradition by roping-in Eddie Chua. Only both of us cycled on Car Free Day.
This year, the plan was the same. Meet up in Sungai Way and cycle to work.
The only difference was having three more guys joining us.
I also put up a request for a video shot by multimedia.

This year's gang.. 
We had The Star Cycling Team captain Kevin Tan on his Tern Verge X20 folding bike, Mohd Sean Shazarin who ride a GT mountain bike and StarMetro Assistant Editor Jacobus Jeyaraj who also rode his GT mountain bike.
So, we gathered at Tukang Basikal Fook Sang at 08:00am in Sungai Way and ride towards Menara Star in Section 16.

Samo leading the way.. 

Negotiating the traffic
A simple ride..

We set out from Fook Sang with ease, rolling down towards Jalan 223 and half-way through, I received a call from the multimedia videographer.
He was late, so we met up with him in Medan Selera Jalan 222.
After filling with some Nasi Lemak and teh tarik, Patrick, our video guy shot some footages.
I also liaised with Award-winning photographer Azman Ghani for the lead photos.
Throughout the ride, we coordinated and planned where the best angles are for the shots.
Azman did a superb job and so did Patrick with the editing and linking up the video on YouTube.



The video put up on YouTube

Arrival at the office.. 
It was a short ride to the office, the only tough part was the long climb from Section 13 to Section 16 at Jalan Dato Abu Bakar.
I had no problems keeping up with Kevin who seemed to be cycling with much ease.
We waited for Eddie and Jacob to climb the hill and I can see that Eddie was struggling to keep his pace.
After clearing the hill, it was a smooth roll to the office.

And there's work to be done.

The moment I got to m workplace, I began to work on the story.

Later in the day, I saw to it that it sees print with an on-line photo gallery and the video link.
My work day came to a close at 06:15pm when I clocked out from the office.
It took me another one and a-half hours to get home.

Likes and dislikes...

The YouTube video was put on-line and publicly shared. On the last count, there were four likes and nine dislikes.
I don't know whether the losers who disliked the video were simply trolls or people who hated cyclists. 
But hey! The least we did, was to cycle to work and we did just that.
I hope that the next cycle to work venture will attract more people. At least this year, we had three more guys joining in the ride. 
And for a company with more than 3.000 people, five cyclist out of the lot goes to say that something is very wrong.. 

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