Martina Rau | sports
home  personal  academics 

My bike



Having spent several years trying to find a suited sport for me, I came to realize that I am just afraid of ball games. I was glad to finally find a reasonable explanation for my aversion against the several sports that I tried - and quit basketball, which I had played for about 2 years at that time.

Since then, I have focused on sports that don't involve balls and came to realize how great it is to just move around in nature, so I started running, rollerblading, and biking. Freiburg is really great for these kinds of exercises because you can run, bike, or skate beneath the Dreisam for many miles, far beyond the border to France. If you prefer hills, you can chose the other direction and bike up the Schauinsland or the Kandel. Personally, I never realized why I should force myself up a hill when I can just as well ride next to a small river and the "champs de blé" - until I came to Pittsburgh, where you cannot avoid going up and down the hills. It was then that I realized how great the achievement felt to have made it up a hill from which you have a great overview...

My favorites still were the individual skates to Breisach or other small cities close by. I got to love the landscape in the surroundings of Freiburg. Another great thing about skating was that I could often stop at one of the farmer market stands and buy some fresh fruits for the evening.

Biking in Freiburg was more a means of transportation for me. However, I did one greater bike tour: From Freiburg to Colmar where we camped and did one day bike tours from there, for example up to Munster in the Vosges.

In Pittsburgh, I first missed rollerblading a lot, until I joined the Three Rivers Inline Club. I especially enjoyed the Friday night skates, which is basically how I got to know the city. Apart from skating, I focused more on biking: I bought a road bike - only a cheap one from Target, but I liked it nonetheless.

When I was back in Germany, I started doing a lot of exercise, but somehow my knee which had been weakened by a knee injury the year before didn't like that much. The only thing I was allowed to do, was to swim, so I learned crawl swimming. A few days after my doctor had told me that I would be able to go running again in a few weeks, I had another crash with my bike, so that I'm still swimming... I'm not quite sure whether or not I actually like swimming, or if I enjoy just the feeling of learning something new and to be able to control my body to improve my strokes almost every day. Maybe it's also just the sweat that I'm missing to get the real feeling of work-out. Anyways, I just hope that I can go back to normal very soon!

sports