6 months of Oulu Cycling

Here's my attempt to act like a real cycling journalist. As I said, "attempt".

Cycling in Oulu, Finland

When some people think of Finland a few things generally come to mind: its famous sauna culture, ice swimming, pickled herring or Santa Clause. For others it might be global companies like Nokia, Polar and Suunto. And still for others it might be, “Where the hell is that? Isn’t that one of those Scandinavian countries.” For me, Finland is about the bike and infinite tracks of uninterrupted riding.

I recently returned from a 6-month trip to Oulu, Finland from August to January 2009. Oulu (pronounced “Oh-Lou”) is a small high-tech/university town in central Finland located on the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea with a population of around 135,000. It is also the home of the World Air Guitar Championships. While I was there on a work assignment, my personal goal was simple: cycle as much as possible and never drive to work. This goal was especially exciting given that Oulu is located at a latitude of 65 degrees north (that’s 200km south of the arctic circle and 600km north of Helsinki).

Oulu has a cycling network (map) of over 500km of bike and pedestrian roads where you seldom, if ever, need to share a road with a car. The bike roads are meticulously cleaned by small street cleaners during the summer months and plowed and graveled before 7AM in the winter months on snowy days. In fact, bike roads get plowed before car roads. Given that approximately 37% of all trips in Oulu are made by bike (possibly highest in Europe) it’s not surprising that almost everyone rides a bike, year round. Contrast that with the highest percentage of bicycle commuters in the US: Portland, OR at 3.7% (US Census study).

My daily commute was about 9km each way through wooded neighborhoods, parks, and small amount of single track. If you don’t make it to work by 8AM you generally don’t have a place to lock your bike in the bike racks. But then nobody tends to lock their bikes to anything and just lock the back wheel. Even kids as young as 1st grade will ride their bikes to school a few miles solo. I remember one snowy morning at about -10 deg C when I saw one of my daughter’s 7-year-old friends riding to school; Finns are tough cookies.



Finland has adopted the concept of Everyman’s Right, which essentially means that you can roam anywhere in the Finnish countryside you want as long as you don’t trample someone’s personal garden. It is rare to see barbed wire in Finland; I am told invisible fences keep in cows. Couple this with thousands of kilometers of jeep trails, a few fire roads, and sprinkle in some single track and you have some incredible uninterrupted long distance riding. The countryside is covered with pine and spruce trees looking much like East Texas without trailer parks. You also get the added bonus of millions of acres of blueberries, lingonberries, raspberries and multiple of other types of wild berries and mushrooms growing in the Finnish countryside. This also gives you great opportunity to get lost while wandering so a mobile phone and GPS is a must.

The best way to get in some ultra long-distance riding is to find the local cycling group. After a bit of web surfing and a few emails I found the 08-Lenkki. Lenkki, meaning “link” or “chain-link” and 08, meaning they always start at 8:00 AM (on Sunday). The 08-Lenkki is likely the northernmost year-round riding peleton in the world. When you are at 65-degrees north you can claim all sorts of “most-northern” titles.

Armed with my Felt F1X cyclocross I bought from Jack and Adam’s, I rode the first Sunday I was in Oulu. The summer months are reserved for road riding, and then moving into autumn in September you switch to knobby tires and into November when the temperatures fall and you switch to spikes. Luckily most of the big grocery stores sell high quality Nokian studded tires so you can find them for most any size rim and width. ( Nokia the mobile phone company used to make paper and rubber products. They thought it would be a better idea to switch to communications and sold off the other parts, which the rubber products go under the name "Nokian".)

The 08-Lenkki have been riding for over 16 years in Oulu with many of the founding members still riding. The typical ride in the summer months is paced at about 30-33km/hour and winter rides fall in pace down to about 20km/hour. What doesn’t change are these guys appetite for long rides. The “short” ride typically lasts for 4.5-6 hours while a few of the core group will ride 8 hours (possibly more, my long ride was 6.5 hours). I calculated that some of these guys have likely put in more than 80,000km in their Sunday time riding, and still have found trails around Oulu they had never ridden. The 08-Lenkki only take time for shorter rides on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. In the winter months the number of riders is typically between 10-15 while the summer months attract about 20-30 riders.

The real excitement heats up in the December months once the snow falls and the sun doesn’t come up until 10AM. And there’s no way around it, 20 hours of darkness in December and January can be depressing so a bit of exercise does wonders for your mental fitness as well. There’s nothing better to make you feel alert than drinking 5 cups of coffee at 6AM, getting suited up to face -10 deg C (or colder) temperatures and navigating the dark roads to make the group ride. My cold weather PR was -23 deg C. In reality it sounds far more extreme than it really is as long as you have the right gear. For the body and legs all you need is a good waterproof outer shell (preferably breathable) and a couple of snug synthetic base-layers (I found wool even too warm). A good pair of mittens and a couple pairs of toe warmers or booties and you are good - for most people. Keeping the toes warm in extreme cold can be hard since there’s always some amount of exposure at the bottom of the foot. For better warmth, some riders used Shimano’s winter riding boots.

Pedaling on ice with spikes takes a bit more effort so it doesn’t take long to get your core temperature up. And when the mercury drops below -15 deg C the grease in the hubs and bottom bracket begins to thicken and a little more effort is required. One thing about winter cycling, your maximum speed is usually equal to your average speed. I remember riding one particularly cold morning and the ice was so grippy that if felt like riding on asphalt. I was riding hard and feeling good, looked down at the speedometer was doing 12 mph.



I got quite used to riding in these conditions on a daily basis and really didn’t think about it much. It’s easy to dress when it’s always predictably cold. When I returned to Austin I didn’t understand why nobody showed up to the regular Grouppo VOP Wednesday group ride on a cool 27 deg F morning?



References:
[1] http://www.ouka.fi/tekninen/Pyoratieopas/pyoratiekartta07.pdf
[2] http://www.leda.ils.nrw.de/database/cities/city0081.htm
[3] http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/american_community_survey_acs/010230.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_public_access_to_the_wilderness
[5] http://personal.inet.fi/urheilu/pekka.lindvall/index.htm

Other articles (in Finnish)
08-Lenkki - http://www.kaleva.fi/plus/index.cfm?j=772130
Texas guy rides bike in Finland - http://www.kaleva.fi/plus/index.cfm?j=772136