How I learned to stop worrying and love pedaling my e-bike

When I first got into e-bikes, I treated them exactly as they felt at the time: tiny electric motorcycles with pedals attached. This was back around 2009 or 2010, years before the 3-class system was even a twinkle in the eye of an e-bike industry lobbyist. I had one of maybe a half-dozen e-bikes in a city of 400,000 people, and they were so new and hard to find that I had to build mine myself from mail-order parts and an old bike frame.

Back then, most e-bikes were clunky and either underpowered by today’s standards or so powerful that they wouldn’t even be considered electric bicycles today (which is what I had built, basically a 35 mph or 56 km/h moped that had once been a Trek mountain bike in a previous life).

In those early days, e-bikes mostly existed to solve one problem: how to get around a city faster and cheaper without sitting in traffic. For me, an engineering school student just looking to zip around town fast and cheap, pedals were basically footrests. The motor did all the work, and the goal was simple efficiency: get from A to B quickly, arrive not sweaty, and spend around $0.50 on “fuel” per month. Rinse and repeat.

It was a blast. And for a long time, that mindset stuck. E-bikes weren’t for exercise, at least not for me.