My blog jarnomaki.com has been alive for a little over one year and most of the stuff I have blogged has been about entrepreneurship and building my cloud-focused company Onrego Ltd. It’s summer time so it’s time for something completely different. It’s time for mountain biking!

As an entrepreneur you might not have such luxuries as normal employees might have like summer vacation. At Onrego, we were lucky enough to have a decent length of summer vacation to all of us. I think it’s essential for us to get a good rest and to load batteries for the next (fiscal) year. For me, summer time was spending time with my family and traveling. But it was also time for some mountain biking too.

I have been fan of mountain biking since age of 12. A few years ago I did lots of business traveling and I always tried to pack my bike with me so that after a working day, I’d head to my hotel as fast as I could, hop into the mountain biking gear and head to local trails. You can imagine the looks of other business travelers wearing suits when I was cleaning my bike at the hotel’s garage after pedaling in mud.

Nowadays I try to pedal as much as possible but I have noticed I have got a bit lazy on this matter. At Espoo and Helsinki (Finland) there are great parks with lots of trails but pedaling 10-20 kilometers with mountain bike to reach the places is quite boring. Another way to reach the targets is by a car, but packing a bike into a car is something I’m not comfortable with. Luckily, I found a nice single track trail just a couple of kilometers away from my home and that’s the place I’ve been pedaling lately. I even took a picture from there! Nice Finnish forest scenery!

I also had a change to pedal to my company’s HQ couple of times this week (no meetings with clients or stakeholders on those days). The straightest way from my home to the workplace is about 13 kilometers but by the sea with a nice scenery, it’s 20 kilometers. While pedaling on a road with mountain bike can be such a frustrating job compared to racing bikes, change to pop off from the route to the forest is worth of it.

I took a pic at the lift when I left Onrego’s HQ couple of days ago and you can feel the happiness of pedaling with mountain bike on tarmac from my face. Maybe it’s time to buy a racing bike for this sake.