Don’t let the dark and chilly weather put you off. Here are some great motivational tips to brighten up your daily commute and get your day off to a sunny start…!

To start, these are appropriate for any time for the year and a cyclist of any nature, however they work well when those dark, cold mornings are casting a shadow over your morning ride…

• “The best routes are the ones you haven’t yet ridden.”
• “Your legs are not giving out. Your head is giving up. Keep going.”
• “The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine.” – John Howard
• “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driving through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”  – Ernest Hemingway
• “Discipline is the bridge between your cycling goals and cycling success.” – Felicity Luckey
• “No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everyone on the couch.”
• “Allow yourself to be a beginner. No one starts off being excellent.”
• “Hills. We love them. We hate them. They make us strong. They make us weak. Today I chose to embrace hills.” – Hal Higdon
• “When you have such a good workout, it clears everything up mentally, physically and you just have a better day.” – Minka Kelly
• “Have you ever pushed yourself to your limit? Then how do you know that you have one?”
• “I may not be the strongest, I may not be the fastest, but I’ll be damned if I’m not trying my hardest.”
• “May your rubber side remain down and shiny side up.”
• “Life is like a ten speed. Most of us have gears we never use.” – Charles Shultz
• “The bicycle is a simple solution to some of the world’s most complicated problems.”
• “Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds.” – Louis J. Helle Jr
• “Kid, you’ll move mountains! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So… get on your way!” – Dr Seuss
• “Nothing compares with the simple pleasure of a bike ride.” – John F. Kennedy
• “A bad attitude is like a flat tyre… you can’t go anywhere until you change it.”
• “The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all.”
• “Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.”
• “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.”
• “There may be people who have more talent than you, but there’s no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.”
• “If you continuously compete with others, you become bitter. But if you continuously compete with yourself, you become better.”
• “Whether you think you’re ready or not, just start right now. There is magic in action.”
• “The pain that you’ve been feeling can’t compare to the joy that’s coming.”
• “You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.”
• “To create more positive results in your life, replace ‘if only’ with ‘next time’.”
• “Work until your idols become your rivals.”
• “If you wait for perfect conditions, you’ll never get anything done.”
• “Life is a climb, but the view is great.”
• “A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness.” – James E Starrs
• “When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• “Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.” – Bill Nye
• “I finally concluded that all failure was from a wobbling will rather than a wobbling wheel.” – Frances E. Willard
• “Crashing is part of cycling as crying is part of love.” – Johan Museeuw
• “After my training wheels, my first real bike was a Schwinn, and my first time out, I rode down a hill, didn’t know how to stop, and ran right into a tree. So, that was a nice experience … like realizing, oh, there are brakes!” – Robin Williams

Got some top tips about winter riding? Let us know at@UKBikeBus!