One of the hottest things in cycling right now is riding your bike someplace far and then taking the train home

The coolest thing in road cycling right now isn't spending 10 grand on a carbon-fiber racing bike, training yourself into the ground using a Tour de France-worthy power meter and becoming a super Fred, or doing trackstands on a fixie to confuse Google's self-driving cars.

What's hot is picking a destination to ride to - someplace far - pedaling there, and then taking the train home.

With an assist from the train, multimodal cycling lets riders go out farther since they don't have to pedal back. And while it's hardly a new thing to take your bike on a train - multimodal commuters have been doing it for ages - many road cyclists we know are doing more big one-way rides like this, with several using apps like Strava and RideWithGPS to help them find new routes and plan distant outings that normally might be out of reach.

Tim Johnson, a New England-based professional cyclist and bicycling advocate, mentioned one such adventure in New York recently on Instagram, and Business Insider caught up with him to talk more about how he loves getting a group of friends together, planning a challenging ride somewhere far, and then taking the train home.