I'm Back!

Sorry, my blog has been down for a while. And some of my old posts are gone. Call it technical difficulties… Anyway, I didn't quit riding while that was going on so I'll probably do a few posts over the next couple days to catch y'all up.

First, some thoughts about my riding in the past year. I’ve been keeping a log of my cycling over the past couple of years. It’s nothing too fancy, just an Excel spreadsheet with the date, miles, time and a brief description of my rides. I’m pretty religious about entering every ride, unless it’s a quick trip to the grocery store or a ride around the block with Adam on the trail-a-bike. I realize I’m a little late for the whole year-end recap thing, but like I said, I’m doing some catch up blogging here. So, here’s what my year of cycling looked like in summary:

I rode on at least 248 days in 2009. In total, I covered about 8,018 miles which is 2/3rds of what the average American drives in a year. I drive a lot less than the average American, so I’m guessing I racked up more bike miles than car miles last year. (Maybe I should keep track of car miles next year so I can compare.)

About 3,383 miles (42% of the total) were covered in my daily commute to and from work, or running errands on the way. I went into the office about 230 times during the year and 192 of those commutes were by bicycle. The rest were using public transportation.

I have both single speed and multi-speed bikes. I generally do my commute on the single speed, but sometimes ride that one on recreational rides too. Overall, 3,922 of my total miles (49%) were on a single speed or fixed gear bike.

Of my recreational rides, 25 were between 50 and 100 miles in length and 15 were over 100 miles. How long was my longest ride? It sort of depends on how you define “ride.” I did two 600k brevets both of which extended over more than a day, so I’m not sure whether to count each of them as one ride or more. Both were somewhere around 380 miles and I completed the first one in 28:50 and the second in 33:45. My greatest distance covered in 24 hours was a little over 300 miles covered between 6 am on June 13th and 6 am on the 14th on the first 600k brevet.

Okay, here’s the statistic that makes me feel a little bit sick: I spent over 533 hours riding a bike last year. Whoa, that’s a lot of hours. That’s 22 days on a bike. In my defense, remember that about 2/3rds of that was time spent commuting to and from work, and my commute doesn’t take much longer by bike than it does by bus. Still that leaves 180 hours last year that I could have spent curing cancer or inventing a better mousetrap or something more useful. Did I mention that one of my resolutions for the new year is to spend less time bicycling?