Milestones

End of the month rides are interesting.  I rode some extra miles with Scott C this morning because he had two goals in mind.  First, ten extra miles would get him over 800 miles for June.  Second, twenty extra miles would get him 5,000 miles for the first half of 2014.  These extra miles were all about arbitrary number goals.

I’m not immune.  Last Friday I rode some extra miles just to achieve one of those numbers.  The problem was that I didn’t remember exactly how many miles I needed to ride to achieve it and fell 1.2 miles short.

I got those in … and more this morning.  I’m pleased to announce that I’ve surpassed

30,000 miles on the bicycle since January 1, 2010.

That’s 4.5 years of riding.

Some have certainly ridden more, but I want to remind my readers that when I started riding, 8 miles per day (or about 30 minutes) was my limit.  I stepped it up and rode about 17-18 miles slowly for a while.  I recall that my first year’s goal was to ride 100 miles in a day.  Getting out there and riding regularly meant that I was able to achieve that goal 4-5 months earlier than expected.  Still, there is no way that I imagined that I would log over 30,000 miles in my lifetime, let alone 4.5 years.

Now I’m just over a week away from another stretch goal … 295 miles in one day, and 622 miles (1000k) in 75 hours.

This is a big deal for me.  I’ve done a lot of mental planning and considerable bike preparations.  This will be a completely unsupported ride, with no drop bags, so we will be carrying everything we need for those 3 days on the bike.  More about all that later.