A Fellow Blogger Interviewed Me! And What Shall I Do After 10 Years and 52,000 Miles Bicycled?

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 14 Comments

I’m super stoked to be the latest blogger to be featured on another blog! Ortensia is the voice behind Truly Madly Ordinary, Diary of a “Not So Desperate Housewife.” I’m featured in her series Chats With Bloggers Episode 7. Lucky number seven. Check out the interview, and her other charming, relatable, funny, and interesting posts at https://trulymadlyordinary.com. Did I mention she’s an Italian who has lived for quite a while in Ireland? Or that she’s a published author, prodigious blogger, mother, among many other things. I want to thank her for her interest and graciousness. I’m not one for the limelight, but if I get a few more butts on bikes, or folks get a chuckle, then it was worth it. Meanwhile below, I’ll delve into what the road ahead holds for A Dude Abikes after my epic velocimania and reaching that literal milestone of 52,000.

Read more: A Fellow Blogger Interviewed Me! And What Shall I Do After 10 Years and 52,000 Miles Bicycled?

This month I have managed to do what I set out to: reduce my bicycling. Gasp! I mean, my body is going to make me take a break sooner than later. Whereas in 2025 I had a weekly goal of 100 (5,200 for the year) which I just missed by 200, for 2026 I set my Strava goal on 7.5 hours per week. I managed one 100 mile week in January, but otherwise I will just barely make it past the 333 needed to make 4,000 for the year. Which again, no one really cares about.

Numerous factors have gone into this decision beyond reaching that decade-long goal. First, I’m just tired, and I deserve a break today. Second, I never intended to have this 10-year goal anyway. I reached the point where there was no more point to continuing at the same pace. Third, it’s winter, and even the milder ones we get here in Central Texas are still cold and not always fun to bike in. Case in point, we had a weekend ice storm that shut the streets down for several days. And fourth, I started a new full-time job, which truly sucks the life energy and time out of the weekdays.

A sign of the times.

Overall, I’m okay with it. It’s a paradox, but less mileage = more health. I’m still keeping my daily streak alive (6 years, 4 months, 21 days), but that will end at some point. (As I’ve said before, a forced break is coming.) My commute is pretty short, but it counts. The week I did 100 miles was by biking 10 miles per night on my home trainer, and then two 25-milers on the weekend. Part of me wants to keep it up, but another part knows it’s better if I don’t. Also, I am slowly other taking steps to improve my overall health, partially because I have no choice. That means diversifying my exercise, improving my sleep, and making better choices about what I eat. Biking will always be by jam, until I’m unable to do it, but there are in fact other things in life. Another gasp! I mean, “Biking is life,” to paraphrase Dani Rojas said in Ted Lasso. And yet it isn’t. Scandalous and blasphemous, I know. So sue me! (Please don’t.)

Stickers I saw in Toy Joy.

Being freed from the 14.5-miles per day every day regimen, I have noticed my legs are less tight, my body and mind are less exhausted, and I’m sleeping more, at least some nights. Those are all positives. Getting to the gym to swim and doing more challenging yoga and resistance bands at home will take some effort at the end of a long work day. But one must pay the bills, so while I was rich in time, I can afford to be poor no more in terms of bills. I owe, I owe, so off to work I go for the next few months and hopefully beyond, because it’s a temporary gig. But isn’t everything in life?

While my daily half hours walks and yoga practice continue, I don’t always read for 30′, and writing is far less often than when I was doing it daily. Certainly with this blog, and since losing my writing buddy, I’ve slacked off the novella. Perhaps Ortensia’s interview and example will lead me back to more frequent writing. I do journal sometimes. I also volunteer on a bike-related project, so that takes time and involves some writing too, be it email messages to fellow volunteers, a flier for event outreach, etc. I also have the chores and errands of daily life to contend with like everyone else, and now that incudes sometimes going to protests. Somewhere in there should be time for naps and a little enjoyment of the filmed entertainments, right? Right!

Bike scenes

In the end, I’m getting older, slowing down, and have to do better at managing my health, which is no small task. Riding solo as I do means no wife or kids to support or to support me. (That I know about! There were a few crazy lost weekends in Las Vegas…. Just kidding!) Life goes on, and so does A Dude, at least until he doesn’t.

Hopefully you enjoyed my interview with Truly Madly Ordinary and this post, too. Adios January, here comes February! Time to reset those New Year’s Resolutions (or not).

Rosie, nice
Frankie, asshole
Scout, sweet. Three cats I pet at a week.

Copyright 2026 A Dude Abikes. All rights reserved.

1/11/2026:  5,011 Miles Bicycled in 2025, 6 Years & 4 Months of Daily Cycling… And I Get Pepper Balled at a Protest for Woman Killed by I.C.E.

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 2 Comments

Renee Nicole Good was killed–apparently unnecessarily–by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) officer at a protest of immigration policy in Minneapolis the other day, reigniting a protest movement with over 1,000 events across the country. Your dude attended one tonight that involved some angry young folks marching around downtown Austin and chanting anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) slogans. At one point, two people set a Department of Justice flag on fire. I thought it was dumb and counterproductive; and should have been my cue to leave. But the Texas Department of Safety–who was kicked out of a joint operation with the City of Austin for aggressive law enforcement actions–again overreacted by firing pepper balls that spew out a gas that causes eyes to water and breathing to become inflamed. This caused the crowd of several hundred to disperse coughing, wheezing, eyes burning. Some were prepared with gas masks and stayed in the smoke, and soon after many marched down Congress Avenue without a permit. Your dude was not too badly affected, and biked home. As I wrote on Strava, my sinuses needed to be cleared out from cedar fever, anyway.

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12/12/2025:  52,000 MILES BICYCLED IN 519 WEEKS!!!

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 14 Comments

A Dude Abikes has done it! I AVERAGED 100 MILES PER WEEK FOR A DECADE! I started tracking my miles on the Strava sports app on 12/19/2015, so I actually completed this monstrous achievement a few weeks early, on 11/28/25. This converts to 9 years, 49 weeks, and 2 days. It was all done on regular bicycles and trainer bikes under my own power (no e-bikes aka motor-cycles here!). My “epic velocimania” has reached its zenith, finally. What a lengthy, weird journey it has been!

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6 Years of Consecutive Daily Bicycling and a 60-Mile Ride

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 5 Comments

Zig Ziglar, the motivational speaker popular in the US in the 1970’s until the 1990’s, used to give out these circular business card thingies that had the letters TUIT on it. I must have gone to a speech because I had one for a while. It was to remind people that goals should not be for some day in the future, you should seize the day. It was my intent to write this post a week and a half ago, but I’m just now getting a round to it. Get it? In other words, after my long ride of 60 miles, I was so tired… (How tired are you?) I was so tired it has taken me a couple of weeks to write about it. So, here at long last is my report off my big annual ride and another year of consecutive daily bicycling.

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9/26/2015:  The 10-Year Anniversary of My First Mamma Jamma Ride to Beat Breast Cancer

~ A Dude Abikes ~ Leave a comment

It was early on a Saturday mornimg in Martindale, Texas, a small town south and east of Austin. I had arrived in San Marcos the night before where I stayed with a friend. The accommodations were not the best, with a very noisy air conditioner, hole in the floor, disgusting toilet, and an air mattress that deflated overnight. But it was free, so I couldn’t complain much. The friend, who was flirting with frenemy territory, got me to the ride in the nick of time. I checked in, got my rider number stickers, goodie bag, said hello to some fellow riders I had met on practice rides, and got ready to roll out hundreds of other people.

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9/9/2025:  33 Days to 2 Big Goals… If I’m Lucky

~ A Dude Abikes ~ Leave a comment

What goals might you ask? Well, one takes us back to the Before Times of October 2019. When the world was, while not pristine, it was still pre-pandemic. Fear and loathing were not yet endemic. And we had the same leader who is seemingly now more schizophrenic. This here dude from Texas would ride his bike often, and gaily. Until one day he decided to do it daily. To make that  six years is one goal I seek, and that is about which this blog does speak. (Or it will when I return to it to tweak.)

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After 5 Years With a Car, I’m Still a Bicyclist First

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 9 Comments

Five months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I got a call. The voice said, “We’re getting rid of this car. If you want it, it’s free, but you’ll have to come and get it now.” After 15 years without a car,  I was ready to be able to buy a watermelon, visit relatives out of town without “riding the pooch” (taking the Greyhound bus), and go places when it was rainy or cold or hot without suffering the consequences of biking in Mother Nature. I found a friend willing to wear a mask too, so we bit the bullet and drove a couple of hours to get the car. We didn’t die. So, five years ago, I returned home with a used but working vehicle. I could no longer call myself car-free.

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8/8/2025: Some Ghost Bikes in Austin, Texas

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 14 Comments

A lack of inspiration and bicycle newsworthy items has me a bit stymied. But except for last month’s post on 7/11 (the date, not the 7-Eleven convenience store in the southern US), I’ve been writing a post on the date where the month and the day match for a while. So, to keep that going here’s a pictorial of the number of recent ghost bikes with some thoughts that I have passed by on my daily rides around town.

(Come back later, I hope to have added some more photos and comments.)

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