Ever since I got Strava, the fitness tracking app with social media component, I’ve tried to make the titles of my rides entertaining, or at least descriptive. Sometimes I’ll link to a ride, but I don’t usually list them. However, I’ve been using them because they have been very helpful in writing my book. It’s a memoir of a two-year period wherein I rode many, Many, MANY! miles on the bike. Being able to look back at the collection of Strava rides has been invaluable in re-creating my experiences. I thought it might be fun to go into this little but significant part of my practice of riding my bicycle usually 100 miles a week.

What’s in a Name? The Letters N, A, M, E

The titles are a mix of factual, fun, and sometimes even a little bit silly. They often are more about documenting what I did, where I went, what happened, and people or things that I saw. And then there’s the miscellaneous. There are plenty of Morning, Lunch, Evening and Night Rides, too, for when it was too short to deserve a title, or I just didn’t have anything creative to add. But my favorites are the ones involving alliteration, a pun, or something clever. They’re mostly just to amuse myself, and sometimes one of my Strava followers (I finally cracked 200!) will find them amusing.

Without further delay, here is a list of the titles of my rides in July 2019:

• This Ride Is Old Enough to Vote (but Probably Shouldn’t)
• This Ride Is Old Enough to Drink… Water
• Eked Another Week of a Hundo, Too Much Sun Tho
• Getting Back to Ackupunckture
• Errands with Heat Exhaustion AC Stops and Collection RERT Art Show
• Anyone Going to Mamma Jamma Training Ride #3? A Dude Needs a Lift
• Salty Sixteen
• Missing 2.6
• There’s a Store-y…
• And It Was All Yellow Mellow Ride
• Hundo Week or Bust (Which I May Have) + 2 PRs
• Bike Curious Social Ride
• Tired Plenty but Still Biked Twenty
• Moo Touch Sigh Bikeling
• Still Recovering from Saturday Ride
• On and Home from Bike Curious
• To Bike Curious
• Mamma Jamma Training Ride #2 (Part 2) + Missing + Solo Miles = 43 Total
• Mamma Jamma Training Ride #2 (Part 1) Missing 8 Miles = 43 Total
• Lab Rat
• Lean Non-Mean Vegan Green Machine Gave Me Wings
• I Think I May Have Just Accidentally* Founded a Neighborhood Bike Gang
• To Meet with New Friends About Neighborhood Bike Safety Concerns
• To the Manor (Texas) Born
• Sába-doh!
• Missing Miles from Malvern to Downtown
• Coincidentally, I Met Brandon, Sponsored Racer and Son of a Blogger I Follow
• To Owen’s and Walt’s Reading at Malvern Books
• This Is US: a Nation of Immigrants (Except the Indigenous)
• 31.5 Mi Demi-Gran Fondo or Half a Hundo (50 Km)
• Klinik Dok
• casa
• one page salon
• rx w/rainbow
• ent + juiceland

A Snapshot of Suffering, or At Least Effort

I think this graph is interesting as a snapshot of a month of my life. You can tell from some titles above that I wasn’t feeling great, but at least I was still getting out there. I did some that were about politics, volunteering, and group rides, while others were about culture, food, and the like. Then again, it doesn’t show many things off the bike of course, and so it is not a full picture of my life. But a lot of things happened, and I would have missed many of them had I not mustered up the energy somehow to get out there and bike.

In the process, I had a pretty, Pretty, PRETTY good month in terms of mileage. I mean, 539 miles ain’t bad for this mid-aged fathlete. (That includes about 50 miles of walking daily, so around 489 biking.) Also, over 14,000 feet of elevation. And 68 hours is almost three full days of biking in one month. That may not be much for you, but it’s a good bit for me, and for some, maybe they can’t imagine it. I couldn’t either a few years back. But I kept hammering away until I gradually improved. You can too. Go for those marginal gains.

Check out all my activities on Strava, and follow me there if you like.

Strava is Kind of Like My Boss, Except Nice

The thing about being at the mercy of a data-tracking app is that when you stop feeding it data, it starts to penalize you for it. For example, although I had some very good weeks in July, so far I’m off to a slow start in August. And that’s immediately visible in the bar above. Meanwhile, the decreasing average over the last four weeks in the following chart also taunts me a second time. (I’m very happy to have thought about that famous Monty Python reference.)

I suppose there are plenty of titles that are more amusing, entertaining or descriptive, if I wanted to go back and pick some out. That seems like a job for a super fan or maybe an intern. Currently I have openings in both positions. But as for those in 2016-2017, you’ll have to wait for the book to see which ones I singled out. Or search my Strava yourself.

Here’s a link to amusing segment titles in Strava.

Do you use Strava or some other app? Do you ever try making your titles more enticing? What are a few good ones you’d care to share? I’d love to hear them in the Comments!

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