Under three months remain until a dude achieves a major mileeage milestone, and I find myself asking the age old question:  Just how many licks DOES it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? (Here’s the old commercial I’m referencing.) The world may never know. Although according to Tootsie Roll headquarters, a bunch of college and some high school students tried–some even invented a licking machine–and they alll came up with different numbers. Digression over, my real query is of course more real world relevancy:  How long can I keep my streak of daily bicycling going? Should I keep going? Why? And why did I start in the first place?

Delving deeper, one encounters the retort, “Why not?” English mountain climber George Mallory said famously of why he wanted to ascended Mount Everest, “Because it’s there.” (He and his climbing partner died on their third attempt.) In Letters to a Young Poet, German philosopher Rainer Maria Rilke said “live the question,” but that’s a kind of non-answer. That’s all to say we humans do things that we may not fully understand and that may not seem rational to others, but that does not mean there isn’t a good reason. Who says we need to explain ourselves, anyway?

But (and you knew that was coming) it’s worth reevaluating our actions, goals, and the like, be they fitness, dietary, career, or otherwise. I created this tiny little speck of dust that is this blog on the internet on January 1, 2016. Since then, I’ve logged 44,952 miles on bicycles. That’s thanks to my Garmin activity watch data uploaded to the sports app Strava, which I started using in late December 2015. I took up longer distance riding in January 2015 so about 3,000 didn’t get recorded.

After doing years of daily yoga beginning in 2013, and then seven days a week of walking, reading, writing, and not eating flour or white foods back in 2018, I added practicing music, eating a salad, and using a foam roller at some point. Recently I’ve let some of those non-exercise activities slide a bit. I’m not sure why, but I’ve just run low on steam this year, and some last year too. Biking daily for as long as I have probably has something to do with that. It can wear you down physically and mentally. No one in a white coat has told me to stop, though. Getting knocked off one’s bike by some cracks, as I was recently, doesn’t help.

A few illnesses, moving several times, a job that started, ended, restarted, then ended, added plenty of stress. So, a few streaks fell and became more regular. And I’m okay with it, mostly. If I don’t read half an hour, I usually make it up the next day or so. Or maybe I won’t, and that’s okay too. I first moved to Austin, the city that birthed the seminal film Slacker the same year it got wide release. A far different movie but still related, Office Space, was also made here and came out eight years later.

A few illnesses, tripling my walking for work for several months on and off, the heat, housing and money woes, plus other stressors have added up. Individual or even a few setbacks are survivable. but cumulatively, a lot of these things can really beat a dude down. Life is suffering, after all, the Buddha said in his first noble truth.

Still, I persist, because I can… For now.

To be continued…