June 6, 2025 is the 156th day of the year, meaning 209 remain for any of us to reach our New Years resolutions. (That’s 43% for you math nerds.) For me that’s mostly my bicycling mileage goals. It’s not just about this year, though. I began tracking my journey January 1, 2016 (technically, 10 days earlier). But December 31, 2025 will conclude a decade of using the Strava fitness app to record my bicycling. The numbers tell a large part of the story, but only part of it.

As recidivist readers will remember, my journey began an artist and 2015 when I did to charity rides. The recent post about 10 years since the first one is a good read if you haven’t seen it. Well I didn’t get Strava really till 2016. So those 3,000 or more miles didn’t count. As the saying goes, “If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen.” Which we all know is hyperbole, but whatever; I drank that Kool-Aid long ago.

Large chunks of my life have been car-free, but also many years were spent being bicycle-free, too. And several bicycles have come to me free including the recent Soqi the Cannondale who is my main squeeze these days. Although I had to lose Sophie the Fairdale in a theft to get the free insurance replacement, which was a monetary loss of parts I’d replaced. And i alsot was a painful loss, which was a cost of a different kind.

So, for 15 years I was car-free. But of these last nine years, five months, and six days, during the last four plus, I have had a car. I am most proud of the fact that I have cycled more than I’ve driven in each of those four years. The big reason for that is that the car needs a lot of work. More recently I was told it has a fatal problem and to only to use it for short in-town trips. So being car-free again in my future.

I’m not as jazzed about that as you might think. Sure I’ll get to ride my bike more, and maybe even have the unbridaled joy of getting on the Capital Metro bus when it’s raining or too hot and skin cancery. (The aside to buses is pure horseshit. See what I did there?) As planetary temperatures rise, we certainly notice it here in Central Texas where it’s already hot enough in late spring and summer to begin with.

Having an air conditioned car to get around during the day has been very helpful. Additionally, I’m almost 10 years older than when I started. With all my challenges, which we all have to do varying degrees, I’m simply not able to go as far or as fast or as vertical as I used to. Not that I was ever much of a speed demon on the bicycle, being the fathlete I am. I keep going but for noticeably shorter distances, and slower speeds, and with less elevation. I’m mostly okay with that; if it takes me a little bit longer to get in my 100 miles a week, so be it.

As for my cycling in 2025, here’s a screen grab from Strava showing my progress today.

As you can see, I’m approaching the magic number of 2,600. But I do 30th if I if that it shows that I’m doing 100 miles a week and on track to make the yearly goal. The measure of 253 hours average is 1.62 hours a day in  the saddle. Other numbers show almost two rides per day on average and over nine miles of elevation. Here you see my totals for May 2025 including walks and yoga.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of bicyclists around the world on Strava who have far more impressive numbers. If you’re one of them, bully for you. And I mean that. We’re not in competition. The only person I’m racing is my younger self. It’s helpful to have inspiration, of course. But as I look at what should be my last year of daily cycling and being a servant of number goals in a sports app, I do try to make sense of all my efforts.

Are there downsides? Plenty. The opportunity cost, what economists call a trade off. Could or should I have been spending all the time on the bike instead on chasing a career, money, relationships, and a more balanced health regimen? Definitely. Would I be better off measuring things more by Half Fast Cycling Club’s BFUs — the elusive big fun units? Maybe. Am I doing the best that I can even if it’s not the Greatest Bicycling Story Ever Told? Definitely.

(Though I would posit that I would not be doing what I do if I weren’t having some fun. Also, having goals and having fun are certainly not mutually exclusive.)

At the end of the day, it’s night. And also, I’m just a dude. Yeah I’m overweight and I ride my bike everyday and I’ve gone a lot further than I or anybody ever thought I could. Aside from a few faithful readers, few people know… and far fewer care. Unless I can ever raise the funds to pay an editor to rescue my memoir / how to bike when you’re old and fat book (really, two books), that story will be on these blog pages for as long as someone pays the bill.

And so it goes. We all get older, if we are lucky. We all get something or another, a disease and accident or what have you. We eventually just fade away, and then pass away in what we bicyclists might call our final dismount. And if we are very lucky, we live on in the memory of those who knew us.

So, am I under any delusion that all of my biking and blogging about it matters one whit? Nah. Although a dude can dream. “Hope springs eternal in a human’s heart,” Alexander Pope wrote. Thanks to any and everyone who’s come along for all or part of this journey. Tomorrow is never promised. Hug your relatives and if you can’t, call them.

The sixth stage of grief was added by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s partner David Kessler. And that stage is called Finding Meaning. May we all be fortunate enough to attain that.

For me, bicycling is not just the journey, an activity, or community. It is a state of mind/body best experienced by living in breathing bicycles day in and day out, weeks  months, years. At the community bike shop, getting your hands greasy, swearing with frustration as you try and fix that damn thing.). Taking your bike to the shop when you can’t figure it out and having these rough and tumble, kind and generous men amd occasional woman fix your bike.

On social rides, with the crazy lights and music and wheelies and laughter. Charity rides with the crowds and volunteers and snacks and cops and the open Hill Country roads trying to wear you down. The hot city streets with their shitty drivers of cars and buses and trucks, lanes full of potholes and fallen bollards and cement turtles in bike lanes, the smog and buildings and people. Wind, rain, sun, snow.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” -Rumi, The Great Wagon

But on a “good” day, or in a “good” moment, when you tune out all the noise, it’s just you and your body/mind, your bike, and the road.  Time stops, you are in the moment, in the flow. Where the bike and the road stop and you start doesn’t matter; it all becomes as one.

As Gene Wilder said in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory:

“There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going. There’s no knowing where we’re rowing or which way the river’s flowing.”

And that’s okay. Just keep going and flowing as long as you can.

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