Austin

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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50,000 Miles Bicycled! A Dude Abikes Did It!

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 13 Comments

I begin this blog like I did my journey on December 19, 2015: One step / pedal / word at a time. It took nine years, six months, and eight days, but I did it! I rode bicycles for 50,000 miles. That means I have now traveled the distance of the equator TWICE. (You may recall my October 23, 2020 blog, AROUND THE WORLD IN 1,770 DAYS (24,901 MILES): 5-YEAR GOAL ACCOMPLISHED !!!) When I reached that goal, I titled my Strava ride “Planet Earth: Lap 2, Day 1?” Similarly, I titled my first ride after the goal, “The Start of Another 50,000 Miles? Just Be Here Now, A Dude. One Pedal Crank at a Time.” That’s all to say that there’s a lot to say about this. I’ll try to be brief.

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11 Years of Sonnie the GT Arette Bicycle

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 12 Comments

In my recent post about my first charity ride a decade ago, I mentioned Sonnie the GT Arette. She was a gift to me from my former reflexologist sometime in 2014. Richard the Lionhearted, I called him. He took pity on me because of  the 2013 Christmas morning theft of the first bike I bought for myself, a smoke grey KHS Urban Xpress (with no name) which I had unmindfully left locked with only a cable on the front porch. (What I rode in the interim, I don’t recall. Probably, I just walked and bused.) Sonnie became my main squeeze for a while, but she’s still here as a trusty backup. Today she gets the spotlight she deserves.

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5/5/2025:  Is Bike Month Useful? Or Just Performative Bragging?

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 6 Comments

It’s bike month–again. Oh joy. The usual brouhaha is made over how wonderful bicycles are. How kids should bike to school and workers should bike to work. Everyone should ditch the car and bike to the grocery store, etc. Bike bike bike. There are group rides and media and sponsors and beer and fun and so on ad nauseam. And that’s all well and good. More butts on bikes means less pollution, less traffic, and less overfat people such as this dude. There’s nothing really wrong with having a month dedicated to bikes. I could have used the encouragement to do it years ago myself. I guess it just all feels a little fake. So  this blog is gonna be a bit of a rant. Again. Nothing too crazy. I promise you’ll be alright.

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10 Years Ago Today, I Bicycled 50 Miles in My First Charity Ride

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 4 Comments

Way back in the autumn of 2014, two things that happened that led to me signing up for my first torture I mean fun fest also known as a charity bike ride. First, I was gifted a bike which would come to be known as Sonnie, my 25-pound steel triple triangle GT Arette. Second, I was working for a beneficiary agency of the event when and somebody said, “Hey dude, you ride your bike everywhere, why don’t you do this charity ride?” They tempted me with a shorter distance than when I was riding on the day we spoke. In previous years I had always said “The first word is hill, so no thank you.”  As a fat yet somewhat fit middle-aged dude, I didn’t think I would survive the distance or elevation. I figured I could just back out, but for some reason, this year I didn’t. So, after struggling and suffering on numerous training rides, on April 28, 2015, I joined hundreds of other riders out in the beautiful and terrible Hill Country west of Austin, Texas, and rode my bike half a hundred miles. Which ain’t nuthin’. And as they say, the rest is history. Here’s how it went down.

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4/4/2025: Bike Story Night in Austin, Texas

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 4 Comments

As a dude who’s been telling bits of his bike story here for going on a decade, I was curious to check it out an event called Bike Story Night. The stars aligned, meaning I heard about it in time and wasn’t busy. So, last Saturday I pedaled Soqi the Cannondale over to the University of Texas at Austin, commonly known as UT (you tee). (Check out my post about UT: The University of Texas and Me:  A Short Autobiography.) There I saw a few familiar faces and a few dozen new ones. The premise  is fairly straightforward:  people come together to tell and hear stories about bikes. Here’s a short report.

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Dude, Come to the Dark Side of E-Bikes

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 20 Comments

After years of pedaling a person-powered bicycle, and complaining all that time about the physical difficulties of the same, I have relented. I got an electric bike. It’s April in Austin, and the weather is by turns, rainy, cool, hot, humid, or windy. But overall, it’s nice, and spring is in the air, perfect for hopping on a pedal-assisted machine and ambling about town on errands or just for a recreational ride. So has A Dude really gone to the dark side?

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3/3/2025:  When Things Fall Apart, Keep On Biking (Or Like, You Know, Whatever, Man)

~ A Dude Abikes ~ Leave a comment

The library book When Things Fall Apart:  Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1996), the classic work by American Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, sits unread on my scuffed black card table. Next to it is another of her more recent books, How We Live Is How We Die, also untouched. They’re thin books but on heavy subjects. If you missed it, my last post was 2/2/2025: 7 Lessons from Buddhism, Biking Daily, and the Film “Groundhog Day”. I’m sensing a theme here:  finding ways to cope with the sometimes spectacular, sometimes shitty, show that is human life on Earth. With all that’s going on in the US and the world, it always feels a bit trivial to write a blog post about one fat old dude’s bike riding. But it’s not a bad* thing to explore whatever ways that help us navigate difficult times. (Or as George Orwell said in 1984, *doubleplusungood.)

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2/2/2025: 7 Lessons from Buddhism, Biking Daily, and the Film “Groundhog Day”

~ A Dude Abikes ~ Leave a comment

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter. From Punxsutawney, it’s Phil Connors. So long.” —Bill Murray as Phil Connor in Groundhog Day

(The film Groundhog Day came out almost 32 years ago, so you’ve had three decades if you’re over 32. SPOILERS AHEAD!) When you ride your bike every single day–as this dude has for five years and almost four months–things can get to feel a bit repetitive. When you ride your bike every single day–as this dude has for over five years and almost four months–things can get to feel a bit repetitive. Biking daily is a bit like Groundhog Day. As as with the classic film, one puts on similar clothing, starts out doing the same thing from the same place, and may see many of the same places. While I can barely claim to be even a lower-case buddhist, the teachings of the Buddha aka Buddhism can also be found in the film and are instructive to not just cycling, but life. Waking up every day in a fictional Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, sitting on a bike seat or a cushion cross-legged are all optional.

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A Return to Be Car-Free for Me:  Pros & Cons

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 7 Comments

Twenty years ago today, on January 25, 2005, my car was totaled in a crash thanks to a truck t-boning me (pulling out before I had time to stop aka they were at fault). It was a return to be car-free for me. For 15.75 years, I did not own a car. In January of 2016, weeks after starting this blog, I began a series of annual posts with 11 Years not a Slave to Cars. Then, in August of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was gifted a car, which I wrote about January of 2021 in Come to the Dark Side, Dude: Where’s My Car?.

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