fun

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!

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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?

Continue reading →

11/11/2024: A Month After My 59-Mile Ride and 5-Year Daily Bicycling Streak, I’m Still At It

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 10 Comments

If you missed the belated edits to my last post, 10/10/2024:  What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been:  5 Years of Consecutive Daily Cycling Tomorrow, please go check it out first. I’ll wait. (Cue the Jeopardy theme music.) It was written the day before my big annual ride. The spoiler version is that I managed my 59.59-mile bike ride, and I’m still doing the deed daily. Although I’m biking slower for various reasons. Extra weight from high stress and low sleep and also after stopping a gig where I walked five to seven miles a day. Biking 100+ miles a week might have something to do with being tired. Whatever, each mile counts. And the only race I’m in is against myself. Or maybe Death. And we all lose that one, eventually. But not today, Death. Not today.

Continue reading →

5/5/24: It’s Bike Month (Again). Does It Matter?

~ A Dude Abikes ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of year–May aka Bike Month–when we’re supposed to celebrate bicycles extra hard. Why? Because the League of American Cyclists and other groups say so. The other 11 months you can just fuggehaboudit. There’s Bike to School Day; Bike to Work Day with breakfast tacos, free swag, a self-congratulatory after-party; a Clinic on beginning City Cycling (not for the faint at heart); a Frankenbike sale; and so on. But we here at A Dude Abikes have to ask the hard-hitting questions that our award-unwinning journalistic reportage and yooge, bigly ethics require and wonder:  Does Bike Month ever really accomplish its goals? Does it matter? To quote the great pop rock band Chicago’s question in a song: “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”

Continue reading →

On St. Patrick’s Day, How the Bicycle Helped Bring Feminism, Freedom, and More to Ireland

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 4 Comments

Today is the holiday of St. Patrick’s Day which falls during International Women’s History Month, plus it’s been two weeks since my last post. Also, I’m a quarter Irish-American myself. All together, those are as good a reason as any to blog. But when it comes to bicycling and Ireland, I don’t know much. Sure, I’ve heard of famous Irish pro cyclists Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche, and Dan Martin (born in England but a dual national, given his mother is Irish and related to Roche). I enjoyed watching the latter back when I tuned into the Tour de France. Martin was a cheeky breakaway and mountain climbing specialist. Professional sports isn’t for 99.9% of people who bike, though. There’s also that Idlecyclist chap, the fellow blogger who’s doing more hiking these days. (No judgement, and it still rhymes). But it was fascinating to learn that the bicycle has an important role in Irish history.

Continue reading →

3/3/2024: Why I Hate E-Bikes / E-Bikes Might Also Be OK

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 8 Comments

I just wrote a post the other day, How Writing Has Helped My Bicycling, but the month and day numbers match again, so it’s already time for another post. As for a topic, I had a hard time choosing one. I was going to go with biking while sick, since I’ve been struggling with something for a few weeks now. A normal person would stop biking until they got better. But I’m in the capitol of Texas where one of our slogans is “Keep Austin Weird,” so in my case, I just have kept riding somehow. I do slower and thus fewer miles, which makes me sad not to meet my goal. There’s not much more to say on that subject, which is boring. I haven’t done an Austin Cycling News Roundup in a while, but I’ve not been very plugged into the bike scene lately, and that takes a little time to research. I considered reviewing the Reddit bicycle discussion, r/BikingATX, but also not much there. So, I landed on my hatred of electric bicycles aka e-bikes, otherwise known as motorcycles. Yeah, I said it.

Continue reading →