I rode my bike a lot as a kid. It was how we all got around back then. And of course my daily paper route, delivering the Hutchinson News, racked up a lot of miles.
I rode for a while when we first moved to California, but eventually tapered off to practically nothing by the late 80s.
In the early 90s, we both got new hybrid bikes and for a couple of years rode … on occasion. Still didn’t really “get it” at that time; we thought a 5 mile ride was pretty long!
And then, something hit me in 2011 (I think it was Dave Winer’s posts about cycling in NYC. For some reason, they really piqued my interest!) and I got a new bike for Father’s Day.
And so I’ve been riding my bike regularly since June of 2011. In that time I’ve racked up almost 12,000 miles!
A couple of years ago I created a spreadsheet to generate reports in terms of miles per year and so on.
I also created a blog entry describing how I created the spreadsheet.
Turns out that was a good thing, as I used that entry as a guide when I updated the spreadsheet today.
The annual numbers were actually revealing to me. I thought I had been riding less, but only in comparison to 2012, the first full year of riding. Since my low mark in 2014, each year has gone up, though I’ve yet to hit the 2012 numbers.
Here’s to many more miles in 2017!
