Mileage update

Crested 4700 miles today. If I wasn't such a lazy shlepp then I'd be closer to 4800, but I didn't ride to work even once this week. First time for that since January.

A new infatuation

With my ride to Emmett yesterday, I'm over 4500 miles now. 800 more to go. There's a light at the end of the tunnel - I just have to reach it before the end of the year.

Anyway, I've recently become very enamored of this screen from Cyclistats. It's a bar graph of my daily mileage since I started recording my ride stats. Each blue bar represents a day, and the height of each bar is the total mileage for that day with the scale on the left (so multiple rides per day get stacked on top of one another). The vertical green line is New Year's Day 2009. The difference between the two years is remarkable, no? One thing that struck me is that giant two-week gap with zero rides in May 2008 - our honeymoon. Without that hiatus, I'd likely have gotten over 3000 miles last year. That woulda been great, but there'd be no way I coulda doubled that this year. So thanks to my in-laws for sending me away. :)

The most striking feature though is the large number of 50-mile days this year. These are almost all commute days. Last year I rode to work several times but rode all the way home only occasionally, opting instead to hop off the bus at Gold's for a 33-mile day. You can see lots of them in peak season 2008.

After looking at this for a while, I realize that I need more long days next year - 70+ miles. Kinda funny - that 67-mile day in 2008 (LeBow metric century) was the longest of my life at the time. I wept that afternoon as I barreled homeward ten miles out. A year on, 60+ is almost routine. I had a similar experience with my 30+ mile LeBow ride the year before. Does that mean that my 108-mile record this year will be commonplace for me next year? Here's hoping!