National Bike Challenge - LIES!

I have not put as many miles in this summer as I usually do, but I've been trying to mimic my at-least-one-mile-a-day goal that I attempted last summer.  With few exceptions, I do at least two miles, even when it's pouring so hard I'm riding in a few inches of water.

Which is why this calendar irritates me.  I did NOT miss the 29th of May.  Not, not, not.  It's far more likely my odometer glitched.  I love my Garmin, but sometimes (including today) it gets stuck, and unless I'm very careful about making sure it synced, it doesn't catch up and log the ride for the current day.


As you can see, that becomes the ONLY day I've missed.



Most days even have multiple rides.  Although that's more common now that I pedal somewhere, Ingress, and then pedal back or pedal somewhere else.  I've got a few weekends where I pedal to Caponi Art Park, pedal to Schultz beach, and then home.

National Bike Challenge

I didn't have huge plans for bicycling this summer after Ming cancelled on RAGBRAI.  A trip to Chicago, which I should probably still blog about.  But that seemed sort of like this extraneous thing (I've been assured 120+ mile days aren't extraneous, but the trip was just sort of a reason to take my family to The Dells and Chicago).

One of my co-workers got me involved in the National Bike Challenge, which I've blogged about before, and that's been my litmus for the summer.  I put in 1457 miles since I signed up, and have tried to remain in roughly the top 12 riders for my company month over month.  The fact that it synced with Strava was a deciding factor in my choice of Garmin odometers so that when I ride my odometer syncs with my phone which syncs with Garmin which syncs with Strava which syncs with the National Bike Challenge.  Welcome to the era of machines talking to machines.  I know that's more important to me than I thought it would be because when it quit working last week I spent hours (and hours and hours) updating the Garmin software, my iPhone, iTunes, Windows, and a number of other things to ensure I had an up-to-date pipeline.

One of the details about the National Bike Challenge is that you get 5 points for bicycling at least one mile in a day.  That's really the bit of trivia that determined my personal bicycling challenge for the summer/fall.  I have now been on my bicycle 88 days in a row.  Potentially more, because I'm ignoring anything before I started recording on National Bike Challenge, but 88 officially.  Hasn't mattered what the weather was like or how dark it was or if I was sick or some muscle hurt, I made it out before midnight to log some time, usually with a trip to Cub Foods or Kowalski's or the movie theater, or by just doing a loop around the neighborhood.  I try to get in at least 2-4 miles in those cases, but one or two have been just the one mile round trip to Cub (or 1.6+ to Target).  If I'm unlucky, it's raining and my odometer resets itself when I lose satellite and I have to log more distance after shopping, but I've learned to enjoy the excuse.

National Bike Challenge

I've got a weekend century coming up in less than a month and a 5+ day ride to Chicago (sagged by my family with hotels, so not exactly spartan), so I thought I should try to crawl on my bike a bit more despite the cold weather.  I got in an 85 mile ride two weekends ago (with Alan, Dan, and Dan's girlfriend Julie.  Ming did the short version; we've been giving him a hard time because he said he did 25, but took the detour for the 15) when I pedaled up to the MS50 in St. Paul and back, but that was an aberration.

So I was happy when a co-worker in R&D, Jack, talked me into the National Bike Challenge as part of the work team.  Logging those 85 miles would have been nice, but that's in the past.  I'm a serious self-gamifier, despite not necessarily appearing like it externally (I think).  It helps that my gamifying goal is never to be number one - Litterati is a good example - but to make a good showing in the time frame and time available to me.  So a new way to target some time is welcome.

I've popped up to #42 already (out of 64 logging) and my goal is to break the top 20, although I know Jack is in the bottom of that category and he logs a 60-70 mile ride every weekend.  I'll have to challenge him by aiming for a lot more weekly rides.  With the long weekend available to me, I took the Highline (hills) on Friday, the lakes (up to the top of Calhoun) yesterday, and into St. Paul for breakfast at the 4 Inns (closed, I went to Keys) this morning.  So just about 80 miles if you include some mini rides to the grocery store.

The challenge lasts through July, which means I'll get to stuff a 500+ miles in one week ride in there.  You'd think that would catapult me into the top riders, but our top rider has 1133 miles in 21 days. 53 miles a day.  I think he commutes 25 miles both ways from Inver Grove Heights if I read between the lines.  That's amazing.  If he's on a good road bike, he can probably do it in an hour and a half, so maybe he's only adding 45 minutes each way to his commute by using a bike.  No gas bill, but his food bill must be out of this world.  That's like 2500 extra calories burned a day (I'm going to assume he's smaller than me, but the speed makes up for it).  No. 2 through 10 are in the 25-50 mile a day range as well.  That's a love of bicycling I can't quite match during a work week.