Counting Miles and Blessings

By Stan Purdum

I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve, 2024, having just tallied up my bicycle mileage for the year. It amounts to about half of the distance I used to put in annually during my heyday, but I’m older now. It’s still a number I feel good about. But matching — or even exceeding — a previous year’s count no longer seems important to me.

Aging, of course, accounts for some of the mileage reduction, but there are better reasons as well. My wife and I care for our 4-year-old granddaughter two-to-three days a week while her parents work, and some of those days are ones where I would have gone cycling had we not had childcare responsibilities. But our granddaughter is a delight, and I willingly devote those days to being with her. Even with her, however, I still get a little exercise as I trot beside her as she works at learning to balance herself on her own bike (an 18-inch wheeler, still with training wheels, which she doesn’t want me to remove yet). I look forward to when she and I can ride together, but in the meantime, I’ve got blessings to count.

In any case, cycling is about so much more than mileage. In his final official email for 2024 (“The Leadout”), Adam Becket, who is the news editor of Cycling Weekly, and a much younger man than I, announced that his resolution for 2025 is that he will not be chasing distance targets. He noted that recently a lot of people have been posting their Strava stats for the year, but he said, “The Strava-ication of exercise means we are almost always looking at numbers. It’s a great way to push yourself, but I think it might have gone too far.” 

Becket continued, “2025 will be the year I try to cycle just to have fun, for its own sake, and try not to worry about how far I’ve cycled in a certain month, how that stacks up against others and also my past self. I’m hoping this will allow me to just enjoy riding my bike, rather than seeing it as a chore sometimes — no more thinking ‘oh, I have to cycle today if I’m going to keep ahead of my target’ — and more ‘cycling makes me happy; let’s go for a bike ride.’”

I’m still on the email list from a bike club I used to belong to in a previous location. That club schedules rides every day of the year, so the emails are usually to alert club members about scheduled rides that are being cancelled, often because of bad weather. In a message that arrived this morning, the ride leader was plainly aware that some might be chasing a distance target. She wrote, “I am not planning on riding in the rain today. If you want to get those last mileage goals, be safe.”

It’s good to have the choice, and even better to have it without guilt while counting our blessings.

Stan Purdum has ridden several long-distance bike trips, including an across-America ride recounted in his book Roll Around Heaven All Day, and a trek on U.S. 62, from Niagara Falls, New York, to El Paso, Texas, the subject of his book Playing in Traffic. Stan, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Ohio. See more at www.StanPurdum.com.