The Fifties

Better fed than Red: Eating turkey makes us impervious to Communist propaganda.  It's true!

With four rides in the last five days I feel like a cyclist again.  We’ve started to string together sunny days in the 50s and it looks like that trend will continue through Thursday.  In fact, we may even see 60 on Thanksgiving.  A long ride followed by a big dinner would be my kind of holiday!

But the end of the cycling season is coming.  In my previous eight Decembers as a serious cyclist, I rode just 55 miles total.  We’ve already reached the point in the year where after-work rides are impossible because of darkness, and we’re probably not far from the point where snow and cold temperatures make weekend rides too unappealing to contemplate.  Until then, I will try to use numbers to motivate myself to keep plugging away.  In the absence of structured training for an imminent competition goal, I at least can pad my stats!  Here are the figures I’m currently using to push myself just a little deeper into the offseason:

20    more miles to set a PR for November
262   more miles to reach 5,000 for the year
46    miles in December to set a PR
8     more rides to reach 200 this year

My November and December mileage marks are nothing spectacular—reaching 46 miles in December could be the work of a single afternoon—but I’m pretty proud of the 192 rides I’ve done this year.  That number is a record already, topping last year’s 170.  I can say for the first time that I rode on more than half of all the days of the year.  That’s kind of neat, right?