2023: A Statistical Review

I’m calling 2023 a successful season. How could I not? I wanted to reach 90,000 lifetime miles, and I did. I wanted to race more, and I did. It doesn’t matter that I beat my mileage goal by the narrowest margin, or that I didn’t race as much as I had hoped. When I look back on 2023 in the years to come, I will remember it for the time I spent in Pennsylvania helping my mother after she had surgery to fix her broken hip. That was the really important work this year. Cycling, as much as I love it, is only a hobby.

I rode 4,423 outdoor miles this year, 1 more than I needed to reach 90,000 lifetime miles. So, I will look for 4,999 miles in 2024 and 5,000 in 2025 to reach 100,000 lifetime miles during the season of my 60th birthday. It’s a worthy goal. I have not had back-to-back 5,000-mile seasons since 2015-2016. With 4,423 miles this year, I beat last year’s total of 4,190. This season ranked 13th out of 20 for mileage and 9th for ride frequency. I did 164 rides this year, up from 143 last year, but my per-ride total of 26.97 miles was my lowest since 2017. I set only one personal record this year: 177 miles is now my record for December. My longest ride of 2023 was only 50 miles. My 6 cyclocross races were 5 more than I did in 2022, but short of what I would have done if not for staffing issues at work that required many changes to my schedule and many overtime hours.

In 2023, I spent 1,581 minutes on the turbo trainer, mostly while hooked up to Zwift. That’s my 9th highest total, all-time. I could have and should have done more. That’s also true of strength training workouts, which I missed during those 16 weeks in Pennsylvania. And I failed to hit my 260-mile fitness walking target, but only narrowly. I walked 238 miles in 2023 and I will keep my 2024 target at 260. But with my new treadmill, scheduled to arrive on Saturday, I think I will exceed that target easily.

In my 2022 season recap, I wrote that in 2023 I wanted to get down to my high school weight of 185 pounds. That didn’t happen. I spent the year between 195 and 204 … usually closer to 204. In 2024, I will do a weigh-in at the start of every week instead of just at the start of every month, on the assumption that it will be easier to correct for a 1- or 2-pound gain than for a 5- or 6-pound gain! Losing weight would be so valuable to me as a cyclist, and it remains the beast I cannot slay. But there’s every reason to keep trying.