95,000 Lifetime Miles

I "created" this AI image in the Pointillist style with exactly 95,000 dots ... I think. Not gonna count 'em. 

For a long time, I targeted 2025 as the season in which I would hit 100,000 lifetime miles. I define “lifetime miles” as miles since I became a serious cyclist. That didn’t happen until 2004. Lifetime–just “lifetime” now, not lifetime miles–goes back to 1965. I thought there would be something poetic in reaching 100,000 miles in the same year that I reached my 60th birthday. But I won’t reach 100,000 miles this year.

Coming up short has nothing to do with the injury that ended my 2024 season. My crash in November probably didn’t cost me more than a couple of hundred miles. The truth is that I had fallen off the pace already. In this post from September 2, I acknowledged that I wasn’t going to reach 100,000 miles on my preferred schedule.

I hit 90,000 lifetime miles on December 24, 2023.

Today, I hit 95,000 lifetime miles. If I reach this year’s mileage goal, 3,161, then next season another 3,160 will get me to 100,000 lifetime miles. I can live with that. It’s still going to be a significant accomplishment.