Just 9.2 miles today. It’s kinda swampy outside. Overcast, 76F, 84% humidity. The dirt roads were muddy in a few spots. Assuming it doesn’t rain again, I’ll likely go out again near sunset.
But… I met my “500 Miles by July 1” goal that I had set at the start of the season. I wish I had kept better track of miles per day, just so I’d know how many days of riding it took to get here (and hence whether or not my new “1,000 Miles by September 1” goal is a good goal). There have been quite a few ups and downs mileage-wise, largely weather dependent.
I’m going to create a trivial PHP class to track miles. I likely won’t use it here in my blog, but elsewhere on my web site.
At any rate, I have cause for celebration. 500 miles isn’t a lot for a dedicated cyclist (which I used to be). But for someone my age who hadn’t done much if any riding in a long time, it turned out to be a near perfect goal. It pushed me to go out every day I could, and to tack on make-up miles when I had to skip a day, but wasn’t unrealistic.
I can thank the e-bike for making it possible to start from the bottom fitness-wise and make the rides as hard as I can handle at any given moment, and for letting me go faster and hence use the bike for errands I would normally do in my truck just due to the time it takes to do it on one of my acoustic bikes. Some of this is of course just a function of my e-bike being a full-suspension fat-tire bike which allows higher speeds on the dirt roads which often have very rough spots. It’s pretty terrible for cornering (slack head angle, long wheelbase), but it’s good for blasting over bad washboard and deep potholes filled with mud and water. Not to mention not having to slow down when I need to ride a runoff-carved mess of a shoulder to let a vehicle pass me.