I see. There's a time limit on caring. If it's less than a certain amount of time, it doesn't count.

Some people like numbers, some people don't. Who put you in charge of judging them? If you aren't interested, leave the thread.

Wow. Nice. Who judged besides you? Who put you in charge of deciding if someone cares or if they comment. I think your first comment was extremely rude and your last one is completely out of line. My comment is called an opinion.

There is a world in which the word "stupid" is not judgmental. I don't live there.

You cared enough to attempt a humble-brag (but you messed up on the humble part).

Overall I'm at 50. Need to work on that.
For 2021 I'm at 36. Need to work on that too.

Looks like I'm at 62.

I don’t have any way to check mine, so I’m just guessing. It’s got to be somewhere in the mid 30’s. And I side with those who think it’s an interesting, if not particularly useful, number.

This came up in conversation during my ride today, and I thought to check the number and evaluate progress.

Two years and I've gone from 79 to 81. I would have guessed a little more progress than that. I suppose there were a bunch of ~80 mile rides that needed to be displaced.

Maybe I can go up few notches by the end of the summer. It' a good goal, anyway.

Problem with the metric is that it doesn’t consider vertical ascent, speed, and intensity.

Perhaps a fun thing to track, even a motivator for some, but a poor metric of fitness or progress.

Have t figured mine, but if I spent the whole year in Florida doing fast flat group rides, it would be dramatically higher than it is spending a good portion of the year climbing in western North Carolina.

So does a 70 in Jacksonville beat at a 45 in Asheville?

Well, exactly 2 years after this post, I took another look. Now I'm up to a lifetime Eddington of 82 (in miles), 118 (in the measurement system that went to the moon).

I for one have never thought this is a metric of fitness, endurance or power. And, unless my quick skimming of other replies here is erroneous, I don't think anyone thinks that it is anything other than a linear relationship between two variables (distance, days), aka correlation.

So what exactly is this relationship between two numbers supposed to tell you, what value does it have, how are you to use it, and why should anyone care?

I love multi-year arguments.

What Badger6 said. Nobody claimed that it's a metric of fitness. And your use of "progress" is ill-defined. If it's progress in fitness, then see previous. If it's progress in riding distances and enjoying it, then, yeah, for me and some others, it's one measure.

Also, my interest in the number is not in any way competitive, and so my present number (82) done mostly in Minnesota doesn't "beat" anybody else's number done here or some other place. It's simply a number that I aim to improve.

I posted a few days ago b/c this came up in conversation with a friend on a ride. Afterwards he, a randonneur, calculated his and got 110. Impressive. I doubt I'll ever get to 100, but maybe after I retire the picture could change....

If you have an appreciation of math, the answer is self-evident.
BTW, any working scientist who publishes in refereed journals can tell you the interesting tyrannies of this kind of counting system.

As to why anybody apart should care, add it to every other number cyclists track. Go tell a non-cyclist about your FTP and you'll get the same response.

The thing is FTP is a useful metric; amongst other things it sets your training zones, is useful to track over time for fitness, and training efficacy, and can be useful in pacing efforts. So far, it appears your Eddington number is nothing more than a curiousity

Sure, like tracking annual mileage.

If it doesn't interest you, I'm sure your valuable time is better spent in other threads.

Why people come into threads that don't interest them and throw insults is beyond me.

It’s not an insult; I just don’t see the appeal. So far other than an arithemetical curiosity, no one has really explained the value or appeal.

And actually, if you are trying to get faster, stronger, it appears to be counterproductive. If I understand it correctly, it rewards doing lots of consistently long rides. Yet a program that will make you faster should have short recovery rides, and shorter but high intensity interval rides, not a steady diet of just long rides.

I fail to see how debating the value of a metric is insulting. Me thinks thou does protest too much.

If you're a randonneur who does R-12 challenges, this number grows quickly but I think hits a wall around 124.

I have 144 rides over 124 miles (200km), so it's 124. More 124 mile rides doesn't increase that number because the distance is the limit.

The next distance where I have a bunch of rides would be 186+ miles (300km) but only 53 and I don't think I'll hit 125 of those in my life time.

Or am I missing something?

This is what data nuts do with everything in their lives: bike mileage, daily spending, BF posts. I divide the cost of a bike jersey by the number of miles ridden in it. It's a sobering number for less favorite rags.

My Eddington number is 76 and not changing soon.

"This isn't a very good way to measure my dick."
"Measuring dicks with this was never the intent."
"Well then, how am I supposed to measure my dick with it? How dumb."

Bacon is from my home town. He was in "Animal House." The parade scene where he gets trampled was filmed in Cottage Grove, OR. I spent a night in Cottage Grove during Cyle Oregon, 2007 edition, and walked down the very street where that scene was filmed.

So I’ll break down and play. Pretty certain, without the documents to prove it, mine is right at 100. Over 40 plus years, I’ve done a lot of centuries. While I’ve done a number of longer rides and double centuries, pretty certain I haven’t done more than 100 rides that we’re significantly longer than 100 miles.

Thus for me, the number is no way motivational, given that it’s highly unlikely I can or would want to push it past 100( as well as not having the data over 50 years to measure it.).

And it tells me nothing about enjoyment or achievement. For example, today I rode along the Blue Ridge Parkway from my house, then up to Mt Mitchell, highest point in the eastern United States, on a beautiful day. 70 miles, 8000 feet of climbing. Did nothing to move my Eddington number, but More of an experience and more of an accomplishment than many of the nondescript flat centuries that make up my Eddington number.

which points out that your Eddington number is largely an artifact of the type of events you choose. Randonnes measured in kilometers lead to a 124 number, doing organized centuries leads to 100.

I'm pretty sure that with his inclusion in the MCU, everyone's Bacon number is now four.

From 2021 to 2023, I went from 79 to 81. Now in 2023, I'm at 90. Nice progress.
Ten centuries so far this year, but I'll need 23 more to get the Eddington number to 100. If injuries don't interfere, that will take another 2-3 years.

As to the people who come in here and say that they and nobody else should care, I'll add some detail to a point I made earlier. For scientists and other academics, there is a metric called the h index. It mathematically identical to the Eddington number, but it counts the number of publications that have been cited by other scientific papers more than n times. For example, if you have an h index of 10, that means that you have authored 10 papers that each have been cited in other scientific papers 10 or more times. Although imperfect, the h index is one (not the only) measure of the total scientific impact of one's work. For better or for worse, h indices are influential in decisions of tenure, promotion, academic prizes, and pay increases.

As a working scientist and a cyclist, I'm happy to say that my Eddington number is greater than my h index. But not by much.