I passed the 1000 mile mark on my ride in to work today. My year goal is 3500. I've completed 1 of 4 centuries I want to ride and my 2nd is scheduled for Friday. I'm thankful for a good season so far.

How about you?

The way my last 16 months have gone ... I'm afraid to make goals anymore. Plans and goals are very fragile and tenuous things when life continuously tramples all over you. I consider myself fortunate every time I can actually get out and ride.


That said, I'm at about 2400 km so far this year, and I've done a 200K brevet (on my beautiful Machak), and a 300K brevet (on Frankenbike, after Machak was stolen). Those are the first brevets I've ridden since 2008, so maybe I'm getting back into it again.

RomeRider. One day you will look back on this post and question yourself.

No true rider measures goals in terms of miles ridden.
You need to concentrate on hours in the saddle and progress in terms of power output.

This measure of miles is largely meaningless.

Oh wait ... you are just joking, right.

Wow, that sounds so elitist.

It's true that a lot of serious racers measure the amount of riding by time instead of distance. But that doesn't mean that a "true rider", whatever that means, can't measure their season by miles, centuries completed, races won, the number of flats they didn't have, or the number of friends they made on the road.

The real thing we are looking for is fun, and that's difficult to put a number to. Hence all the imperfect metrics.

Climbing Haleakala on Maui - check

Climbing Mt Evans in Colorado - pending.

...

Well, I'm not a racer and never will be, so miles are my marker.

I've got about 500 on the year so far, which is good (for me) especially considering I didn't ride at all in January or February. I've got my first century next month, which I'm training for, and last weekend broke my personal distance record on a 72 mile solo ride that was... surprisingly not as difficult as I'd expected, despite serious headwinds and a lot of hills. Most importantly, I've lost my winter weight gains and I'm having fun.

The year is almost 1/3rd over, isn't it? All of the good stuff is yet to come.

I'm on track to do a century a month. It should be smooth sailing on that goal until December.

I rode a century in a new state in March. That makes 11/50 states so far. I know I'll get one more in August, but I'll try to squeeze in some more. It would be nice to get to 15, but I'd be happy with 13.

My first big goal is coming up May 1st (Calvin's Challenge), and so far I'm feeling good for that. My last long training ride for that is coming up on Saturday.

RAIN is in July.

I haven't decided on a goal for fall yet, but I'll come up with something.

Says who?

I'm on track thus far. Despite the crummy winter, I was ahead of last year's pace at the start of April.

I'm behind where I was last year in terms of mileage and ride time, due to a crash, but I feel like I'm ahead in fitness. I guess that's progress.

I'm going backwards towards my goal of a sub-hour 40k TT. Lost Feb/Mar due to travel/re-location to another part of the world, and while April is going well, I have a lot of catching up to do.

But I am getting a lot of miles in - should get about 1000km logged this month

I'm a miles man myself. Mileage is not meaningless to me, since racking them up and exploring some new routes in the process is my goal.

This year I'd like to do 4,000 to 5,000. I'm about 750 on the year, but January and February are never great riding months, and I really don't kick it into gear until spring, anyway. Last year I managed just over 2,000, but had to squeeze that riding in between two major surgeries, radiation and chemo treatments. So I don't think 4 or 5k is an unrealistic goal.

I must not be a true rider. I measure training and racing in my log book by time and zone. If I forget to switch the computer head between bikes or I ride my vintage Raleigh I log the miles in the back of my log book. At the end of the year I want to know how many miles I have ridden. My non riding friends don't understand "hours in the saddle or rides on the trainer" they can relate to miles and where that would have taken me. Incidently, I have about 2,750 miles to date.

OP, nice job to so far and keep on keeping on.

I have 10 goals I wrote for myself, 2 of which are cycling related. So far, I'm 3 and 1/4 goals completed - although neither of my cycling goals (bike to work for a week straight, and compete in a bike race) have happened yet. Tryin to decide what race I should compete in!

Hope all of you winter zone bikers are getting some springtime relief and more great rides.

I'm in week 10 of my latest biking effort in my new Baja location. But, I also enjoy all of the other outdoor activities available here.

First bike test is this weekend... https://www.rosaritoensenada.org/

I always wanted a hanggliding/kayak, how does the tandem work?

Considering I smoked for the last 23 years and quit six months ago... I took up road cycling more seriously than ever before and now ride 40+ miles three days a week and two rides a week of whatever feels good at the time I think I am right on mark for my goals of the year so far.

I am on track to ride my first century ever on May 15 this year (which happens to be my 38th birthday) and if I make that, I have made my overall goal for the year! We will see what happens after that...

Ask me Sunday.

Yea, I agree with him and don't. I dislike this concept of a "true rider." The OP is certainly a cyclist. But I did find cycling a lot more enjoyable when I started thinking more about ride time and less about ride distance. It kept me from staring at the computer the whole ride. And, as you said about racing, I found myself much better able to ride hard and recover rather than just ride at a moderate to difficult pace constantly. Which is more fun for me and I would guess more rewarding for most. I get a lot more out of completing that climb faster, or more controlled, than I do out of being .1mph faster on my average for an XX mile ride. Probably because that's a much shorter duration thing and there's comparatively little room for excuses.

In the end I still tabulate miles and not hours. There's no hour odometer on my computer.

I'm pleased with my progress so far.
Inside 45 rides/ 62 hours on the rollers
Outside: 11 rides; 450 miles; 24.5 hours

Last week I had my surgery, 4-6 weeks off the bike.
Today I walked 1 mile.

My new goal is to be on the bike in 4 weeks or sooner (anything beyond that is a bonus, including:
Group rides by mid June.
Annual club century ride in September
Unfortunately no racing this year

I wanna get to the Ultimate Cat (3).

3/20 points (or 2/10 top tens) of the way there.

Winning something along the way would be nice too.

The time vs. distance debate is an interesting one.

My father always asks me how far I rode or raced, and I'll tell him a time - 4 hours, or 35 minutes - and he always asks how many miles that was. I often don't know.

When I first started riding about five years ago, I focused solely on mileage. During that first year, I targeted 1,000 miles as my goal and struggled to get there. At the time, it seemed really far. This year, I've already got well over a thousand miles in. Heck, I put in about 450 miles just during the month of January, even when the weather was in the 20s.

At the same time, my training plans and most of my crits are now based on time. I know I need to do an hour and a half on the trainer tonight. My next crit is 45 minutes. So time is what I tend to focus on more. It doesn't matter whether I do 10 miles or 35 miles during that hour and a half period on the trainer, so long as I complete the workout and intervals as planned. So, my perspective on riding and training has changed.

As for my personal goals for the year, I reached it -- I catted up to a 4. I guess I need to set a new goal, like move up to a 3.

It's a great debate: miles vs. hours. I'm a slow rider, but I stick with it and over time the miles add up. Here's a question, though: If it takes me 7 hours to complete a century and it takes you 5 (same route), then how do you evaluate our relative performance with only one set of data, i.e., miles or hours? Seems to me you need to consider them together to get the complete picture. Obviously, you're the stronger rider, but I spent more time on the bike.

Huh? What world are you living in? Are the only goals relevent ones you make up? I am pretty driven to do what I do and enjoy it along the way. Perhaps you're just kidding because I can't imagine having such a narrow and snooty point of view.

That being said I'll wave to you and smile when I pass you on the road sometime.