Turn the page

The pages have all been flipped, and it's time to start anew.

2015 came to a close, and 2016 began. With it, thoughts naturally tend toward looking both backward and forward.

Sometime into the year, around mid February, in fact, I finally solidified my riding goal as 500 hours of saddle time. I'd just come off almost a week off the bike (for what reason I can't recall), and was ramping up the time a bit. To that point, my average daily time was around an hour and ten minutes, almost 12 minutes per day lower than I'd need to complete the 500 hours by December 31st.

But I made the 500 with time to spare, as I wrote in my last post here, and finished up with 522 hours 39 minutes of riding.

How did this break down?

108 of those hours was on the mountain bike, usually on the fire roads and "trails" at my place of employment. Almost 29 hours were what I would call "gravel rides", not on the mountain bike, and primarily on dirt and gravel roads. 127 hours plus were on the stationary trainer (so that means a lot of Netflix). And just over 258 hours were road rides.

If I consider the road rides to be at an average of 17 mph (a conservative estimate), that makes 4389 miles. If I take the MTB and gravel rides to be 12 mph (which is a pretty close approximation), that's another 445, for a total of 4834 miles actually traveled on a bike. If I take the trainer rides to be the same mph average as a road ride, that adds another 2164, for a grand total of 6998 equivalent miles. About. I suppose I could round that to an even 7000, given that this is all approximation anyway.

Along the way to making all that mileage, I had 54 days off the bike over the course of the year. If I take those days out, then I averaged 1:40 for every day I swung a leg over a top tube and turned the cranks.

For the coming (okay, HERE) year of 2016, I'll renew the 500 hour riding goal. It shouldn't be a stretch.

I'll ride a few events to keep myself honest and to help get the Mjolnir Cycles name into the local cycling scene.

There will also be a couple rides to put on -- a chapter 3 for the Elbe Multi-Strada Loop Ride and a part deaux for the Capital Forest ride (Lucky Masochist's Gravel Deuce).

And have a lot of fun with it.