by I spent many hours in the bike saddle in 2017. In early January I looked at the 4,783 miles I had biked in 2016. I decided to round up to 5,000 miles and set that as my goal for 2017. That would be about 100 miles a week with two weeks off for vacation.
I didn’t pay much attention to the goal until October when I noticed that I was still on track. But I still had to ride those 100 miles a week, and the days were getting shorter and colder. That meant some days on the bike saddle that I might normally have chosen to spent on the couch. I got there, but save one last mile for a special ride.
Some of my highlights from 2017:
With just two days left on the calendar, my family joined me on short ride to turn the odometer to 5,000 miles. It was bitterly cold with flurries, but they toughed it out for a short 1.5 mile ride with me to complete the goal. It’s always better to have them along side me.
The Pan Mass Challenge is the highlight of my cycling season. It’s an emotional rollercoaster over three long days of riding. Team Kinetic Karma raised over $485,000 in 2017 to fund the fight against cancer. A lot of those miles are my preparation for that ride.
My longest rides was the B2VT, from the battlefields of Lexington to the Vermont mountain of Okemo. It was my second year cycling the 130 miles of this ride. Unlike last year, the weather was beautiful.
While the kids were at camp this summer, I biked out to their camp for the parent’s overnight weekend on my third annual bike to Becket. That was 125 miles of riding through rain in the dark of night and early morning.
This was my first time cycling this fundraiser for Bikes Not Bombs.
In 2015, I cycled all the streets of Newton. In 2016, I rode all streets of Allston-Brighton, the Back Bay, Fenway, Downtown Boston, and the North End. This year, it was the streets of Brookline.
Of those 5,000 miles, about half were bike commuting to and from work. The other half were recreational cycling miles. In the heatmap below showing my rides in 2017, you can see the roads I traveled. That red blob are the roads of Brookline. It takes a lot of going back-and-forth to get across all of the roads.
With 2018 on the horizon, I’ll have to sit back and think about my cycling goals for 2018. For now, I’ll just watch the ball drop on New Year’s eve and enjoy the last of 2017.
