Done

Yesterday - halfway through through 2011 - I managed to accomplish my entire year's worth of bike commuting goals. My standing target is to get in 100 rides and 1,000 miles, but neither are date-specific. At 8.8 miles per round trip, it usually takes me 114 rides to get in the miles. This year, after having taken some more climby routes to and from work for a few weeks, I saw a chance to hit the grand early and then, to hit it right at 100 trips. As I kept riding, I saw another chance to wrap it all up in just six months of riding. After that, it was on like Donkey Kong.

Trying to skew my average up from 8.8 to 10 miles per day took some creative route choices. I initially kept up with the climbing but as the heat built up, I pushed the extra miles into the flats along Silverbell and the newly-paved sections of the de Anza Trail by the Santa Cruz River. The hotter it became, the farther I rode, resulting in doing a 14-mile loop on the 103° afternoon of the summer solstice. It was the first bike commute during which I needed to stop to refill my water bottles. I ended up this past Wednesday with 99 rides and about 93 miles - right on schedule to finish June at the century mark.

At 3:00am on Thursday, I woke up to lightning and thunder and shortly afterwards, a steady rain began to fall. Ordinarily, I would have pumped my fist in the air, happy that our ever-more droughty desert was finally going to get wet. Instead, all I felt was my commuting goal slipping away. It wouldn't be the same if I drove to work and hit 100 rides next Tuesday (in July, no less). I decided I'd ride to work, even if I needed to wear a mask and snorkel and put water wings on my bicycle. As it turned out, the storms were fast-moving and by the time I put a set of fenders on my bike and rolled down the street, all I had to face were puddles.

At one point, another rider/commuter rode up and drafted me for a while. I've seen him before and I know he's much faster than I am. Eventually, he came up beside me, thanked me for allowing him to wheelsuck, and asked if he could take my picture. Sure. He dropped back and I saw a couple of flashes go off. Having just had my ass photographed by a stranger, I asked why. He told me he keeps a Facebook page based on his bicycling and commuting experiences.

I got the rider's name but didn't think to ask the page's name. Also, he dropped the camera just after taking the pix, so there may no longer be any unattributed photos of my rear view. Nevertheless, if anyone knows of a Tucson based Facebook page oriented towards bike commuters, please let me know in the comment section here. Oh, and Veelz, this doesn't mean that I'm on Facebook. I'm just too antisocial for social media.

As I reviewed my commuting numbers, a few other interesting pieces of data stood out. My coldest morning ride was 19° during the February deep freeze. My hottest ride happened this week, when it was 111° on one of my afternoon legs. The smallest temperature differential between my morning and afternoon rides was 5°, which means all I needed to change in terms of my kit between the rides to and from work was to go from clearies to sunglasses. The biggest temperature change was 43° (41° in the a.m. and 84° in the p.m.), which means I rode to work with a messenger bag full of summer gear and back home with it stuffed with winter kit. I'm a biologist but, as you can see, I geek out a little bit on meteorology.

But back to the mileage. Here I am with 1,000 miles of bike commuting under my belt. Unfortunately, as I've lamented here before, big weekday miles almost invariably come at the expense of weekend rides, and this year is no exception. I have clocked a whoping 100 miles of bicycling just for the fun of it - a 10:1 ratio between cycling for utility vs. riding for fun. On the other hand, having concluded the statistical obsession portion of my 2011 bike commuting, I'm free to dial it back and save my legs for the weekends. The impending summer monsoons will probably hold me back a bit, but I've got a couple of 29ers (the trail bike I got last spring and a geared hardtail I added to the quiver 3 weeks ago) that are begging to be ridden.

Bye now.