In September of 2019, I decided it was time to celebrate rolling over 200,000 logged road bicycle miles. That was when my latest Excel summary spreadsheet had me rolling over 199,999. Or so I thought. It turns out I was off, by about 5,000 miles, through a simple error in data entry, the result of combining 4 decades of records scattered across 3 different systems.
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| Finishing ride in September 2019 |
Scattered in some boxes, I have all of my early mileage logs. They are a mix of simple ledger books, Year-on-a-page logs sheets from the League of America Wheelman (now LAB) magazine, and free monthly logs from Bicycling. All told, I have reasonable approximations of my early riding, especially considering that the first 10 years relied on mechanical peg cyclometers and simple dead reckoning for most of that portion of my mileage history. It wasn’t until 1982 that I had my first electronic speedometer/ odometer from Cateye. And has a side note, ever since that first one, in our household, any, bike “computer” has been a Cateye, regardless of brand or capability.
The first bike computers were clunking affairs, relying on AA batteries, and offering only speed, trip and total miles. You could actually buy a little external battery pack with alligator clips to keep your milage while you changed the batteries. Thoughout the `80’s they decreased in size and increased in sophistication, and began their gradual transition to todays offerings with GPS Navigation and tracking, heart rate and power output.
About the same time I started using electronics on our bikes, in 1983 we purchased our first home computer, a CPM based KayPro II. It included a simple spreadsheet program called PerfectCalc. I used it to begin collecting all those early mileage logs into annual cumulative summaries, with categories for the 4 types of bikes I was riding; Touring, Sport, Tandem and Mountain. Those early spreadsheets, and daily records, were my first electronic record keeping, through the late `80s.
By 1989, I had begun working on a Mac at home, and was also doing relationship data base development professionally, also on the Mac. So using those developer tools, I put together a bicycle data base that would track my daily miles by bike and ride, and created summaries for annual reports. I kept adding features; types of rides, the state where the ride occurred, time and distance. I basically keep that database running through about 2016, which coincidentally, was when I started using RidewithGPS.com. In 2016 that aging data base database finally hit a platform limit, and unless I spend about $500 for a new license, or until I take the time to rebuild it in a shareware SQL, I was back to Excel. And that brings back to my 200,000 mile year.
Also along the way, I had to start backing trainer miles out of the road total. That meant backing about 22,000 miles out of the total. There is a screen shot of hitting 200,000 TOTAL miles in may of 2015, but that is sort of sidebar.
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| My annual mileage summary, circa 2015, with indoor trainer miles. |
My bicycle database had an annual summary, and that included a 200,000 ROAD mile forecast. Back in 2015, I knew it was going to happen sometime in 2018 or 2019, based on my average annual daily miles (yes, I had that calculated too!). But I sort of lost track of that forecast with the database. I then dowloaded some data and began tracking annual miles in Excel. Based on that work, I settled on September 2019 as the month I rolled over 199,999 road miles. And I didn’t think much about it until last month of this year.
This year I rolled over 5,200 miles in mid-October, and I wanted to look back at my string of 5000+ years. So I pulled up the spreadsheet with the summary from the summer of 2019, and started adding things up, and I finally saw that when I built that sheet, I had missed a column entry and 2005 was recorded as 468 miles. I did a bit of double take, and looked back through a couple of other summary files, and corrected the error (5251 miles), and looked again at the total. When it was all said and done, I had probably logged 200,000 road miles about the time of the 2018 Hilly Hundred. It would have been nice to have celebrated it there, but my September 2019 celebration was fun too.
For now, I have everything agreeing, and I have winter project to rebuild the database, and get a few more totals fixed, like the the total number of rides logged, (almost 13,000) and my average ride (around 16, a lot of 10 mile commutes). And of course, the milage on each of my bikes. And then I have my next distance goal to celebrate, in about 5-6 years, when (and thanks to my brother Jeff for the reference), I will complete my first “lunar”.
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