July Biking / Bikes Of My Life
July was a record bike month.
- I broke my July record. The previous best was July 2015 at 232.7 miles on 13 rides. I went 453.0 miles on 19 rides in July 2020.
- I broke my single month record. 453.0 eclipsed June 2020's total of 418.9 miles on 21 rides. That means my average miles per ride actually went up.
- I broke my single day record. I took off yesterday and knocked out 67.1 miles, which broken my June 28th total of 55.7 miles. 67.1 also handily eclipsed the metric century. Even better, although I was definitely tired at the end of it I wasn't in pain, and today I feel fine.
For all that, July actually felt a little disappointing. I was at 250 on July 15 and felt great. 500 miles seemed very achievable for the month, but then a series of leg ailments forced me to take a few days off. It's extremely irritating that the mere act of getting out of bed can lead to a hamstring pull, but such is life. This led me to finish just a few miles short of my best ever year; I'll probably pass that on my next ride. If I'd known I was so close I might have tried to tag a few more on my metric century. C'est la vie.
On the plus side, the foot pain issue seems to have mostly been because of shoes. I normally wear my newest sneakers to the gym, and my older pair on the bike. Since I'm not going to the gym right now, I switched to the newer pair for biking, and my foot pain went away. I suspect I never put enough bike miles on my prior pairs of old sneakers for it to matter before.
In any event, a century is still in play. I'll probably shoot for one over Labor Day weekend, as after that the slowly reducing amount of daylight may come into play. 67.1 took me about 6 hours with about 15 minutes total of breaks, so I'm going to need at least 9 or 10 hours for a full century.
I rode bikes throughout all of my childhood, but upon due consideration I'm not sure I ever rode more than 7-8 miles at a clip, and rarely even that much. Before I bought my first and so far only adult bike, I owned three bikes.
1. We lived in Butte, Montana when I was a little kid and moved out when I was in first grade. My first bike was a big red upright tricycle. I rode that all over the neighborhood. In a sign of how different childhood was at the time, I had a band-aid (or possibly a sticker) with my parents phone number written on it taped around the trike so if I got lost I could call them.
2. Later on in Montana I graduated to a red bike, the kind where you break by reversing direction on the pedals. In my mind I have that tagged as a BMX bike, but I have no idea if that's accurate. I started out with training wheels and then ditched those. At first I wasn't quite tall enough for the bike so I would wheel it to a big rock next to our mailbox and use that to give myself a boost over the bike. And yes, this meant that I would ride it somewhere and walk it back if I couldn't find something to give myself a boost wherever I was.
This is the bike I was riding on what was by far the most dramatic bike crash I've been in. I was racing some other kids and the one in front of me slammed on the breaks. My front tire crashed into his back tire and I flew over the handlebars and slid on my left knee and my left shoulder for quite some distance on the pavement. There was a lot of hydrogen peroxide and bandages, but nothing was broken, and I didn't have to go to the doctor. This was back in the day before bike helmets were a thing, but I managed not to hit my head. In retrospect, it's sort of amazing any of us survived childhood.
My family started going on bike rides somewhere in here, with my sister in a kid seat on one of my parent's bikes. I recall that we rode past Evel Knievel's house. I assume it couldn't have been more than 3-5 miles from our house given my age at the time.
My dad biked to work upon occasion when we lived in Montana, but I have no idea how far that was either.
3. My last childhood bike was a ten speed. I got it in fourth or fifth grade when I outgrew the BMX. Unlike our part of Butte, Thompson, North Dakota had gravel roads so I rode that bike over gravel to visit my friends or to go to practice until I was old enough to drive, and sometimes beyond that when I couldn't borrow the car. I never rode it to school since that was only a block and a half.
The family bike rides continued here. There was one stretch of paved road near our house that we would take, but even that was not more than four miles in total, and some of it degenerated into gravel over the time since there's wasn't really much justification for repaving it given how few people lived out there. I suspect that this means the longest ride I went on at that time was no more than 10 miles at most.
I don't recall my dad biking to work in North Dakota, although in retrospect it wouldn't have been much farther than my current bike commute. However, he didn't have a shower at his office.
4. I didn't take a bike to college, and both of my old ones were sold or given away by my parents somewhere along the way. I didn't really touch a bike from 1996 until I bought my current bike in 2013. And here we are.
- I broke my July record. The previous best was July 2015 at 232.7 miles on 13 rides. I went 453.0 miles on 19 rides in July 2020.
- I broke my single month record. 453.0 eclipsed June 2020's total of 418.9 miles on 21 rides. That means my average miles per ride actually went up.
- I broke my single day record. I took off yesterday and knocked out 67.1 miles, which broken my June 28th total of 55.7 miles. 67.1 also handily eclipsed the metric century. Even better, although I was definitely tired at the end of it I wasn't in pain, and today I feel fine.
For all that, July actually felt a little disappointing. I was at 250 on July 15 and felt great. 500 miles seemed very achievable for the month, but then a series of leg ailments forced me to take a few days off. It's extremely irritating that the mere act of getting out of bed can lead to a hamstring pull, but such is life. This led me to finish just a few miles short of my best ever year; I'll probably pass that on my next ride. If I'd known I was so close I might have tried to tag a few more on my metric century. C'est la vie.
On the plus side, the foot pain issue seems to have mostly been because of shoes. I normally wear my newest sneakers to the gym, and my older pair on the bike. Since I'm not going to the gym right now, I switched to the newer pair for biking, and my foot pain went away. I suspect I never put enough bike miles on my prior pairs of old sneakers for it to matter before.
In any event, a century is still in play. I'll probably shoot for one over Labor Day weekend, as after that the slowly reducing amount of daylight may come into play. 67.1 took me about 6 hours with about 15 minutes total of breaks, so I'm going to need at least 9 or 10 hours for a full century.
I rode bikes throughout all of my childhood, but upon due consideration I'm not sure I ever rode more than 7-8 miles at a clip, and rarely even that much. Before I bought my first and so far only adult bike, I owned three bikes.
1. We lived in Butte, Montana when I was a little kid and moved out when I was in first grade. My first bike was a big red upright tricycle. I rode that all over the neighborhood. In a sign of how different childhood was at the time, I had a band-aid (or possibly a sticker) with my parents phone number written on it taped around the trike so if I got lost I could call them.
2. Later on in Montana I graduated to a red bike, the kind where you break by reversing direction on the pedals. In my mind I have that tagged as a BMX bike, but I have no idea if that's accurate. I started out with training wheels and then ditched those. At first I wasn't quite tall enough for the bike so I would wheel it to a big rock next to our mailbox and use that to give myself a boost over the bike. And yes, this meant that I would ride it somewhere and walk it back if I couldn't find something to give myself a boost wherever I was.
This is the bike I was riding on what was by far the most dramatic bike crash I've been in. I was racing some other kids and the one in front of me slammed on the breaks. My front tire crashed into his back tire and I flew over the handlebars and slid on my left knee and my left shoulder for quite some distance on the pavement. There was a lot of hydrogen peroxide and bandages, but nothing was broken, and I didn't have to go to the doctor. This was back in the day before bike helmets were a thing, but I managed not to hit my head. In retrospect, it's sort of amazing any of us survived childhood.
My family started going on bike rides somewhere in here, with my sister in a kid seat on one of my parent's bikes. I recall that we rode past Evel Knievel's house. I assume it couldn't have been more than 3-5 miles from our house given my age at the time.
My dad biked to work upon occasion when we lived in Montana, but I have no idea how far that was either.
3. My last childhood bike was a ten speed. I got it in fourth or fifth grade when I outgrew the BMX. Unlike our part of Butte, Thompson, North Dakota had gravel roads so I rode that bike over gravel to visit my friends or to go to practice until I was old enough to drive, and sometimes beyond that when I couldn't borrow the car. I never rode it to school since that was only a block and a half.
The family bike rides continued here. There was one stretch of paved road near our house that we would take, but even that was not more than four miles in total, and some of it degenerated into gravel over the time since there's wasn't really much justification for repaving it given how few people lived out there. I suspect that this means the longest ride I went on at that time was no more than 10 miles at most.
I don't recall my dad biking to work in North Dakota, although in retrospect it wouldn't have been much farther than my current bike commute. However, he didn't have a shower at his office.
4. I didn't take a bike to college, and both of my old ones were sold or given away by my parents somewhere along the way. I didn't really touch a bike from 1996 until I bought my current bike in 2013. And here we are.