How do you measure a year of riding?

It depends on what I want to believe, or maybe it’s what I want you to believe. In 2022, I either rode over 8,000 miles, or just over 4,000. It’s really just a vanity number generated by the app Strava, which with 95 million active users is arguably the default app for tracking bike rides. Strava says I hit 8,527 miles in 2022 (combining rides with some hikes and walks.) And they helpfully created some nice graphics that I can share on social media for self-promotion and to confirm what everyone around me already suspects: I ride a lot, (but believe me, not as much as many others.) 

But is that how we should really measure a year of riding when some of it is done inside on a stationary bike? 

I downloaded all of my 2022 rides to a spreadsheet, divided them into indoor and outdoor rides, and totaled the miles and hours for each. (That may be the most depressing sentence I’ve written in a long time.)

Wait, distance for indoor rides? Yeah, the apps that track indoor rides calculate how far you would have gone. No, “calculate” is probably too strong a word. They make up a distance based on your size and how much power you generated. And it assumes a flat road, no wind, no draft from other riders. But if you’re using a virtual riding program like Zwift, which varies your speed based on the terrain in its virtual world, you’ll get a different number that could also include a faster speed if you’re riding with a group. So it’s another made-up number but with lots of additional made-up variables. So about 45% of my 8,000+ miles are made up. I put in the time but never physically covered any distance.

Here in the real world, I live on a hill, in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians. The grade at the top of my driveway is over 25%. So none of my outdoor rides are really flat. As a result, the average speed of my outside rides was a little over 16 mph. 

Meanwhile, the average “speed” of my indoor rides last year was 19.7 mph, a speed I suppose I could average if I were stronger, or lived in a pancake-flat, windless place. Sounds lovely.

It’s clear to me that if you do any rides on a stationary bike, distance is the wrong way to measure what you’ve done. Singers Gillian Welch and David Rawlings wrote that “Time’s the revelator.” And it really is, for so many things. Ultimately, time reveals what’s real. It can’t be manipulated, adjusted, or paused. It works the same way for rides, whether they’re inside or out. 

But time is also flat, colorless, windless, sterile, and empty.

When I think back on the 463 hours I spent on the bike last year, either inside or out, I don’t have 463 hours of memories. And the memories I have are virtually all from rides outside:

• Finally finishing Rouge Roubaix, a bucket-list race I’d failed to finish in 2017. I remember the rough road at mile 120 or so and the intense pain on the soles of my feet that didn’t stop until I finished. 

• The “easy” spin with Automatic Racing's Tom Gibbons and Daniel Swan and recognizing again that pro cyclists are just a different species.

  

• Rolling up to a red light at the beginning of a Tuesday Night Worlds ride and seeing Marlow sitting there with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, trash talking us. And the several conversations with him at the end of those rides as I was putting my bike on the car.

• Gravel rides with Hardwick, Merrill, Rox, Bo, Greg, and others, on roads I’d never ridden. It's amazing in 2023 how many miles of dirt roads there still are, where if you do see a car (or more likely a truck) you’ll usually get a wave instead of a finger.

• Gravista, a gravel race in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia near where I went to college 40 years ago. And the first things that come to mind are the challenge, fellowship, and spirit, not the result — a spot on the wide-angle, age-group podium.

  

  Photo: Brett Rothmeyer

• Early Saturday morning rides with my Six26 Cycling teammates that almost always passed the spot where cyclist Mark Miller was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2021. It was gut-wrenching each week to see the orange spray-painted marks on the road left by the officers who investigated it. 

The spray paint has mostly faded, but his death is still one of the main reasons I spent almost half my time on the bike inside. Time’s the revelator.