2023 Year in Biking

Another year, another post about how much I enjoy riding my bicycle.¹ Check out prior Year in Biking posts here.

A Note About Prior Years

I made a mistake. In years past, I have accidentally included all sport types when calculating total year cycling mileage. Which means I overstated my cycling mileage in 2022 – oops!

I’ve developed some news ways to visualize and reflect upon my cycling and sport data from the year. Below is my first attempt with these new methods. Hope it makes things interesting and informative.

3,500 miles?

See above note explaining why the heading on this section might be a tad overstated.

3,500 miles is what I see on VeloViewer’s Dashboard.

However, this includes hiking and walking miles in addition to cycling. Here is how 2023 miles broke down across sport types:

So, mostly biking. A summation of the miles I did on two-wheels in 2023 = 3,380. I’ll be sure to use this number in the future when comparing to prior years.

Regardless, I set a high-water mark this year in terms of cycling and in terms of all sports combined. 2023 is now the year to beat.

194 Rides

So close to 200 riding days! That will be a goal for next year.

• 89 real world
• 105 virtual Zwift rides
• 48 walks
• 16 hikes

Looking just at my two-wheeled exploits over the year:

Observations:

• It’s cool to see how my activity count stayed relatively flat, but my distances grew in the summer. This is a natural consequence of (a) having the same number of days in each month just about, and (b) having more daylight and time available to ride in the summer months. There’s only so many miles you can knock out on the indoor trainer, whereas being outside means you can tackle more epic rides.
• The mix between Zwift and outdoor road riding really swings in the summer. However, there’s a baseline level of indoor Zwift riding I accomplished even in the summer months. I enjoy having the variety of riding indoors and out, and when it’s rainy outside I can get a few miles banged out indoors.
• I got very attached to my brand new mountain bike in November!

First Century ride and other highlights

I completed a 100 mile (aka “century”) ride (Strava link) just one single day before my 34th birthday, which means I can claim to have conquered my first 100 mile bike ride at the young age of 33.9973 years old. This was a big goal for me in previous years, and I did try and fail once before back in August 2019.

This was a huge personal accomplishment for which I put in many hours of training, many miles in the saddle, and lots of fixing up my diet ahead of the event, etc. Super proud it all paid off and I was able to finish the 100 miles this time around! Next year it would be nice to be able to finish without dead legs.

Here’s a video made by Relive showing a summary of where and how far I went.

I will absolutely try this again next year.

Second highlight is that I crossed 4,000 miles ridden on Zwift. That’s a lot of time and distance to be riding indoors on a trainer. Back in 2019 when I first started riding a lot outdoors and with the South Jersey bicycle club I figured I would never find it interesting to ride inside, stuck on a trainer. Friends in the cycling club told me “try Zwift!” and I shrugged it off at the time. Turns out I was wrong! Riding indoors gives me something to do in the winter months and means when I get back on the road in spring I haven’t lost too much fitness from the prior year.

27 days of at least 27 miles

My Eddington number² for this year. I was two days short of bumping it up to 28 miles, but when I discovered this on December 30th I did not have the heart to knock out two 28 mile rides, one on that day and one on the next.

The number is moving in the right direction for this year, and I’m hopeful I can bring it back into the 30’s starting with next year.

743 Explorer tiles, max square 9x9

Extremely proud of this one.

I managed to expand my Max Square to its largest size yet by strategically choosing routes at and around my home base. Back in 2019 my max square was down in South Jersey, since I was doing many miles of riding with the Outdoor Club cycle group.

In 2024 I’ll need to continue expanding into different areas, though, to ensure I beat that Explorer Tile count of 761 from 2019. I simply did not travel to enough new areas this year for riding, despite adding in new loops north of me in the Flemington area.

Let’s just compare my “home base” area:

Some observations:

• I got more North and East this year. I blame that new Flemington bakery “Bread & Culture”, which has become a good starting-off point for bike rides in the summer.
• I also got more South and West. The completion of the pedestrian bridge over Route 295 means I can leave my house and quickly be in Pennsylvania for a ride. There are some excellent roads which make up a 15-25 mile loop I can do after work in the summer. The dark red lines in the lower-left corner of the 2023 map (as compared to 2019) show how much I enjoyed doing these routes last summer.
• I changed my riding habits within the central square. Roads which were only lightly colored in 2019 have become heavily colored in 2023. Considering I moved into this area in January 2018, I have now had 5 full years to explore it. I suppose I’ve found the roads I like, and those I dislike. Another angle, some of my favorite roads from prior years were under prolonged construction this year – so they would not show up as bright red.

Finally, back in 2022 I missed one single tile that would have given me a 6x6 square that year. This year I corrected that mistake – both with a few bike rides that included that tile, and with a hike, too. Feels good to check that miss of my list this year.

Best Biking Photos of the Year

Poked around my photo library and grabbed a few of the best ones. Click on any photo in the grid to open a gallery and see the captions.

×

1 / 7

2 / 7

3 / 7

4 / 7

5 / 7

6 / 7

7 / 7

8 / 7

9 / 7

❮ ❯

Strava Year in Sport

This is a recap of my year provided by Strava. I did not include these images last year, but going forward I believe I will. Who wouldn’t want more statistics?

Click any photo to open a gallery.

×

1 / 10

2 / 10

3 / 10

4 / 10

5 / 10

6 / 10

7 / 10

8 / 10

9 / 10

10 / 10

❮ ❯

Overall

So ends 2023. I accomplished a lot on the road bike. I acquired a mountain bike. That will certainly impact my balance of riding next year, and possibly impact the 2024 goals I’ll set in the final section below. If I don’t accomplish what I set out here to accomplish… well, that’s ok.

It’s all about enjoying the ride.

2024 Goals

• 200+ days riding (vs 192 this year)
• 20+ days hiking (vs 16 this year)
• A century ride