A year of biking

I wrote about learning to ride back in May 2020. My first (snow) bike ride was a whopping 3.1 miles back on March 21, 2020 and it took me about an hour. I have put in a lot of miles since then, 3,811 to be exact. My longest ride to date is the 73 mile loop around Lake Tahoe, so pretty.

This year by the numbers:

metric	Road Bike	Bike Trainer	Mountain Bike	Snow Bike	Totals
rides	91	66	48	16	221
elevation	164,737	52,460	42,771	9,426	269,394
miles	2,462	770	462	117	3,811

With COVID-19, all of my rides were within driving distance, albeit some very long drives – Carmel, Monterrey, Moab, Sacramento, Fruita, Gunnison, Pagosa Springs, Breckenridge, Telluride, Leadville, Park City, and Oasis. You can follow me on Strava if you care about the details. I invested in a Wahoo Kickr Smart Trainer and am hooked on Rouvy AR for the amazing routes I can ride.

As much as cars scare me, I love the road bike. I did not expect this, but I feel safe on the road bike even though I have taken some hard falls – stupidly mostly in parking lots or standing around waiting for people, only once riding fast and hitting ice. The mountain bike still scares the heck out of me but the beauty of the places I’ve been able to see make it worth it. My bike and I flipped off a cliff in Telluride, and I dropped about 30 feet back in September. Luckily no permanent damage to me or the bike, beyond some minor scarring on my side.

I still take a very deep breath if a cliff is on my right side when I ride. I fall to the right about 95% of the time, so if the cliff is on my left, my fear is significantly less. Perhaps more surprisingly, I love riding in the snow. And maybe that is just because the trails out near Colorado Mountain College in Leadville, Colorado are magnificently groomed, with miles of rolling trails through the trees. It’s incredibly peaceful to be out there. And, if I fall in the snow, it’s generally really soft and fluffy even it if can be challenging to try to get up out of a snow drift.

I even had a bike themed birthday celebration. I mentioned previously how the person teaching me to bike was “cooking the frog slowly” and we added “to make it bionic.” For his birthday I made custom bike shirts where I listed him as the “frog master” and got permission from Cayuse Vineyards to use the Bionic Frog wine label on our shirts. So he had a gluten free decadent chocolate cake made with a biking frog. We of course had to drink some Bionic Frog wine in our bike glasses.

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So today, on the 1 year anniversary of my first “bike” ride on this incredible adventure, I bought a road bike. The bike have been riding is amazing, but the faster I get, the more I wanted disc brakes so that I could stop when needed. And I love the snow bike in part because it feels really sturdy, and this bike has slightly wider (28 vs. 25 mm) tires. I am looking forward to trying it out on the road when the weather gets better.