Cycling 10,000 kms in One Year
The idea came from a much observed conversation with other cyclists at big-ticket events like the Etape du Tour in France: 'How much do you ride?' 'Ten thousand kilometres a year.'
I have kept mileage charts for a decade, and I ride a lot, every day, and the closest I had come was just over nine thousand. So I thought: let's actually do this and see how it feels.
Bizarrely, the year in question was 2015, yet this is my first published thought on the subject in February 2017. Why?
There are hundreds of possible answers, but the chief one is that this completely arbitrary, self-imposed challenge became momentous. It attained a huge significance for me. To anyone looking in, it is meaningless. That in itself is a mystery.
The second rather prosaic answer is that I set out to write a book about it, yet the notes dried up as the riding took over. When the goal was reached I plunged into a semi-panic about the 'book'. Looking back, I chuckle. By making the riding 'work' I released a lot of tension that would have arisen from seeing it only as a distraction from work.
And here's the thing. The absolutely crazy lesson of the past decade is that I observe a strong correlation between time spent cycling and extra payments made on the mortgage. My big year in the saddle confirmed this. They say, 'time is money'. So hours and hours and hours spent pedalling around ought to register as non-productive leisure, if not luxury and even vice, if we're going to get Victorian about it. But cycling produces clarity of mind, efficiency in other areas of life, and perhaps above all focus. The mental health benefits are simply enormous, and perhaps largely underestimated. This registers as economic productivity too.
Anyway, trying to summarise it all, I am repeatedly drawn back to the energy room at the Science Museum in Exhibition Road, London. There, you find this immensely heavy fruit machine-like rotating wheel, and a screen that pops questions out including this one:
The correct answer is, of course, this one:
Except that it's not, is it? Why not cycle it? Apart from the fact that most UK trains are grossly polluting heavy diesels, and that their environmental credentials rest entirely on load factors, the brilliant reality of my big year in the saddle is that I rode Manchester to London, ('M2L') raised money for an autism charity, and smashed all my previous limits in what now seems like a completely epic day, the sort of day you remember forever. The fact that this achievement gloriously subverts the conventional answer to the transport conundrum raised by the Science Museum is fantastic. I'd go so far as to say it's counter-cultural. It is a brilliantly awkward truth that illuminates untrodden paths and invites us all to follow.
Having survived it once, I've signed up to do it again in 2017. As part of another 10,000kms.
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Dec 31st, 2015. 10,000kms reached at this spot, 400 metres shy of George Bernard Shaw's
home in Ayot Saint Lawrence, at 12.05pm. Aside from his great fame as a playwright,
Shaw was a brilliant pioneer of cycling. |
