2016 Year-End Recap

Here’s a look back at my cycling year. It was a really good year, both by the numbers and by the memories.

This year-end summary image is courtesy of Strava and VeloViewer.

By The Numbers

  • 7,340 miles, my 2nd all-time
  • I rode 361 out of 366 days of the year, missing only one a few days of travel and illness
  • 502 rides
  • 3 centuries, 18 metric centuries, 28 half centuries
  • Longest ride of the year: 107.8 miles, Cup O’ Dirt #12: PST Hundee
  • Eddington numbers: 40 miles, 56 km, 115 minutes

Bikes

  • Retrospec Amok: 177 rides, 2521 miles. This was my “utility” bike, along with being my default road and gravel bike for the first half of the year.
  • Nashbar 4050: 110 rides, 2195 miles. This was my one “new to me” bike for the year. It was my gravel bike and my “fun” bike for the latter half of the year.
  • Diamondback Response XE 29: 115 rides, 1201 miles. This shared mountain biking duties with the Giant for most of the year, though I used this one more for real trail riding (vs. utility riding).
  • Giant Acapulco: 60 rides, 585 miles. This shared mountain biking duties with the Diamondback, though used more for traveling to-from trail  work than for real trail riding. Ran it as a “dinglespeed” for part of the year.
  • Windsor Clockwork: 25 rides, 439 miles. I still really enjoy riding this singlespeed road bike, but it didn’t get a lot of use this year for some reason. Still, it was used on one of my centuries.
  • Surly Long Haul Trucker: 6 rides, 292 miles. Used it for one tour, that was it.
  • The Puch Cavette II (105 miles) and Dahon Vitesse D7HG folding bike (3 miles) didn’t get ridden much this year.

Gear of the year: Not a whole lot of major new gear to report on this year. I did spring for a Garmin Edge 510 as an upgrade to my old Garmin Edge 200. The 200 still worked fine, but the big selling feature for the 510 was bluetooth, which allows me, in concert with a smartphone) to upload my rides wirelessly. This is a big improvement, compared to having to connect the device to a computer to sync. I’m somewhat less impressed with the other aspects of the 510 (i.e. the touchscreen), but it works.

Memories

A few highlights and lowlights:

  • Tours:
    • Bikepacking Overnight Via The Prairie Spirit Trail — Rode the Prairie Spirit Trail north to Ottawa, then via gravel to Hillsdale State Park to meet up with friends for some bike-camping, then back the next day via gravel and the PST.
    • A Little Eastern Kansas Bike Tour — Led an early-July mini-tour, starting in Iola and overnighting in Osawatomie, Lawrence, Topeka, and Melvern. 5 days, 4 nights, about 290 miles.
  • Cup O’ Dirt Challenge — Lotsa great memories of riding a dozen dirty metric centuries, May through September.
  • Trail work — Trail-building on the Lehigh Portland Trails consumed an awful lot of my time this year. It was great fun, and I don’t regret it at all, but I maybe went a bit overboard.
  • False starts and fizzles — I had the opportunity to do a really long and remote tour this year (the Great Divide Route), but I ended up bowing out of that due to a lack of time to plan for a ride of that magnitude, especially in terms of purchasing a new bikepacking bike and getting its gear dialed in. I also had planned to do a couple days for the Biking Across Kansas tour, but had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts with other stuff. I’d also toyed with the idea of an Iola-to-Dallas-and-back tour, but scrapped that one as well. Bleh, I sure did do a lot of changing my mind in 2016. 🙁

Ride Maps

The map on the left shows all my rides, including a few short excursions to Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. The map on the right shows my rides in Kansas. Obviously, in 2016 I was a bit of a homebody.

Map images are courtesy of Jonathan O’Keeffe’s excellent Strava Multiple Ride Mapper, which pulls in all my ride data from Strava and displays all of the routes overlaid in a heatmap.

Photos

Picking the best photos of the year is kind of tough, because I take a bunch of them, and end up liking a fair number. I went through my images and made a “Best of 2016” album, and had 114 photos. Too many to share here, obviously.

So I put together a collage of nine of my favorites:

Captions, left to right, top to bottom:

  1. Snowy mountain bike ride at Lehigh Portland Trails in Iola.
  2. Spring ride in Linn County, Kansas.
  3. On the steps of the state capital in Topeka.
  4. A wicked little hill in Anderson County, Kansas.
  5. Roadside flowers in Allen County, Kansas.
  6. Summer gravel in Allen County, Kansas.
  7. Autumn leaves on the Southwind Rail Trail near Iola.
  8. Autumn mountain biking at Lehigh Portland Trails.
  9. Brilliant winter sunset at Lehigh Portland Trails.

 

DirtBum Written by:

I enjoy riding bicycles all over -- city streets, suburbia, rural roads, gravel roads, dirt roads, rail-trails, and singletrack. I love exploring the countryside and finding the interesting and historical treasures hidden in plain sight. You can follow my rides on Strava.

2 Comments

  1. Clayton
    January 9, 2017

    Great end of year recap, Randy. I enjoy your posts and photos. Here’s wishing you an even more productive and satisfying 2017.

    • January 9, 2017

      Thanks, Clayton!

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