I left home just after 07:00 this morning for a great 63 km cycle ride to the north of Heerlen.
It was already sunny and warm, very quiet and really ideal cycling conditions.
Six years ago, almost to the day, I started cycling again, after an extended break of over 50 years.
When I handed over €70.00 in 2019 to purchase a second-hand Dutch bicycle, I had no idea where it would take me.
I had zero expectations, just a hope that it would be at least as much fun as I had on a bike as a teenager.
Today’s 63 km has taken me past 30,000 (yes, thirty thousand!) kilometres since May 2019 and past 20,000 on the new bike I acquired in May 2020.
The remaining 10,000 km or so was ridden on that first Dutch bike, my eBike and the indoor spin-bike.
Ride With GPS tells me I’ve taken 510 separate cycle rides since 2019, amounting to 1598 hours in the saddle.
I’ve cycled uphill quite a lot too, here in the Netherlands as well as nearby Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg.
187,271 metres of elevation gained over the past six years is over 21 times higher than Everest!
Another useless statistic is that I’ve burned almost a million calories, just riding my bike. (949,018 to be precise….equivalent to 3650 Mars bars, or 10,663 bananas!).
I’m happy to report that I have not actually consumed anything like those amounts!
Finally, my calculator tells me my legs have spun no fewer than 7,672,368 times over the past six years, assuming a cadence of 80 revolutions per minute.
I have to say that I’ve enjoyed every single moment of this adventure, always planning new routes, setting myself new challenges and even though I’m nearly halfway through my 70th year I’ve no intention of slowing down….
Back to today….the featured image is of barley fields, near the German hamlet of Bocket, near Geilenkirchen.
