Cycling Adventures with Brian Toone

Cycling Adventures with Brian Toone

Finishing Arkansas

After 22 rides covering 4,347 miles and 173,193 feet of climbing across 130 counties in 10 different states, I have finished riding in all the counties in Arkansas! Just under 2,500 miles of those rides was within the state of Arkansas. Yes, that’s right, I did 22 rides that had at least some small part…

October 20, 2024
The Rift 2024

What an amazing experience this race was. I came into the race doing it mostly to have a reason to visit Iceland. I was surprised by how challenging and perfect and awesome the race itself actually was. There is a reason why more and more people keep signing up for this race with this year’s…

July 26, 2024
Riding from Birmingham to the Chief Ladiga Trail

This is mostly just a place to document some of the options. But I would like to also state that people who don’t ride 20,000 miles on a bicycle every year don’t have a good perspective on the hierarchy of dangers in cycling. For example, riding a two-lane county road with a speed limit of…

March 18, 2024
A tale of weather, Sir Arthur Eddington, counties, and Pike’s Peak

TLDR Adventure 1 – Thanksgiving – I attempted a 550 mile out/back-ish (tight loop) from Birmingham to Panama City Beach and back to record my own GPS data for Washington and Bay counties in Florida. The ride was going to be split into 265 miles there and 285 miles back for back-to-back Eddington 256 rides.…

December 12, 2023
Paris-Brest-Paris 2023

TLDR – It was tough I had imagined this as being a slightly faster, slightly longer version of my normal multi-day adventures around the South. What I hadn’t counted on was how exhilarating it would actually be to do the ride and how I would overextend myself early in all the excitement. They had great…

October 14, 2023
The Road to Paris

I had intended to document my training and everything leading up to my Paris Brest Paris (PBP) adventure a bit more, but life has gotten so busy. I’m going to use this post as a “reverse order” summary of the journey leading up to PBP. TLDR Paris Brest Paris is only held once every four…

July 23, 2023
2023 Skyway Epic

Another year, another skyway. This is the life. This was my 11th year racing the skyway. It would be one of the few races I’ve ever had the opportunity to do every single edition … except for getting hit by a car and spending the week of the race in the hospital in 2014. This…

June 21, 2023
Six State Graceland 600k++

This ride started and ended in the land of the delta blues with a lot of delta blues in the middle, too — but no pouring rain. Instead, it was beautiful dry weather with a wind blowing pretty strong behind me as I headed north. Unfortunately, the wind did not die down much during the…

October 22, 2022
Home via Uvalde, Texas and Santa Fe, Texas

I took the picture above early in the morning of July 3rd, 2022 while biking across Texas to get back to my home in Alabama. As you can see, some of the flowers are starting to wilt. It had rained the night before and was about to start raining again. I could not speak without…

September 15, 2022
Tour Divide 2022 – Day 18 – June 28th, 2022 – Finishing the Tour Divide on our 19th wedding anniversary

On June 28th, 2003, in a beautiful small town with no traffic lights in rural Northwest Wisconsin, my beautiful wife said “I do”. The featured pic above is an hour or so later taken by a dear friend who snapped it after we finished the drive even farther into the woods to a cross country…

August 12, 2022