I used to call this post my “season statistics” or “season summary” in reference to the cycling racing season. I would calculate all my statistics from December 1 of the prior year to November 30th of the current year. This was based on the Eddie Borysewicz cycling training book called “Bicycle Road Racing”, from which I learned how to train and race road bikes in the early 90s.
Several years ago when I stopped focusing on regular bike racing and switched over to ultra distance races and adventures, I started doing these statistics based on the calendar year. My current focus is riding in all the counties in all the states (starting in the southeast and east of the Mississippi River). So I will start with an update on that front since I added a new state to the tally this year – Arkansas! See all the maps of all the rides in all the states I’ve completed below.
USA State/county update (RIDES ONLY)
2024 – 186 counties in 10 states with one new state completed: Arkansas
Lifetime – 1158 counties in 38 states with eight states completed in this order: Alabama (2016), Mississippi (2021), Florida (2021), Georgia (2022), Louisiana (2022), Tennessee (2022), South Carolina (2023), and Arkansas (2024) – I’ve included a gallery of maps below showing all the rides in all eight states that I’ve completed. The amount of labor that went into creating these maps and also doing the rides is pretty high, so please appreciate each one, lol. The map at the top of this post is my lifetime rides covering 1158 counties in 38 states.
| STATE | COMPLETED | RIDES | STATES | DISTANCE | CLIMBING |
| Alabama | 2016 | 6,015 | 9 | 255,995 mi. | 25,308,114 ft. |
| Mississippi | 2021 | 64 | 11 | 9,768 mi. | 402,620 ft. |
| Florida | 2021 | 63 | 6 | 6,584 mi. | 153,560 ft. |
| Georgia | 2022 | 224 | 7 | 27,752 mi. | 1,767,352 ft. |
| Louisiana | 2022 | 27 | 7 | 4,184 mi. | 120,459 ft. |
| Tennessee | 2022 | 117 | 11 | 15,470 mi. | 1,078,993 ft. |
| South Carolina | 2023 | 53 | 5 | 6,562 mi. | 433,097 ft. |
| Arkansas | 2024 | 22 | 10 | 4,347 mi. | 173,189 ft. |
Click on the links above to open an interactive version of each map in a new tab.
COUNTRY UPDATE (rides only)
2024 – 2 countries including one new country: Iceland
Lifetime – 9 countries – USA (6600 rides), New Zealand (13 rides), Canada (6 rides), Nicaragua (5 rides), France (4 rides), Iceland (4 rides), Mexico (2 rides), Denmark (2 rides), The Netherlands (1 ride)
wandrer
I found out towards the end of the year that I am currently leading the USA in terms of number of unique miles ridden out of 36,423 USA wandrers, which is tracked by a cool website called wandrer.earth. As it turns out, I’ve ridden almost 1% of all the roads and bikeable trails in the entire USA, which translates into 58,386 miles out of a total possible 6,404,813 miles of trails and roads being tracked (via Open Street Maps). They wrote up a fun blog post from a zoom interview I did for the website.
totals
2024 – 21,458 miles with 1,333,681 ft of climbing over 1430h 34m
Lifetime (on Strava) – 318,375 miles with 28,681,149 ft of climbing over 22,444h 58m tracked on 6818 rides since November 2008. Note that I started riding more seriously in 1993 and rode a few thousand miles in 1994, well over 5000 thousand miles in 1995, and about 10,000 miles annually in 1996, 1997, and 1998. My riding took a nose dive in graduate school scaled back to a couple thousand miles annually until I started riding again seriously in 2005 where I didn’t quite make 10,000 miles. But I averaged right about 10,000 miles in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Using these rough estimates, my current lifetime mileage is approximately 405,375 lifetime miles. I do have detailed records for 1995 and 1996 (paper records) and Microsoft database records for 1997 and 1998. I stopped tracking completely during graduate school (so no records from 1999-2004). But I took a picture of my bike computer at the end of each year starting in 2005 before resetting the odometer for the next year. I also switched over to Polar software and started tracking data from my heartrate monitor in 2007 and 2008 before getting the Garmin and switching all tracking to Strava in 2009.
eddingtons
With a lifetime goal of 256, I made a lot of progress this year bumping my Eddington number up to 221 … sounds close to 256, right? Well, no. I still need to ride 102 more rides of at least 256 miles to get that number all the way up to 256. That being said, I did 24 rides 256 miles or longer this year and 23 last year. So very optimistically and assuming no injuries or other major changes, I should make it to an Eddington number of 256 by early 2030. This is one of the challenges with the Eddington number – goal setting! At the moment it seems like I have set my “lifetime” goal of 256 at far too small a number. But who knows if I’m going to make it to the year 2030, especially given the inherent dangers of riding a bicycle on modern roads where everyone is distracted and in a hurry. So I’m already trying to keep my long rides/days closer to 300 miles, which is truly a stretch goal, but I will be thankful to make it to 256 hopefully.
THe highlights
With 24 rides of at least 256 miles, there were a lot of epic adventures this year. As I get older, the fresher a memory is, the more meaningful it is. So I’ve got to say one of the highlights of this year was definitely yesterday’s completion of the Festive 500 with a 256 mile ride after flying home from Minneapolis, especially since I got to finish the last 14 miles riding with my son locally and showing him my commute route home from work.
But the best highlight of the year was riding my bike last month from my house in Hoover, Alabama on a long commute to Staunton, Virginia to rabbit-sit for my daughter for a couple days while she was out of town and then help her with the drive back home to Alabama. Half of the “fun” of these adventures is planning out the route. One road in particular that I had been looking forward to and changed the entire setup of my bike for was a road called “Buffalo Rd” climbing up from the James River in Buchanan, Virginia up and over a small pass before dropping down into Lexington, Virginia. It was easily the highlight of the entire trip and included unexpectedly herding some cows. See below:
Finishing Arkansas
Another highlight was definitely all my rides in Arkansas this year to finish out riding in all the counties in Arkansas. I completed about a dozen rides totaling 1,975 miles spread out over several breaks in school and over the summer. The culminating final ride after an earlier failed weekend (shortened route and missed some counties due to LOTs of rain) was a beautiful (but cold) fall break 550 mile weekend in October where I was the first in my family to find the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet which was visible all over the southeast after sunset. I found the comet while crossing the top of a large Ozark mountain and looking back one last time thinking it was too late. But there it was, right there as clear as day.
Iceland
I raced The Rift towards the end of summer in Iceland. It was my first time in Iceland even though everyone else from my family has been there at least once. My friends Michael Staley and Rick Swagler convinced me to go over and do the race with them that they had done the previous year called “The Rift”. The name is based on how the race spans two different continental plates that are pulling apart. While the race itself was awesome and just about as traditional a “gravel race” as you can imagine but in the context of incredible scenery of glaciers and volcanoes, the highlight for the trip for me was definitely traveling all around Iceland hiking and biking with my wife and son.
The Crowdstrike software attack that took down airline reservation systems happened on the day we were leaving to come back so Delta rebooked us on a flight THREE DAYS later. So we did get three bonus days that Delta ended up mostly reimbursing. My daughter was busy studying and living her best life in Oxford for a Virginia study abroad program for college students, so she missed out on this trip to Iceland but we hope to go back again!
Winning a bicycle race
Another highlight was winning the Shake and Bake gravel race (masters), my first bicycle race to win since the 2016 Skyway Epic 100 when I was in the best shape of my life. This year, I rode to the race, won the race, and then rode home on a long enough route to still count towards my Eddington 256 goal. Interestingly, I rode almost exactly 256 miles without having to add on anything at the end, which I kept laughing at from about 80 miles away doing the calculations in my head based on current distance and how much farther to go. It always changes a bit if you do any route deviations or GPS drift. And I wasn’t sure if there would be any route changes during the race or how accurate the race course was on ridewithgps. So it surprised me (and made me laugh) that every 10-15 miles I would recalculate what my total distance was looking like and it was 256 on the money. Then when I climbed up the hill to my house, it didn’t tick over from 259.9 until shortly after I made it to my driveway. So I kept on going and as soon as it ticked over, I turned around and rode back leading to ride of 256.08 miles on Strava.
University of Montevallo cycling team
The last highlight for the year was getting to see my son sign with the UoM cycling team in the spring and then start training and racing with them in the fall. It has been so awesome to see him succeeding and making friends at his first year in college at a great school. Plus, I got into all kinds of adventures randomly riding to/from Montevallo (which is not outside the range of a commute home from work … albeit a bit on the long side) as well as riding down to Auburn to see him race.
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