The Cycle 100 Challenge…

May is Bike Month. I love Bike Month. Of course I also ride daily the other eleven months of the year, but Bike Month is special. Mostly that’s because it’s May and the weather bounces back and forth between wet and dry. Of course it’s also special because there are a lot of events going on around the country and even here in Hawaii.
This year I’m participating in “The Cycle 100 Challenge” which is the Hawaii Bicycling League’s bit of the National Bike Challenge. The 100 runs just during the month of May, the National runs from May 1st through September 30th. Basically the idea is to get folks to track their riding and accumulate points. Both of the challenges are using Endomondo as the tracking tool and the social interaction platform.
The challenges are just about accumulating miles or going faster over the same course like Strava. Here the idea is go encourage people to get on their bike more often. The point system is weighted towards riding daily rather than lots of miles – though they count too.
If you ride a mile on a given day you’ll get 20 points just for riding, and, if I’m not mistaken (a frequent occurrence) another point for the mile. Thus riding just one mile every day would net you 147 points over the course of a week. That’s just 7 miles. If you rode 100 miles on Saturday but didn’t ride the rest of the week you’d have 120 points. Better to ride every day. Of course if you ride 100 miles everyday…well…good luck with that, folks do it, I’m not one of them.
So what’s my point here? Well in a very non-competitive way I’m doing pretty well in the standings. I ride pretty much every day. In fact during the month of May I didn’t ride on two days. I was in the hospital on those days if my memory serves. In fact, at the moment out of 139 or so riders who signed up in Hawaii i’m in 4th place on May 30th, with most of 2 days to go.
I will not finish 4th though. I’ve been neck and neck with another rider for the last couple of days and as soon as he hops on his bike today he’ll pull ahead. Still it’s highly likely I’ll finish 5th. Not bad for an old fat guy. What’s my secret. I ride every day. That’s it. Just get those daily points consistently. Now I’ll admit I have a few long rides in there as well, the JBK Haleiwa Metric Century, a ride to Ewa Beach, and last weekend’s ride to Haleiwa, but mostly it’s just an accumulation of daily points and the 10 to 20 miles I ride. Good stuff.
Since I probably won’t be in 4th by the end of the day, nor tomorrow, here’s some proof…as Manny A. says, “pictures prove it happened.” [Knowing something about photography I’d argue the point, but hey, for the most part he’s right.]