Cycling Savvy tour pre-ride

I have spent some time trying to create a tour route for the upcoming Cycling Savvy class here in Louisville. An important part of the creation process is what we call "ground truth" examination. This gives us a chance to look at the features we want to teach in real life (instead of using the satellite view and Google car camera view), in part to be sure that a road that appears to go through actually does, to get up to date information on road conditions, and better decide where to situate the gatekeeper and receiving instructors for each feature.

I finally got to ride my route today. Jenn will get to ride it with me over the next few days--indeed, I may give her the cue sheet and have her ride it herself and compare notes afterward, then hit it one more time over the weekend and fine-tune things a bit.

For some reason, I was thinking about my bike miles today, and wondered how many miles I've ridden in what I think of as my bike-driving era, compared to how many lifetime miles I've ridden. I have no way to even guess at the latter number, as I didn't really keep track of such things until I got my first recumbent bike in 1992, and then only sporadically until the beginning of 2010, when David convinced me to start using MyCyclingLog.com to track my riding.

In 2003 or '04, I had a minor crash while riding my Bacchetta Strada in Iroquois Park. At the time, I figured I had ridden something like thirty thousand miles since getting my Linear recumbent bike in '92. I probably rode an average of twenty-five hundred miles a year between that time and my first posts on MyCyclingLog.com, for ten or fifteen thousand more miles--I'll call it forty thousand from 1992 to January 2010. My stats on MyCyclingLog.com show that I've ridden over twenty thousand miles since January 2010, and over a third of those miles in 2011 (my banner year).

This number pales compared to many racers' results, and even compared to several club members I know. However, it's significant that I've had few crashes, NO car-vs-bike crashes (I count my fall on the Frankfort Avenue rail crossing as a solo crash, even though it was partially influenced by a motorist who cut me off), and no crashes that required hospital visits.

Well, not really significant, when one considers that cycling is safer than many more mundane activities, like being in a car (by half, based on injuries per million hours of exposure), or taking a bath, or walking in a room where there are loose rugs.