To heck with #bava4000, that’s old news. Let’s acknowledge #rushaw4000 – 4,000 miles on the bike(s) in 2025. It being December 21st today there’s still a few more miles to go in 2025.
This isn’t all about bragging. It’s more about feeling like 2025 was a survival year, which again, sounds too dramatic. Better to call it a back-on-track year. Yeah, that’s better.
It’s not that all 4,000 miles were blissful, but as I reflect back on my year of riding, I’m not recalling any bad days. No crashes. Very few flats (two?). Of course there’s the constant interactions with bad drivers. That’s a given. There are nice interactions as well. You know, the faith in humanity restoration kind. The people in cars who stop and ask if you need help when you do get one of those flats. I couldn’t be more appreciative.
I didn’t necessarily blog as much as I wanted to. I never do. I’m pretty sure I wrote more than 4,000 words. 4,000 miles on the bike? That’s where I want to be. I ride a “road” bike most of the time, but I did add another bike to the stable that let’s me explore gravel roads and dirt trails in the style of a road bike. The featured pic for this post is me on my gravel bike in the Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt Area at Timucuan Preserve, very close to my home in Jacksonville Florida. It’s a beautiful place to ride a bike. However, my gravel bike and I are most happy in the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve. That’s where I spent nearly two hours riding the trails and taking in the ocean waves late last month. It’s a place that I get deliriously happy riding in and thankful that a place like this is so close to home.
So late December 2025 and I begin to think about what next year will bring. Yes, I DO believe it will be 2026 already – because it will be. Time marches on and “at my age” (Paul Dooley in Breaking Away), I appreciate every day. Hopefully even more miles will be spent on my bike. As my Strava screenshot says below, PROGRESS!
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