At the beginning of the year January was a really good riding month. But everything was getting fuzzy in my vision and when I went to the eye doctor he recommended both eyes have cataract surgery. That knocked out January. Then February rained like hell. It destroyed a lot of roads that they still haven't repaired or repaired well. On one of the local 10% two mile climbs there's a section that is plainly going to fall over the cliff if we get another hard rain next winter. I called the county and they put a patch on the worst part. The patch was fine but 30 feet below that is another section they should have done as well.
Anyway every riding day for a month it rained. Then my brother started going blind from glaucoma which required me to be taking him to the eye doctor every day for a month until they got it under control. He now has better eyesight than I do in one eye and as good in the other.
Then my retired NCIS friend visited and in chasing him down a steep hill I hit a pothole, slid off the road and fell into this stone culvert that was 5' deep. It felt like every bone in my body was broken but it was just bruised. So that knocked out another month of riding.
Since then I tried to get back into shape. Four months off of the bike really screws your fitness up and so it took me a couple of months of solo riding to be able to try to ride with the group again. Though my rides were normally longer than they would be with the group but slower. 60-70 mile rides were often. Then I dropped back down to three hard rides a week and one recovery ride. So I put in about 130-150 miles a week with over 6,000 feet of climbing that I would call climbing. Redwood Rd, little Pinehurst, big Pinehurst, Norris Canyon - both ways on Palomares etc. There's a 600 ft 5% climb that I ride going to and from one of the rides. If you relax on it you can use it as a warmup. But young guys will use it going to work in the morning to the jails halfway up. That make you ride too fast if you're not careful. They you aren't warming up but wearing out.
Anyway - I would normally have a target of 6,000 miles for the year and made 8,000, this year I had a target of 4,000 and will probably put in 5,000. Before my concussion in 2009 I put in 10 years of 10,000 miles/yr. That wasn't all that much since Dan'imal Tonelli would do 20,000 every year like clockwork until he got too afraid of the increasingly dangerous traffic as they've now build houses everywhere. He now runs marathons.
I'm sure that over most of the USA the weather doesn't permit the riding time we get in out here on the west coast. Indoor trainers and video game trainers certainly are a good way to keep at least part of your fitness when you can't ride outdoors. But they are not riding a bike and shouldn't be treated as mileage or climbing.
PansyBob telling us that he can ride l'Alpe d'Huez every other day shows you just the sort of rider he considers himself. That's the same sort of thing as his opinions of tubeless tires when half of more of all the new racing tires are tubeless.
