Happy 2026!

Yay new year! I always get excited about new years, even though not that much changes for me and I have no great expectations of magically becoming a new and improved version of myself. But I like the twice yearly arbitrary opportunity (the other being on my birthday, my own personal new year;) to take stock of my year — what went well, what felt good, what I want to gently redirect, things I want to continue to focus on or maybe shake loose.

I’m not actually going to write about those things here, since they are in my physical journal and that is where they will stay for now:) BUT I will say that when it came to actual pragmatic, measurable goals that I made for last year, I did indeed make it to 100 miles of biking per week! Or rather, 5,200 miles of biking for the year, since weekly mileage may vary.

In fact, I made it to 5,320 miles! So, bonus points for me, heh.

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(some miles had really pretty sunsets! And incredibly swollen rivers after it rained so so so much in December)

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All these miles is despite being away from my house and bicycle in Portland for 6 and a half weeks over the course of the year. Though one of those weeks was a bike trip, so we’ll say 5.5 non-biking weeks;) (Side note: how awesome is it that my last year had so much travel??)

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(more fun flooding shenanigans)

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My sweet 13-year old friend who helped me calculate my yearly mileage as we waited to ring in the new year asked me a very astute question: did I end up biking that much because of a smattering of really big biking days, or was it just because of consistency over time? (Dude I love this kid. Was I that thoughtful at 13? Probably not.) And the answer is that it was very, very much consistency over time. When I look back, I don’t think I have any single day where I biked over 75 miles, and only a few that were even remotely close to that, mostly on my bike trip, and two day trips to Sauvie Island. But mostly, I just plugged away at about 15 miles per day (or 28 on days where I commute to work and back) over and over and over and over until it added up to 5,320 miles. Some days I didn’t bike at all, or only biked the two miles to Mt Tabor and back to go running. But continuing to do it over and over and over and over (and over) really adds up over time.

Which brings me back to new years and resolutions. I am firmly of the mind that I will never really bring about gigantic changes to who I am, especially not in some dramatic sweep all at once. BUT, I really do believe that if I want to do something, I can just keep chipping away at it consistently, sometimes skipping a day or a week but remembering that it’s a thing I want to do and coming back to it. And that slow-burn consistency is where the forward momentum for any sort of change comes from. For me.

Anyway. Happy new year to all:)

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P.S. I loved this article that is running-focused but widely applicable about “the case for not starting over” with new years. A lot of it really resonated with me for all the things I just typed.