This post belongs in the totally-arbitrary-physical-goals camp:)
At the beginning of this year, I wrote that I was recommitting to my goal of biking 100 miles per week, something I’ve done with varying degrees of attentiveness since COVID when I first implemented my “fake commute” from home back to home. Post-COVID, I’ve gone back to my office but not as frequently as before, so I find that if I’m going to bike 100 miles per week — my baseline when I was commuting to my office 3 or 4 days per week — I still have to somewhat more intentionally work toward it.
So, how’s it going?
Here’s a funny thing. Even though my stated goal is “100 miles per week,” in my head I actually extrapolate to a yearly calculation of 5,200 miles. This makes up for the fact that some weeks I’m not in town as much so I ride less, but then I ride more on other weeks. In my head it equalizes over the course of a year.
HOWEVER. This year there have been many, many, many weeks where I am not in town for several or even a full week’s worth of days, many of which are spent fully in the wilderness with no bikes, and that has made it more of a thing to recover from the low- or no-biking weeks. I suppose a sane person would just adjust their goal to reflect the number of weeks she’s actually in Portland, but where’s the fun in that? Ha.
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(Some weeks, like this week in the Canadian Rockies, contained lots and lots and lots of hiking but zero biking;) Photo by James)
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(Other weeks, I’ve just been living for work at Mt St Helens, or Mt Adams, or wherever)
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But you know what? Even without adjusting, I’m going to make it. As we speak, I’ve ridden 4,497 miles this year. And even though I have two more weeks coming up where I am fully not in Portland, plus several away weekends as well (how how how (and why?) did I stuff so many plans into the end of my year?? ha), I still only have 703 miles to go to get to 5200. So even if I ride zero miles for the two weeks I’m gone, that still gives me 8 weeks to go 703 miles, only 88 miles per week.
Let me take a step back and say that no, none of this matters in the slightest. It’s all just about trying to do a totally arbitrary thing I re-set my mind to 10 months ago. BUT, I think that it’s a nice commitment to myself to actually do the things I say that I want to do. I feel good about this. Plus there’s just the fact that this much biking just really makes me a happier person, so even though it fully doesn’t matter how many miles I’ve ridden, the sum total of all this biking is a happy and exercised stasia who also feels good about to the best of her abilities living up to a commitment she made to herself.
So, moral of the story is that none of this matters at all, but I still feel good about it. And we’ll see if I make it but I think I will. The end;)