Pinkbike Poll: How Far Have You Ridden in Your Lifetime?
Russ Mantle, who has ridden one million miles since 1952. Credit: Robert Spanring / Cycling UK
With the advent of Strava and the host of other means to map and record rides it's become much easier to keep track of mileage to brandish for bragging rights, training or even just for personal challenges. But this advent of automized uploading and collating of our ride data doesn't mean you can't keep record the old school way, right?
Russ Mantle, one hell of a chap from England, was the spark for this week's poll question. This year the 82 year old reached the one million mile milestone. One bloody million. It doesn't matter which way you look at it or in which units (just over 1.6 million km), it's an astounding amount of riding over the course of a lifetime. Tip of the cap.
According to the Telegraph article, he's kept records all his life. And his handwritten ride records, started in 1952, include fantastic little details of temperature, wind direction and which lovely little villages he passed through. I find it utterly humbling to read the story of Russ and his quotes and responses depict a man who just got on with it, no grumbling. None more so than when he suffered a heart attack three years ago and now 'only' rides every other day.
Mr Mantle's paper records from 1992 and him racing the National Championships 25 mile Time Trial in 1955.
Converting this number of digits into tangible feats is where it really starts to hit home about how far this bloke rode. He's circumnavigated the Earth 40 times and has done the equivalent of back and forth to the moon, twice! And with a flavour of saving the environment, he's ridden a bike double the amount that your average driver will likely drive in their whole lifetime.
Curious as to how many people know or can speculate how far they've ridden in their lifetime, and as a nod to Russ, this week's question is: "How far have you ridden in your lifetime?"
Most of us haven't kept meticulous records like Russ, but at the very least this might spark some thought into just how far we've each ridden a bike.
How far have you ridden in your lifetime?
If you know, you know! But you can also throw an educated guess in there too.
And for something a bit more tangible, with it being close to the end of the year and with lots of us logging our riding throughout the year, let's see how far and how high you've climbed in 2019.
Author Info:
Must Read This Week
Sign Up for the Pinkbike Newsletter - All the Biggest, Most Interesting Stories in your Inbox
PB Newsletter Signup
or bald eagles per cheeseburger...
do wizards ride bikes?
Just because we're Canada's Mexico.
Grade man : "we have to dig a square thats 3 meters by 4 meters and 2 ft deep."
The imperial-SI debate pops up here every once in a while. It would help if everyone who measures tire or suspension pressure in psi and/or talks spring gauge in lbs/inch would just accept that it is just fine working with both systems.
how many bikes you got? a lot.
How many drops have you dropped? a lot
How many problems ya solved? a lot
Dig a new trail, dey dont dig them selves~
Roll what ya got cause it do that sh#$.
Holler at ya friends, gonna ride or Die!
Never wrote no rhymes but I might as well try.
How many punctures?
Then everything becomes relative since you'll never need to be as fast or skillfull as sam hill, greg minaar or nino schurter since they very likely spent a great deal of their life riding 25 - 40h a week which would make 15-24% of their week. If you ride 2-5h a week you can now feel good, since riding is only a part of your life, not your LIFE.
But this Russ Mantle guy is nuts, say he averaged 25km/h 16mph then he rode 64000h say since he was 12. Then he must have ridden EVERY SINGLE LIVING DAY FOR 2.5h and not skipped once. That's now my definition of persistence. And all in those nice English weather conditions, badass.
Average rider keeps his bike for 3-5 years. Lets say their bike was 5000.00 and lets go with 4 years as the average. Thats 1,250 KMs a year on a mountain bike. with the average ride being about 15-16 KMs and taking about 1 hour and 23 minutes on average, you would need to complete 78 rides in a year with a total of 105 hours of on the saddle time to achieve 1250kms a year.... So according to you anyone below these stats in a year is lazy? wut?
Do we sell litre-a-cola?
..."dont spit in that cops burger"
Its the fastest who get paid, and the fastest who get laid
And if you only split it into two, where do you put a gravel segment? On both road and mountain? What if there’s a gravel road segment that a bunch of gravel riders do, but only like 5 mountain bikes have done, and then you come in on a hardtail and get the KOM and it’s faster than anyone has done it period. Shouldn’t you be recognized for beating all those gravel riders?
I agree it would be nice in theory, but in practice it would be a mess, I think
In addition, it would organize a lot especially on the weekly group leaderboards. As it is right now, the leaders on the weekly group leaderboards are always the road riders and park guys because they have the most mileage. It is impossible to categorize every kind of bike, but 4 broad categories would help a lot organize the type of riding.
Also, on the Strava maps to have a distinction between dirt and road segments would be great.
I like riding my gravel bike on gravel and throwing in some light singletrack between fire-roads, so where would those efforts be categorized?
I think the current system is fine. Nobody is riding a TT bike on singletrack in Moab and people aren't racing the Tour on a Bronson.
I use an app for tracking ski runs that auto-pauses on lifts, so it's clearly possible.
Also, when I talk about separating dirt and road segments on the Strava maps, I am only talking about the labeling, so when you search for trails you could distinguish what segments are dirt and what segments are road. Just like trailforks uses different colors to distinguish difficulty of segments, Strava could use different colors for dirt and road segments.
Where was strava in 1995???
As a software engineer, a pet project I have wanted to do is a data visualization tool for strava records. They just don't do much of a job showing me all the stuff I would like to see.
For example, All-time elevation climbed/descended, and PRs per bike. The latter sounds cool because I have a big squishy bike and a hardtail and I'd love to know how I fare between them over the long run. Data is cool.
thomaschampagne.github.io/elevate/#/landing
Keep up the good work
dannychew.com
I know that's complicated for Americans. A bit like you can't get your head around practice the noun and practise the verb
Hey my mistake. I actually thought the UK was using km.
That being said, i was born and lived in australia for 20 years. I still use metric for work (construction) because inches suck.
^ is that like a line of thermometers, speedometers, anemometers...
I measure my distance and climb in kilometres and metres