There's not a lot good to be said about 2020; in fact, I'm not going out on any limbs saying it's been one of the crappiest years of most of our lifetimes. But there have been some highlights: the outcome of the presidential election is one that far too many of us take for granted, perhap. Maybe we've been distracted from recognizing the actual results by all the idiocy emanating from what I follow Stephen Colbert's example in referring to as T****.
But, far more personally, a few months ago I was looking at my bike mileage for the year and thinking that I had certainly chosen a bad year to set a public goal of riding 1500 miles. The second half of March, April, May, and June I rode a lot less than I had in most recent years. I wasn't commuting to work. There was no bookstore day. There was no garden tour day. There was no backyard farm day. There was no yard sale day. There were no tulip fields to visit. I wasn't even going to the grocery store. I'm not sure I left West Seattle between mid-March and mid-July. My riding was essentially limited to deliberate exercise periods during which I anxiously worried about encountering anyone else on the street.
Somehow, publicly declaring that I wasn't going to achieve the goal turned things around. After that we just started riding more. Oh, the week or more of the weather being "very unhealthy" thanks to wildfires threw a wrench into September and then we both got sick (not Covid) for a week in October, but after each setback we just got back out and biked. Still mostly in West Seattle and with only one serious all-day ride (to Whistling Train Farm in Kent). And so I rode just over 800 miles in the final five months of the year and--woo-hoo!--hit 1504 miles on Boxing Day.
It's a tiny little thing, utterly meaningless in any way. But this year, I'm taking it as something to celebrate.
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