impossible targets

In case you hadn’t noticed, I do a lot of cycling. And as I frequently tell Paula, I don’t do it ‘to keep fit’, although this is clearly a benefit. I do it because I enjoy it. And I like to set targets for myself. For example, at the start of the seven-month period that I spent in Hong Kong in 2015/16, I set a target of 5,000 kilometres for the aggregate distance to be cycled. This was a purely arbitrary figure that I thought would be easy to achieve.

I was comfortably on target after five months, but I reckoned without El Niño and its detrimental effect on the local weather, and I eventually fell short by almost 600km. However, I kept the same target for the following winter, and because there was almost no adverse weather, I reached it with some time to spare, as the following summary of my 2016/17 activity shows:

There was just one small problem!

The speedometer that I’d been using to record my activities for the past few years had occasionally malfunctioned—the contacts had become tarnished—and on my first time out upon returning to Hong Kong in October last year, it refused to work altogether. So I bought a new one and duly recorded the distance cycled, failing to notice that there was anything amiss.

On descents of steep hills in Hong Kong, it’s often necessary to proceed with caution because there isn’t a safe run-out at the bottom, but where there is a safe run-out, I like to see how fast I can go. And my second ride was around the final frontier, a highlight of which is the switchback. I had previously managed to reach 50km/hr on the two main descents here, but this time I couldn’t do any better than 46km/hr. Then it dawned on me: I’d transferred my old speedometer from a hybrid bike to a mountain bike without recalibrating it to take account of the latter’s smaller wheels!

This meant that all my records for the past few years were inflated by around 8 percent, and I hadn’t hit 5,000km in 2016/17 after all. Damn! As a result, I decided that not only should I aim for a genuine 5,000km this time, I should try to beat the false 5128.7km from the previous winter. It did cross my mind to try for 6,000km, but I dismissed this idea as unrealistic.

My second target was to improve on the false trip average of 52.33km. I did consider whether I should aim for a trip average of 60km, but in the end I didn’t think this would be feasible either.

Because so many of my rides in 2016/17 had covered less than 40km, I decided to set myself a target minimum of 40km per trip last winter, which wasn’t at all difficult to maintain for the first two months. However, due to a miscalculation, I failed to make the distance on one occasion, so at the beginning of 2018, I decided to increase the target minimum to 50km.

I don’t remember at what point I noticed that my trip average had been increasing steadily, but in mid-March I decided to increase the target minimum to 60km per trip. By the middle of April, my trip average had crept up to 60km, but then I experienced a minor setback. I was caught out in a thunderstorm and decided to abort, recording only 19.5km for that particular ride. This knocked my trip average below 60km again. Paula suggested that I not include it because it was in a sense an artificial reading, but I felt that this would be cheating, so it is included in the overall figures.

And I did hit 5,000km with a month to spare, so although I’d originally dismissed the idea as unrealistic, I thought that I might as well see whether I could reach 6,000km after all. And I did:

You will notice that after the minor setback in April, I was able to push my trip average above 60km again. So that was two ‘impossible’ targets achieved. But there was a third!

I’d been wondering for a while whether I could cycle 160km (100 miles) in a single day. Actually, the problem isn’t so much the distance as the location(s). A lot of my bike rides take in narrow paths and alleyways, where you would be lucky to average 10km/hr, and in order to do 160km, it’s necessary to average at least 16km/hr, which is achievable only on roads and official cycle tracks. So the problem is finding a long enough route that meets this criterion.

I had managed 123.6km in November 2016 by following the cycle track network around new towns in the New Territories, but as I explained above, this was a false reading. However, by expanding the options that I covered then, I managed to cycle 134.1km in a day in December last year. Finding an extra 26km was always going to be a problem, but I eventually succeeded in February:

I have no intention of trying to improve on these figures this winter, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have some targets in mind. During November 2015, I cycled a total distance of 1341.1km, which remains the farthest I’ve ridden in a single month. This included a weekly total of 356.2km, also a record. However, as I’ve already indicated, these are false readings that need to be replaced. I do think that improving the monthly total is probably impossible, because among other things it depends on continuously favourable weather, but I will certainly be giving it a go.