For those at the back who might not have heard the first time, I’ll say it again…

No one cares how far you rode your bike.

Let’s just get that straight out there in the open.

Distance is the most superficial metric with which to measure your cycling ability. It’s a basic and effortless means with which to impress the layman with their “That’s a long ways” as anything beyond riding to the shops is an impossible length for the person in the street to imagine on a bicycle.

For fellow cyclists, it’s a straightforward, shorthand method of letting someone know where you lie on the riding league table, and a handy passive-aggressive “I’m better than you” boast if that’s the way you like to deal with things.

> Going the distance — learn how to build up to an epic ride

It’s easy to obsess about miles ridden per ride/week/month/year and confuse distance cycled with prowess, experience, training, aptitude, divinity and kudos; and I’ve been pedalling around long enough to witness plenty of people do at least one of these at some time in their cycling biography – myself included – when I thought piling on the miles meant something.

By the way, I’m going to be using miles for the rest of the article; but any fool knows that if you want to make your ride quantity seem more impressive, you’ll prefer kilometres as your measure of distance. It instantly makes you about one-and-half-times ‘better’. 

100 miles
Congratulations, sort of... (Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons)

The cycling world is full of mileage challenges. Those led by marketing campaigns, charity-based goals, well-intentioned motivational incentives, and entirely arbitrary figures that individuals like to conjure up as annual distance goals. The latter are usually nice round numbers, as no one seems to want to finish on an odd figure, which is weird as it would make just as much sense as a randomly generated figure. But, I digress.

When it’s not distance, it’s frequency. Every day for a month, or a significantly large ride a month for the year… the list of mileage bait is endless. The proliferation of social media has exploded the culture of racking up the miles and displaying it on a pretty graph, chasing the dopamine high compared to when you might just scribble the total in a little book for your own amusement and analysis. Press send on any distance-related post (include altitude gain if you want to increase the wow factor) and smugly watch the likes and comments and status massaging accumulate. It makes it all worthwhile, and it’s great for the fragile self-worth.

I’m no stranger to putting the miles in (quite a lot of them sometimes if it matters) so I’m keenly aware of the difference between wanting to do something and having to do something. I’ve dragged myself through the latter enough to decidedly favour the former whenever possible. Committing to any distance-related challenge or goal will at some point steer your bike to riding down the sunken road of loathed drudgery by having to go out when you might not necessarily have much desire to. I’ve done too much mandatory misery in the name of completion, and witnessed too many others reluctantly shuffle onto a saddle to finish some mile-related chore to only know this as an inescapable truth.

While the motivational aspect is often cheerfully waved about as a positive, nothing sucks the enjoyment out of an activity like making it compulsory, or submitting it to a deadline, and cycling becomes the sucky feeling of homework you’ve left to the last minute on a Sunday night.

Proponents of such things will point to the incentive and ‘we’re in this together’ group encouragement that the cycling community can offer, and the camaraderie of a virtual peloton, ignoring the fact that a whole lot of them are sat in front of the fire just waiting for the schadenfreude to unroll.

We’re nearing the end of another edition of a certain festive cycling distance challenge, that on the face of it is not an entirely impossible task; but when you have to squeeze it around the social and family commitments that crowd this time of year, it gets harder. If you live in the northern hemisphere, the lack of daylight hours, the not inconsiderable and predictably harsh realities of winter weather and debatable road conditions conspire to make the competition a proper mournful ordeal. 

While the motivational reasons behind it are a laudable way to get people out the door while they might otherwise be festering on the sofa, the downsides can more than cancel all of this out. I’ve watched enough cycling friends put themselves through this challenge over its history, and they’ve all hated it at some point. The combination of wind, weather and having to ride when they ordinarily wouldn’t makes them complete the trial with a bitter and bile-ridden dislike of their bike that takes a while to get over… at least until the next dry, sunny day with double-digit temperatures. 

It’s also now become a bit of a Christmas tradition that someone within my extended riding family breaks a bone falling on ice while partaking in this jolly festive challenge, so that all adds to the fun.

A number of years after its inception, this particular winter challenge started to allow indoor miles to count towards a valid completion stamp. I’m not sure if that just confirms that trying to do this outside is a silly idea, or if you hate yourself and your family more than the outdoor riders do to go bore yourself into a garage-based stupor. Could you get some prawn vol-au-vents out the freezer whilst you’re there?

If you do have to ride insane distances, Be More Bill

Ask yourself if you’re getting paid to do this. Is there the chance of a worthwhile prize? What have you proved? Do you care? Does anyone really care? If the answer to any of these is ‘No’, then you’re allowed to stay at home in the warm. It’s quite telling that over the years, the number of riders within my shaded bit of the two-wheeled Venn diagram considering dipping their overshoed toe into the bleak midwinter task has been ever trending towards zero.

There’s no doubt that hitting an arbitrary annual mileage target is a popular pastime, if you’re the kind of person that likes to imagine a random figure large enough to impress your friends. Every person that manages to hit their made-up goal is equalled by at least one other that doesn’t fulfil their total, and is a little disappointed in themselves. Luckily it’s easy enough to rectify any shortfall by simply ignoring that random figure, or just retrospectively making up a new annual mileage goal to fit, as it’s unlikely anyone has paid any attention whatsoever to the distance you said you were going to reach 12 months ago anyway.

Simply make up a new one that’s lower than your final annual mileage, so you can say you beat it by a significant amount, and everyone will be pleased for you for a brief heartbeat (hurrah) before returning to whatever they were doing.

> What can we learn from ultra-distance cyclists?

I don’t care about how far you’ve been. I don’t believe anyone aside from you does really. It’s the most simplistic and tedious way to measure your cycling, especially if you use it as a stick with which to beat your worth over other riders.

The only thing that it really genuinely proves is that you have more spare time to ride a bike. If you can only value yourself by how far you’ve been, then you need to stop more often, and have a long hard look at where you are. Ride your bike as much as you like, as far as you like, but don’t judge yourself or your riding success by volume of miles. And don’t judge yourself against other people by how far you’ve ridden, or others by how far they may or may have not. Measure all of this by what happened along the way, the places you visited, the views you paused in front of, the people and characters you met, the amazing meal you had, that kindness of a stranger, the next view you paused in front of, the sunset/sunrise you saw, that moment on the road that made you laugh out loud. And the one that made you cry. Tell me the tales instead. Tell me about the hundreds of things that happened that weren’t the miles. 

Any and all of these reasons above are far more interesting (if only to listen to) and far more important than how far you rode, or how you managed to complete a tick list or fill a spreadsheet; each of which I think are so far down the bottom of reasons to ride a bike that they’re not even on the same page.

Don’t make your New Year’s resolution about how far you’re aiming to ride this year. Make it about how and where you’re going, and then tell me the story.

This article was first published in 2021, and was last updated in December 2025