How far did you ride in 2023?

This is a request to submit your mileage totals for the last twelve months (1st Jan. 2023 to 31st Dec. 2023) for consideration towards the annual awards for the greatest distances cycled. Your scores will be entered into the Big Spreadsheet where for more than twenty years the precious records of your accomplishments in the club have been maturing.

There are two shiny trophies, one for the woman who has cycled more miles than any other woman and one for the man for the highest mileage amongst the men. At this point in our social evolution having two separate prizes for persons of each gender might be starting to sound a little quaint. But that is our tradition and while the prize money attached to these two awards remains identical for both winners nothing is likely to change.

And we have a special award, the Mark Roy Trophy, for the person recording the largest increase in mileage over the previous year. So anyone who has posted their mileage for both 2023 and 2022 is eligible. 

To summarise the rules, your miles must have been clocked up whilst riding your bicycle, tricycle, tandem or eBike on or off road. Mileages achieved on turbo trainers, Watt bikes or any other static contraption don't count. We know that this is something of a blow to members who were keeping indoors, out of harm's way, during the pandemic, riding through virtual alpine landscapes with Zwift or Rouvy but for now we are only considering miles actually, rather than virtually, travelled.

For the competition, contenders for the prizes must be regular riders in the club though we are happy to collect mileage data for everyone who is a paid up member of CTC South West London. And we wish to continue recording mileages for our several members who ride eBikes.

If you are curious at all about how many miles you ride in the course of a year please start recording your distances today for 2024 in a diary or spreadsheet.

Just one word or warning; several riders who use a GPS enabled device such as a Garmin, or smartphones running apps like Strava or RideWithGPS have experienced rides when their devices stop communicating with the satellites, sometimes for quite a while, and this can lead to totally unreliable data. So please verify the accuracy of your data. The evidence of this known problem is a long straight bee-line between two points on your ride where you know the road really had many twists and turns.

Fixie Dave's Garmin nodded off for a while with this result!

In my opinion this is not a problem which is specific to Strava or other phone app but is to do with the phone and its own software, memory resources perhaps. This erroneous data can also accumulate if you have hopped on a train with your bike but forgotten to stop recording 😏. Fancy doing that!

Please write to me with your total mileage:

Tim Court (Graduate Bean Counter)

We hope to be able to present the prizes in our traditional awards ceremony at the Annual Lunch, this year on Wednesday 6th March.

A very Happy New Year to you all and if you haven't been collecting your mileage scores please start now, from January 1st 2024.

The Bean Counters need your numbers!

~ Tim