At the risk of jinxing myself, by the time these words are in print, I will have reached my long-awaited personal goal of 50,000 miles on my bicycle, a quest I started 16 years ago. In that time, I have ridden in 22 states and on six continents. I have ridden in every calendar month of the year. 35 thousand of those miles were ridden on a titanium bicycle made in Springfield Ohio by a company called Airborne which took over the old Huffy plant there. After I was hit by the blue van in 2020 that cracked my shoulder, my ribs and the frame of the bicycle, I have continued on another titanium by a company called Lightspeed out of Missouri. Airborne went out of business.
My aim was to complete this mark by my 70th birthday. I am actually reaching it with a little more than a month to spare. Although I have ridden bicycles my whole life, I only started recording them in 2010. In that time there were years that I hit five or six thousand and years which I rode hardly at all. It took only six years to hit 25,000. It has taken ten more to reach 50k.
What’s the point? I receive no honors, no trophies or recognition. I could have easily stopped riding or stopped counting, and it would not have made a difference to anyone but me. It was always an arbitrary ambition. The fun has been the journey. The thrill has been the changing scenery of each ride, the adventures along the way. Reaching the goal is more the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.
Most of my rides have been solo. My schedule of being a principal and a husband, father, son, sibling and grandfather varies each week, so I don’t like to commit myself to riding at a set time with any weekly established rides around town. But riding by myself has given me thousands of hours to think, to pray, to contemplate how I might live my life better. Of course, one can’t daydream too much on a bike as a rider must watch for cars, people, dogs, potholes, and other obstructions.
Ten years ago, I rode through small villages in Ghana where school children shouted out oburani which means “white man,” a rarity for them. In Chile this past spring, I saw the face of God in a sunset at the peak of the Andes Mountains. In Amsterdam I sat in bicycle traffic jams. In Australia, I had to orient myself riding on the left side of roads and paths. On Prince Edward Island in Canada, I rode to the house of Anne of Green Gables, naively not realizing that this book is a work of fiction. It was pretty house, nonetheless.
Besides my collision with the van, I have had close calls, some my fault, many more the fault of distracted drivers or people who just think that I should not be sharing the road with their large, menacing trucks. I have changed dozens of flat tires while out on journeys. I have been so hot that my clothes were soaked through with sweat and so cold that my fingers have stung. I have struggled up hills that I thought I could never finish and rode down hills where I was convinced that my brakes would give out at the end. I can honestly say that I have enjoyed each mile.
Now what? 50,001, 50,002, 50,003 and so on until I can’ t ride any more. The mileage re-sets. Now I aim for 60,000 miles and, with any luck, 100,000. It took me 16 years to reach 50. I will only be 86 years old in another 16 years.
Except for our goal to get to heaven, the satisfaction of all other goals is in the attempt. I am going to enjoy each mile and thank God for the ability to do it. Pedal on!
Jim Silcott