The Newsroom

A good month in October, putting on 206 km and change and just slightly under my September tally of 226 km. But more importantly, in October I hit my goal of cycling 2,000 km in 2012, which I'm ridiculously happy about.

I am not an athlete. I'm just a guy who decided three year ago that it would be fun to cycle to work in the summer. Eventually, that turned that into a 2012 goal of cycling a total of 2,000 km. That was a pretty lofty goal, given that in 2011, my cumulative total of running, walking and cycling was a mere 1,363 km  (and I originally figured I'd try to reach 1,500 km in 2012 before expanding that). So I'm happy that I not only achieved my goal, I crushed it - and I would have crushed it sooner had it not been for my August cycling accident. But I'm not going to rest on my laurels. I've already set another goal of cycling an additional 400 km before the end of the year. And for 2013, I think 2,500 would be a good start for a guy who isn't an athlete but just likes to ride his bicycle.

A pretty good September, totalling 226 km. I'm currently at 94% of my cycling goal of 2,000 km in 2012 (1,875 km as of yesterday), and in my RunKeeper life, I've gone 3,405 km of cycling, walking and running.

As I noted in my last entry for July, my August RunKeeper stats sucked in comparison to, well, pretty much any other month since I've been measuring. A mere 100 km (and change) for the month of walking and cycling. I have a good excuse, however: On Aug. 9, while riding to work, I lost control of my bike on a path in the river valley after hitting some mud doing a right turn and faceplanted into the ground, breaking 2 teeth (one of which couldn't be saved and was extracted that day, the other of which got a root canal this morning), splitting open my chin for five stitches, spraining my left arm and lots of road rash on my right leg. Yeah. Not fun. I don't recommend it. So that has slowed me down a bit. I did get some outdoor cycling in during August, but the strain on my left arm made it difficult to go very far, so my bike is retired for this year and I'm cycling on a bike at the gym until next spring.

Yeah, yeah, I'm really, really late with this. My July cycling and walking totals were nearly 204 km, which I was pretty happy with considering I didn't ride for 2 weeks in July due to vacation. I'll post the August stats this weekend. Warning: my August results comparatively suck. But I had a good excuse.

As I had hoped, June turned out to be a great month in terms of exercising, as I put on 367 km in the month, almost all of it cycling. I continued my 3-year-old summer tradition of riding to work as often as I could, which helped put on a lot of miles (or kilometres, I suppose). So far in 2012, I've cycled 1,396 km, so I'm 70% of the way towards my goal of biking 2,000 km for the year.

It was another good month in the exercising department as I clocked 248 km worth of cardio in May and acquired a set of dumbbells and some weights so I can do some upper body workouts at home. But what I'm most happy about is that I passed the halfway mark of my goal to bike 2,000 km in 2012 - currently 1,018 km. That should increase tremendously in June as I start cycling to work.

April was a pretty good month on the fitness trail in terms of mileage (kilometerage?) My five days in Vegas were criminally under-tracked, I suspect, but there was no way I was incurring charges for using my GPS in the US for 10 hours a day over 5 days. So I guesstimated a couple of days worth and then basically gave up. I walked a lot in Vegas.

So March came in like a lamb and went out ... well, like lamb on protein powder, I suppose. It wasn't a great month for me for exercising due to work. I put on just shy of 157 km in March. I probably could have pushed myself this week to do way more, but, honestly, I had hit the point where my body needed the rest more than it needed the exercise. But I'm at 637 km for the year so far, or 32% of my 2,000 km goal. I'm quite happy with that. I'm off to Vegas for a few days, where I'll be doing a lot of walking up and down the strip. I won't be using RunKeeper to track my distance, as I don't really want to pay a billion dollars in data roaming charges. The strip is about 3.5 miles one way, so I'll be estimating and entering some data based on that. I figure all that walking should count for something.

To absolutely no one's surprise, my February RunKeeper stats were considerably off from my January stats.  Still, considering the crazy hours I work when the Alberta Legislature sits, I'm quite happy with a February total of 178.14 km, which is 110.7 miles. That gives me 477.44 km total so far in 2012, which is 24% of my way to my 2,000 km cardio goal for 2010. Which isn't bad considering we're only 17% through the year. I'm ahead of the pace!

Assuming I've done my math right, I ran, walked and cycled 302.3 km in January (that's about 187 miles). Well on my way to my new goal of 2,000 km this year that I'm doing with my RunKeeper buddies. I'm betting February won't be anywhere near close to that.

Here's my RunKeeper totals for the year - the sum of all my measured walking, running and cycling. For the non-metrically inclined, that's 846 miles. And for the non-calorie converting, that's 15 lbs. So, yeah, I'm pretty happy on the whole. If I have a 2012 new year's resolution, it would be to beat that total - try to get 1,500 km.