Remember those cycling goals for 2025? And if you do, do you care how I did? If so, prepare to be disappointed.
To recap, my goals for the year were:
- Complete 1,800 miles distance
- Complete 55,000 feet of elevation
- Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
- Increase lifetime Eddington from 43 miles to 46 (requiring six days of 46+ miles)
Here's a sit-rep at year end:
So, I failed on distance, for reasons I discussed briefly at the last update, only managing 85.7% of target. I did better on elevation, but still only managed 94% of what I'd hoped for. I only managed 12 days of 17 miles or more toward my annual Eddington target, but at least managed an annual E of 16.
As for my lifetime Eddington goal... well, that's a longer story. It's achieved but only because I realised a mistake in my calculations for it. My Google Sheets spreadsheet tool that hooks into the Strava API and does all my stats assesses all timestamps in co-ordinated universal time (UTC) but Strava timstamps are local (GMT/BST for me). So during British Summer Time, any rides that I started between mindight and 1am were being assigned to the wrong day for the purposes of Eddington calculations. I've now fixed the spreadsheet but this had a bigger effect than you might think, which shows how often in my Strava cycling life I've cycled home from a night out in the witching hour. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that although I only managed two days in 2025 where I rode 46+ miles, my lifetime Eddington is actually now 46 miles, my original target for year end. Hooray. Well done me.
What about targets for 2026? Well, I'm relucatant to row back too much on distance and elevation - I feel these are realistic goals, notwithstanding the issues I had to deal with in the summer of '25 (which, inevitably, will recur, if not in '26 then at some point). I've set Eddington goals too, though the beauty of that particular metric is that it becomes progressively harder to advance, so they're modest goals. In summary then, here are my goals for 2026:
- Complete 1,750 miles distance
- Complete 54,500 feet of elevation
- Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
- Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)
Wish me luck, if you like.