It's a numbers game

I've mentioned my Google Sheets tool that consumes all my Strava data via an API, and let's me slice and dice everything the way I want. There's nothing new there. But drilling down into some figures last night, I noticed some anomalies. It was a lot of elevation in 2019, more than I could remember doing. So I started investigating... and found multiple rides that year that were duplicated. There was even a pattern - rides recorded on my Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, synchronised to Strava and then edited to change the name. So these rides were effectively stored twice, once with the default name, once with the edited name. I've been through Strava and deleted all the duplicates, and whatever the problem was it didn't seem to happen after 2019, at least not for me, so my stats are in a better place now even if I haven't cycled quite as far as I thought.

This reckoning has sliced 1 off my Eddington number though, annoyingly. In turn, this has required me to revise my Eddington-related cycling goal for this year. It was:

• Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

And it's now:

• Increase lifetime Eddington from 45 miles to 47 (requiring two days of 47+ miles)

Bugger.

If nothing else, that feels more achievable. Silver linings, eh?

A mixed bag

I'm a couple of days late with this, but here's the quarterly update of progress against annual cycling goals which, in case you've forgotten (or care), are:

1. Complete 1,750 miles distance
2. Complete 54,500 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

Sit-rep after Q1:

So, I'm mostly doing okayish, but need to have some long days in the saddle. No surprise there.

See you in three months for another update. Try to contain your excitement.

Another year of failure

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:

1. Complete 1,800 miles distance
2. Complete 55,000 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. 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:

1. Complete 1,750 miles distance
2. Complete 54,500 feet of elevation
3. Record an annual Eddington of 17 miles (requiring 17 days of 17+ miles)
4. Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

Wish me luck, if you like.