366 Days of Blogging Thrills

Today marks the one year anniversary of this exciting blog. I had been writing long emails to my friend Charmaine about my daily bicycling misadventures.  She like them and suggested I start a blog. So if you've wasted parts of several perfectly good evenings reading my stuff, blame her. The original intent was for it to be only about my bicycling life.  As it turns out, several of my posts have had little or nothing to do with cycling.  One very popular one, had to do with acroyoga. A year ago I didn't know what acroyoga was, but my friend Florencia set me straight.  (Funny how I met both Charmaine and Florencia on 50 States rides.)  Now I know that it would be a really quick way to hurt myself.  (Not that I need any help with that.)

Several other posts had to do with my wife's medical follies. First, she had a thunderclap headache. I got to ride shot gun in an ambulance (with the accent on the last syllable, because this is DC), but other than that it was an incredibly miserable experience, particularly for Mrs. Rootchopper.  If you really want to see the underbelly of the national health care system in this country, hang out in the emergency room of an urban hospital. Cops with wounded perps, morbidly obese people, disoriented men from skid row, flat out crazy people, and lots of people lying around in a disheveled state moaning in pain.  Anyway, this was how my wife enjoyed her last birthday.  Tomorrow, we hope to do a little better by her.

About a month later, you all got to read about her being run over by an SUV. Weeks and weeks of pain and suffering followed. You just couldn't get enough.  She's still being treated for her injuries. She'd be real happy if her knees and ankles worked right.

Turning to biking, the blog post with the most hits described how I rode my bike into the back of a parked car. I know you all like a good laugh but come on people!  All you want is pain, misery, and humiliation (mine!).  I was told that there were a bunch of sick folks roaming the interwebs and many of them appear to be reading my blog.

One weird thing about this blog is the geographic origins of its readers. Of course, most people access the blog from the United States.  In second place comes Russia!  If this keeps up, I may have to switch fonts to cyrillic.  I don't know anybody in Russia so this an unexpected development.  The UK comes in third, mostly because they never get sick of yanks who make a fool of themselves. Fourth place goes to Germany.   The also rans are Canada, Brazil, France, Australia, the Czech Republic (hi, Steve!), the Netherlands, India (hi Chelli), Malaysia, Thailand (hi, Flor), Norway and Iraq.

It took quite a while for my blog to be discovered.  More than half the hits on this blog have come since 2012 began. Many of those hits are from people checking out the earlier blog posts.

Since I started this blog, I 've ridden 6,858 miles and commuted to work 133 times.  The commutes alon account for over 3,800 miles.  How do I know?  I've been keeping a hard copy riding or running diary for about 30 years. 

I've crashed twice, both times on my recumbent.

Some how I have managed to actually gain a little weight in that time. Could it be that cookies and milk while blogging is a bad idea? Who knew!?

What I need is a long bike tour. My son goes to college in Saratoga.Springs NY, so Saratoga to DC is way up there on my to do list. My daughter wants to go to school farther away.  If she lands in California, I'd have the perfect excuse to do a cross country ride. 

While I dream I'll continue to ride my bike to work like a two-wheeled Chaumcey Gardener.  I like to ride my bike.