Shadow selfie with dinosaur and bike.

My usual Sunday riding buddy was gone last week, so I took my road bike out for a longer-than-usual spin, out past the dinosaur sculpture I call “My Red Friend.” I got the requisite Blake’s breakfast burrito early (they’re the right shape to fit in a bike shirt pocket, and properly nibbled over time can fuel four or five hours on the bike, which is as much as I’m capable of).

Most of my long Sunday rides these days are on my e-bike, a happy accommodation for my age. But I’d been riding the road bike lately for my around-town rides, and it’s so much fun – light, playful.

I’ve been riding since forever, raced a bit (and poorly) when I was younger, but it’s only been in the last decade, in my crazy new life as an academic, that I’ve had the work life flexibility to ride as much as I want. This year, that was an average of an hour a day (364 total hours on the bike through Dec. 29), and it’s a very important hour.

I read an essay (I can’t find it, sorry.) a few years back by a neuroscientist who also was a cyclist and meditated, about cycling and flow. Flow, popularized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the experience of being so connected with an activity that everything else slips away. At its best, cycling offers that up for me, as I move through space and my mind is fully enveloped in the space I’m moving through, and the activity of moving through it. Part of it I suppose is the rhythmic nature of the pedaling. Part of it is feeling one with the bike, like it’s an extension of my body. (The road bike above, my All-City, does that. The e-bike less so – it’s big and demands my body’s attention to muscle it in a way that the road bike doesn’t. I have to think more on the e-bike.)

The bike rides over the last five years became an integral part of the research for our book, which is about Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande. There were some specific “book research” rides, to see specific places and things we were writing about. But the more important connection was the sense of the relationship between the human and natural landscape that came from moving across that landscape over and over again on a bike – the feel I got for the geography, the intuitions about how the pieces of our community fit together.

As you can see from the map below, I ride everywhere.

Bernalillo to Belen

2024 on the bike

The combination of the Rail Runner (New Mexico’s commuter train) and the e-bike made it possible again this year to cover the Rio Grande Valley from Bernalillo on the north to Jarales on the south, more than 50 miles of river valley (Not all at once!). We GPS all our rides, and a “tile” (squares a bit more than a mile on a side) is colored if I visited it over the course of the year.

Without meaning too, it seems I rode nearly all of urbanized Albuquerque, short a few neighborhoods in the far northwest and out on the edges of Rio Rancho. Goal for 2025!

Of special note on this map are those scattered squares up in the mountains east of town. Those are hikes. Between my bad knee and arthritic feet, I’d resigned myself to never hiking again, but diligent physical therapy and ridiculously expensive marathon shoes have opened up a new kind of flow. (I cannot run a marathon. I can barely run across a street if a car is coming. But the carbon fiber plates in fancy marathon shoes really help my feet.)

One of the games we play is Wandrer. You feed it your GPS traces and Wandrer’s elves figure out which roads you’ve ridden, and which roads you haven’t. It’s a hoot (“Number go up!”), encouraging me to visit new places. I’ve been riding in weirdly wandering ways for so long that there are fewer and fewer roads in Albuquerque I haven’t ridden, but I’ll never run out. Between that and the tiling games (that’s “tiling” on the map on the right) there is endless gamification of the bike ride, even for an old guy for whom going fast is no longer an option.

Final 2024 stats

With two days to go, including all my hikes and walks and such:

• Total distance: 3,581 miles
• Total tiles: 355
• Total time: 574 hours
• Total new Wandrer miles, Bernalillo County: 252
• Eddington number (the largest value for “n” such that I’ve gone “n” miles on “n” days this year): 31 miles, 43 km