The Annual Lunacy (aka "I Don't Do Winter") Challenge Chatzone

[steverob]

I just checked. My 2020 Lunacy achievement to date is... [drum roll, fireworks, gasps of astonishment]...

21 kms!

You're ahead of me then - I'm only at 12 miles / 19 km for my current 13th longest ride this year.

 

[ColinJ]

I can't bring myself to post the short rides in the reports thread but for fun I will keep a tally in this chat thread. I will start reporting properly once I get my 13th longest ride to 50 kms.

Anyway... There are 3 rides of 21 kms in my 13 so it will be a week or so before I raise the bar to a larger number beginning with a '2'!

 

[Sea of vapours]

The following musing is solely to highlight a possible nuance with this challenge. Clearly anyone can do whatever they like and this is just my thinking. I'm certainly not trying to be prescriptive here!

Taking my top thirteen rides, I'm at 105km, and that goes to 112km with three more at that distance. I won't be posting those though as I think there's a question of original intent here. It's a somewhat nuanced point, but essentially I see the Lunacy Challenge as being an
-'aspiration to achieve a certain, pre-specified distance thirteen times'
and not to be
- 'the longest thirteen rides of the year'.

I think it needs to be an actual target, not simply a 'best of the year' thing. So, whilst I may revise my pre-specified distance down from 150km, a distance I've not attempted so far in 2020, I don't feel that I can lower it to 111km, that being the distance I was deliberately doing in January for Metric Eddington purposes.

Oh - and on a different topic: I thought the idea of a rolling Lunacy (thirteen rides of distance > X in the last 365 days at any point in time), which (I think?) @Aravis mentioned last year, was a good one. Since I was on eight Lunacy rides at this point last year, starting March 29th, that idea is very much gone now!

 

[ColinJ]

On second thoughts...

My revised 2020 target distance is 100 kms. I have done one ride of 101 kms this year but nothing else close. I will NOT now be posting about rides less than 100 kms, but assuming that I eventually do 13 rides >= 100 kms, I WILL track any improvement beyond that.

That is based on 100 kms being a reasonable challenge in the current circumstances. Normally I would be doing the MCAMC so doing one extra at that distance wouldn't be much of a challenge.

I don't think I will be doing any more rides of that length until at least mid-summer, maybe even the autumn.

 

[Sea of vapours]

... assuming that I eventually do 13 rides >= 100 kms, I WILL track any improvement beyond that.

Absolutely! I think the key is to have an aspirational target rather than simply saying "these are my best thirteen rides". I wasn't criticising your previous post, merely musing about one psychological nuance of this challenge. Exceeding targets is certainly a good thing and worthy of recording :-)

 

[ColinJ]

Absolutely! I think the key is to have an aspirational target rather than simply saying "these are my best thirteen rides". I wasn't criticising your previous post, merely musing about one psychological nuance of this challenge. Exceeding targets is certainly a good thing and worthy of recording :-)

I think you are right.

I originally made a joke about how limited my rides have been so far in 2020 but then slipped into "best of thirteen" mode. It was never the intention that this challenge should work like that.

I'm fairly confident that I could get 12 metric centuries done in 2 months, as long as weather, health, and the virus situation permit. Hopefully, those months will not be November and December or I will be spending an awful lot of time trudging up and down the A646/A6033 on my singlespeed bike!

 

[lazybloke]

I just checked. My 2020 Lunacy achievement to date is... [drum roll, fireworks, gasps of astonishment]...

21 kms!

Go ColinJ, I can only dream of such distances. My achievement to date is slightly under 3 km!

Is it just me, or is Strava really sh*t for viewing ride data? I just wasted ages looking for an xls export tool (https://entorb.net/strava/) so I could sort my rides in descending order of distance. And only then did I remember I can do exactly the same thing with a few clicks in Garmin Connect. Doh!

 

[steverob]

Taking my top thirteen rides, I'm at 105km, and that goes to 112km with three more at that distance. I won't be posting those though as I think there's a question of original intent here. It's a somewhat nuanced point, but essentially I see the Lunacy Challenge as being an
-'aspiration to achieve a certain, pre-specified distance thirteen times'
and not to be
- 'the longest thirteen rides of the year'.

I think it needs to be an actual target, not simply a 'best of the year' thing. So, whilst I may revise my pre-specified distance down from 150km, a distance I've not attempted so far in 2020, I don't feel that I can lower it to 111km, that being the distance I was deliberately doing in January for Metric Eddington purposes.

Oh yes, I totally agree that Lunacy really needs a target rather than just being a list of your best 13 rides. My post was just joining Colin on showing how far we were from even being anywhere near a recognisable cycling distance - normally by May I should have done a handful of metric centuries and a bunch more imperial halves, yet here I am at distances that barely cover to the shops and back!

For the record, my provisional target would have been around the 100km mark (possibly slightly longer to help improve my Eddington score), but as I have not achieved any rides of that length this year, I haven’t posted that in the thread yet. I may well drop it to 50 miles if the current situation holds for much longer - I have done ONE of those, so just 12 more to go I guess!

 

[ColinJ]

I just realised that I had forgotten to post the ride that I had done for my now-abandoned MCAMC, so I have just rectified that. I am now 1/13th of the way through this year's Lunacy Challenge - yay!

 

[Aravis]

Oh - and on a different topic: I thought the idea of a rolling Lunacy (thirteen rides of distance > X in the last 365 days at any point in time), which (I think?) @Aravis mentioned last year, was a good one. Since I was on eight Lunacy rides at this point last year, starting March 29th, that idea is very much gone now!

I introduced the "rolling lunacy" idea as food for thought, not really expecting it to be adopted. I've finally managed to produce a decent-looking graph (previous versions always came out blurry) of my progress from the beginning of 2017, the point at which I had sufficient data. I've projected to the end of June on the assumption I don't post another qualifying ride.

Possibly I could create a similar graph for the period 1985 to 1990; life took a different turn after that I lost some data when the desk diary containing a year's records was thrown away when preparing for a house move. The things marriages have to survive...

I finally broke the 200km ceiling on September 19th with the 11th qualifying ride of the year; two rides from the previous October were still counting at that point, and by the time they'd slid out of view I'd completed 13 in 2019.

By the end of the year I had 15, one in each month with extras in July, September and October. What rolling lunacy boils down to is that you must keep ahead of a schedule based on your last 13 qualifying rides in the previous year. In my case the first critical date was March 19th. My next ride is due by June 21st, and that's now unexpectedly under threat.

I think it's quite a spicy challenge, and not as complicated as it may seem. I think the best tactic is to make sure you put down a even spread of qualifying rides through whatever is your normal active season. A few extra rides will help as they'll create some leeway in the following year. If it provides an incentive to ride more, especially making the most of fine days in September and October, that can only be a good thing.

 

[Sea of vapours]

As soon as you mentioned it I thought it was a good idea, but one which I was in a very poor position for, though I was going to try to do it.

I did all thirteen Lunacy rides between 29th March and 23rd June in 2019. Not a disaster in itself, but then I did only three more of the required distance. That meant that the crunch came on 14th April, not to mention that I would have needed a further three in April and another by today.

If I do get gong on them again this year, and I plan to, the Rolling Lunacy will be easier to maintain subsequently as this year will inevitably be back-loaded and perhaps won't be bunched into under three months. And even if it is bunched up in August-October, there will be plenty of time to spread out a few more rides in the March-June period next year.

 

[steverob]

I introduced the "rolling lunacy" idea as food for thought, not really expecting it to be adopted. I've finally managed to produce a decent-looking graph (previous versions always came out blurry) of my progress from the beginning of 2017, the point at which I had sufficient data. I've projected to the end of June on the assumption I don't post another qualifying ride.

Possibly I could create a similar graph for the period 1985 to 1990; life took a different turn after that I lost some data when the desk diary containing a year's records was thrown away when preparing for a house move. The things marriages have to survive...

View attachment 520264

I finally broke the 200km ceiling on September 19th with the 11th qualifying ride of the year; two rides from the previous October were still counting at that point, and by the time they'd slid out of view I'd completed 13 in 2019.

By the end of the year I had 15, one in each month with extras in July, September and October. What rolling lunacy boils down to is that you must keep ahead of a schedule based on your last 13 qualifying rides in the previous year. In my case the first critical date was March 19th. My next ride is due by June 21st, and that's now unexpectedly under threat.

I think it's quite a spicy challenge, and not as complicated as it may seem. I think the best tactic is to make sure you put down a even spread of qualifying rides through whatever is your normal active season. A few extra rides will help as they'll create some leeway in the following year. If it provides an incentive to ride more, especially making the most of fine days in September and October, that can only be a good thing.

When you originally posted about a "rolling Lunacy", I was intrigued, but not enough to really do anything about working it out. But then you go and post a graph and now it becomes a lot more interesting! I'd even go as far as to say it's a technical challenge - after all I don't want my Excel skills going to waste while I'm working from home, do I now?

Took me a little while to work out the best way of getting the data into a usable format, but eventually ended up with this:

Scale on the left is miles by the way. I've started the graph from 1st June 2014 as that was about one year after I got back on my bike following an 15 month hiatus and also I got my first GPS and joined Strava two months after, so my figures become a lot more reliable from that point on.

As you can see, I've dropped off a cliff this year, but was kind of proud of the long streak I managed from November 2017 to August 2019 where I was above 60 miles. The marked high point of 68.16 was for literally just one day - on 2nd June 2019 I did 102 miles at the Tour of Cambridgeshire, but then the next day the ride I did on 3rd June 2018 (also ToC, but only 85 miles) disappeared from the list, dropping my 13th ride back down to 67.57 again!

 

[Supersuperleeds]

Got two qualifying rides done, one Saturday and one today.

 

[Fiona R]

Got two qualifying rides done, one Saturday and one today.

Excellent going. I'm needing to build up again

 

[Supersuperleeds]

Number 4 done today