Your 2024 mileage totals please
Please forgive the cutting and pasting from last last year's request 😕:
This
is a request to submit your mileage totals for the last twelve months
(1st Jan. 2024 to 31st Dec. 2024) for consideration towards the annual
awards for the greatest distances cycled. Your scores will be entered
into the Big Spreadsheet where, since the dawn of the 21st century, the precious
records of your accomplishments in the club have been maturing.
There
are two shiny trophies, one for the woman who has cycled more miles
than any other woman and one for the man with the highest mileage amongst
the men. Having two separate
prizes for persons of each gender might sound a little
quaint. But that is our tradition and while the prize money attached to
these two awards remains identical for both winners nothing is likely to
change.
And
we have a special award, the Mark Roy Trophy, for the person recording
the largest increase in mileage over the previous year. So anyone who
has posted their mileage for both 2024 and 2023 is eligible.
To
summarise the rules, your miles must have been clocked up whilst riding
your bicycle, tricycle, tandem or eBike on or off road. Mileages
achieved on turbo trainers, Watt bikes or any other static contraption
don't count. We know that this is something of a blow to members who have been riding
through virtual alpine landscapes with Zwift or Rouvy but we are
only considering miles actually, rather than virtually, travelled.
For
the competition, contenders for the prizes must be regular riders in
the club though we are happy to collect mileage data for everyone who is
a paid up member of CTC South West London. And we wish to continue
recording mileages for our several members who ride eBikes.
If you are curious at all about how many miles you
ride in the course of a year please start recording your distances for 2025 in a diary or spreadsheet.
Just one word of warning;
several riders who use a GPS enabled device such as a Garmin, or
smartphones running apps like Strava or RideWithGPS have experienced
rides when their devices stop communicating with the satellites,
sometimes for quite a while, and this can lead to totally unreliable data.
So please verify the accuracy of your data. The evidence of this known
problem is a long straight bee-line between two points on your ride
where you know the road really had many twists and turns.
 |
Fixie Dave's Garmin nodded off for a while with this result!
|
In
my opinion this is not a problem which is specific to Strava or other
phone app but is to do with the phone and its own software, memory
resources perhaps. This erroneous data can also accumulate if you have
hopped on a train with your bike but forgotten to stop recording 😏. Fancy doing that!
Please write to me with your total mileage:
Tim Court (Associate Bean Counter*)
We
hope to be able to present the prizes in our traditional awards
ceremony at the Annual Lunch, this year on Wednesday 5th March.
A very Happy New Year to you all and if you haven't been collecting your mileage scores please start now, from January 1st 2025.
The Bean Counters need your numbers!
~ Tim C
*Nota Bene: The Bean Counting team has now now doubled its number of staff and we are pleased to advise you that Mick Arber of B Group has flown through his apprenticeship and is now embarking on his new career in our Bean Counting Department.
