"It's a dull stretch of tarmac and I've spent 170 hours of my life on it"

The Doc takes a ride down memory lane - for the 2,000th time...

- Michael Hutchinson

I've largely given up on Strava KoMs. For a while it was fun. But these days all the segments around here have been hoovered up by chaingangs in tailwinds, cheaters on scooters, and geniuses who leave their Garmins running during the drive home. (These are, I think, the most likely explanations for my lack of recent success. There are other possibilities that I prefer not to examine too closely.)

On the other hand, I have started paying horrified attention to Strava’s statistic for the number of times I’ve ridden a given segment. Some of these numbers are genuinely shocking. There is a road near my home which, according to Strava, I’ve ridden 940 times since 2016. That’s not allowing for life pre-Strava, when I was riding the same roads and doing, if anything, greater mileage. Adjusting pro-rata would mean I’ve ridden that road over 2,000 times.

It’s not even an interesting road. It’s a dull stretch of nondescript tarmac surrounded by featureless fields that only exists to connect two exceptionally uninteresting villages. I've spent 170 hours of my life on it. And that’s only the trips heading north.

For years part of my standard response to anyone who complains that cyclists don’t pay “road tax” is that cyclists don’t pay a vehicle tax partly because we're so small and light that we don’t cause any damage to the roads. I'm guessing I’ve caused measurable wear to this one. At absolute minimum, all the rubber I’ve worn off my expensive tyres over the years must have gone somewhere, and clearly quite a lot has ended up on this road. I like to think of this as “highway rubbery”.