This past month I participated in Strava’s January Challenge. Strava is an online cycling social media site, one of many, but with more visibility in the blogosphere, generally negative, than others. I like the app they have for my iPhone and it takes uploaded rides from my Garmin Edge 500 more easily than the Garmin website.

When I took on the January Challenge I set a goal for myself to try and be in the top 50% of riders, measured by miles ridden, but didn’t really think about why that was my goal. I didn’t have any idea how many people would participate, but found out toward the end of the month that there were over 36,000 riders enrolled in the challenge. The Strava site also posts stats from previous challenges and showed around 7,200 riders taking the January Challenge for 2012. That’s substantial year over year growth.

About mid-month I saw that I was in the top half of the pack and was pretty pleased with myself. I had ridden about 200 miles at that point including a couple of cold rides on my trips to Iowa. 35 degrees Fahrenheit is my lower limit for cold weather cycling. So I figured I would check out how the top riders were doing. Well, although I hadn’t thought this all the way through, the top riders were from locations like Australia, New Zealand, and other summery Southern Hemisphere locales. One of the top ten riders on the challenge was from Boulder, Colorado, though. These are some serious cyclers. Halfway through the month the top riders were sporting over 2,000 miles! By the end of the challenge the top rider had ridden more than the distance across the U.S. from New York City to Los Angeles. Inconceivable!

I was able to log 389 miles for the month, besting my 2012 distance by about 70 miles. Some of the other riders must have tailed off during the final weeks because I came in very close to being in the top 1/3. Interestingly, when I segmented the results by age group (45-54, putting me at the far right end of this group), by weight, by gender, or by country I still came in pretty close to the top 1/3 in each result. 12,566th place never felt so good.