Around the world once, up Everest 34 times

According to Mark Twain, it was Benjamin Disraeli who coined the phrase "lies, damn lies and statistics", giving the collection and analysis of sets of figures a rather disturbing light. Statistics can, however, offer an interesting insight into the data being analysed, say on someone's cycling activity for example.

I use a website called Statshunters.com, linked into my Strava account, to hold data about my cycling activities. I should say here that I am in no way attracted by nailing Strava segments, KOMs, maximum speeds or anything that would suggest I simply go out on my bike to blast as fast as possible. For me, cycling is about fitness, scenery, meditation, coffee and cake, and not necessarily in that order. However, I do like to keep tabs on where I've ridden and how far, so Strava is useful for that, and I don't use the majority of the myriad of features that it offers. FYI, as of today I've ridden 28,086 miles since I started recording online in September 2016.

Then one day my brother-in-law Ian mentioned to me a website that showed you pictorially where you'd ridden, a heatmap of your rides. That sounded like it could be interesting and so I signed up (it's free of course, I doubt I'd pay for anything unless it was really interesting or useful). It looks like this;

It can help with coming up with new and varied rides, as I have been in Cheshire long enough that it can get a little stale going over the same old roads again and again, and indeed it has led me to find some lovely scenic roads that I would otherwise maybe have neglected. And then one day, when I was having a little look at my latest map, a popup appeared saying I'd earned a new badge. Intrigued I looked into it, and it has a whole load of badges you can earn for a wide range of activities - like Strava challenges these can be used to provide variety in your riding to maintain motivation. Having just spent a bit of time investigating I've come across the following;

• I've cycled the equivalent of 1.128 trips around the world, and have got 0.118 of the way to the moon
• I've cycled the equivalent of 34.1 climbs of Everest
• I've ridden for 1,887 hours
• My rides have been spread out fairly equally between all days, with most on a Sunday (16.2%) and fewest on Tuesday (12.2%). Tuesday is weekly shop day so no surprise, but I generally try to avoid weekends now I'm retired, so that may change over the years.

If you're still with me by now well done! As you can imagine you can get lost in it all, but the key thing is to dig out what makes it fun and/or interesting. And we all know there are many different opinions on what is interesting and what isn't!!!!