…. statistics of course* It’s a hackneyed phrase oft adjacent to ‘we had enough of experts‘ and ‘do your own research’. Being a data chap myself, I prefer ‘if you torture data long enough, it’ll tell you anything‘

And here we have an excellent example of exactly that. Except we don’t, as abused through a dodgy pivot table as it is, this Strava data from all of 2022 doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.

And because I am fairly wedded to good data as the cornerstone of empirical analysis, let me explain why. That graph is a careful summary of 300+ data rows each representing a stored ride. Each of those rows is enriched with a further data points on obvious stuff such as bike, time, distance, etc and some ‘well just because we can meant we did‘ nonsense like calculated power and pedal balance.

It’s nonsense because data should drive a narrative, tell a story, not be dumped into excel with all the graph options turned on. No I don’t believe you can correlate moon phase with bike choice although…. anyway enough of my whinging about how crap 90% of often also crap data is presented, instead let’s see what plot nuggets we can unearth from this single view of my ride data**

1)  The basis of the graph is skewed. For any kind of longitudinal analysis you need data at each reference point. We don’t have that because – here’s surprise number 1 – I have bought, sold and changed bikes through the year. More of that on the updated bike page

2) Even with this limited data to consider, we can see the Boardman and Bardino (early 2022) and Scout (late 2022) make up most of the bike selection during the winter/early spring/late autumn months. Since the Rascal is basically 8 pivots too many for mud, and the Giga is a bit overkill for paddle steaming on waterlogged trails, again not a huge insight here.

3) The Giga was ridden a lot. That’s actually a bit interesting. Sure the two big spikes are the Basque and Molini trips, but I rode it often in between as it’s a fantastic if weighty trail bike. Also Matt and Steve always ride their big bikes through the summer and I need all the help I can get following those 2.

4) I rode the Rascal 35% less distance than the Giga. Kind of makes sense. All the hardtails (ahem 3) represented 50% of the full suss miles. Again makes sense, crap conditions shorter rides. eBike is included but really that’s a car subsitute which brings us to..

5) .. the not very secret dirty secret. Even with my Zwift apathy this year (down over 25% on last year – I didn’t include the year on year analysis because even I know only I am interested) just over 30% of my total milage. Less than 20% of the climbing and a similar percentage of time. Go further in less minutes.

I could go on (no really I could, but I won’t) other than to say statistically I’ve ridden less kilometres, climbed less hills and spent (a bit) less time on bikes this year. And that’s where the numerical story ends. Because I have had WAY MORE FUN.

Most of that is no lockdown, back to whatever normality is here. Also pretty good weather, so much local riding and I finally ditched my FOMO of needing to tick new location boxes every month. Two brilliant week long trips with fantastic friends bookended that summer season.

Still some regrets, didn’t get to ride the King Alfred’s way and probably won’t bother now. Not sure we rode any trail centres either. Next year I’m going to put at least one of those right having got properly excited reading my new gravel routes book. Trail centres/bike parks tho. Meh.

Obviously one mandatory issue with another year passing is I’m another year older. This is where I tell you of my plans to at least partially mitigate that decline through diet, moderation and a rigorous fitness programme. Er, no I’m not. Not happened for the last 15 years, so no point in setting myself up to fail there!

2023 then. Just round the corner. The one thing I think I’ll do is ditch Strava. Subs due in Jan. Based on dicking about with spreadsheets for a few hours today, it’s not telling me anything I don’t already know. I have friends who can point out I’m slower than I was, and they’ll do that for free 🙂

And no MTB eBikes. Unplugging and going strictly analogue for ’23. Have a good one and catch you on the other side. If you’ve nothing to do in the meantime here are my favourite articles (from not much written) this year.

*Mark Twain attributed it to Disraeli who denied it. And the original full quote from old Marky was ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” which actually makes more sense if he’d said it.  Which apparently he didn’t. All clear now? Excellent we’ll move on 🙂

**I did, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, look at elevation, time, location etc but it added nothing other than amplification and confusion. Normally work wise I’d leave that shit in there, but I’m throwing you a bone here 🙂