1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
So yesterday, Amanda Coker completed her year for the Highest Annual Miles Ridden (HAMR) record, blowing away the record Kurt Searvogel set a year ago by something like 10K miles (she finished the year with over 86K miles.) That is just an incredible feat - insane, in a word. And she had some other shit to deal with that Searvogel probably never had to worry about. Apparently, some a-holes were not happy about a woman breaking the record and came out to ride right on her wheel unannounced at times. And people were calling her a fraud because she was so consistent day after day. And while Searvogel was able to pull off his attempt because he was a business owner who could leave it in the hands of his employees while still drawing income, she had to live off her family's savings while none of them worked in order to support her for the full year.
When I first heard about this and saw her strava feed, I was kind of disappointed by how little elevation she seemed to have for so many miles (case in point -- through the first three months of this year, I had climbed about twice what she had while riding less than 5% of her miles), but the more I thought about that, the more I think that's just smart -- it ain't a climbing challenge, it's a miles challenge: why make it tougher than it needs to be? Riding over 250 miles a day is hard enough on its own.
Just an incredible accomplishment ... here's the Bicycling article on it from yesterday.
When I first heard about this and saw her strava feed, I was kind of disappointed by how little elevation she seemed to have for so many miles (case in point -- through the first three months of this year, I had climbed about twice what she had while riding less than 5% of her miles), but the more I thought about that, the more I think that's just smart -- it ain't a climbing challenge, it's a miles challenge: why make it tougher than it needs to be? Riding over 250 miles a day is hard enough on its own.
Just an incredible accomplishment ... here's the Bicycling article on it from yesterday.
