On Thursday, as a nation, we sat down to give thanks. And to eat. Hours before, in preparation, many of us set out to walk, or run, or ride, or just do something to burn some calories and build up an appetite for the feast ahead.
I rode my bike. In Moab, Utah. With friends I met cycling in Laos two years ago.
For Thanksgiving, I wrote that the sports tech I’m most thankful for this year was a heart rate strap. Perhaps I really should have put the humble bicycle.
Bicycles are the original sports tech. While they might not predate the ball, the stick, or the shoe—equipment that facilitates a host of the most popular sports—bikes couldn’t exist without some level of industry, and the various cycling sports couldn’t exist without bikes. You don’t need shoes to run. A branch falls from a tree, you find a pebble on the ground, and now you can play some form of cricket, or hockey, or baseball, or golf. Yes, you can make a better golf club and ball, but you can play regardless. Bikes require wheels, chains, gears, things that don’t exist in nature. Technology.
The premise of a bicycle is pretty simple—two wheels—but like most things in our modern world, we’ve made this machine increasingly complicated and diverse. You can’t just own “a” bike anymore. On Thursday I rode my mountain bike. I’m also lucky enough to own a gravel bike, a track bike, and a slightly beaten up fixie for riding around town. There are many more varieties: road bikes, downhill mountain bikes, fat bikes, cruisers, single speeds, tandems.
Unlike the equipment that features in other sports, bikes, quite literally, take you somewhere. This past year, bikes have carried me hundreds of miles across the Great Plains. They’ve taken me up and down the coastal mountain ranges of California, and most recently over the sands and slick rock of Moab. I’ve raced three blocks straight up Potrero Hill in San Francisco in the Red Bull Bay Climb, and six miles up Gibraltar Road near Santa Barbara in the Hillclimb World Championships. I struggled through a double century of gravel around Emporia, Kan., in the Dirty Kanza 200, as my bike quite literally fell apart, and another 93 miles of dirt roads outside Ketchum, Idaho, in Rebecca’s Private Idaho, as my legs seized with cramps.
While cycling is still possible without data, 21st-century cycling has become a numbers game. I own a Garmin bike computer that I can switch between handlebar mounts on my three nicest bikes. It tracks location, speed, and altitude through GPS and syncs to the heart rate strap I wear around my chest. I also installed a power meter on my gravel bike over the summer, giving me a host of additional statistics on my pedaling. All of that data syncs mostly seamlessly to my Android phone, and then out to social and training platforms like Strava and TrainingPeaks. Barring the handful of rides on which my battery died or I simply forgot my computer at home, every one of my bike adventures from 2018 has been captured and catalogued.
This year, I’ve ridden a distance greater than that between my home in California and New York. I’ve climbed easily enough height to account for taking me up over the towering Rockies on that virtual journey, too. I’ve spent more than a week on a bike. Nine hours of that in the red-lining, maximum intensity, Zone 5 heart rate.
Perhaps the most important metric of my cycling year, though—at least when planning for Thursday’s gluttony—is the number of calories burned. More than counting miles, or time, or anything else, society counts calories to solve the equation for health. Burn up more than you consume, and you lose weight. Flip the other way, and you gain it.
According to the Calorie Control Council, Americans can each consume more than 4,500 calories—approximately twice the average daily requirement—in one sitting at Thanksgiving. For comparison, at Dirty Kanza I burned 7,862. At Private Idaho I used up another 3,579. In total, I’ve expended around 100,000 calories cycling this year.
Which is a long way to say I feel I earned that second helping.