If you're riding in Paris-Brest-Paris and you haven't found your way to the PBP Wiki yet, you should definitely go take a look. It has some great information and tools that can help with your planning.

One section I found to be particularly interesting is the statistics on who from the U.S. is registered. They have a complete list of all U.S. riders along with a bit of demographic information about them. You can go there and see all the details for yourself, but I thought I'd pull out some of the highlights here just for fun. (Yes, I'm one of those nerds who think statistics are big fun. Woohoo!)

In total, 438 U.S. riders have registered for PBP. Not surprisingly, the vast majority are men.


Ages of the riders cover a wide range from 21 to 70. The average age is 50, and a sizable majority (about two thirds) fall between the ages of 45 and 60, clearly supporting the stereotype of randonneurs as a bunch of grumpy old men.


Notice the large anomalous spike in the chart at age 49? I wonder how many of those are people trying desperately to do something meaningful as they cross the half-century mark and begin the long decline into senior discounts and vacations on cruise ships. I suppose you could put me in that camp.

One of the things I've agonized over and still stress about is the choice of a start time. I'm now locked into the 80 hour start, so I might as well get used to it. Here's how the other U.S. riders are lined up for start times.


U.S. PBP riders will be coming from all over the country, but clearly a disproportionate number are from the west coast. California has the largest number of riders with a fifth of the total. Not too surprising since it's the most populous state and much of it has an excellent climate for cycling. But how about this? Washington State is a fairly close second with 12%. Almost every one of those Washington riders is a member of my club, Seattle International Randonneurs. Since the California riders are divided among several clubs, SIR has the largest number of riders by a landslide (64). The next closest club is San Francisco Randonneurs with 43 riders.


I was curious how disproportionate Washington's number of randonneurs is compared to other states, so I compared the number of registered riders in each state with the state's total population. Washington state has 9.37 randonneurs per 1,000,000 of total population (call it "Rando parts per million" or RPPM). That's the highest rate in the country by far. Next is DC (the other Washington) with a RPPM of 4.99. Impressively Alaska ranks third with 4.22 RPPM (but since that's based on only 3 riders total, I'm not sure it means much). Colorado, Montana, California, Oregon and Minnesota all have RPPMs of 2 or more. In the rest of the states, a PBP rider is literally one in a million or less. Ten states had no riders registered for PBP (Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming).

So what's going on in Seattle that makes randonneuring so popular compared to other parts of the country? I sit here in the middle of the Seattle Rando scene and honestly I have no idea. I mean, the club is fantastic. We have great leadership, volunteers and members. But why here in Seattle where it rains 367 days of the year? I have no theories...

I've been off the bike for the last few days. Between holiday activities and icy roads it seems like a good time to stay indoors and reflect on what I did on a bike in the past year and think about goals for the coming year.

At the end of last year one of my goals was to spend less time riding. In 2009, my first year of randonneuring, I went a little nutso and spent what felt to me like a little too much time on a bike. In 2010 I was successful in dialing back the amount I rode, and yet luckily was still able to achieve all of my randonneuring goals. Basically, I cut out most of the long training rides and just rode the official randonneuring events and continued to commute to work by bike. Initially I was a little afraid I wouldn't be in shape for some of the tougher events, but I managed to get by. On the rare occasions that I did get out for a training ride, I kept it short and intense.

My rando goals for the year were to complete another Super Randonneur series (200k, 300, 400k and 600k brevets), get an R-12 award (an official rando ride of 200k or more in 12 consecutive months), and finish the Cascade 1200. I achieved those goals by riding a total of 4680km (2908 miles) of rando events. I'm sure there was a fair amount of pain and suffering in all those kilometers, but I can only remember having a great time on every event I rode. Some of the highlights were the fastest 300k I'll ever ride, the four passes 600k, the Cascade 1200 and the Winter Solstice ride.



My commute amounted to a little over 3,000 miles for the year. That's about 44% of the total 6876 miles I rode in 2010. I feel very lucky to be able to commute by bicycle. I still enjoy the ride on all but the crappiest days.

Once again, nearly half of the miles I rode were on a single speed bike. My main commuter bike is a single speed and I rode it on a few of the 200k rando events too. I think riding single speed is a big part of what keeps me in shape well enough to survive the harder rando events.

In 2011 I really only have one serious cycling goal: ride in and finish the 2011 Paris-Brest-Paris Grand Randonnee, the granddaddy of randonneuring events. I'll still need to complete a SR series in order to qualify for PBP, so it's not like I'll be sitting around doing nothing for the first half of the year. :)

Sorry, my blog has been down for a while. And some of my old posts are gone. Call it technical difficulties… Anyway, I didn't quit riding while that was going on so I'll probably do a few posts over the next couple days to catch y'all up.

First, some thoughts about my riding in the past year. I’ve been keeping a log of my cycling over the past couple of years. It’s nothing too fancy, just an Excel spreadsheet with the date, miles, time and a brief description of my rides. I’m pretty religious about entering every ride, unless it’s a quick trip to the grocery store or a ride around the block with Adam on the trail-a-bike. I realize I’m a little late for the whole year-end recap thing, but like I said, I’m doing some catch up blogging here. So, here’s what my year of cycling looked like in summary:

I rode on at least 248 days in 2009. In total, I covered about 8,018 miles which is 2/3rds of what the average American drives in a year. I drive a lot less than the average American, so I’m guessing I racked up more bike miles than car miles last year. (Maybe I should keep track of car miles next year so I can compare.)

About 3,383 miles (42% of the total) were covered in my daily commute to and from work, or running errands on the way. I went into the office about 230 times during the year and 192 of those commutes were by bicycle. The rest were using public transportation.

I have both single speed and multi-speed bikes. I generally do my commute on the single speed, but sometimes ride that one on recreational rides too. Overall, 3,922 of my total miles (49%) were on a single speed or fixed gear bike.

Of my recreational rides, 25 were between 50 and 100 miles in length and 15 were over 100 miles. How long was my longest ride? It sort of depends on how you define “ride.” I did two 600k brevets both of which extended over more than a day, so I’m not sure whether to count each of them as one ride or more. Both were somewhere around 380 miles and I completed the first one in 28:50 and the second in 33:45. My greatest distance covered in 24 hours was a little over 300 miles covered between 6 am on June 13th and 6 am on the 14th on the first 600k brevet.

Okay, here’s the statistic that makes me feel a little bit sick: I spent over 533 hours riding a bike last year. Whoa, that’s a lot of hours. That’s 22 days on a bike. In my defense, remember that about 2/3rds of that was time spent commuting to and from work, and my commute doesn’t take much longer by bike than it does by bus. Still that leaves 180 hours last year that I could have spent curing cancer or inventing a better mousetrap or something more useful. Did I mention that one of my resolutions for the new year is to spend less time bicycling?