Can you beat me?

My question to you is simple: can you beat my 50000 km cycling?

I am sure that most of you are going to yell an emphatic NO. And on the face of it, sounds very correct. Even some of the accomplished cyclists will have to think about it for a while.

I am overweight and arrogant. Not exactly the fittest guy you expect to see on the bike. Most of you reading this might be weighing under 80 kgs. Which means u have about a 23 kg weight advantage over me. Some of you are even 10 yrs younger to me. I am 34. Even with all that advantage in your favour, can you beat my fifty thousand kilometers?

The logic is simple folks. The real question is how much time will it take to do 50k. As a lifetime goal its very reachable, no doubt. But do you want to spend a lifetime to do something I did in 10.5 years? This 10.5 yrs is including a total of 16 months of onsite travel.

To do 50000 km in a car in a year is a pain, forget cycling. If you do 25000km in a car a year, you are considered driving too much! :) A jumbo jet flying at 900 km per hour will take 55 hours of flying to reach 50k mark.

50K is not easy - anyway you look at it. Remember this, if you are one of those stud cyclists pedalling Bangalore-Mysore and back every week, you will be doing approx 300km in a weekend. If you do that week on week for 52 weeks, you will hit only 15600km per year. That means you will take 3 years and 3 months almost to hit 50K.

I have shared in my previous blog the tip: daily cycling. The best way is cycle to work! This works especially well if you stay far away from office. Any big goal has to be broken down into something manageable. And we have to work on it relentlessly, day on day, month on month. But dont begin with something like 20km per day. If you are new to cycling, start cycling 2 km per day for a week. Then graduate to 4 per day for a week. And so on, based on your comfort. Over a period of 2 months, I believe that 40 km per day is easily achievable if you stay 20 km away from work.

Make cycling a habit - if you want to go to the nearby grocery shop or post office or whatever, just take the bike. Slowly this will become a habit and you will start cycling everywhere! And without even thinking consciously about it. And thats how the magic begins to happen. Slowly but surely. And the effects start compounding.

I highly recommend everyone to read the book "The COMPOUND Effect" by Darren Hardy. This man very clearly talks about what it takes to do what seems "impossible". The secret is daily routine, and doing it in manageable chunks. This is not a health book, but a book for organising yourself, in the category of "self-help". Dont snigger, one can never be too good to read this book. I found it out myself!

For example, he talks about how a 2 hr workout 5 days a week is not sustainable in the long run, at least for 99.9% of us. Because it is fundamentally a very tough thing - the momentum and enthusiasm slowly wanes away. 5 day work out slowly will turn into 3 and 2 day work outs and will eventually stop.

And then we tend to drop it completely. The best would be a 1 hour work out 3-4 times a week, max.

Please follow a similar approach when u start cycling. When we begin doing something, we tend to be over-enthusiastic and do it overly. When u begin something, keep a lifetime goal of continuing it - thats the sure shot way of success. Very very few of us can sustain a lifetime practice of 2 hour workout a day, 5 days a week. Cycling is far more simpler than that.

The key is consistence. It is far more effective to do something at a lesser rate (20 km per day), but maintaining it 365 days a year, rather than do superhuman stunts (like 250 km per day) once or twice or thrice a month.

20km per day is not big deal guys - you will do it in one hour. Will it happen automatically? No. Lets say u stay just 5km from office and u ride up and down to work. Thats 10 km. Once your are back home in the evening, if you are willing to switch off the idiot box and do some pedalling, you will enjoy it all the more! 10 km ride takes 30 mins. This is very very moderate rate, almost without any exertion at all.


I highly recommend you guys to read this book - this will help you not only beating my 50K, but in your life too. I have not read such a good book in a very long time. PERIOD. And I read a lot of books, mind you.

You can download a pdf of this book for just 12 USD. Check the net.
And after that, the tough part - put the stuff into practice and beat me to 1 lakh km!!

Hey, believe it or not, if I have inspired at least one person to really DO this, and beat me with any target (distance or time), I consider the purpose of this blog done.

Good luck to all cyclists.