why I do it: In August 2020 @bee posted that…
We decided on a new family rule that any new equipment aquisitions should be backed by a beeminder goal.
At the time I was umming and ahhing over whether I should buy myself an electric bike and had a list of pros and cons written down. One of which was something like “but will it just end up sitting in the garage with my old (non-electric) bike”. Of course the answer is beeminding.
how it works: Straight forward link from Apple Health via the Beeminder app tracking the distance cycled. Distance cycled tracked using Apple Watch apps, both the default workout one and WorkOutdoors.
settings: I had lots of info on how much I’d ridden my last bike which I’d bought just over ten years before. The electric bike was four times the price that that one had been. I worked out how far I’d ridden around home in ten years. I excluded holidays as I thought they skewed the data a bit much - I live in a hilly region and take my bike on holiday to flat places for a reason! So something with a factor of four made sense - I did a quick calculation of what four times the distance in a quarter of the time would be - laughed at myself because that’s a factor of sixteen - but the answer wasn’t stupid, about 45km a week, so I went with that as an initial goal.
When I first bought the bike I got ahead of the line pretty fast, and ratcheted the line up, only to run into mechanical problems that made me derail. I got ahead again, had more mechanical troubles, so I haven’t done any more ratcheting.
current state: I’ve cycled a lot less this winter than the first, and the weather has been awful lately but I have enough buffer that I think I can stay on track with my original goal.
changes: A couple of months back I realised that I was going to cycle a lot less in the second year I had the bike if I just kept to the original goal, which seemed a bit disappointing. I had cycled just about 2000 miles in the first year. So I added an extra goal to cycle another 2000 miles in the second year - and I’m sticking breaks in this one to keep it on track for when the days are longer and the weather is nicer. This is my stretch goal so if it becomes clear it’s failing then I don’t really mind that much, but I want to try and keep at it as long as I can. It’ll probably involve more effort than last year as lockdowns very much worked in my favour last year encouraging me out onto my bike for exercise when the swimming pools were closed. This year I will need to do both. I’m just putting another break in this one, leaving the target date and distance the same, while I wait for a spell of storm-free weather to arrive!
And, yes, my mile based goal is in km because Britain is a mixed up place that continually frustrates my attempts to be an SI unit person.