A graph showing the number of posts I have made to this blog each year since I started it. I posted almost once a week during the first two years of the blog and then my posting frequency started dropping. When I moved to California, I revised my goal to posting once a month, a goal I have been able to meet. The reasons for these changes are discussed below. (In 2012, I didn't start posting until May, so the number of posts is corrected upwards to compensate.)
Why Do I Blog?
"I was inspired to write this blog to organize and preserve my thoughts and experiences in this part of my life, to document my view of modern cycling from a 40 year vantage point, and to record my experience of a man in his 60's trying to regain enough fitness to return to active cycling. I will post to this blog once a week."
This quote comes from my very first blog post, 200 posts and more than eight years ago. Eight years is a long time. It might be expected that my reasons for blogging would have changed, or that I might have even lost interest in blogging altogether. However, I am still blogging to "organize and preserve my thoughts". Two things have changed: I now try to post once a month rather than once a week and the "thoughts" about which I blog have changed some too. Even by my 100th post there had been significant changes in what I was thinking compared to my first post, changes which I discussed back then. The purpose of this post is to discuss the changes that have occurred between my first and second hundred posts and to look ahead to what the future of this blog might be.
From Once a Week to Once a Month
"When I started this blog back in 2012, I promised a post a week, and for the first 100 posts, I did a pretty good job of maintaining that. Since then, my record has been dismal. I have some pretty good excuses, but honestly, I just don't think my current cycling warrants that many posts. As of this post, I am going to try to maintain a rate of one post a month. I hope by doing that I can keep them interesting."
The above quote comes from my blog post of November 2017, shortly after my move to California. In retrospect, the promise I made in my very first post, to post once a week, was optimistic. Other bloggers post once a day (I'm looking at you, Bike Snob), so why is once a week too much for me? I don't know, but it obviously is, as is illustrated by the graph at the top of this post. Although I came close to one post a week for the first 100 posts, my rate of posting fell off pretty rapidly after that, hitting a low in 2017 when I only managed eight posts for the entire year. (To be fair, that was the worst year of my life.) Since getting settled in California I have easily managed my revised promise of one post a month, even managing a bonus post now and then, so it seems I have found my balance.
How was I able to maintain such a high rate of posting for those first 100? I think it mostly came from being able to draw on a long history of my cycling. Some of that is literal history, eight posts on my first cycling career back in the 1960s and 1970s for example, but some of it drew on a backlog of questions and thoughts about restarting cycling and catching up on the 30 years of technological and social evolution that I had missed during the 30 years I was out of the sport. Finally, there was four years of cycling I had done between 2008 when I restarted cycling and 2012 when I started blogging. Once I caught up on all that, I had to reduce my rate of posting to reach a steady state where my rate of posting matches the rate at which I had new ideas and experiences.
Changing Thoughts
I was first inspired to start blogging by my interest in randonneuring, a branch of cycling which is focused on challenging oneself to complete rides (brevets) of 200 to 1200 kilometers (120-750 miles). Despite the fact that "once a randonneur, always a randonneur" and despite the fact that nothing (or almost nothing) is impossible, I cannot conceive of ever riding a brevet again, it is just too much for who I am today. As a result, I didn't blog much about randonneuring during my second 100 posts and don't expect to blog about randonneuring at all going forward. So if the inspiration that started this blog is gone, why am I still blogging? Randonneuring inspired me to start blogging, but I ended blogging about much more. In my 100th post, I put those first 100 posts into groups based on their general topic. (Posts about randonneuring were included in the "Ride Reports" or "Training" groups.) For comparison, I am now putting the second 100 posts into the same groups:
| Topic | 1st 100 Posts | 2nd 100 Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Training | 33 | 32 |
| History | 17 | 4 |
| Infrastructure and Culture | 15 | 21 |
| Equipment (e.g. Bikes) | 14 | 8 |
| Ride Reports | 13 | 11 |
| Miscellaneous | 7 | 24 |
For many topics, the number of posts is pretty similar for the first and the second 100 posts. The two big exceptions are History and Miscellaneous; there are fewer History posts and more Miscellaneous posts in the second 100 posts than in the first. I have already described how I used up my source of posts in the History group during my first 100 posts, so the fact that that group has shrunk makes sense. To try to understand the Miscellaneous posts, I subdivided them into subcategories. The two largest were Summary and Life. Summary posts are posts like the 100th post, 20,000 miles, and so on. The first of these was the 100th post, so all but one occurred in this second hundred. There have been 7 of these (counting this one.) The second category is Life Events, major non-cycling events that influenced my cycling, like the illness and death of my father, the illness and death of my wife, moving to California, COVID-19, etc. There were 12 such posts. Most of these events occurred during my second 100 posts. (Other subcategories, not very important in explaining the difference, were one post which covered more than one subject, one post on philosophy, and three attempts at humor.) In conclusion, the increase in Miscellaneous posts is due to the many disruptive life events that occured during my second hundred posts and to the accumulation of enough recent cycling history to justify summarization.
If the number of History posts went down because I ran out of things about which to blog, why didn't the same thing happen with other topics, Training for example? Again, the answer comes from looking inside the category. Every training post I wrote in my first 100 was about a book written by a coach. There was one more of those in my second hundred, but all the rest were about scientific papers. Although I was still posting about training, it was at a higher level of sophistication making it essentially a new topic.
O brave new world, That has such bicycles in't! (with apologies to Aldous Huxley)
Randonneuring and the history of my cycling were not the only topics to become less important in my second 100 posts. Posts about my bewilderment at the changes in bicycle technology did as well. By my 100th post, I had pretty much figured that out and made peace with those changes. Visually, I still prefer the look of bikes from my youth and I still prefer to ride on Brooks saddles, but these days I am happy to discuss the latest gravel specific grupos and the newest and hottest bikes on the market. I knew I had changed when I had the opportunity to buy a vintage Peugeot PX-10 for a very affordable $500 and passed, not because of the $500 but because I found, to my surprise, I didn't actually want it. I still love my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima and my 1967 Hetchins Mountain King. However, I don't love them just because they are classics but because they are my classics, the actual bikes I rode back in the day. If I buy myself a new bike it most likely will be thoroughly modern. At the end of 2019, I planned to purchase a band new Bianchi Infinito. The inspiration for that purchase was to make riding the 2020 Death Ride a bit easier. The only thing that stopped me from buying that bike was the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic meant no 2020 Death Ride which meant no new bike. If the vaccines work and there is a Death Ride 2021, will I buy that bike? I don't know, it's so 2019. I might prefer something more modern.
Resources
When I wrote my 100th post summary, I didn't have room to include the influences on my blog in that post so I discussed those in my 101st post. Many of those resources ended up being listed on the right margin of my blog. I was inspired by this 200th post to update that list, and it was a sad process. Lovely Bicycle hasn't posted in three years, nor have the Blaylocks, so both were removed from my list. Other sites were removed when I realized I no longer had any interest in visiting them. In general, I rely much less on cycling sites than I used to. Bike Snob I visit every day, but that is more because of his entertaining writing style than because he blogs about bicycling. Bike Forums is a wonderful site and I recommend it enthusiastically but even it barely made the cut. I doubt that I visit it more than once every six months. I still read everything Coach John Hughes posts on RoadBikeRider, and find something like a quarter to a half of his articles useful (more than enough to keep me interested) but he is the only coach I follow anymore. The link to the Modesto Roadmen Website is more of an advertisement than a resource. I created it and I think it is way cool but you get to decide about that for yourself. And that's about it.
What Do I Have Left to Blog About?
Can I keep this up forever, or at least for as long as I am still riding? I believe I can. I have discovered new sources of training advice, podcasts and tweets. Once the pandemic is under control there should be more rides so the ride report category should become active again. I definitely hope to buy at least one new bike and lots of bike equipment, so posts about Equipment should continue. I really hope the miscellaneous posts slow down since most of those are in the "Life Events" subcategory, and most such events are bad news, but I think I can make up for that by posting more in the other categories.
Who Reads This Blog? Do I Care?
Nothing I have said so far requires that anyone besides me reads this blog. My son Matthew has a saying "If you want to think, write," a saying I have found to be very true. That is reason enough for me to write these blog posts. On the other hand, none of that requires a blog, a journal would do just as well. Thus, the fact that I chose to write on a blog rather than in a journal suggests that I do care if somebody read what I write, and I confess that I do.
So does anyone read this blog? Blogger, the software I use to host this blog, provides some statistics on who has been accessing my blog. The number of people who read this blog varies a great deal from post to post but it is never large. I have between 5 and 10 "regular" readers, people who see my post within days of my posting it. As best I can tell, these are mostly friends or relatives. From there, the number of people who see a post varies enormously from post to post and goes up slowly over time. Because of this latter fact, it is difficult to compare the number of people who have visited my blog during my last 100 posts to those who visited the first 100 posts because these older posts have had more time to accumulate visits. When I wrote my 100th post, the most popular page had accumulated just under 1,000 visits. The most popular of those first 100 now has over 2,600 visits. My most popular of the second 100 posts currently has had just over 1,700 visits. To give some idea of how variable this is, the posts just before and after the one that got over 1,700 visits have gotten 125 and 456 visits respectively.
Are these late arrivers the people I hoped would read my blog? I really don't know. They could be, but they also could be people who somehow stumble across my blog only to realize it is not what they are looking for. How do these late arrivals end up on my blog? I am essentially a non-participant when it comes to promoting my blog. The one thing I did in that direction, back when I was a member of Randonneuring USA, was to add my blog to RUSA Blogs, a bookmarking site for RUSA members. I also sometimes list this blog as "my website" when I create an account, for example on the Bike Forums website. These lead to some referrals. Google Search (and other search engines) are an obvious way for someone to get to my own blog and the evidence shows that they lead to some referrals as well. Are there others? There are, and Blogger lists the top 19. After that, everyone else is relegated to the category "Other". Since I began this blog, it has received 108,065 visits. The category "Other" constitutes 82,600 of these visits, or 76%. Another 7 are sites that make no sense to me. I did some poking around, and I gather at least some of these are what is called "Social Bookmarking" sites. Honestly, I had no idea that social bookmarking was even a thing until I started working on this post and I still don't know very much about it, so I dump those 7 back into "Other" bringing it up to 78% of the total. Of the remaining 22%, search engines (almost entirely Google) constitute 18%, leaving only 4% for everything else. RUSA Blogs, mentioned above, is 2%, cases where someone links from one page on my blog to another is 1%, leaving 1%. A social media platform named rredit, which my younger son uses a lot but which I have never visited, is 0.3%, trailsnet, a blog about hiking and biking trails, is 0.2%, and Facebook is 0.1%. The last 0.4% is rounding error (for example, search engines were actually 18.24% of the visits.) Any visits from places like Bike Forums where I am a member and list this blog as "my website" are lost in the "Other" category. I do know I got at least one visitor from Bike Forums, because they left a comment to that effect. So what do I conclude from all this? That the Internet is a big, complicated, confusing place incomprehensible to me and as a result I have no idea who the people are who visit my site.
Another metric of interest besides visits is comments. I rarely get comments, and comments are even more rare in my second 100 posts than they were in the first. Twenty nine of my first 100 posts got comments while only four of my second 100 did. Judging from the fact that these visitors took the time to leave comments and the content of these comments, are these the people I hoped would see my blog? I think they are. If so, is that all there is or are these the tip of an iceberg of folks who came, enjoyed, and moved on quietly? I have no idea. In my 100th post, I asked readers to leave a comment to help me figure that out. Nobody did. Now, older, sadder, and wiser, I won't even ask.
So that's it, my 200th post. My plan for next month is to blog about Dr. Stephen Seiler, polarized training, and podcasts and twitter as sources of training ideas more generally. Despite having posted on polarized training several times before, I do think there is more worth saying on that topic. Stay tuned.
