Manifesto of Mileage

Club miles are that exciting reward you receive every time you sign up and ride with a club that tracks miles. The more you ride, the more miles you earn. Riders flock to the club rides as often as they can and rack up those miles as if they were airline miles, or those points you find underneath your Coca-Cola bottle cap.



The difference between the bicycle club miles and those other miles is that you can't spend them. I was extremely disappointed that I couldn't cash in my 20,000 club miles for a round trip from Detroit to Toledo. I also couldn't get a Coca-Cola t-shirt, a free download on iTunes, or a cheap stuffed Pac-Man at Chuck E Cheeses. After thousands of hours of saddle-sore, you'd think I could get something for all my trouble!

Although club miles are for achieving personal goals (so they say), I can't help but feel a bit competitive when all I gotta do is ride 20 more miles on New Year's Eve to move up from number 78 to 77 on the club's mileage list. Heck, one year I rode 5 straight days in winter weather to pass Buster the dog, who accumulated miles by sitting in milk crate on the back of his owner's bike (the owner actually had many more miles than Buster). We bookmark the web page with the mileage directly and hound the mileage person to keep things up to date, especially near the end of the year.

Unfortunately, club mileage is the incentive to ride with the club, not ride your bike in general. Things like riding into the club ride, commuting, riding with the kids, or doing charity rides tend not to count. Some club riders won't ride unless there's some mileage at stake. Worse yet, they'll drive the 6 miles to and from the ride because credit isn't given for the whole trip. They'll also drive 25 miles across town instead of riding 2 miles to the closer ride because they can gain an extra 10 club miles by riding across town. And as silly as you think that might be, you actually feel compelled to keep up with these mileage junkies.

Also, there's no difference between the guy who rides 50 miles in 4 hours and 50 miles in 2.5 hours. If you've got unlimited time on your hands, you can maximize your rides and miles. I suggest a change to the system to accomodate people with less available biking time and make it fair:

1) Add mileage bonuses on the route for getting to the coffee shop or ice cream stand first. No longer is getting your food first the only incentive. Now you get 5 bonus miles.

2) Killer Hill miles. Every route I've been on, there's always a mile or two detour that you can do to climb a hill that was skipped when the route was drawn. Now you can get 10 bonus miles per Killer Hill. If you're a good climber, you can get a few centuries in on any given ride.

3) Safety bonus points. Want to get club riders to stop at your stop signs? Traffic tickets, extra signs, safety commercials - none of those work. If you really want to get a rider to stop at a stop sign, attach a coupon for 1 bonus club mile at each stop sign along the route. This will force the rider to stop the bike to pick up the coupon to turn in at the end of the ride.

4) Sprint points - there's nothing better than outmuscling your fellow riders to the end of a bridge, a sign, or some other familiar landmark, except for outmuscling your fellow riders and picking up the bonus miles that go with it. If you win enough of these bonus miles, we'll even throw in a green jersey.

5) And finally, for those who just can't ride long distances or keep up, we offer some very special bonus miles for consuming more calories along the ride than you actually burn. This may not help you get better, but it will improve the local economy.

In absence of these bonus miles, I suggest you just log your miles on bikejournal.com and be proud to be on a bike.