Hello everyone!
It has been about a month ago that I took a break from Hive. I must say I'm happy that I took the decision for this break. I didn't leave Hive. I did check in a few times, but it has been a relief not to feel the 'burden' of all the projects I've built up in the past couple of years.
And I'm happy that two of my dearest projects @topcomment and the Cycling Community are still continuing under the lead of @incublus and @nanixxx
Thank you guys, you're doing a great job!

As I said in my post a month ago, I didn't quite Hive. And I will create a blog post every now and then, but I just won't be that active anymore (at least for a while).

But this is a blog I just had to make. Every year I set myself a cycling distance goal. Almost every year this goal is set to 5000 kilometers. In the past two years I didn't manage to reach that goal.

In 2023 I nearly got 20% and in 2024 I was 11% from my goal. In 2025 I did set the same goal again, destined to reach it this year.
After a good start in January I got a quite severe groin injury from which I had to recover and that ment a couple of weeks no cycling. And after that , I had to built it up slowly again.

But the recovery went well and I started to keep my weekly numbers in a Google sheet (see the graph above). Going towards and in the summer I really made a lot of kilometers. And just after summer the 'kilometers needed' and 'kilometers made' lines crossed over.
But when Autumn arrives, also the bad weather comes. It can get really rainy, cold and windy when we're heading towards the winter here in The Netherlands. And usually the weekend rides are cancelled when it rains. So, usually I won't ride that much kilometers from October to December.
But despite that, I did manage to reach my goal just before the end of the year.

My Sunday ride

It was quite cold this Sunday. It has been below 0 degrees C in the past few nights and the ponds are covered with a thin layer of ice. Not enough to go ice skating unfortunately. But cold enough for me to dress up well before going for a ride in the morning. In the early morning the temperatures was a few degrees above 0. But my baclava, gloves and thermo undershirt kept me warm. And there was not a lot of wind and a nice watery sun that helped a bit to stay warm during cycling.

On the photo above you can see one of the nice views I had during the ride. This is a cycling path of a couple of kilometers alongside a canal. A very nice piece of the route I made.
After roughly two hours of cycling I managed to finish the 56 kilometer route I planned for that day.

By cycling this nice route through the polder I managed to reach my 2025 distance goal of 5000 kilometers. I'm quite proud of this achievement, especially because I didn't manage to reach it on 2023 and 2024 and I even had a serious injury this year.

For 2026 I'm going to set the same goal again. Let's see if I can reach it even earlier in the year.

Do you track the kilometers you made in 2025? And is it what you expected it to be?
And are you going to set yourself a goal for 2026 too?

I wish you all the very best for 2026!