I was triggered by a recent post of @lesmann who shared the progress of his cycling goals for the current year.
It reminded me that I had set myself a cycling goal for this year too. If you want to know why I set myself these goals and how I am doing; just read on!

Why set goals?

Why in the world would you want to set goals for cycling? In the first place for motivation. Knowing you are working towards a goal can motivate you and prevent procrastination.
Be careful that you do set realistic and achievable goals because then they are probably demotivating.
Setting a cycling goal stimulates me to grab my bicycle for both commuting as recreational rides.
It's also nice to see the progress you're making. You can keep track of your process and increase your efforts if needed.
And finally; reaching a goal can be very satisfying and rewarding. You might even want to reward yourself after achieving a goal for instance buying new gear.

Gamification

Many apps like Garmin Connect and Strava use gamification in the form of badges to reward users for their efforts.

My Garmin Connect app shows me different challenges every month with which I can earn badges.
You have badges for all sorts of sports. Most of them challenge you to ride a number of miles/kilometers or the number of active minutes of a certain sport.
Although the badges themselves are worthless, they do motivate me to get them. And after a while you can get a nice collection.

My 2023 Goal

Apart from the predefined goals you can also set a custom goal in Garmin Connect.
At the start of 2023 I set myself a goal to ride at least 5,000 kilometers in one year.
That's 416.66 per month, 96.15 per week and 13.69 per day.
I thought it would be achievable, but I failed to complete the goal by far...

I managed to reach 'just' over 4,000 kilometers.
A lot of rainy days in the end of the year and a busy schedule were the reasons why I didn't reach this goal. In December I hardly made any kilometers on my bicycle.

My 2024 Goal

This year I wanted to do better and set myself the same goal as I had in 2023.
My year started in 2024 with a skiing trip from which I returned with an injured shoulder. Because of to the injury I wasn't able to ride my bicycle for a couple of weeks; a bad start of my cycling year.
In the months after that I got back on my bicycle again. I went to work on my bicycle one or two days a week and I also restarted the recreational rides with my friends in the weekend.
Unfortunately the weather wasn't always that good. We're used to rain here in The Netherlands, but this year we had a very wet spring. There were so many days of rain this year. In May, which traditionally is a very sunny month, all rain records were broken. With an average of 12,7 centimeters of rain all old records were broken.
In June I could catch up a bit doing some larger rides and in July I mostly went to the office three days a week and went almost all of them by bike.
Usually I take my road bike with me on holiday, but a smaller car and a hot destination (Spain) made me decide not to bring my bicycle with me.
After the holiday the weather was mostly quite nice so I got back on my bike again.
And now we are halfway in September and you might already expect it; I'm a bit behind my schedule. This where I'm at now, way over the half of the year:

With 110 days left to go I managed to ride 3,223.57 kilometers. This is 64% of my 5,000 kilometer goal. I still have 1,776.43 kilometers left in the remaining 110 days. According to the number of days I have left I should have been at 69,32% by now.
It doesn't seem to be that much, 5,32%, but 5,32 % of 5000 is 266 kilometers.

It's going to be tough to reach my goal for this year since the summer has ended and the actual 'rainy season' has yet to come.
I do have a cycling weekend planned at the end of the month which should enable me to increase my number of cycling kilometers significantly. That is when we have good weather then.

And maybe I should increase the distance in the weekend and hope for some better weather.
I'm not yet giving up on the goal I set!
I will keep you updated on the progress!

Your goals

What about you? Have you also set any cycling goals? And will you achieve them?
Are you also earning badges in Garmin Connect or Strava?
Let me know in the comments!

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