It’s the middle of the night on the last day of March so it’s technically April and that means it’s 30 Days of Biking!

“30 Days of Biking is a pledge to ride your bike every day in April and share your adventures online with the hashtag #30daysofbiking. There’s no minimum distance–down a hill and around your garage count just like a 20-mile commute or a 350-mile charity ride.⁣⁣ ⁣If you miss a day, no worries. Just keep riding and don’t give up! It’s all for fun, or as serious as you want it to be. What matters is we’re all in this together.⁣⁣⁣⁣” – 30DaysofBiking.com

I adore 30 Days of Biking and credit it for turning me into an everyday bicyclist 10 years ago. Since then, I went car-free, became a bicycle advocate, and published a book about bike commuting. Yay bikes!

I didn’t do such a great job at 30 Days of Biking 2020. Looking back at blog posts I can see I made a bit of an effort, but I have to admit I don’t remember much about a year ago. I was in such a deep hole for such a long time, in the throes of feeling like a failure as a mother, as a coworker, as a friend, and just as a human. Things are much better now, though one thing that hasn’t returned to normal is my ability to sleep–but that just means it’s easy to ring in April with a midnight ride! (*Obviously riding my bike more would have made things considerably better a year ago even if it didn’t erase the underlying problems. But it’s one thing to know a thing when you’re down in the hole and another to actually make it happen.)

My kids haven’t been riding their bikes very much, nor getting outside the house as often as I’d like. With the days getting longer and warmer I’ll hopefully get them pedaling a bit more, though I don’t intend to force the issue. Lately I’ve been focusing on getting myself outdoors more since that’s something I can control.

I dunno if I’ll have any sort of theme this year (some years a theme develops on its own), but I’ll track my mileage since historically that’s been fun to do. Nowadays I usually ride sans kiddos and doggo so I’ve been on my road bike a lot, which means I can go farther faster. And even though I have nowhere to go with work being remote and kids’ school being remote, I think I might rack up some impressive mileage.