10,269 Daily Rides In a Row: An Interview with Jim Langley

Just a few weeks ago I was spinning my legs in a Pace Partner group when a noticed a rider name I hadn’t seen before: “J. Langley (10,269 Daily Rides In a Row)”.

My first thought was, “That’s a lot of rides!” I did the math and realized that worked out to over 28 years of daily riding, which sounded even more impressive than the daily ride number. I had to know the story behind this riding streak, so I reached out via a Zwift pm.

Turns out, Jim Langley is quite an interesting dude: a competitive racer, a gifted bike mechanic, and truly an ambassador for cycling. Enjoy the interview!

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Riding every day for 10,269 days… what an amazing accomplishment! Tell me how it all began.

I ran cross country in high school and as a huge running fan I knew about Ron Hill, the great British marathoner who ran a 2:09 and won the Boston Marathon. He was famous for running every day and a couple of us decided we’d try to do it but we never made it more than a week or ten days.

The idea stuck with me though. Fast forward to 1989 when I started working as a technical editor for Bicycling Magazine. Some of the other editors were doing amazing things like Ed Pavelka who was setting cross-state records and later set a RAAM team world record for 50+ racers. I had been an athlete long enough to know I wasn’t capable of setting world records like Ed. But, I remembered Ron Hill and I decided to see if I could keep riding every day in a row for 5 years, which I thought would be something the other editors would respect. 

And how did it end?

Well, the first streak from 1990 to 1993 ended with falling on black ice in the Santa Cruz Mountains and breaking my hip. Which was incredibly frustrating and made me even more determined to try again!

So I started back up in late December of 93 and kept the streak going until last February. This time, it was sepsis that did me in, an awful urinary tract infection resulting from what was supposed to be a routine prostate procedure – when they say “routine,” you know it’s anything but ;-). The funny thing about it was that we were camped in our RV in Tombstone, Arizona at the time I got sick, a fitting place for my streak to die I guess. 

Ouch. Tough way to end your incredible streak… but I suppose it was never going to end easily.

My guess is Zwift was at least a nice diversion on those days when you needed to ride indoors. Any idea how many rides you spent staring at a wall before Zwift came along? How much of your riding was indoors vs outdoors?

I’m glad you asked this question because most cyclists assume that I would ride outside every day. But, I set my own requirements for a ride to “count.” For a ride to count towards my streak I had to go for what I considered a “real” ride. And to me that meant suiting up and riding for about an hour. A ride to the store and back or around the neighborhood wouldn’t count. But it was fine to ride indoors as long as it was still a real ride.

In the early years it was always harder to ride indoors than outdoors due to extreme boredom. Zwift has been a godsend in that department – such a game-changer! To answer your question, I used to only ride indoors if it was before or after dark or the weather was bad. So not that often at first. But later during my racing years and as indoor trainers improved, I started riding more indoors because I could monitor my effort better to dial in my training. And on Zwift I was super motivated to ride every course and get all the badges, break an hour up the Alpe and get the Tron bike and Lightweight wheels!

You say your indoor riding increased as trainers improved. Apart from staring at the wall, what indoor platforms have you used over the years, and how would you compare Zwift to these platforms?

I can’t really answer this question because Zwift is the first virtual indoor platform I have used long-term. I was the new products editor of Bicycling Magazine so all through the years I saw indoor trainers change from rollers to wind trainers to magnetic to hydraulic and then the early electronic ones. And I had a chance to try quite a few as an editor.

But the thing is that as the new virtual trainers came out I was being coached by Mark Edwards who had us all on regimented trainer workouts. We all used Power Tap hub-based watt meters. And Coach was an expert at changing up the workouts so we never got bored. Since this worked so well, I didn’t have any interest in changing to a modern platform. Basically I was worried it would hurt my racing.

What changed my mind was when a good friend gifted me a Tacx Neo 2 ON THE CONDITION that I had to promise to ride it. He did that because he wanted to ride with me in Zwift so how could I say no?

What is your current Zwift setup (trainer, display, etc)?

I have a Tacx Neo 2T with an Apple TV and an LG 42″ flatscreen. I have an iPhone 11 running the Companion app. Knock on wood but I haven’t had any issues with this setup. Once in a while the wi-fi signal in the garage goes out (the router is in the house kind of far away) but Zwift keeps trying and eventually reconnects. Most of the time though it’s rock solid.

Oh, the Apple TV remote is a pain to use.

You say riding every day will wear you down eventually, and I totally believe that! I definitely start feeling it in my own body if I’m riding daily and pushing my efforts on some of those rides.

What advice would you give to help people who struggle physically with riding daily? How can you build up that mental/physical endurance, stay healthy, and keep yourself motivated?

One of the reasons I started my riding streak was because I was lacking motivation. I figured that having the goal of riding daily would give me something to look forward to because every ride would add one day to my streak. But, I quickly realized that even though I was relatively young and pretty fit, riding every day is a lot to ask of your body, especially if you ride too far or too hard.

The key was to have some rest days, usually Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays in my schedule. On these days I would limit the distance and effort, focusing more on spinning, easier gears, flatter terrain, and recovery. The rest days are a form of motivation, too, since you look forward to the break.

Motivation is a mind game, though. You need lots of tricks 😉 Some of mine include:

• buy some cool new bike component or accessory to look forward to using
• clean your bike or even just your drivetrain or put on new tape – voila, bike feels new!
• a new kit, new shoes, new helmet, etc. can fire you up for a while
• new routes to ride are motivating
• bored of a certain loop? Ride it in reverse or add/change it up a little!
• to motivate yourself to ride further, plan a route with a coffee shop halfway or a nice view, etc. something to look forward to
• find or make a riding buddy and you both choose a goal to try for
• join a cycling team or club with regular rides
• listening to audiobooks or episodic podcasts on rides is awesome for giving you something to look forward to (use safe technology to listen)
• I put my iPhone on my stem with a Rockform mount. I tell Siri to play NPR radio and listen to sportstalk, etc. No headphones. I just listen to the iPhone’s speaker. It’s great for doing intervals to get your mind off the suffering.
• group rides are motivating IRL and in Zwift
• I found the Zwift route badges super motivating, just wish there were more now
• setting IRL event goals is great motivation, too. Hill climbs, time trials, gravel events, etc. These are getting more expensive, but then again it’s worth it because that money should fire you up to keep riding.
• on Zwift it’s motivating to try to beat your personal records on timed segments – the only problem is that Zwift doesn’t actually save your best times as far as I can tell – only your best for the past certain amount of time. I wish they’d fix that.

Regarding staying healthy, the biggest challenge with riding every day or just training seriously is overtraining. If you push yourself too hard and don’t get enough rest you’ll find yourself unmotivated, depressed, and feeling awful all the time – not just when you’re riding. I don’t know the secret to guarantee you never overtrain. The only advice I can give is to watch for the signs and back off on the hard efforts if you’re feeling lousy – and you will probably need to go easy for at least a week if you’re badly overtrained.

For me the two key signs of overtraining are insomnia (feeling anxious as you’re trying to get to sleep or waking during the night feeling that way), a general feeling of malais or mild depression, and a lack of interest in anything throughout the day. If I start feeling that way, alarm bells start sounding so I ride easy until I’m back to my old self because that’s the only way to cure overtraining.

What sort of outdoor riding did you do during your streak? Did you mix up long and short rides, races and leisure? Was it mostly solo rides, or rides with friends?

I have done all those, Eric. At first I was mostly riding for fitness and to be ready to do events like the annual Sea Otter Classic here and weekly group rides. At Bicycling Magazine and later running SmartEtailing (we did websites for bicycle retailers) I would attend events, too, such as centuries and festivals and industry stuff like Interbike. I always wanted to be able to hang with the fast riders so the streak’s purpose was to keep me in top form.

I tend to ride solo more than with groups or friends but only because I have a family and I needed most of the years of the streak to be home early. It’s hard to find people who enjoy riding at 5 a.m. 😉 In the mid 2000s though while out alone I came upon a group doing hill repeats. They asked me if I wanted to join, which I did. It was a fun group and the coach leading the ride asked if I’d like to join a team with him and the other guys.

That led to racing on a couple of masters teams over a 12-13 year period, which was a blast. I won my share of age-group races and finally won a California State Championships in the 65+ Men’s Individual Time Trial in 2018. That was a major accomplishment because I had tried since my first State Championship in 1984 and across all disciplines (road, criterium, time trial, cyclocross even mountain bike). I got lots of second and thirds but never the gold until 2018 – never ever thought it would take so long.

Tell me about the bikes you ride during your streak. And did you always have a spare available just in case?

The bike that made the biggest difference in keeping the streak alive was my Bike Friday Pocket Rocket Pro. They knew about my streak and set me up with the bike gratis – I did review it for Bicycling Magazine and I know the review sold a bunch of bikes. It’s an amazing riding bike plus it goes in a standard suitcase, which flies for free since you’d never even know a bike’s inside. The suitcase even turns into a trailer to pull behind the bike when you get to your destination.

That bike saved me every time I flew somewhere, though there were some scary moments. Like the time our flight to Maui was delayed and we didn’t arrive until 10:30pm, meaning I only had a little over an hour to get my ride in. I didn’t have lights so I stopped at a 7-11, bought tape, flashlights, and batteries and managed to get my hour in – in the pouring rain. My wife was having none of it.

Most of my rides were done on a Litespeed Vortex (I had 3 of them – long story), a couple different Cervelos, and various Specialized and Trek mountain bikes.

I know you’ve done a lot of work with Bicycling Magazine and other cycling-related publications, as well as maintaining a popular YouTube channel… did you find that your life become more cycling-centric as your streak grew, or did daily riding just get slotted into your everyday life?

Like a lot of die-hard cyclists, I fell in love with bikes when I was just a kid. I loved riding them and was just as excited about figuring out how they worked and how to fix them. And the very best thing was being able to take off and see places I’d never seen before. So I don’t think that changed much, but having a streak does give you an important daily goal and that develops a life of its own.  

Keeping up the daily regime must have affected various aspects of your life. Tell us more about yourself – what do you do for work, where do you live, etc?

I live in Santa Cruz, California and I’ve been a bike guy my whole life. In high school I started working in bike shops and kept that up for 17 years in 5 different shops. Along the way I started writing about how to fix bikes for a number of different magazines, which led to becoming the west coast technical editor of Bicycling Magazine. Most recently I’ve been an engineer and wheel builder at Praxis here in Santa Cruz, maker of cranksets, bottom brackets and rims. I also have a weekly column called Jim’s Tech Talk which is on RoadBikeRider.com.

Riding every day is definitely easier if you’re working with others who appreciate how essential your daily ride is to you. So for most of my streak I could fit rides in on most workdays because of that, which was super lucky.

Riding daily for 28 years is a life-changing accomplishment, for sure. What were the positive benefits you received from riding daily? Were there negative effects that you had to battle as well?

I get asked this a lot so I made the following list of benefits to share with people. It’s long, but only because so many good things happen from biking every day:

• Always feeling comfortable on the bike – never needing to get used to the saddle again, etc.
• The ability to quickly raise my fitness as needed to do any fun ride, event or race and be competitive if I wanted
• Strong motivation – every ride motivates you to keep riding as your streak total grows
• See the world on two wheels – due to my daily ride requirement I have ridden in all kinds of places I probably would not have otherwise and I have wonderful memories of these adventures
• Keeps you healthy – As soon as I started streaking I noticed I almost never got sick and if I did feel a little off I would bounce back after riding (the sickness that ended my streak is the first time I’ve been that seriously ill since a battle with pneumonia in college)
• Keeps you young – during the streak I’ve been told many times from friends, competitors and family that they’re surprised how young I look (and I feel younger than my age). So I think there’s something to this.
• Streaking is something to be proud of – friends and family may think you’re a little crazy, but it’s highly satisfying to keep riding every day for a while and it’s not something very many cyclists do for very long. I know it’s inspiring to other riders, too, because they’ve told me so.
• Streaking will likely lead to other positive lifestyle changes – for me, it required having a plan for my rides, my bikes, my work, my nutrition, rest, and everything else. I think having to organize your life and have a set schedule and healthy habits like this is a wonderful thing especially for achieving goals. It did not make me less productive, either, it made me more productive.

For negatives I would say that streaking can make you feel guilty. After all, it’s basically a selfish for-yourself-only goal. You can argue that you wouldn’t be fun to be around if you didn’t get your ride in, but it’s also true that while you’re riding your loved ones could be worried about you or wishing you were around more. To combat the guilt I tried to always ride when it had the least impact on the family.

The other negative is that depending on your body, age, and personality riding every day might wear you down eventually. I have always been competitive and 25 years into my streak including lots of hard training and racing and some bad crashes, I finally started having pain with every turn of the pedals. Now if I had started streaking at 18 years old, it definitely wouldn’t have been an issue most likely. But I started at 40 years old.

Do you hold the world record for streak cycling? Is there even an official record?

As far as I’ve been able to determine only runners have a governing body of streaking with record-keeping and Ron Hill is the world champion at 52 years!! (See runeveryday.com.)

I do know of other cycling streaks a little different than mine (most are mileage-based), which I try to keep track of on my Streak Athletes webpage.

What advice would you give to anyone interested in becoming a “streak cyclist”?

Streaking isn’t that hard as long as you love riding your bike. I always say ‘you brush your teeth every day, right?’ Streaking is kind of like that – something you commit to every single day. Also, you’ve got 24 hours every day to work with. You only need to fit in that daily ride and who doesn’t waste a couple hours of every day?

Once you commit and stick with it for only a few days your streak will gain a momentum of its own. As weeks turn into months, you get fired up to make it to a year. Even after only a few months it’s something you can be really proud of. When you tell your riding pals they probably won’t believe you but as you convince them they’ll be impressed and then you’ll be motivated by them as they keep asking you if your streak is still alive.

It gets very exciting and fun for most streakers I’ve talked to and heard from. I encourage anyone with an interest to give it a try because I know they can do it for at least a good number of days and they’ll be really happy they did.

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