Two days is not a habit. Two days is two days.
But something happens on the second one that does not happen on the first, which is that the first stops being an accident. Thursday I stopped mid-ride and wrote because there was a bench and I had a pen. Friday I stopped because I had done it on Thursday. That is a smaller and more interesting event than it sounds.
Again, unedited:
40,075 — that is earth circumference. Today marks the second day in a row where I write! And aiming at an initiative to cycle earth? It would take 3 years more or less! It will give my soul and body a purpose through these days. I’am not only cycling earth but the whole existense through my senses! 30 kilometers every day, with a few lines of writing every day.
The number
40,075 kilometres is the earth’s circumference at the equator. It is not a round number and I like that about it. A round number would feel chosen. 40,075 feels measured — it is the figure that came back when someone went and checked, and it carries the seventy-five at the end like a receipt.
The arithmetic is not complicated. Thirty kilometres a day into 40,075 gives 1,336 days. That is three years and eight months of not missing one. Which is the part the number quietly conceals: the figure that matters here is not 40,075, it is 30. Nobody rides forty thousand kilometres. They ride thirty, then they ride thirty again, and the large number is what accumulates behind them while they are not looking at it.
I have watched enough plans die to know which of the two figures is the dangerous one. The large number is motivating for about a week and then it becomes a debt. Every day you do not ride, it grows relative to your remaining life. The small number does not do this. Thirty kilometres is a morning. It has no opinion about the other 1,335.
Not a ride around the world
Let me be precise about what this is, because “cycling the earth” reads as something it is not.
I am not going to circumnavigate anything. I am not shipping the bike to Lisbon. There will be no crossing of a continent, no visa problems, no sponsors. The route is Riyadh — the same roads, most mornings, before the heat takes the day. What is being ridden is the distance, not the geography. Forty thousand kilometres of Riyadh is still forty thousand kilometres.
I suspect some people will find that a cheat, and I understand why. The romance of riding around the world is the world part. What I am proposing has no romance in it at all: it is the same road, in the dark, for three and a half years, with a notebook.
But the honest version of most large things looks like this. The distance is real either way. The legs do not know whether the kilometres were exotic.
Soul and body a purpose
The page says the project will “give my soul and body a purpose through these days,” and that line is doing more work than the rest of the entry.
Because the truthful reason for any of this is not fitness and it is not adventure. It is that the days have a way of dissolving. I run a business; the shape of my week is set by things arriving — problems, messages, other people’s urgencies — and it is entirely possible to work very hard for a month and be unable to say what happened in it. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is recorded either.
Thirty kilometres and a few lines is a structure that resists that. Not because it is productive — it is not, it produces nothing — but because it is mine, and it happens before anything else has a chance to claim the morning. By the time the first message arrives, the day already has one thing in it that was not assigned to me.
The page reaches for a bigger claim — “I’m not only cycling earth but the whole existence through my senses” — and I am going to let it stand without defending it. That is what the second morning felt like. It will probably not feel like that on day four hundred. The record is more useful if it keeps the mornings when I was overstating things.
The ledger
So: thirty kilometres a day, a few lines a day, and a number to ride toward that I will almost certainly not reach on schedule.
I am not going to pretend this is a commitment I can guarantee. Three and a half years is longer than most things last. There will be travel, illness, weeks where it does not happen and the arithmetic quietly worsens. The interesting question is not whether I complete 40,075 — it is what the attempt looks like written down honestly, including the gaps.
That is the part I have not seen much of. Plenty of people announce the large number. Fewer publish the mornings in between, and almost nobody publishes the mornings they missed.
Day two. 40,045 to go, more or less.
Entry 2 of 40,075. A record kept in the margins of a ride toward the length of the earth’s circumference — thirty kilometres a day, a few lines a day.