All Roads Lead To One

8 October 2024 by Charlie LaNoue

Ever wonder about the most prolific Wandrer in your nation? I know I have. I find myself wondering what their life is like… Are they totally obsessed with biking? What led them to this pursuit? How do they find time for all of this wandring? And what crazy stuff have they encountered along the way?

Assuming you aren’t from a micronation that has already been “completed” – or “99%’d” in Wandrer parlance – chances are there’s way more roads in your country than a person could possibly ride in their lifetime. That’s definitely the case for me living in the United States.

Most Roads Completed in the US, By Far

At the time of this writing, there are now over 35,000 Wandrers on the United States leaderboard. If you check the leaderboard sorted by “points” (the default), it tells one story. This factors in points awarded to those who win monthly and yearly challenges (e.g. the top Wandrer within a region for January) as well as “Explorer Achievements,” the points awarded when you hit the 25%+ threshold in a city or town. Now go ahead and click that “progress” button to re-sort the data and rank the US leaderboard strictly by percentage of roads completed – and a new frontrunner emerges in the #1 spot: Brian Toone.

Assuming you’re a nerd like me, you’ll agree there’s something satisfying about gathering up thousands of athletes’ rides, aggregating their geospatial data, then boiling it down to one simple metric. That’s right, umpteen bike rides, essentially infinite Strava activities, all those thousands of different roads, all leading to one data point – “progress” completed.

Father of two, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Samford University, and one insanely badass Wandrer cyclist, Dr. Brian Toone is truly a machine. And he’s approaching an almost unfathomable 1% coverage of all roads in the US.

With over 55,700 unique miles ridden in the United States – to say nothing of the eight other nations he’s ridden in – Dr. Toone has cycled down 0.86988% of all roads in the US. No one else is really even close; he’s got over 10,000 more unique miles than the #2 Wandrer in the US. To put things in perspective, it’s sort of like how hockey legend Wayne Gretzky had 2,857 career points during his NHL career, and no one since has even hit 2,000. In other words, you could ride 100 new unique miles every month for 40 years straight, and you’d still be a ways behind Dr. Toone. Especially if he keeps up his pace.

In a League of His Own

When you don’t own your own car, a lot of biking distance gets “built in” to your day-to-day life. That’s definitely the case for Dr. Toone, leaving each day from his home base in Birmingham, AL. The work commute, grocery runs, errands – all done on bike. But before and mostly after his workday as a professor is when he really puts in serious distance, usually averaging upwards of 50 miles/80 km a day. Talk about taking the scenic route home!

While some of these rides are intentionally seeking out new territory in places he’s never been (see section below on his “epics”), the vast majority are training rides from his home around his familiar stomping grounds in north-central Alabama, which makes his Wandrer supremacy all the more impressive.

He’s also not too preoccupied being a hyper-local “Neighborhood Completionist”, having completed a mere 46% (769 of 1655 unique miles) of Birmingham, AL. Ironically, Dr. Toone sees some of this “micro-wandring” as a competing interest; he’d rather skip the stroads, dead-ends, cul-de-sacs and other unpleasantries in favor of wide open free-flowing roadway. Less focused on the minutiae, and more so on the big picture. When you’re aiming to ride over twenty thousand miles per year, who can blame him!

Crisscrossing the Map

A glance at Dr. Toone’s US Wandrer map is at the same time inspirational, mind-blowing, and sure to prompt curiosity. He’s ridden from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico, up to the Great Lakes, and down to the Everglades. Hell, he’s spontaneously gone on a weekend trip hundreds of miles from home just opportunistically following a tailwind.

In 2017, Brian completed RAAM (Race Across America) for the second time, the pinnacle ultra-distance cycling race in the US, starting in Oceanside, CA and ending in Annapolis, MD. Finishing 4th overall (and as the 1st American!) He spent 10 days, 2 hours, and 53 minutes riding the 3070 miles / 4940 km coast to coast. Even counting the handful of hours of sleep he got, that’s still averaging over 12.6 mph / 20.2 km/h!

And while road bikes are great for speed, Dr. Toone doesn’t just stick to the pavement. In 2022, he rode the Tour Divide, snaking his way through gravel logging roads, rugged singletrack, and the occasional snowy mountain pass on his way southward through the continental divide of the Rockies. What set Dr. Toone apart from the competition? Well, unlike everyone else, he rode his bike home afterwards! Just a short jaunt from New Mexico to Alabama via the petite state of Texas - easy!

While planning out epic tours or bike races over months is one thing, spontaneity adds another element. For Brian, maybe the most memorable of all the massive lines on his US Wandrer map is the line heading up to Michigan from his home in Alabama. Out of work on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving with the rest of the week off, his family had already taken off in a car headed north to see family.

He checked the weather, noticed a perfect tailwind blowing from the south, and decided to throw his essentials in a backpack (who needs panniers) and ride up to Michigan on a whim! He rode over 370 miles / 595 km in one 24 hour period before taking his first real pause in northern Kentucky. After riding through some cold rain in Indiana, making it into Michigan (and seeing his family in time for the holiday feast) felt surreal. His takeaway from the experience? “The world’s a lot smaller place than you think it is.”

BHAGs

So when did Dr. Toone join Wandrer? Honestly, he’s not sure. It was sometime before the pandemic, but he couldn’t recall exactly. Let’s just say, whenever Dr. Toone first input his backlog of Strava data into Wandrer, he probably had a nice head start on almost everyone in the US.

One of the wildest parts of this feat of dominance is that Dr. Toone wasn’t aware of his standing in the US Wandrer progress leaderboard. Although Dr. Toone is patently obsessed with cycling data – he was aware he ranked pretty high in some categories in Wandrer – at the time of this blog interview Dr. Toone didn’t even know he led the US in overall “progress”.

That’s because, for Dr. Toone, ranking #1 in the US Wandrer leaderboard is cool and all, but he’s primarily driven by even bigger, bolder, (and if I’m being totally honest) completely insane cycling goals. In his perspective, Wandrer is a fascinating lens of analysis that sort of neatly fit into his existing plans when he discovered it. You see, for Dr. Toone, Wandrer is sort of a side project – a bonus feather in his cycling cap.

While some of us are just chasing modest goals like covering over 90% of our hometown or maybe being the local legend on their favorite Strava segment, Dr. Brian Toone is on another level. If there was ever a person whose aspirations definitely qualified as “BHAGs” – big hairy audacious goals, for those not in the know – it’s Dr. Toone. Being a mathematician and computer scientist, naturally, he’s all about numbers.

256

Some random number that’s over a quarter of a thousand? Think again. 256 holds great significance for some, especially those in the world of computing. For starters, 2⁸ = 256, and thus 256 also represents a series of doublings from one. In computing, a byte consists of 8 bits and thereby represents 256 different values (ranging from 0 to 255) due to its ability to store 2⁸ unique values.

It also seemed like a fantastically audacious Eddington number for Dr. Toone to pursue. What’s an Eddington number? In the world of cycling, an Eddington number is the number of (recorded) rides a cyclist has been on, of the same number of miles. So in other words, if you’ve been on 100 century rides, your Eddington number would be 100. In case you still need that spelled out: yes, he’s attempting to do two-hundred and fifty-six rides of at least 256 miles! And he’s well on track. But as we stretch the upper limits of sanity and what counts as one bike ride, there’s shades of gray.

Sometimes, when he’s working toward an “Eddington ride”, he might roll his morning commute plus a much longer after-work ride into one singular Strava effort, and sometimes he may even catch a quick catnap somewhere 180 miles into a long haul, then keep on trucking. But he draws the line at 1 hour of sleep in terms of what counts as one “ride” toward his ambitious Eddington quest. You can’t just do back-to-back 128 mile rides over two days, and refrain from closing out the day’s ride on your Garmin while you get a full night’s sleep – that would be cheating! Already a Strava user and curious to find out your own Eddington number? Go here.

3,143

The United States is divided into 50 different states. Each of the states are divided into counties, except for Louisiana (parishes) and Alaska (boroughs), and they collectively total 3,143 distinct municipal zones. From massive San Bernardino County, CA (itself having the land size of multiple New England states) to tiny Kalawao County (a former leper colony, population 82) in Hawaii, and from the far-flung keys of Monroe County, FL to remote Aroostook County, ME to the isolated islands of San Juan County, WA, there’s a whole lot of ground to cover in between. Even the most die-hard road trippers on r/travelmaps have only been to a modest fraction of them.

But Dr. Brian Toone is determined to head to each of them on bike. It started out as a dream of heading to each one on a ride from his own house. After all, having ridden across the entire nation coast-to-coast in 10 days during RAAM, anything seemed possible. Getting to all 67 counties in his home state of Alabama was one thing, but he has since decided that it’s okay to chip away at this lofty “all counties” goal with the assistance of a car to get to the starting point of a ride, then carrying out what he calls “epics”.

So basically he borrows his wife’s car and takes a long drive with his bike (he needs to go about 10 hours driving out one direction, these days), followed by a huge bike loop carefully crafted so it routes through a ton of new US counties. We’re talking maybe 300-500 miles that he might ride over a weekend. And when you’re on a route created just to ride through new counties, then it’s a lock that each bit of road is also a brand-new line on your Big Map. No wonder he’s miles ahead on Wandrer!

1,000,000

Although less obscure than 256 or 3,143, don’t let the fact that it’s ending in six zeroes let you sleep on Brian’s last BHAG, because it’s an absolute doozy. Even he knows this one might be a stretch, but really truly seriously, he’s striving toward biking one million miles in his lifetime. As in, one thousand thousands. And not just in a theoretical, pie-in-the-sky sort of way. He really has a chance. He figures he’s already almost halfway there, confident that he’s done over 400,000 logged miles (643,738 km) across different platforms and devices, and probably a lot more if he could quantify all those unrecorded college era rides.

So, where does that leave him? Just another thirty years averaging 20,000 miles/yr (32,186 km/year) and he’ll have his million. While that may sound insane as a 48 year old, he’s already been doing it for several years!

Small World, Big Possibilities

One quote stuck with me after my chat with Brian Toone: “The world’s a lot smaller than you think it is.” Indeed, we are separated by less time and space than most people think, especially when they’ve only traveled across the nation in a car or a plane.

Dr. Brian Toone’s incredible journey serves as a testament to the boundless possibilities that lie in the pursuit of a passion. His achievements in Wandrer, from conquering vast stretches of road to setting audacious goals, illustrate not just a remarkable dedication to cycling but also a broader philosophy of exploration and discovery. As he continues to push boundaries and redefine what’s possible, his story inspires us to dream bigger, ride farther, and see our world in new and exciting ways. In a world where every road holds a new adventure, Toone reminds us that with determination and a touch of madness, the horizon is only the beginning.

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