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Colin Gay’s Instagram account is, at a glance, fairly monotonous.

Every square of is a selfie, and nearly all of them are a side view of Gay’s head, in a white S-works bike helmet, his face pointed forward down the road. Depending on the season, his chin and mouth might be covered by a Buff; in warmer weather, his salt-and-pepper beard catches the wind. The captions on the posts don’t add much luster; each one is just a number in chronological order: 3351, 3352, 3353, 3354, 3356, 3357 — you get the gist. Gay puts one hashtag, #ridestreak, next to the number, and that’s it. He has 945 followers.

But the benign Instagram account belies something astounding. Those numbers represent Gay’s ride streak, the number of days he has ridden his bike in a row. By January 18, he was up to 3,358 days. That’s over nine years of riding every single day.

Gay isn’t a professional cyclist, nor does anyone pay him to ride his bike. He’s a dad from Charlottesville, Virginia who sells IT solutions to the government. His ride streak is completely self-motivated and, as the Instagram account illustrates, is happening to very little fanfare.

Streaks of all types are having a day right now, what with Duolingo and the NYTimes puzzles keeping people on the hook for daily practice. But Wordle is easy to do in bed, or anywhere you have your phone on you (which is everywhere). Furthermore, the internet is generous if something comes up: miss a Spanish lesson, and Duo will preserve your streak for one day. Miss more than one, and you can buy your way back.

Gay’s ride streak isn’t forgiving at all. Although he has work and family, and there is bad weather and sometimes people get sick, if he doesn’t ride the streak ends. Nine years of riding every day in a row could vanish, poof, just by letting a ‘I just don’t feel like it’ win.

“It’s interesting, when I talk to people about the streak, they don’t understand,” Gay told me. “They immediately say, ‘don’t you take days off?’

You don’t take days off because that’s not what this is about. ‘But what if you get sick?’ they say. I do get sick, but I still ride.”

‘I knew nothing about riding’

Gay is 48 years old but he’s only really been riding a bike for … well, about 9.2 years. Like most kids, he had a bike growing up, but living on a farm meant he never really rode it. It wasn’t until the summer of 2014 that he hopped onto a friend’s cruiser at the beach that riding bikes really crossed his mind.

“Before I started the streak, I’d maybe ridden 20 times in my life,” Gay said.

That chance ride on a beach cruiser spurred Gay into action. At the time, he was teaching math and coaching team sports at Woodberry Forest, the all-boy’s boarding school in Virginia where he also attended high school. Gay had been a varsity athlete then, playing some of the very sports he would go on to coach as an adult. Later in grad school, he took up running. But by the 2010s, he said, traces of that former athlete were long gone.

“I had gotten super out of shape, which was a really hard mental thing. I coached football, wrestling, and lacrosse, and I was asking my kids to do things I couldn’t consider doing,” he said. 

Gay wasn’t really interested in running anymore, but riding was intriguing. He talked to the mountain bike coach at Woodberry Forest and asked if he could borrow a bike (“I didn’t want to buy a bike and be the guy that bought a bike and didn’t ride,” he said). The coach loaned him a school bike, a beat-up GT Avalanche, and in November, Gay started to ride.

With the innocence of a first timer, Gay pedaled around in mesh athletic shorts with boxers underneath. His ignorance proved to be, indeed, bliss. After just a few days of exploring the roads of the 1200-acre Woodberry campus by bike, Gay felt like he was on to something. Riding felt so different than running, where he couldn’t wait to be done with the exercise.

Coupled with one of Gay’s most salient personality traits — “if I’m into something, I’m all in” — the realization that riding was pretty cool led to the genesis of the ride streak. 

“I knew nothing about riding, but it was like, ‘I like this. I could do this. I could do this every day,’” Gay said. “‘And it won’t be whether I worked out or not, I will have just done it.’ So I said, ‘I’ll do this for 100 days straight not taking any breaks. And then I said I’ll do 1000 days. And then after 1000 days, it was 10,000.”

Gay proceeded to ride the GT Avalanche into the ground. After he covered all the roads and trails on campus, he started to venture further afield. His rides got longer. He was loving it. His wife Laura politely requested that he put a time limit on the rides — the couple had two little kids at the time.

At around the 150-day mark, Gay believed he had enough experience and information to make some hard and fast rules about the ride streak. He had started tracking his rides using Strava and a bike computer, so he knew about how far he could get in two hours — which was the time limit he agreed upon with Laura. He decided that, for a ride to count, it had to be a minimum of 30 miles. Reasonable.

But he knew there was still a lot he didn’t know. He also needed to buy his own bike. So, he called up , an old friend from high school, who was an avid cyclist. Hawkins had just launched , a cycling apparel brand, after a devastating bike crash. Gay explained the streak and said that he was considering buying a hardtail mountain bike to replace the clapped-out GT.

Hawkins said that it wasn’t abnormal for a friend to call out of the blue for bike advice. What was odd is that Gay did not take his advice.

“I was kinda like, ‘I don’t know if I’d get a mountain bike if I was going to ride every day outside,’” Hawkins recalls telling him. “But every bit of advice I ever gave him, he never took it. He always did something different. That’s how Colin is.” 

Although Gay prefers to learn things his own, er, the hard way, he did accept some of the things that Hawkins sent him in a care package nearly a decade ago. Bibs replaced his athletic shorts, he finally started wearing sunglasses (“I had tears freezing on my face from riding,” he said), and Hawkins taught him to pull the leg warmers up to his thighs instead of wearing them like socks around his calves.

Meanwhile, despite how green Gay was in terms of things like kit and nutrition, the numbers were steadily ticking upward. And with each milestone, his audacity grew.

“In the beginning, 100 seemed like a ridiculous number of days to ride,” he said. “But I didn’t know what anyone else did, so when I got to 100 I was like, ‘I’ll pick something even more ridiculous.’ And when I got to 1000, I was like …”

Why not 10,000?

So what does it take to ride every single day for over nine years?

A lot of logistics and coordination, thousands of pre-dawn rides, and an unwavering sense of purpose. (Also, better equipment: Gay has acquired a full stable of bikes, from road and gravel to a Surly Traveler’s Check with CNC coupling and a Tern folding bike that he can pack into a suitcase in 15 minutes).

Gay still abides by the 30-mile minimum rule, which he can reasonably ride in two hours or less. During the week, he does this at 4 a.m., so he can be back at the house before his wife and kids wake up. On the weekends, depending on the family schedule, he may ride longer.

Because Gay is so committed to the streak, there haven’t been as many near misses as you’d think. He rode through a two-week stint with Covid. He takes a bike on family vacations (hence the Surly and the Tern). He has added many cold-weather accessories to his quiver, like bar mitts, so he can ride through the Virginia winters, which can deliver plenty of single-digit days.

But Gay has done some things to keep the streak that most people would consider, in a word, insane. Like the one time he and Hawkins did Jeremiah Bishop’s Alpine Gran Fondo, a 115-mile ride with timed segments. When he went to upload the file from his bike computer, it showed that he’d ridden some 2000 miles and with just a straight line on the map — the file had been corrupted. He called Hawkins, panicked.

Hawkins told Gay that he could add him to his ride on Strava so he could get credit. Later that evening, Hawkins called Gay to tell him he’d sent the file. But Gay didn’t answer — he was out riding.

“It was like 9:30 at night and he was out there, riding and crying,” Hawkins said. “Then he got back, slept for three hours and did another 30 miles early the next morning.”

“It wasn’t a rational thought, but it’s what had to happen,” Gay said.

Then, there was the time that Gay went on a work trip to Jamaica. He needed to be at the airport at 4 a.m. for a 6 a.m. flight. The airport is an hour and a half away. Any way he did the math, he couldn’t squeeze in a ride. So, late the night before his trip, he drove to Richmond, got a hotel at the airport, didn’t really sleep, and got his 30 miles in before the flight.

Examples like these shine a light on just how impressive Gay’s streak is. It’s certainly not the physicality of it — 30 miles isn’t massive by most standards — nor is Gay breaking any speed records. He’s not recovered enough to do well at events, so it’s not about training, either. Rather, it’s the enduring commitment to something with such low yield.

Hawkins thinks that this is exactly why Gay’s streak can feel so unrelatable. In fact, he thinks it might be easier for people to relate to being a pro cyclist.

“In our sport, we have all these fast people that we know and we say, ‘maybe if I work hard enough I could get to that level,’” Hawkins said. “It’s the total package of what Colin’s doing every single day that’s crazy.

At the basic level it’s kinda simple, he’s working out for two hours a day. What I don’t think people understand is that the way he does it, he has to plot the weather, plan accordingly, etc. 90 percent of the time he’s doing it in the dark, so there’s lights, batteries, safety. And because of how he is, he hasn’t burdened his family, he’s getting up at 3:30, before anyone is awake. 

That’s what’s impressive. It’s not the physical feat of it. It’s just the amount of times he’s done something. Mentally he rarely has these moments of, ‘I don’t wanna do it.’ It’s not if I’m gonna ride but when.”

Gay’s ride streak has had some unforeseen benefits. After 25 years of teaching and coaching, he applied for a new job in sales a year and a half ago. The people interviewing him had heard about the ride streak and wanted to know more; it ended up being his number one qualification for the position.

“It was surprising to me, but it was the main thing we talked about in the interview,” Gay said. “They were looking for someone who was gonna show up every day and not take shortcuts. They respected the commitment. And I needed someone who was gonna take a risk on me because all I’d ever done was teach and coach.”

The risk has paid off, for both employer and employee, and Gay has even received support at events from his boss at GovSmart.

However, if Gay does in fact make it to 10,000 days, he should be well into retirement. At 3,358 days, he is only one third of the way there. He realizes that a lot can — and will —  happen in the next 18 years, but getting this far in the ride streak has already taught him invaluable lessons.

“I’m very much a destination person,” he said. “If I go on a trip, I want to be there. When I’m done, I want to be home. By nature I don’t enjoy the in-between. The streak has helped me enjoy that. You can’t speed it up. It’s one day at a time. There’s lots of lessons on the bike, so I don’t think what I’m doing is all that special, but it is special to me because it’s had such a positive impact on my life.”