This is the first year we took the Coffeeneuring Challenge seriously enough to actually complete it.

For the unacquainted, coffeeneuring involves:

  • between October 11 through November 24, 2025,
  • ride your bike 7 times,
  • to at least 6 different places (you can repeat 1!)
  • at least 2 miles round trip every time,
  • max 2 rides per week,
  • drink 7 total cups of coffee (or another approved fall-type beverage), and
  • document your coffeeneuring

Here are the full rules for this year’s challenge, as well as my own summary page (Jen has one too).

Our prior two attempts were interrupted by travel, illness, and/or intensive prep for our 100-day adventure. We could have completed both of them, had we understood the rules to mean that we needed at least one ride per week, as opposed to simply a total of seven rides. So when we missed a particular week, we had assumed we had failed and simply gave up. Whoops.

Not this year, though. While my exercise and heart rate restrictions limited the length of our rides, it also kept us from traveling—and that meant that we were home on the weekends to do some coffeeneuring. Not only did we not miss a week, but we even snuck in a bonus ride too. Not bad for a non-coffee guy like myself—though yes, I did sub in some fall brew beverages. In fact, I could have only done fall brew destinations, but Jen really wanted to do all coffee ones, so we ended up in the middle.

While only one of our rides was longer than 5 miles, the rest were much shorter affairs: usually around the 3 mile mark. That was due in part to the aforementioned restrictions, but also simply because our targets just happened to be pretty close by. But our goal was never about getting in mileage as much as it’s simply getting out on the bikes. I suspect that next year’s rides will look quite a bit different.

The big change this year was also using our new Lectric folding ebikes. We’re still dialing in a lot on the bikes, especially the accessories (gah, finding a suitable back rack and/or pannier setup has required countless orders/returns). But they were a please to ride, and accounted I think for some of our excitement in coffeeneuring this year.

Overall, we had fun doing the challenge and I anticipate that we’ll continue to give it a shot every year for the foreseeable future.