The Eddington Number is a strangely addictive score for cyclists, devised by British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington for ranking their achievements in an ever-harder scale. Also known as the Eddington Scale, it is defined as "the largest integer E, where you have cycled at least E miles on at least E days (source: triathlete-europe.competitor.com). It not only gives you a nice number that you can show off to your mates, it also comes with clear progression targets for you to achieve ever-higher Eddington numbers. In other words, "how many more days riding of at least x miles do I ride to achieve that score?" Clever, eh?
It doesn't just work for cyclists; runners and swimmers can also apply the scale. The problem is that it's a little bit tricky to calculate your number, as you need to sort all your rides by distance, then bucket them up appropriately. The key to an accurate number is keeping a good record of your activities. An awful lot of people use Strava nowadays, and on that note I've produced a little tool that analyses all of your Strava rides, calculates your Eddington Number, and shows how many more rides you'll need to increase it. So, head over to "My Strava Eddington Number" page, and see what number you get!
For the record, as of March 2023 my number is 126 (it was 110 in September 2020, 90 in October 2017, and 54 in September 2015), and has pretty well stalled there. For the time being I've switched to the metric number (currently 178), with 43 needed to reach the "audax randonneur" magic number of 200. My lifetime target will still be 150 (in miles) so I'm keen to do as many of those as possible in the meantime.
Each tab shows the count of Eddington numbers recorded on the My Strava Eddington Number page, so we can get an idea of what are the more common ones.
Switch to the imperial (miles) version
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When a ride is over 24hrs (is it elapsed or riding time? how does E calculate? Eg if I rode 150 miles over 25 hrs what would be added to the E data base? Or say 300 miles over 49 hrs. Thanks Mike
I take it rides can't be added retrospectively? I used to use Garmin to log rides before strava and tried to add my first few long training rides for comparison, but the E number didn't alter afterwards.
Let me know if that works for you!