Someday, Terry Mashek will decide that enough is enough.
But it probably won’t be today.
Or tomorrow.
Because after a full decade of riding his bicycle to work, no matter what the weather or if he’s feeling aches and pains, the Sioux Falls software engineer knows the streak will end someday.
Just not today.
Or tomorrow.
Earlier this winter, when the temperature had dipped well below zero and the winds were brutal, his wife, Amy, asked him, “Are you really going to ride?”
“I figured one of these days I will have had enough, but I’m a few weeks out of a 10-year anniversary, so you’ll have to pull me out of a snowdrift before I break this streak,” Mashek said.
“Now it’s 10 years, and I’ve proven I can do it. So do I break the streak? I’m pretty fat as it is. How much fatter do I get if I stop riding?”
Mashek started commuting by bicycle to work in 2007. He challenged himself to see how many consecutive days he could ride in the winter in 2009. In 2016, he began the streak that continues to this day.
From Mashek’s home to the Omnitech office building in southwest Sioux Falls, that’s “about a hair under 16 miles,” he said. He doesn’t always go to the office, however. The loop to his current client covers about 22 miles from home to work to home, and some days he adds onto it if he has errands to run or another appointment to keep.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Mashek worked from home, he still made a daily trip to the Omnitech office building every workday morning.
The self-proclaimed nerd scrupulously logs his mileage on a spreadsheet. He has done so for 19 years. Most years his home-work-home commutes total between 3,000 and 4,000 miles. In 2025, it came to about 3,200 miles. In 2024, when Mashek’s schedule included greater-than-usual traveling, it dropped to 2,850 miles.
Mashek owns seven bicycles, but four bikes are in rotation 98 percent of the time. His road bike is used primarily for commutes, then he has a bike set up for rain and hauling items. One winter bike is set up for traveling on ice, the other one for snow.
Snow. You might think Mashek dreads hearing a forecast with predictions of snow. But not really. The past two winters have been kind to Mashek when it comes to traveling through drifts. And cold temperatures, while unpleasant at the start, aren’t so bad once the exercise warms him up.
But, oh, the wind.
“The wind can suck the fun out of your day in a hurry,” Mashek said. “Usually on those days, I hope I can fight the wind on the way to work so when I’m tired and less motivated, it will push me home. I don’t like to sit there dreading the wind you’re going to fight on the way home. … It is a little deflating when your alarm goes off and you’re lying in bed and you hear the wind howling — ‘Oh, this is going to be ugly.’”
Winter weather also stretches out the time it takes for Mashek’s commute. In warm-weather months, a one-way trip takes from 15 to 40 minutes. In less-efficient winter weather, it generally takes twice as long.
Mashek uses the city’s system of bike trails whenever he can. It’s about a mile from his home to a trail. When Omnitech is his destination, he travels 5 miles on the trail, then takes city streets for the last 2 miles.
He doesn’t have many stories of treacherous encounters or harrowing escapades, and that’s the point, Mashek said. He has had the occasional narrow escape, but those are rare. The only time he actually made contact with an automobile was in the first five years of his streak.
He did have what he suspects was a “very chemically altered guy” attack him once, and a couple of weeks ago another person chased him for a couple of blocks. He didn’t even accelerate much, Mashek said, because the pedestrian wasn’t running particularly well.
“So much of what makes something like this feasible is that there aren’t a lot of interesting stories,” Mashek said. “If you have a lot of stories, you’re probably doing something wrong. You learn to ride and anticipate things so you can take action before it becomes a close call. No amount of care will ever make it 100 percent incident-free, but you can reduce the odds that it’s going to happen.”
And when Mashek says “you,” he means, well, you. Anyone. He’s not athletically gifted, the 56-year-old said, and he doesn’t think he’s special. He may have above-average tenacity, Mashek conceded, but deciding to do it was the hardest part.
“I try to encourage people that you can do it,” he said. “Maybe it’s not jumping into it. It’s ‘I’m going to try it once, and then maybe I’ll try it again.’”
What Mashek doesn’t do is ride aimlessly. He doesn’t see the point.
“I’m kind of a ride-because-I-need-to-go-somewhere kind of guy,” he said. “Once or twice a year, I’ll go out and ride without a specific destination. For the most part, I do so much riding to and from work I like to give my body a break.”
