What Happened?

The Zombie, sitting in his office. Why isn't he out on a bike? Who knows?

I ended my last blog post with two questions:

1. Is this the end of my blogging?
2. Is this the end  my cycling?

The answer to both of these questions is the same: I hope not, but I worry it might be. I have not ridden 300+ minutes (my goal) during any week since that post, and during those 8 weeks, there have only been 4 where I have reached even the lesser-goal of 150 minutes a week. There was a stretch of 9 days where I did no riding at all, not even a trainer ride. It has been 28 days since I have been outdoors on a bike, any riding I have done has been on my trainer. I am not happy with this state of affairs and am thinking hard about how to get out of this slump. If not the end of my cycling, could this be the end of my blogging?

Do any of you really want to read about me not riding my bike? I don't think so. So, unless I can do something interesting on a bicycle, I don't really have anything to blog about. In 2017 I went from trying to post once a week and failing to trying to post once a month and succeeding. Since then, my posting had been remarkably consistent until two months ago when I missed a monthly post for the first time since moving to California in 2017. Having missed that one post, I may never post again, and if I do, I have no idea when that will be, but the one thing I will promise is that I will not post again until there is something I really am inspired to write about that has something to do with bicycles.

What Happened?

In my last post I said about sticking to a cycling schedule "Once I miss a week, the spell is broken, and I am more likely to miss future weeks". That's exactly what happened, but I think there is more to be said than that. One fact that I feel is relevant is that this lapse was preceded by my second longest run of rides that met the 300 minute goal since I restarted cycling. I think these two things might be related. Starting with the Art of Survival in May of 2024, I have been struggling to maintain my enthusiasm for cycling. My speed on that ride was so poor that I decided to stop riding metric centuries, the events that had been my most important source of motivation up until then. It is true that I did manage to complete my 75th birthday ride a few months later and that did give me immense satisfaction. The problem was that it was a one-off, I did not provide any motivation for the future. I tried a number of different things that I hoped would provide that motivation, developing a training program that I hoped would increase my speed, making an effort to ride and appreciate my entire collection of bicycles, seeking out new routes for rides, and these things did work for a while, but somewhere about the middle of that last long run of 300+ minute weeks, the motivation from of all these faded and the only thing keeping me going was the determination to stay above 300 minutes a week. The thing that actually ended that run was a week of rain. It is almost impossible for me to accumulate 300 minutes during a week where my riding is restricted to my trainer. Once my winning streak was broken, that last motivating factor was gone.

I want to mention one more interesting bit of news. I had my routine physical a few weeks ago. I talked to my doctor about my sciatica which comes from age-related deterioration of my spine and also talked to him about my frustration with the dropping speed of my bike rides. He surprised me by suggesting the two might be related. If the nerves leading to my leg muscles are being pinched as a result of my spinal deterioration, that might reduce the strength of those muscles. This is on top of my theory that the pain resulting from my sciatica contributes to a generalized fatigue which both reduces my enthusiasm and might also affect my speed. My aging back might be playing a larger role in this story than I have been giving it credit for.

This is Not the First Time

Well gosh, this all seems so hopeless. The good news is that I have been here before and in each case, I managed to start riding again. I have blogged many times about how my cycling restart in August of 2008 was something of a false start in that by February of the following year I had stopped riding and didn't start again for over a year. But even if I ignore that lapse and just scroll through entries in my cycling journal since then, there are plenty of multi-week lapses, my current slump is not all that unusual.

All that may be true of riding, but how about blogging? Back in 2017 I stopped blogging for four months but restarted thereafter. Why might this time be different? What is different is that I have been wondering for quite some time now why I was continuing to blog. More and more I have been feeling that I have had nothing new to say. Arguably, this is not even particularly connected to my current riding slump. There is one more blog post I do hope to write concerning a ride I hope to complete, the 60th birthday ride for my Hetchins which would happen in July of 2027, the 60th anniversary of the day I picked it up and began my European bicycle tour. Does that mean no more blog posts for a year and a half? Who knows. If I come up with an idea that I am excited about, I may resume blogging before then.

An Aside

Given that this might be my last blog post, I am going to stick in something that I have been working on as its own post which is somewhat relevant, and that is the context in which this is all happening. So far, my second cycling career has lasted over 17 years. (A generous estimate of the length of my first cycling career is 14 years.) 9 of those years were in Texas, 8 since my move back to California. Of those 8 years, more than 5 have been since my move into my current home in the middle of the Santa Cruz mountains. "The days are long but the years are short" as the saying goes. 17 years is a significant fraction of the lifetime of a person. 

Another point of reference: I am not certain of this, but it is my impression that there are groups on Facebook for cyclists in their 60s and for cyclists in their 70s, but no groups for cyclists in their 80s. Similarly, most (but not all) of my high school riding buddies have stopped cycling. The 70s seem to be the age when this happens.

As of the time of this post, the Social Security Administration expects me to live 11 more years, less than the length of my second cycling career and only twice the amount of time I have been in my current home. Maybe it is not surprising that I have to start letting go of some things. All that said, I haven't given up yet. Quitting cycling will happen when it happens and not before.

What can I Do to Regain my Enthusiasm?

For my first three years in California, I lived in a rented house in a fairly flat part of the Peninsula. Once I got there, I found that when I replaced and adjusted the height of the saddle on my wife's commuter bike, it fit me quite well and was very comfortable even on fairly long rides. The nice thing about that bike is that it was set up to be ridden in normal clothing and shoes. This was especially nice when the weather got cold. There was something very motivating about hopping on that bike with absolutely no preparation and going for a ride.

About five and a half years ago, my landlord dramatically increased my rent and I decided to purchase a house. That seemed like a golden opportunity to try to find something closer to my grandkids, which I managed to do, I am now just four doors down from them. The one thing I worried about, correctly in retrospect, is that this new neighborhood is much hillier than my old, making it harder to manage that same kind of easy, door to door rides I had been doing when I wasn't up for a hillier ride. One consequence of that is that I haven't ridden my wife's old commuter bike since that move. From my current house, I have a choice: I can either take a hilly ride leaving from my driveway or if I want to do an easier ride, I have to put one of my bikes on my car and drive to a flatter area. The only bikes with low enough gears to allow me to ride these hills pretty much demand special cycling clothes and shoes, just enough of a production as to create a bit of friction. Driving to a flatter route, giving me a greater choice of suitable bicycles, creates a different kind of friction. That said, I now have a new rack on the back of my car that would allow me to transport my wife's commuter bike. If I got it back into riding condition (it needs maintenance), might the joy of riding that bike help with my enthusiasm, even given that I would have to drive to ride it? That might be something to try. I could maybe combine that with the exploration of new routes, that bike is especially good for riding on the many stretches of the Bay Trail that are gravel, and there are some interesting parts of that trail that I would love to explore.

Last August, I got my granddaughter a very nice new bicycle for her birthday, allowing her younger brother to claim the very nice bike she had just outgrown. It has been a bit heartbreaking that since getting that bike four months ago, she has only managed to ride it once. There is nothing wrong with the bike and it is not that she doesn't like to cycle, it is just that their family has a very busy schedule. I have been wondering if I can do something about that, maybe getting the two grandkids to join me for a ride on the traffic-free Bay Trail. And of course, there is that birthday ride for my Hetchins. Maybe, given all these wonderful opportunities, the Zombie will ride again.

So is this "goodbye" or is it "see you later"? I wish I knew.

Consistency

This post is closely related to last month's post; it might be seen as its mirror image. Thus, I deliberately decided to use exactly the same image at the top of the post, a snapshot of my weekly training record. Last month, I focused on the third from the right column, labelled 'mi/yr'. This month, I am going to focus on the sixth from the right column, labelled 'Weekly Min.'

There's making the plan. And then there is sticking to the plan. On this blog I have mostly talked about making the plan. That makes sense, there is a lot to be said about the different possible plans, which one I should pick, how to customize the plan I pick to fit my particular needs, etc., whereas it would seem that the only thing that can be said about sticking to the plan is yes, I should do that. However, in this post, I am going to say a bit more. The fact of the matter is that sometimes I am better at sticking to whatever plan I have, and sometimes I am worse. Why is that? Is there anything I can do about it?

Depending on what I am trying to accomplish with my cycling, I have different plans at different times. However, whatever specific plan I am following, it is on top of the plan prescribed  by the medical community, that I should engage in 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity (e.g. bicycling) per week. The longest I have consistently ridden 300 or more minutes a week is 67 weeks in a row. That run started the week of April 8, 2019. As it happened, those 67 weeks were also my most successful cycling period (e.g. highest average speed on my standard rides) since moving to California. As of the moment of this writing, I rode 300 miles or more for 25 weeks in a row, and then last week, failed to do so, ending my run.

My pattern of runs and fails over a 23 week period is shown in the figure at the top of this page. The sixth column from the left, under the heading "Weekly Min.", is how many minutes of riding I completed each week. These are color coded in yellow for those weeks were I met the goal of 300 or more minutes a week of riding, in green where I met the medical communities lesser goal of 150 to 299 minutes a week, and white where I failed to meet even that lesser goal. Over these 23 weeks, I failed to meet the 300 minute goal for the first week, had a two week run of successes followed by two weeks of failure followed by three weeks of successes followed by one week of failure, followed by a long run extending to the bottom of the figure, that being the 25 week run referred to above.

How much does it matter if I fail to reach 300 miles for one week? My best guess is not at all, it might even be beneficial to take a week off now and then. The coach whose advice I follow, Coach John Hughes, recommends doing just that. Why, then, am I pushing these long, continuous runs? The value of these runs is psychological rather than physiological. Once I miss a week, the spell is broken and I am more likely to miss future weeks, more weeks than Coach Hughes would consider wise. I think that if I had a plan for taking off a week now and then this might not be true, but I don't. For me, it has always been either an unnecessarily strict adherence to a 300 minute minimum or long periods of suboptimal cycling.

What causes me to break a run, to fail to reach 300 minutes of cycling for a week? There is a long list of reasons. Here are a few of the most common ones:

1. Illness.
2. Conflicts (e.g. out of town trips.)
3. Rain.
4. Feeling tired.
5. Feeling discouraged.
6. Not feeling the joy of cycling that week.

I tried to arrange these causes from the most to the least justified: 

1. I absolutely should not be cycling when I am ill. 
2. I can try to work around conflicts, but if I am out of town with no access to a bicycle for a week, there is no room for rearrangement. 
3. I feel no shame for not going outside for a bike ride when it is raining, I am much too old to risk falling on slippery roads. In that case, I can ride indoors on my trainer but I have previously confessed, because I find the trainer so boring, there is only so far I can use my willpower to push me to complete long trainer rides (though I will have more to say about that below.) 
4. ...and...
5. Being tired can be good reason for skipping a ride or even a week of riding. However, I have found that being tired and feeling tired are not always the same thing. Similarly, feeling discouraged can feel like being tired and being tired can feel like being discouraged. The way I deal with this confusion is when I am unsure, to start a ride that has options for returning early. When I am feeling tired but I am not actually tired, usually I start feeling better after a few minutes on the road.
6. What kind of pathetic reason for not cycling is "not feeling the joy"? Pathetic it may be, but if it keeps me from riding, I have to deal with it. To do that, I have been varying where I ride and varying the bikes I ride. This helped a lot at first, but over the past year, this novelty has worn off a bit and I am afraid I am going to come up with something new to keep motivated.

Normally, I try to post on the first day of the month or shortly thereafter. This post is going up near the end of the month. This is another symptom of the same demotivation that is affecting my cycling. Is this the end to my blogging? To my cycling? I definitely plan to have a post devoted to those topics! However, as a possible step in that direction, this will be my blog post for both October and November, I am skipping one of my monthly blog posts. Peace.

Perverse Incentives

The Current Version of my Weekly Training Log

Goodhart's law states that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." A business owner might want to know how productive her nail factory is. To measure that, she determines how many nails the factory produces in a day. To please their boss, the managers of the factory increase their nail count by producing only very small nails. Unfortunately, these nails are useless. Making the measure into the goal ends up defeating the purpose of the factory.

Quantitating progress is an activity not limited to nail factories. It is something that is part of many different human activities. For example, cyclists do all the time, me very much included as evidenced by the figure at the top of this post. We have a variety of measures for assessing our progress: miles ridden, VO2max, maximum power, and all the rest. What is so insidious is how seductive these measures can be, even when we know we should use them with care. 

For the purposes of this post I'd like to consider the case where I am not training for some specific event but rather riding for its health benefits. How best should I accomplish this? Is it even possible? In a recent post I reviewed a scientific publication that argued that there are no health benefits to exercise. That is a bit of an overstatement of what the authors actually wrote and in any case I would not reverse all my beliefs about the health benefits of exercise based on any single publication. That said, I do think this paper is a good reminder that we don't have nearly as much firm knowledge about the benefits of exercise as we wish we did. Given that necessary skepticism, what should I do? For one thing, I think I should act based on the weight of the evidence, the consensus of the medical community, rather than some philosophical standard of absolute proof.

Based on a very large number of studies carried out over several decades, the consensus of the medical community has been that individuals should participate in at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise a week, and that ideally, twice that. There is also a growing consensus that, although 300 minutes of exercise is optimal, most of the health benefits come from the first 150 minutes. According to this, I should worry much more about doing some cycling consistently than hitting that arbitrary 300 minute goal. And yet, I am who I am, and I always want to know "how I am doing" (whatever that means.)  I collect all kinds of training statistics (e.g. measures.) And, not only do I want to know how I am doing, I am happier if I am doing better, so I try to make these statistics look good. That is how my measures become targets.

The above process led my recent obsession with mi/yr (miles ridden during the past year) as recorded in the third column from the right of my Weekly Training Log shown at the top of this post. How did this particular number end up in my Weekly Training Log? It was not in the last version of that log that I posted about back in 2021. It comes from a recommendation from Coach John Hughes, the coach that I follow; specifically, his "riding for health" training plans that I blogged about in 2022. He suggested four different training plans, depending on the athlete's cycling history, and one measure of that history was miles ridden per year. Which plan Hughes recommends is based on a point system, and an athlete gets one point if they ride less than 3.000 miles per year, two points for 3,000 to 3,500 miles a year, and three points if they ride more than 3,500 miles per year. In that 2022 post, I pointed out problems with that measure, but it got stuck in my brain nonetheless and thus I included it in my training log. While I was training for group metric century rides, I didn't pay all that much attention to that measure, but now that I am no longer participating in those rides, I am looking for some kind of goal. That goal became miles per year. Because the ups and downs of my health over the past several years, I have gone above and below that 3,000 mile goal. In 2023, I feel below that goal as a result of problems with my back, and in 2024 my training for metric century rides and my birthday ride brought me back above it. As I searched for meaning after the birthday ride, not allowing myself to fall back below that 3,000 miles per year goal became an obsession.

The miles per year measure could be tracked on a daily basis, but a training plan doesn't have much meaning day by day. I would argue that the smallest unit of a training plan that makes any sense is a week, and so I only calculate miles per year once a week. A weird property of this measure is that it depends on the riding I am doing this week, but it also depends on the riding I did a year and a week ago. Each week I get credit for the new miles I ride that week, but I also lose credit for those miles which are now more than a year old. As a result, I found it easy to stay above 3,000 miles per week at first, but as I started approaching the time of year when, a year ago, I was training first for the Art of Survival Metric Century and then for my birthday ride, the miles that would "fall off the back" each week got larger and larger and so it got harder and harder to stay above the magic number of 3.000 miles.

So at long last, I can explain why my goal of staying above 3,000 miles per year was a Perverse Incentive. Now that I am riding for health it makes no sense to overtrain today to make up for training that I failed to do six months or a year ago. That's one problem. The other is that, as is well known, miles is a flawed measure for how much cycling an athlete has done. It is flawed because 20 miles in the mountains represents much more exercise than 20 miles on flat roads. So, as I was struggling to stay above 3,000 miles per year, it became tempting to favor flat rides over hilly rides. To do so would be perverse.

Let me now turn to a less extreme example, my goal of riding for 300 minutes per week. Because this is such a well established goal of the medical community, it is much less problematic than the Hughes goal of 3,000 miles per year. And yet, it still needs to be used carefully. There are many factors I have to consider as I plan my weekly ride schedule: how I feel, what other tasks I need to accomplish, etc. Imagine I come up with a schedule that fits how tired a feel, involves rides that increase my enthusiasm, and give me time to accomplish some important tasks, but adds up to 298 minutes of riding. Now imagine I could change my schedule to make it add up to 307 minutes of riding, but only by giving up some of these benefits. Obviously the 298 minute schedule is the correct choice, but because it doesn't actually meet the arbitrary goal of 300 minutes, I confess I am often tempted by the 307 minute schedule.

Realistically, how much of a problem do these perverse incentive create? In my experience, not as much as might be feared. Let's consider the example of the Hughes goal of 3,000 miles a year. As perverse as this incentive might have been in theory, I think it was helpful in practice, and therein lies a tale. That tale starts with a question: What is a person to do to prevent a measure from becoming a goal, or at least, to minimize the harmful effects of that? My true goal was to bicycle enough to stay healthy. Therefore, what I had to avoid was to allow my attempt to stay above 3,000 miles per year to push me into unhealthy or demotivating behavior. But if I could use that measure as a motivator towards my true goal (health), I might "beat the devil" so to speak, to violate Goodhart's Law without suffering the consequences. The key reality that made this possible is that the worst thing I could have done for my health was to get discouraged and to stop cycling entirely. For health, it probably doesn't matter if I ride hills or flats, just so long as my heart rate remains above what the medical community calls "light" effort and stays within "moderate" or "vigorous" range, something that I find easy to do even on a flat ride. (A counter-example where this is an issue is my rides on my trainer.) As it happens, deciding between a flat ride and a hilly ride is not so important from a health perspective. What is terribly important is not skipping a ride altogether, something I find very tempting when I am discouraged. And in that case, looking at my progress as measured by miles per year encourages me to do something, a flat ride, a hilly ride (so long as it is not an easy trainer ride) both of which benefit my true goal of better health.

Whither my Alpine Ride?

 

Rides on one of my four Alpine routes have been of tremendous importance to me since my move to California in 2017. In my second post after moving to California, I identified a 23 mile long ride near my new home, a ride I called The Alpine Ride. Within a month, I had identified an extension I could ride when I felt like going longer, the 34 mile long Alpine-Cañada ride. When I moved from San Carlos to nearby Emerald Hills, I was able to continue on two almost identical routes that differed only in being a mile shorter. I accumulated hundreds of rides on these four routes. As a result of this accumulation of data, I was inspired to use my speed over these routes as a measure of my cycling ability (a metric known as Form) and did a statistical analysis to show that was justified. Recently, however, I have stopped riding those routes. Why did I abandon them? Is my abandonment permanent? Does it matter that I have abandoned them? What does it even mean to say that I have abandoned them?

In response to that final question, the bar graph above shows the number of Alpine rides (rides over one of the four above routes) I have ridden during each month since I move to California in 2017. There is a lot of month to month variation, including the occasional month with no Alpine rides, but overlying that is a larger trend. Starting in August of 2022, there is a fairly steady decline in the number of my Alpine rides until February of 2023 when there were none. It is not until September that there are some Alpine rides again, then another four more months with no Alpine rides, then an eight month return to those rides, and finally and most recently, I haven't ridden on an Alpine route since October of 2024, nine months and counting.

Why did I stop riding on the Alpine routes? My reasons fall into two general categories. Some months I didn't ride my Alpine rides because I wasn't riding at all, or was only doing very easy rides on my trainer. This is not so much an abandonment of the Alpine route as it is an abandonment of cycling, and for the purposes of this post, I am less interested in those months. Other months I was riding, but on routes other than the Alpine routes, and it is those months that I want to focus on here.

At the same time the number of my rides on Alpine routes started going down, in August of 2022, the number of my rides on another, similar route, the Cañada route, started going up. As I noted in an earlier post, the Cañada route is prettier and has less traffic than the Alpine routes which is why I switched.

So why does this matter? I found a new route that I liked better than the Alpine routes and I switched. That's all good, right? Not entirely. The current version of the Alpine route is 22 miles long and the current version of the Alpine-Cañada route is 33 miles long as compared to the Cañada route which is only 17 miles long. It is relatively easy to adjust my schedule so that my total weekly mileage is about the same as it used to be. What is more difficult is to find longer rides, especially rides as long as the 33 mile Alpine-Cañada route. Two 17 mile long rides on Monday and Tuesday do not have the same fitness benefits as one 33 mile ride on Tuesday. And in fact that is the explanation for the reappearance of Alpine Rides first in September of 2023 and then again in February through October of 2024. My fitness goals at both those times required the longer Alpine rides, especially the Alpine-Cañada rides.

The length advantages of the Alpine routes are especially important when I am preparing for group metric centuries, rides like the Art of Survival, Golden Hills, or Ride the Rogue. In May of 2024, I struggled to keep up during the Art of Survival, and as a result, I have recently decided  it is time for me to give up group metric centuries. Without the stimulus of preparing for these rides, the need for me to ride the Alpine routes is largely gone.

There is another advantage of the Alpine routes and that is the large amount of data I have about my speed over those routes. If I am riding one or another of the Alpine routes regularly, there will be ride to ride variation in my speed that are not meaningful, but looking at the pattern of my speed over multiple rides and comparing that to what I was doing in the past gives me a sense if I am getting faster, slower, or staying the same. Of course I can do the same thing with my Cañada rides, but there is less total data and it does not go as far back in time so is less useful.

Given the advantages of doing at least some Alpine rides, might I ride these routes again in the future? Absolutely, but it is also possible I might not. Might the fact that I haven't done an Alpine ride for nine months suggest that it is more likely I might not? Maybe, but that brings me to one more factor that has reduced my enthusiasm for the Alpine routes. The least attractive part of these routes is the five to six miles near the start which are on Alameda de las Pulgas. Although most of this stretch has a decent bike lane, the traffic is somewhat heavy and there is a lot of cross traffic due strip malls that make this stretch uncomfortable and dangerous. Recently, this stretch has been the site of construction by multiple government entities which have made these problems significantly worse. That's the bad news. The good news is that this construction won't go on forever, so I could imagine a time in the future when the construction has been completed, I grow nostalgic for these routes, and restart riding them, at least occasionally.

The Cedar-Elm Loop Go-To Ride

 

Three years ago I posted about something I call a Go-To ride. You can read that post to get the whole story but briefly it is a route that I tend to ride over and over again. In the picture above, I am showing the routes of two Go-To rides, the Tamarack Sprint on the left side of the picture and the Cedar-Elm Loop running diagonally from upper left to lower right corners of the picture. Both of these routes are loops and a ride consists of multiple laps around that loop, typically nine laps for the Tamarack Sprint and eight laps for the Cedar-Elm Loop. The Tamarack sprint is one mile around (with the part I sprint being 0.23 miles) and the Cedar-Elm loop is three miles around. I posted about the Tamarack Sprint a while back and I am describing the Cedar-Elm loop in this post for the first time.

What do these two routes have in common?

1. They are located a few blocks from each other.
2. They both involve riding the same loop multiple times.
3. This:

The Zombie with his 1963 Bianchi Specialissima at Eroica California in 2019

...not me, the guy holding the bike, but the bike itself, my 1963 Bianchi Specialissima. I raced this bike as a member of the Berkeley Wheelmen during the 1970 season, rode it from Boston to Montreal in 1972, and, accompanied by my wife Agi, completed a week-long Inn to Inn bike tour on this bike in 1979. When I restarted cycling 30 years later, it was initially on this bike. Although my Specialissima has been largely replaced by more modern bikes for my everyday riding, I still love this bike and look for opportunities to ride it.

What is it about this bike that links it to these two routes? Sadly, it is that it is now impractical for many kinds of rides. There are a number of things about it that make it impractical, but the one most relevant to this post is that it has "sew-up" tires, tires that are glued to the rims, tires which I cannot change on the road. That means that if I get a flat tire, I have to walk my bike home or to where I can get a ride home. When I first got my eBike, my Orbea Gain, I had a similar problem. Because of the carbon rims and tubeless-ready tires, I did not know how to change its tires and so I developed my Emerald Hills Go-To ride as a ride where I could walk home from any point on the ride. Unfortunately, this route would not work for my Specialissima because of another aspect of its impracticality, its lack of low gears. Because the Emerald Hills ride is in my neighborhood, it is extremely hilly and there is not a snowball's chance in Hell that I could complete it on my Specialissima. That is why I drive to my old neighborhood in San Carlos to ride my Specialissima. 

Before developing the Cedar-Elm loop, I rode my Specialissima on two routes in San Carlos, the Tamarack Sprint and the Neighborhood Go-To Rides. (Both of these rides are described in the same post from 2019.) What motivated me to develop the Cedar Elm Loop is that I have recently been finding that my body is responding well to long Zone 2 rides. (Zone 2 rides are easy, low intensity rides.) Although I have gotten better at completing hilly rides while staying within Zone 2, that requires low gears or eAssist, both of which my Specialissima lack. Both the Tamarack Sprint and the Neighborhood routes are too hilly to complete as Zone 2 rides on my Specialissima. Therefore,  to accomplish the two goals of enjoying my delightful Specialissima and completing longer rides in Zone 2 required finding a flatter route that stayed within walking distance of where I parked my car and the Cedar Elm loop was that route. Eight laps around that loop gives me a ride that is 24 miles long and takes me two hours, a respectably long ride. Although I have not yet done so, I could generate an even long ride by simply increasing the number of laps.

Doesn't riding around and around the same roads over and over again get boring? After all, I have said that I find it intolerably boring to ride my trainer for rides longer than 30 minutes. In fact, I find riding laps outdoors much less boring than riding on my trainer indoors. As proof of that, back in Houston, a large fraction of my rides were on the Rice Track, a third of a mile course which meant that even a short ride could involve 35 laps. I wouldn't want all of my rides to be on the Cedar-Elm Loop, but for one ride a week or so, the delight at riding my Specialissima makes up for a less than exciting route. Besides, the city of San Carlos is rather pretty, further reducing the potential for boredom.

Does Exercise Extend Lifespan?

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For some time now I have wanted to write a blog post describing the limitations of scientific studies that associate health benefits to exercise. I published a gee-wiz post back in 2019 describing a study that suggested that subjects in the top 2.3% of fitness were a stunning five time less likely to die in a given year than those in the bottom 25%. (For purposes of comparison, the impact of smoking on annual death rate is a much smaller: 1.4-fold.) In that post, I did my best to describe the limitations of that study and alternative explanations for its results but I felt like there was more to say, and so I had been collecting facts and ideas to be used in a future blog post. What finally got me to write this post was this scientific study: "Does exercise prevent major non-communicable diseases and premature mortality? A critical review based on results from randomized controlled trials" by Marcel Ballin and Peter Nordström (09 July 2021) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13353. The short answer the authors give to the question in their title is 'No', a shocking answer indeed. As my son said when I chatted with him about this post, "That's absurd, it flies in the face of decades of research and thousands of other scientific publications." He has a point.

How can Ballin and Nordström justify such a radical conclusion, that exercise does not extend lifespan? To explain that requires some background. The first thing to point out is that this publication does not contain original data, rather it is what is called a meta-analysis. Instead of doing experiments, the authors combined the results of multiple published studies. An example of that is shown in the figure at the top of this post. This figure displays results from twelve published studies on the effect of exercise on either cardiovascular disease (e.g. number of heart attacks) and all cause mortality (i.e. how long the subjects of the studies lived.) Let's focus just on all cause mortality for which the authors looked at ten studies. In eight of those studies, the subjects who exercised lived longer, on average, than those who did not. In one study, the subjects who did not exercise lived longer than those who did. In one study, there was no difference between the two groups. However, every study has uncertainty, and in nine of the studies, due to that uncertainty, it was not possible to be 95% certain that there was any difference between the two groups. Further, when all ten studies were combined, the combined probability indicated that from these ten studies considered together, it was not possible to be 95% certain that exercise had any effect on all cause mortality. Thus, the conclusion of the authors of this meta-analysis is that there is no statistically significant difference between the longevity of those subjects who exercised and those subjects who did not.

But what about all the other studies that conclude that exercise does decrease all cause mortality? How did none of them end up in this meta-analysis? To answer that question I have to explain the difference between interventional studies and observational studies. The gold standard for scientific studies are randomized interventional studies. If you wanted to know if exercise extends lifespan, you would enroll a bunch of people in your study, randomize them into two groups (e.g. have them flip a coin, heads means exercise, tails means no exercise), have one group follow the exercise program you think will lead to a long life, have the other group not do that, and then keep track of them for decades until all of them have died. You then compare the average lifespans of the two groups. There are a lot of obvious problems with this approach. What exercise program do you test? There is almost an infinite number of possibilities. What does it mean not to follow that program? Supposing a member of the control group enjoys walking around their neighborhood. Are they forbidden to do that? How would you ever get anyone to agree to participate in such an invasive study? How would you ever get the review board at your university agree to such an immoral study? How would you ever guarantee continuous funding over the long period of this study? And what is the general public going to do during the decades of waiting before the last subject dies?

There are standard workarounds for many of these obvious problems but none of these workarounds are perfect or even close to perfect. As a result, an alternative approach to answering these questions has arisen, the observational study. The very beginnings of this field can be traced back to one such observational study done in the mid-1900s by Jeremy Morris and Ralph Paffenberger. They noticed that bus conductors, who walked around the bus during their work day, lived longer than the drivers of those buses who sat all the time. Today, such studies are usually based on a questionnaire. A list of participants is gathered, they are asked to fill out a questionnaire about how much they exercise, and then they are followed to see how long they live. This shares some of the same problems as the hypothetical interventional study I described above but eliminates many of the most serious problems and thus the vast majority of studies linking exercise to longevity are observational. This is important because observational studies have one major disadvantage compared to interventional studies; they cannot prove that one thing caused another, only that the two are linked. In the case of exercise and longevity, an observational study can show that exercise is linked to longevity, but not that the exercise caused the longevity. But what other explanation can there be? Ballin and Nordström would suggest that maybe both exercise and longevity are caused by a common factor, inherited good health for example. The idea is that a person who is born healthy will feel good and therefore want to exercise. They will also live a long time, not because they exercised but because of their inherited good health. If this contrarian opinion seems implausible to you, you can take comfort from the fact that the bulk of the medical community agrees with you. That is why my doctor recommends that I exercise and yours probably does too. That said, this disadvantage of observational studies is why Ballin and Nordström limited their meta-analysis to interventional studies. Because these studies are randomized, they are immune from this alternative explanation. If everybody's intuition is correct about the observational studies, such studies should be confirmed by the interventional studies, and according to Ballin and Nordström, they are not.

So is that it? Was all my Cycling for Health a waste of time? Not necessarily. Perhaps it is the interventional studies that are misleading rather than the observational studies. Those who would criticize the observational approach would use a catch-phrase popular in the scientific community "Correlation does not prove causation", that is, just because subjects who exercise live longer does not prove that the exercise caused the longevity. However, those who would criticize the interventional studies have their own catch-phrase: "Absence of proof is not proof of absence." Just because the interventional study failed to provide proof that exercise causes longevity doesn't prove that exercise does not cause longevity. Perhaps the wrong exercise program was tested or perhaps too few subjects were included to get the statistical significance needed for such a proof. To their credit, Ballin and Nordstöm noted these concerns and my guess is that they would be among the first to argue that the jury is still out on this important question.

So how does this publication affect the cycling I am doing? Not at all, as it happens. To me, someone with over 30 years experience as a working scientist, I am used to the eb and flow of scientific research. I believe that it is very difficult to study the effect of exercise on longevity for the reasons mentioned above and for many other reasons as well and so I am not at all surprised that definitive evidence for the value of exercise is still lacking. That being the case, I simply have to go with my gut and gamble on the answer that seems most plausible to me, and that answer is that exercise is good for my health. That said, I applaud Ballin and Nordstöm and wish them and all their fellow exercise the best of luck in the many years of exercise studies that will be necessary to provide a more convincing answer to this question. Meanwhile, I will continue biking.

Door to Door or Drive to Ride?

My Bianchi Volpe strapped to the back of my car at the start of my exploration of the San Francisco Bay trail in July of 2022. In the background is the San Francisco Bay, and to the left, the Dumbarton Bridge. The ten year old bike rack shown in this picture has since gone to the bike shop in the sky and has been replaced by a more modern rack, one that can accommodate all my bikes, something which the old one could not do.

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There are many good reasons to prioritize riding "door to door", that is, to start and end my rides from home rather than attaching my bike to my car and then driving to the start of a ride ("drive to ride"). One reason is some combination of social responsibility and esthetics; a bike ride is supposed to be an environmentally friendly activity, a feature at least somewhat corrupted by driving to the start of the ride. Another is that a door to door ride is more time efficient. The time to load up the bike, drive to the destination, unload the bike, reload the bike after the ride, and unload it at home, all add significantly to the time it takes for the ride. When time is tight this might be the difference between fitting in a ride or skipping it.

I am far from the most fanatical of door to door cyclists. When I was an active randonneur, I used to read about those randonneurs who would bike significant distances from their home to the start of a brevet and then back to their home when it was over, making an already challenging ride even more difficult. There never has been a time when I didn't drive the start of a group ride. However, for routine training, I usually ride door to door.

Why would I ever want to do a training ride that was not door to door? I would want to in order to have access to rides that are not practical if riddent door to door. The value of such rides became much greater the day I moved from a house in a relatively flat neighborhood in San Carlos to a house in nearby Emerald Hills which was anything but flat. If I wanted a flat ride, and I did, then I would need to drive to it.

Since I restarted cycling back in 2008, the extent to which I have been willing to drive to the start of a ride has varied depending on my circumstances. At first, the only rides I drove to were group rides but in 2010 I discovered an uniquely valuable route that was not practically accessible from home, the Terry Hershey/George Bush park ride. What made this ride worth the drive was that it featured attractive scenery, was long, and was completely car-free. Thus, it lent itself to the riding needed to train for long group rides. This became important in 2012 when I started randonneuring, a version of cycling whose goal was to complete long rides known as brevets. By riding back and forth over the Terry Hershey/George Bush route a few times I was able to accomplish the 90 mile long training ride I needed to prepare for a 200 km (126 mile) brevet. When, in 2014, I decided to stop randonneuring, I decreased my riding on the Terry Hershey/George Bush route and my cycling returned to a more door to door pattern. This door to door pattern continued when I moved to California in 2017. However, I probably should have gone back to a more balanced mix of door to door and drive to ride when I moved into a hilly neighborhood in 2020, but the advantages of door to door riding and inertia delayed that rebalancing. However, by 2022, my pattern had started to shift.

The first thing, post-move, that caused me to ride something other than a door to door ride was my continuing efforts to ride my Hetchins. That Hetchins does not have very low gears so is unrideable door to door. As a way to work around that limitation, in February of 2022, I threw my Hetchins onto my bike rack and drove to the Bay Trail for a reasonably long yet flat test ride. Because that ride was successful, a month later I drove down to another segment of the Bay Trail with the Hetchins on the back of my car to ride with the local Classic and Vintage bike club. As it happened, that ride traversed some parts of the Bay Trail that I had never before ridden which made me want to explore the Bay Trail more on my own. One barrier to exploring the Bay Trail during a door to door ride is the steep climb that would come at the end of the ride to get me back home but another is the issue of time. If I started from home, by the time I got to the part of the Bay Trail I wanted to explore, I would be out of time and would need to turn around and return home leaving no time for exploration. Using the drive to ride strategy was a solution to both these problems. By taking this approach I was able to undertake a series of explorations of the Bay Trail that made my 75th Birthday Ride possible two years later.

What was good for my Hetchins was good for another antique bike I own, a 1963 Bianchi Specialissima. As is the case with my Hetchins, the very narrow gear range on my Specialissima makes it unrideable in my neighborhood, so I threw it on the back of my car, made the very short drive down to my old neighborhood in San Carlos, and the Specialissima rode again. Being willing to drive to ride has made it possible for me to enjoy this somewhat impractical but deeply nostalgic and totally delightful bicycle.

In addition to hills, another change that has impacted my cycling is that I have gotten older. These two changes exacerbate each other and together have caused me to continue to incorporate more drive to ride rides into my schedule, not just to accomodate an antique bike, but to accomodate my aging body. These days, it is more often than not that a week of riding will include at least one ride that is drive to ride, an approach which I very much hope will allow me to continue cycling for years to come.