I Am Legend: the Emerald Lake Ride

The title of this post pays homage to one of the first Zombie books ever published, Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend", originally published in 1954, and is a somewhat ironic nod to the fact that, because of the ride described here, I have attained Local Legend status on Strava.The above picture is a scan of the edition of this book that I own, published in 1964. 

This post may get the award for "Most Potential Titles". The first was "Lake Loop GoTo ride". The second was "I Am Legend". I smooshed these first two together to create the title I used. A third potential title was "The Rice Track, California Style" to note the fact that my new GoTo ride has the same "many lap around a short course" property as my old favorite in Texas.

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Regular readers of this blog know that, last July, I moved from San Carlos to Emerald Hills, a move that impacted my cycling. One concern I expressed was that, because me new home was in a hillier neighborhood than the San Carlos house, it would be harder for me to find the easy rides which are a necessary part of my training schedule. This new GoTo ride is not a perfect solution to that problem, my local geography probably makes a perfect solution impossible, but so far, it seems to be working pretty well.

The core of this new ride is a local gem of my delightfully quirky new neighborhood, a man-made lake set up like a summer camp swimming hole organized as a country club for the enjoyment of local residents; the Emerald Lake Country Club. I don't belong, but my grandkids and their parents do, and I can use it as their guest.

The local streets make a short 0.4mile loop which follows the shores of this lake fairly closely. I was inspired to explore this loop thinking that this might be my long-sought flat ride. The laws of physics dictate that the lake itself must be flat, so maybe the roads around it would be as well. They probably are about as flat as a road in this neighborhood can be, but they are not perfectly flat, I usually do some gear shifting as I go around the lake. By the time one gets far enough from the shores of the lake to build a road, the terrain has already acquired some ups and downs. The larger issue is the hills going to and from this loop. By the most direct route, the lake is less than a half mile from my house, all downhill. Returning by that route would be impossible, however, due to the steepness of the hills. As it happens, I also don't want to take that route to go to the lake because it includes too many dangerous intersections. The routes I have selected to go to and from the lake are different. The route to the lake is about a mile long, starts with a short, steep climb, then has some flats, and finally a very steep (but safe) downhill. The route home is 1.7 miles, almost all uphill, mostly steep. There is a 2.3 mile route home that is less steep but features heavier traffic and after having tried both, decided I prefer the 1.7 mile route. If I use the lowest gear on my Volpe and deliberately keep my pace as slow as I can, the ride home, while not effortless, is not too bad. I feel like this makes for an OK recovery ride, and gives me practice saving my strength on hills to boot.

So where did this lovely lake come from? In researching this post, I came across this informative interview with the current president of the Country Club. Briefly, the dam that forms the lake was constructed in 1920 by a pair of developers who imagined they could attract visitors from San Francisco. After six years, they were unhappy with the business and sold the lake to a group of local families who ran it in a way that has stayed the same until today. Fifty families share ownership of the lake and its developments (a sandy beach, diving boards, a barbeque area with picnic tables, etc.) Every couple of years or so one of them sells their share to another family. This group of families sets the policies for the lake and sells a strictly limited number of summer memberships to anyone who would like to use it. It is this summer membership that my son and daughter-in-law have. A family who is interested in acquiring an ownership share when one becomes available volunteers to help with lake maintenance and is put on a waiting list. The lake is very well run. My son and daughter-in-law are very conservative about COVID-19, but the lake management was able to develop policies to keep the lake open that were safe enough that they felt comfortable allowing their children continued to use it, a very welcome relief from the limits the pandemic have imposed on us all.

So how did I get to be a legend? Strava is famous for its segments, stretches of road on which they track and compare the performance of their members. For any given ride I do, I have the opportunity to notice how slow I am compared to everyone else on several such segments. Stava also has a consolation prize for those of us who are never going to set a speed record. If you ride a particular segment more often than anyone else, you are declared a "Local Legend." The loop around Emerald Hills Lake is such a segment. My fastest time around the lake is 1 minute and 39 seconds. The record is 1 minute and 2 seconds. (It would probably be much faster if this segment was at all popular.) However, because I have chosen to go around this lake 20 times every time I do one of my easy rides, and because this segment is not very popular, very quickly I had ridden it more often than anyone else; I Am Legend.

40,000 Miles and Counting

Approximately six years ago I posted about the first 20,000 miles of cycling I had done since I restarted cycling in 2008. In this post, I will continue the tradition and blog about reaching 40,000 miles. I went back and re-read that earlier post and was struck by how relevant it still is. By simply updating the numbers I could probably reuse that earlier post, but I don't want to do that. Instead, I am going to look at the subject from a different angle and consider different issues than I did last time. Given that, it seemed appropriate to focus on not just my second 20,000 miles, but to (re)consider all 40,000 miles I have ridden.

So what are the new issues I am looking to consider this time around?

• I did not ride alone. My wife Agi was my most frequent and by far my favorite riding partner and was a significant cyclist in her own right. I won't say I neglected her on this blog, given its original focus and Agi's intense desire for privacy I feel like I did the right thing at the time. Now, however, I feel like it is time to look at her part in all this in more detail.
• 10,000 miles ago, I suffered the worst blow of my life: I lost Agi to cancer. This changed every aspect of my life, cycling included.
• During the 12 years of my second cycling career I also retired, went through the illness and death of both my parents, acquired two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren, moved from a flat part of Texas to a hilly part of California, went through hurricanes and forest fires and now a global pandemic. And let us not forget that, at my age, the physical consequences of getting 12 years older is no small thing. Physically, I am not the same person who started all this so long ago. How I cycle is not just the product of training theories and my interests, but is probably even more the product of these life events.
• I have been learning about modern bicycle technology and training practices. I know so much more now than I did when I started all this back in '08.

As I was approaching 55 years of age I realized my physical condition had deteriorated badly and that I needed to start an exercise program. I had initial successes with weight training, swimming, and running, but in each case, my resolve eventually faded and the exercise program came to a stop. In early 2008, as I was approaching my 59th birthday, I got a surprise phone call from Paul, a member of my high school bicycle club. Before that call, Paul and I had been out of touch for forty years. We reminisced about our bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen, and as a result, he got on eBay and bought himself a modern carbon road bike and I took my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima to a local bike shop to be returned to a rideable condition, and we both started riding again. My first ride, five miles home from the bike shop, was on August 1, 2008. My second ride was on August 5, 2008. It was five miles around our neighborhood and I was joined by my wife on the 1973 Gitane road bike we had bought for her back when we first started dating. Although not all my riding was done with Agi, a significant fraction was. She was an enthusiastic cyclist and a wonderful partner on a ride. For her landmark 60th birthday that October she decided to celebrate with a bicycling weekend in the Hill Country of Texas. Just weeks later, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer has a terrible prognosis and we were devastated. We were relatively fortunate, she did much better than the average ovarian cancer patient, living eight more years, many of those cancer free. During those eight years, cycling continued to be one of our favorite things to do. But that was later. Sometime during the 16 months she was too sick to ride, my riding virtually stopped as well. So how is this different from weight training and swimming and running, other forms of exercise which I started and abandoned? As I have confessed on this blog more than once, in many ways, it wasn't. The biggest way it was different is that I eventually restarted cycling on a regular basis and have continued doing so for ten years and counting. Another way it is different is that virtually stopped and stopped are not quite the same thing. During those 16 months, I rode five rides, ranging from 20 to 35 miles in length. In retrospect, I am amazed I could do that. My first five mile ride in August of 2008 left me exhausted. Within a month or two I was easily completing 20, 30 and 40 mile rides, which is the expected result of training, but what was unexpected, at least to me, was that the ability to do those longer rides didn't go away even after six months off the bike. I have no explanation for that.

A final reason that cycling was different from my other attempts at exercising is that although Agi and I stopped riding, we never stopped talking about riding. One of the reasons I had stopped riding was that at some point I had ridden over a pothole which damaged the rear rim on my Bianchi making it unrideable. I was both discouraged by the amount of maintenance my Bianchi required and unable to decide what I wanted to do about it: should I try to keep it in its historically pristine but fragile condition or should I make it less authentic but more practical by replacing the sew-up rims with clinchers, for example [2]? Agi was also unhappy with her old Gitane, a relatively low end bike to begin with, so our conversations began to turn towards getting new, matching bikes. As I began to research what we should buy, I was overwhelmed by the extent to which bicycles had changed since 1973, the last time we had purchased a bike [3]. I finally found two bikes that looked vaguely familiar to me, the Bianchi Volpe and the Surly Crosscheck. We were unable to find a Volpe in my wife's size (they exist, just not in the bike shops of Houston) so we purchased a matched pair of Surlys, and the rest is history. 

We got our new Surlys in April of 2010 and went out for a ride the day we brought them home. In May, Agi had her last cycle of chemotherapy; her cancer treatment was over. In June, we were both in San Diego for business and took the opportunity to rent bikes and ride out to a scenic lighthouse. By July we were ready for a week long cycling vacation in Maine with our two boys. In September, we decided to start checking out some of the local cycling resources, and went on a short, easy ride offered by the Houston Bicycle Club. In November, we picked up a book on the best rides in and around Houston and started trying some of them. Most weekends we would manage to take a local ride or two together. From the day we came home with our Surlys to the end of 2010 was 35 weeks. For 28 of those weeks I managed to reach the minimal medical  recommendation of 150 minutes of cycling and for 14 of those weeks I exceeded the optimal 300 minutes [4]. One more important thing happened in 2010. Agi believed that the only way to get the best food was by shopping for different items at different stores. Her favorite store for produce was a farmers market-like Houston institution known as Canino's which was ten miles from where we lived. In October of 2010 we did our first Canino's shopping trip by bike, officially making us utility cyclists.

In 2011 Agi and I continued with our weekend fun rides and continued bicycling to Canino's to shop for produce. Baylor College of Medicine where I worked was a big supporter of The Tour de Pink, a charity ride which raised money for breast cancer patients. In September of 2011, Agi and I rode the Tour de Pink for the first time, a ride that would become an annual event for us. In June, our younger son Matthew graduated from the University of Chicago. Because he had so much stuff to bring home and because Agi and I loved long road trips together, we drove from Houston to Chicago, attended the graduation, stuffed our 2006 Honda CR/V (which I am still driving) full of Matthew's stuff and drove him back to Houston.Two weeks later, we gave him our other car, a 2005 Toyota Corolla (which he is still driving) as a graduation present, and I drove it with him to California so he could start his new job in Silicon Valley. Our plan was to replace the car we had given Matthew with a new one. However, we soon found we could get by fairly well with one car. Still, it was a little inconvenient, especially if we forgot to plan ahead, so in March of 2012, Agi started commuting to work by bicycle. Once she started, she loved it! It was actually faster than driving and had the advantage of providing her with regular exercise. Between that and the shopping trips to Canino's our utility cycling cred was growing.

Once we were in California, Matthew and I took some time to visit friends and family, including Paul, my friend from High School who started this whole thing, and my parents. Although it was lovely for Matthew and I to see Mom and Dad, it was also a shock. We knew Mom had been having some problems with her health but she was much worse than we expected. She wasn't thinking clearly, she kept losing weight, and none of her doctors seemed to know what was wrong with her. At the end of July we all came back for Dad's 90th birthday party. Tragically, Mom could not be there because she was in the hospital. She remained in the hospital through most of August. I flew to California when she was released to help her move from the hospital back home and to get her and my Dad settled. It was clear to both me and my sister (who lived near them) that Dad could not manage this on his own, especially once Mom was finally diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and put into home hospice care, so we agreed to take turns living with them. From then until Mom's death in February of 2012 I spent about half my time in California caring for Mom and Dad and half back home in Texas. Obviously, this impacted my cycling dramatically. In December my wife and kids bought me a California bike, a 2007 Bianchi Volpe so that I could squeeze in the occasional ride while I was caring for Mom and Dad. That Volpe is currently the favorite of all my bikes. At the end of February 2012, Mom died.

In 2011 I retired [5]. (It was only because I retired I was able to spend so much time with Mom and Dad.) My first official day of retirement was September 1, but I had so many accumulated vacation days that my last day at work was in July, and thereafter, I cycled all week long. Even before I retired I rode more often than Agi did, but once I was free to ride during the week, my cycling career bifurcated, weekend bicycling with Agi, weekday cycling on my own. Being on my own, I started asking myself, "What now?" After browsing the Internet to find out what was going on in cycling in this Brave New World, I discovered Randonneuring [1] and for three to four years that became my obsession. In August, I decided to prepare for a 200K (124 mile) brevet. That preparation was interrupted by Mom's illness, but before it was I was able to ride enough to realize that I didn't know what I was doing. I was increasing the length of my training rides too quickly and finding I could not complete them. 

Sadly, as soon as Mom died, Dad started to decline. Now I was flying out to California to care for him. At first, the trips were not nearly as frequent or long as they had been for Mom so I was able to prepare for and successfully complete a 200K Brevet in May of 2012. While I had been caring for Mom, Agi had been searching for a training book for me. This time, I followed a training plan from the book she found and that allowed me to complete my first brevet. In May of 2012 I posted on this blog for the first time, two weeks to the day after that brevet. That timing was no coincidence. The excitement I felt at having become a randonneur made me want to blog about it, and as a result, the meager two brevets I completed resulted in a disproportionate amount of discussion of randonneuring on this blog. Randonneuring was one part of my cycling I didn't share with Agi which accounts for her getting relatively little attention. In reality, the role Agi played in my cycling was vastly more important than that played by randonneuring.

What I didn't learn from that book, either because it was not explained well or because I did not read it carefully, is what to do after the brevet. Believe it or not, after resting a week (good) I assumed that I should just start doing the longest training ride I had worked up to, 90 miles, as my weekly long ride (bad). That lasted two weeks before becoming unsustainable. I then assumed I should just start over from the beginning, and so did that in an attempt to prepare for a second 200K brevet in November. Following that plan, I was able to ramp up to 80 miles, but was unable to complete a 90 mile ride the week after so had to abandon that brevet attempt. In an effort to figure out what went wrong, I started reading other training books, and for some reason became enamored with Greg Maffetone's "The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing." I purchased a heart rate monitor and started doing a training ride that was based on my interpretation of that book, a ride that I called a MAF test. 

MAF tests continued to be a major component of my training until I moved to California five years later. One thing that made the MAF tests work so well for me was a unique Houston resource, the Rice University Bike Track. That track was located only a few miles from my home and was on Agi's commute to work so that I could keep her company on her ride to work and then do my workout on the track. Physically, the track was not much, it was just some painted lines in one of the Rice University parking lots. What made it special is that the parking lot was unused most of the time (it was used during football games) and so the track was blocked off from cars, making it about the safest place imaginable to ride. It was a third of a mile around, there was no banking on the turns, but for me, that was not a limitation, I could ride it as fast my legs and lungs would allow. My version of the MAF test required me to ride for 45 minutes, maintaining my heart rate between 130 and 140 beats per minute. If I tried to do that in traffic, the distraction of watching my bike computer would have almost certainly caused me to have an accident. On the track, doing so was completely safe. So, the availability of the Rice Bike Track made MAF tests possible. That is why when I moved to California, I could not continue riding MAF tests. The Rice Track was also a great place for intervals and time trials. 

As my next 200K attempt approached in May of 2013, I started adding long rides to the MAF test rides. I increased the length of these long rides by 10% each week, and by doing that was able to complete that second 200K, riding it faster and more comfortably than I had the first. However, when I tried to do a third brevet in November, I ran into the same problem I did the year before, I could work my way up to an 80 mile training ride but could not complete a 90 mile ride the following week. To this day I am not sure why that was. I have a bunch of possible explanations but not enough data or understanding to decide which one to believe.

Meanwhile, Agi and I had either settled into a pattern or fallen into a rut, depending on how you want to look at it. She was biking to work. We were biking to Canino's for produce. Most weekends, we would go on one or two rides together, but always took the same three or four routes. Most of my weekday cycling was around and around on the Rice Track, a mixture of MAF tests, intervals, time trials, or social rides when I happened to bump into one of my Rice Track buddies. I hadn't yet given up on riding brevets, but in 2014 my local randonneuring club didn't offer a 200K in May so I decided to wait until the November 200K, or that was my plan. Unfortunately, Dad's health continued to deteriorate, and so my efforts to prepare for that brevet were interrupted by trips to California. I worked around those and felt like I was on track to complete that brevet when a medical emergency had me in California caring for Dad instead, so no brevet in 2014. Dad's illness continued to progress and he died in July of 2015. 

Agi was finding my absence during all those trips to California emotionally difficult so I looked for ways to spend more time with her when I was in Texas. We rode the Bluebonnet Express, another charity ride, in February of 2015 and we did a second, longer ride with the Houston Bike Club in March. As Agi and I rode through the Hill Country of Texas together, having been dropped by the other Houston Bike Club riders, Agi turned to me and asked for a favor: "Could you quit riding brevets and instead focus on rides we can do together?" That was the end of my career as a randonneur. A month later her cancer came back. Recurrent ovarian cancer is not curable but it is treatable, so we hoped for several more years together. We were given two. Chemotherapy is never easy, but if you looked at our cycling schedule or at Agi's work schedule, you would never have guessed anything unusual was going on, at least at first. We rode the Tour de Pink that September, but it was for the last time. By the summer of 2016 she was feeling bad enough that it was difficult for her to throw her leg over her road bike with its traditional diamond frame so we bought her an urban commuter with a step through frame to allow her to continue biking to work. November 30, 2016, she commuted to work, and that was to be the last bike ride of her life. By December, we started what became a discouraging series of emergency hospital visits. There were still some good times ahead, but by May she was transferred to home hospice care and on June 10, 2017, she died. It goes without saying that Agi's illness impacted my cycling, but I rode when I could, and ten days after her death I reached 30,000 miles of riding since my restart in 2008. Three quarters of this story is now over.

So how did all these ups and downs affect my cycling schedule in terms of health and fitness? RUSA, the governing organization for randonneuring in the United States, suggests that randonneurs should average at least 5,000 miles a year of cycling. I reached a peak of 5,571 miles during the year between July 2012 to July  2013, but by February of 2014 my average had fallen below that magic 5,000 never to return. I'm not completely sure why that that was, perhaps it was all the MAF tests which are relatively short rides, but if I had been able to attempt a brevet in November of 2014, I would have been considered underprepared. The medical community has a lower bar. They divide exercise intensity into three levels, light, moderate, and vigorous. Bicycling is considered either moderate or vigorous depending on how you ride. To be conservative, I have always counted cycling as moderate exercise. The Medical community wants me to engage in a minimum of 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, and says that ideally I should up that to 300 minutes. Most weeks I managed to easily exceed that 300 minute recommendation. Because of week to week variation, I have started tracking a running average of minutes per week over the last year. That weekly average peaked at 494 in July of 2013 and stayed above 400 until May of 2015. In February of 2017, during some of the worst of Agi's illness, my average weekly minutes finally fell below the magic number of 300.

Losing Agi is the hardest thing I have ever experienced. I couldn't imagine how I could recover from that until I finally accepted that I couldn't, the old me was gone forever, my only recourse was to create a new me. After the burying and mourning and selling of the house and Hurricane Harvey and getting rid of all the stuff that I wasn't taking to California and arranging to have the rest moved, I hopped into my trusty CR/V and started the long road trip from Houston, Texas to San Carlos, California. The drive was not nearly as much fun without Agi by my side. As a result of all these disruptions, there were six weeks where I did no significant riding and my yearly averages continued to fall. But soon, I had started defining some new go-to rides in my new home state of California and resumed a regular schedule. A few weeks after moving into my new home in San Carlos I reached a low of 1967 miles a year and 180 minutes a week, then slowly, those averages started creeping back up. 

As of today, I have ridden 40,336 miles total, 9,776 which have been ridden since I arrived in California, so California now represents a significant chunk of my second cycling career. I seem to have reached a steady state where I am averaging between 300 and 350 minutes a week of riding and 3,000 to 3,500 miles a year. Back in September of 2016, Agi and I attended the 50th reunion of my High School bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen. One of the other attendees was Roger, who showed up with this his gorgeous 1970s Singer touring bike. As I was admiring it, he urged me to bring my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima to the next running of Eroica California, a combination group ride and bike show centered around vintage bikes. Eroica California is held in April, and given Agi's advancing illness, attending in 2017 was out of the question. After I moved to California, I planned attending in 2018 but developed pneumonia and was unable to make it. Roger was disappointed by my absence so suggested that in May, I drive the seven hours up to his place (California is a big state) and ride with him in The Art of Survival, a metric century (100 kilometer/62 mile) group bike ride, which I did. This gave me the fun challenge my California cycling had been looking for, or rather, two challenges. The first was demonstrably achievable, to ride a metric century. I had just done one, would I do another? It was now my turn to suggest a ride so I started looking for one and came across just the ticket, the Golden Hills metric century. It's biggest attraction for Roger and me was that it was held on the roads we used to ride together back in the days of The Modesto Roadmen. 

The second challenge Roger set for me was more aspirational, one that I have only achieved in the most minimal way possible, a metric century a month. The closest I have come to that goal is back to back metric centuries in October and November of 2019, but I get ahead of myself. In April of 2019, I and my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima finally made it to Eroica. The following month I once again rode the Art of Survival with Roger, I rode a short version The Death Ride with my son Michael, and repeated Golden Hills as well. The new me in my new life in California is not only meeting his medically mandated riding goals, he is finding ways to have fun as well. My plan for 2020 was to do the same, and if possible, more. My reality was the COVID-19 pandemic. All group rides were cancelled in 2020. Will COVID-19 ever be controlled well enough that we can go back to the way things were or are group rides, at least for the elderly like me, a thing of the past?

So what does the future hold? I confess, 40,000 is pretty lame as round numbers go, wouldn't it have made more sense to wait until I had ridden 50,000 miles to post this? There were three reasons I didn't wait. First, I didn't want to. Second, my previous summary was at 20,000 miles, so it seemed logical to write another post after another 20,000 miles. Third, at my age, it would be presumptuous to assume I have 10,000 more miles in me. "Don't wait until tomorrow to do what you can do today" is advice that becomes more urgent for me as each year goes by. That third reason is probably the most important. And yet, there is no reason for despair. While it would be presumptuous to assume I will be riding 10,000 more miles, it would be silly to assume that I will not. If I am able to continue riding and if I ride at my current level, I would reach 50,000 miles in September of 2023 at which time I will be 74 years old. At my age, time is most definitely not my friend, but it is not impossible that, even riding against that headwind, I might still be able to get a bit more fit than I am today. Will the Zombie make it to 50,000 miles, and if he does, what cycling adventures will he have enjoyed? Stay tuned to find out.

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Footnotes

[1] Randonneuring is a subsport within cycling which consists of a series of endurance challenges. The most common rides are 200, 300, 400, 600, and 1200 kilometers long, which translates to between 124 and 744 miles. These rides must be completed within a specified length of time, 13.5 and 90 hours for the 200 and 1200 kilometer rides respectively, with the others falling in between. These rides are referred to as brevets. RUSA is the governing organization for randonneuring in the United States and you can read all about this sport on their website.

[2] This is a debate I have with myself even today.

[3] We did purchase a 10 speed bike for my older son in 1993, but as luck would have it, we purchased one of the last of the old style bikes and failed to notice how different all the other bikes in the store had become.

[4] Besides cycling, Agi walked regularly and did aerobics and yoga at work. For me, cycling was my only exercise.

[5] Agi never did retire. Her last official day as an employee of the University of Texas (albeit a sick day) was the day she died.

San Carlos Bikes

The San Carlos Bikes Website as of early 2019

In September of 2018, about a year after I moved to California, I participated in a group ride to inaugurate the Peninsula Bikeway. I found out about this ride from an announcement on Facebook from an organization called San Carlos Bikes. I assumed San Carlos Bikes was a bike club and was very eager to get in touch with them to see if they might be a group with whom I'd want to ride. I had hoped to see them at the Peninsula Bikeway ride, but that did not happen. After the ride I continued to try to get in touch with them but it was not until the following January that I succeeded. I quickly found out that they were not a bike club and, although they sponsored the occasional ride, that was not their main focus. Rather, they were (and are) an advocacy group focused on helping the City of San Carlos become a more bike-friendly community. While living in Houston, Texas, I had been a member of the cycling advocacy group Bike Houston, so although an advocacy group is not what I had originally been looking for, it was of interest nonetheless. My timing was good in that the City of San Carlos had just begun updating their bicycling master plan and was soliciting input so I could both participate in development of that plan and see San Carlos Bikes in action.

Working with San Carlos Bikes was one surprise after another. My first reaction to watching San Carlos Bikes in the context of the hearings that the city held about their bike plan was that it was not a significant player in this process. I was wrong about that because I had not yet learned how San Carlos Bikes works. A second surprise was that San Carlos Bikes held no meetings. That was one reason it took me so long to get in touch with them. I had started with the idea that I would drop in on a meeting, get a sense of what they were about, and based on that decide if I was interested in joining. I couldn't find their meetings because there weren't any, at least at the time. Getting in contact with San Carlos Bikes meant directly contacting its founder, Sonia. Although there were about a dozen members listed on their website, my first impression was that only one of these members, Sonia, made all the decisions. It turned out I completely misunderstood the reality of the situation. Rather than a dictatorship, San Carlos Bikes is more of an anarchy. Its members are all free to do whatever they think best and the way they work together is that when someone has an idea for a project, they personally contact some of the others and ask for help. Some of its members are members of the city council so that rather than being an outside force applying pressure to the city government, San Carlos Bikes is part of an organic whole, a whole that includes the city government. That is not to suggest everyone always agrees, oh my no! Rather, it's that the resolution of any disagreements is more like what happens inside a family than a political process. 

For our first meeting, Sonia invited me to help her with a survey of Burton Park to develop plans for an increased cycling presence in a major city event, Hometown Days, one of the biggest events on the city's calendar. This two day party in the park features bands in the band shell and booths offering food, games, and other activities throughout the park, each booth being run by some city organization. Sonia had drawn up detailed plans for bike parking, a bike lane around the park, and other bike-friendly features for this event and wanted to go over them on site. As we worked on this project, people dropped by to chat and I soon realized that Sonya knew everybody: leaders of surrounding cycling organizations, city council members, and so on, and also had a network of friends and neighbors in San Carlos who she could call on for help. That was how she got things done. Not everything she proposed came to fruition, but a bike parade and a bike valet service did and both were a smashing successes. 

Another surprise, one very educational to me, was the emphasis of San Carlos Bikes on kids. Early in my involvement with them I attended one of the meetings the city had to take input on the Bike Plan. (San Carlos Bikes happened not to be present at this particular meeting.) There were several recreational cyclists there, some belonging to one or another of the local clubs (Pen Velo, Western Wheelers) and we all had the same reaction: upgrades to the infrastructure in San Carlos were not our highest priority. San Carlos is a fine place to ride because of its light traffic and friendly residents. It isn't particularly exciting, a recreational cyclist would rarely make a point of visiting San Carlos on a ride, but if you live there or are just riding through, it's fine, you probably wouldn't notice it one way or another. There were a few problems here and there, we all used the meeting to note them, but San Carlos was not first on anyone's list of cycling priorities. I mentioned this to Sonia some days later, and she started talking about her priorities, and most of them involved kids. How kids could safely bicycle to school. How kids could get to the places they liked to hang out. How kids could have bicycling adventures about which their parents could  feel comfortable. Just one example: half the High School students in San Carlos attend Sequoia High School in Redwood City. For many (most?) of these kids, there is only one relatively safe route for bicycling from San Carlos to school, Stanford Lane in San Carlos which turns into Warwick Road at the Redwood City boundary to Oakdale Street to Duane Street to school. That requires a short jog on Arlington Street to get from Warwick to Oakdale, a left on Arlington followed by a right on Oakdale. There is a curve in Arlington just before this intersection, limiting visibility. Also, the road is ever so slightly uphill at this point, not anything even the weakest recreational cyclist would even mention, but if you are a kid bicycling to school trying to make that left turn uphill from a standing start with limited visibility into traffic, it is scary. So Sonia got onto social media and reached out to her friends and contacts, and in a remarkably short period of time, Redwood City (not even Sonia's home town) had installed a four way stop at that intersection. Now the kids biking to school are safer, and quite frankly, even though I would never have asked for that stop sign, I feel safer as well. Most experts argue that it is at age 10, more or less, when kids can safely ride their bikes in traffic by themselves. At age 16 most of them will start driving cars. We all hope that they will acquire a life long love of cycling but certainly for those 6 years, cycling is their only option for freedom and independence. When we talk about complete streets (streets that also serve the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, not just cars) and cycling infrastructure, I now realize that kids are one of the major reasons this is important. 

I no longer live in San Carlos and am not currently a member of San Carlos Bikes. There are other cycling advocacy organizations in the area, the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition (SVBC) being an important one. I knew about SVBC before meeting Sonia, but it was Sonia who inspired me to join, and I remain a member to this day. Club bike rides are the last thing I am looking for in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, but if and when the world returns to normal, I will be looking to join the Western Wheelers, a club that Sonia brought to my attention. Not living in San Carlos, I probably will have much less exposure to The City of San Carlos' bike infrastructure but I now appreciate how critically important that infrastructure is to the children of San Carlos, and because Sonia and I have stayed in touch, I watch that infrastructure getting better and better. This improvement results from the efforts of many people, Sonia being one of the most important. I am very glad I saw that message from San Carlos Bikes on Facebook and as a result, learned what they are all about. Go San Carlos Bikes!

My Go-To Rides Must Die!

Left to Right, my son, granddaughter, daughter-in-law, grandson, me, daughter-in-law, and son.

Good news - I just moved much closer to my grandkids! I now live just five doors down from them, easy walking distance. But even though my old house in San Carlos and my new house in Emerald Hills are less than three miles apart, the move did impact my cycling. This is because I have a strong preference for riding "door to door" (as opposed to driving with my bike to the start of a ride) and so when the location of my "door" changes, so do my rides. One complaint I had about my old house was that it was on the side of a hill so it was never possible to do an entirely flat ride and, no matter how tired I was coming home, I always had one last hill with which I would have to contend. This complaint applies much, much more to my new house. My San Carlos house was 145 feet above sea level in contrast to my Emerald Hills house which is 470 feet above sea level. As one subjective example of what that means, it was a minor annoyance to have to bike from the shops and restaurants of downtown San Carlos (33 feet above sea level) to my old house. In contrast, to ride to my new house from that same elevation is a major challenge, approaching impossible on days I am tired. To put this another way, there are some of my bikes which I may never ride again because they lack the very low gears I would need to ride in my new neighborhood. I am struggling to imagine how I might do an easy, recovery ride in my hilly neighborhood; I am considering purchasing rollers for that purpose, definitely a less desirable alternative to riding on the road.

With regards to the title of this post, does my move mean I have to restart defining go-to rides from scratch? Not at all. I can continue to ride my two most important go-to rides, named Alpine and Cañada, with only minor changes. The new rides are about a mile shorter, the start/finish for these rides have moved, and, given my new location, it made sense to make some additional minor route changes. But even though these changes are minor, they are enough that my times and speeds on the new versions of these rides will not be comparable to the old. Those 100+ repeats of the Alpine ride are no longer as relevant or useful as they used to be. The go-to rides that will be most impacted are the flat ones on the east side of the peninsula. Getting to my new house from the west involves significant climbing but can be done without unmanageably steep hills. In contrast, getting to my new house from the east cannot be done without ascending some very steep hills indeed, steep enough that there are some days I cannot get up them at all.

One last consequence of the move, a temporary one: the move itself derailed my training plans. After 66 straight weeks of meeting my 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise, I managed to do no cycling at all during the week of my move. Those 66 weeks were a pretty good run and I am sad it is over. However, I am now 6 week into my new run of 300 minutes weeks. Wish me luck!

Biking aside, my new house has many advantages over the old, proximity to the grandkids being the most important. But even in the context of my biking, the move is certainly not all bad. For example, the move provided new opportunities for go-to rides. Shortly after the move, I went on a ride with my son (another advantage to living closer) and he showed me one of his go-to rides, a beautiful if hilly hour long ride that has now become a ride I do weekly.

I have previously described how, between 2005 and 2008 I tried a variety of exercise plans, none of which I stuck with, and how, even when I started cycling in 2008, after six months I dropped that as well. The difference between cycling and everything else was that a year later, in 2010, I restarted; It is not that my cycling never lapses, but that I manage to return to cycling after each lapse. Maintaining my cycling through this latest move is just one more recent iteration of that process. More recently, the wildfires which have become a seasonal plague here in California became the latest disruption. Each day I have to check the air quality to determine if the health benefits of cycling outweigh the harm of inhaling smoke. But this too shall pass (at least until next season.) For now, I will do the best I can with faith that I can resume my regular cycling schedule when conditions make that prudent.

Training Derailed

As I think about my journey since restarting cycling in 2008, my attention often turns to points on that timeline where an apparently successful training plan is, for no reason I can remember, abandoned. The problem is that my memory is quite fallible (most peoples' are.) So, when I recently watched a training plan unravel in real time I decided to document it before I forgot how it happened. I started a new training plan last February, my last training plan having derailed the previous November. That new plan was designed to prepare me for metric centuries during the 2020 season. This new plan came apart in March with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, but by April, I was ready to resume it despite the fact that the metric centuries for which I was originally training would not be held this year. It took me three weeks to work back up to that plan, and after three weeks of executing it, my body complained so I cut back a bit for four weeks to recover. I then went back to this plan for another three weeks when life events caused it to derail once again. It is this last derailment that I want to talk about here.

What is this training plan that keeps derailing, and what does "derail" actually mean? That plan is to ride my "maintenance" schedule most weeks, one 34 mile ride with 1800 feet of climbing ridden mostly in Zone 2*, one 23 mile ride with 1300 feet of climbing ridden in a mixture of Zones 2 through 5, and two easy rides ridden in Zone 1. There are two ways I can use this plan to be ready for a metric century. If I do a metric century every month, then two weeks of each month I ride the maintenance plan, one week I ride two to three easy rides to taper (rest) for the metric century which I ride at the end of that week, and then the following week I do five to six easy rides. If I am not currently riding metric centuries, then I ride the maintenance schedule every week. From that base, four weeks before a metric century, I increase the length of the longest ride from 34 to 45 miles. The following week I drop back to the maintenance schedule. Two weeks before the metric century I increase the longest ride from 45 to 55 miles. One week before the metric century I ride the maintenance schedule. The week of and after the metric century is the same as the metric century a month schedule, easy to rest before and recover after the event.

What does it mean to say that the above schedule "derailed"? For more than I year I have consistently completed at least 300 minutes of aerobic exercise every single week, so derail does not mean no riding, it means less riding, but still enough riding to add up to 300 minutes. A common minimal schedule I do to reach that 300 minutes is five one hour, relatively flat rides each week. So, from a health perspective, I'm doing fine. It is only in the context of a regular schedule of metric centuries that my schedule derails. Subsequent to derailment, I may no longer be a month away from being able to complete a metric century (though see below), it might take me two months or more to reach that goal.

What were these "life events" that most recently derailed my training plan? They were a relatively modest pair of events which, upon reflection, were only able to derail the plan because 1) they were on top of other life events which, by themselves, were not enough to derail the plan but brought me close to that eventuality and 2) because my maintenance plan appears to be close to the maximum training load I can sustain. The two things that pushed me over the edge and caused me to drop back to an easier schedule were: 1) Road repair that made it difficult to ride my 23 and 34 mile rides. 2) My grandkids and their family took a vacation. They needed some extra help from me to get ready and that extra effort left me exhausted. They left mid-day on Saturday, and after they left, I had planned to do an easy ride. I was unable to complete (or even start) that ride nor could I do anything else for the rest of the day. I collapsed on the couch for the rest of the day. On Sunday, I completed that short ride but was unable to do anything else thereafter. On Monday, I was scheduled to do my long ride, and had even toyed with the idea of working towards a solo metric century four weeks from now by extending that ride to 45 miles. However, that Monday I was exhausted and opted to spend my limited energy doing some chores and forgoing the ride. On Tuesday, I was still feeling tired but also feeling that this was my last chance to avoid another derailment and even feared slipping below 300 minutes for the week.  If it had not been for the road repairs, I suspect I would have forgone the longer ride but would have completed my normally scheduled 34 mile ride. In retrospect, I don't know if that would have been a wise decision, but faced with finding my way around the road work, it was more than I could manage emotionally so I did a much flatter, easier 38 mile ride instead. Thus was my schedule derailed.

If my maintenance schedule is at the limit of what I can sustain, how is it that I can ever do a metric century? Part of the answer is given by the word "sustain." I have noted multiple times on this blog that it is possible to train to a peak of fitness which is above what I can sustain long term. Thus, I can work my way up to a metric century but then might have to take a break to pay off the resulting fatigue debt resulting from preparing for and riding the metric century. If that were true, then my dream of riding a metric century a month all season long is doomed. Perhaps a more realistic explanation is that what I can sustain on the bike is strongly influenced by what is going on off the bike. When I am unstressed and well rested, I might well be able to maintain a metric century a month schedule, but when life takes its toll, I can barely maintain the easiest version of 300 minutes a week, and in fact I think that is what the story in this post suggests. Key to appreciating this alternative explanation is the dramatic impact of life events on the ability of my body to absorb training, that may be more important than the fine details of exactly how I train. Sadly, this scenario may also doom my metric century a month dream, the odds of going an entire season with no intervening life events are low indeed.

One final point that I don't quite know how to fit in with the rest of this story is that I know from experience the more I do, the more I can do. Right now, I find my 34 mile ride fairly tiring, my legs are inevitably sore by the end. I have found, however, that when I start doing longer rides, that 34 mile ride starts feeling easy. This was particularly evident last Fall, when my preparations for the Golden Hills Metric Century and a subsequent solo metric century worked particularly well, leading to a level of fitness and comfort on the bike I haven't seen for a long time. I sure would like to repeat that! When I look back on that period, they key was not consistency, up through August I had a lot going on in my life and my cycling schedule had been derailed to say the least so that in September, I jumped into the ramp-up to prepare for Golden Hills with very little preparation. Why did that work? When I think about it, the period in question, September through November of 2019, was a period of particularly low stress in my life, and maybe that's what this is all about. I often follow the Tour de France, and have been puzzled by the speculation about how the various favorites are "feeling" and how that bodes for their Tour that year. These guys are professionals! Shouldn't they have a training plan that allows them to tune their fitness and fatigue in a predictable way? To some extent they do, the other discussion about the favorites is which races they have ridden leading up to the Tour to maximize their fitness and minimize their fatigue, but there is an unknown factor as well. Might they be similarly susceptible to what is going on off the bike as I? Maybe this is just the way it is, I have to just keep trying, cutting back on my training when my body tells me I must, being the best that I can be when I am lucky enough to have a stress and illness free period of which I can take advantage.

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* Zones 1 and 2 are a pace I can ride indefinitely, with Zone 2 being harder (faster) than Zone 1. Zone 3 is a pace I can maintain for an hour or so. By the top of Zone 4, I can only manage to ride for 30 minutes. Zone 5 is some degree of sprinting, a pace I can maintain for 15 minutes at the bottom of the zone to 20 seconds at the top (aka Zone 6). 

Intensity and Fatigue

The Road Bike Rider newsletter regularly appears in my inbox, and in it is usually an article by my favorite coach, John Hughes. In a recent article, he answered a question from one of his clients, a 70 year old man (the same age as me.) The question was "Why Do [my] Legs Hurt?" His response was pretty harsh, he pointed out to his client that he had not followed Hughes' directions, but rather had ridden more than he was supposed to, thus the sore legs. I felt rather sorry for the client for being publicly shamed, but at the same time noted that I had been feeling worse than usual and wondered if I deserved a tongue lashing as well. So I looked back at my recent logs to see if I have been faithfully following my own training schedule.

I talk a lot on this blog about "listening to my body." My body "speaks" to me in two way: how I feel (tired, sore, energetic, moody...) and how I perform (speed on a standard ride.) Listening to my body has been the only way I have found to figure out how much and how hard I should be riding, but it is not a panacea; my body cannot design a cycling schedule for me, it can only tell me if the one I am riding is too hard. Furthermore, by the time I get feedback from my body, it may be too late. By the time I feel the effects of overtraining, I may have already built up a fatigue debt that will require me to cut back significantly on my training, perhaps even for months. Thus, it is important that I carefully design and stick to a training schedule to keep that from happening.

How did I come up with my current training schedule? When I moved from Texas to California three years ago, many aspects of my cycling changed. The hills of California made it more difficult for me to do rides at well defined intensities, so I switched to a more "just ride" strategy, relying on those hills to give me the mix of intensities that cycling coaches recommend. So designing a schedule became making a list of local rides that together kept me fit and healthy but which were sustainable so that I did not drift into overtraining. This schedule consisted of a list of the rides I would be doing each week: Alpine on Monday, Cañada on Wednesday, Stafford Park on Thursday, Neighborhood on Saturday. Each ride has a distance and an amount of climbing; 23 miles and 1300 feet, 34 miles and 1800 feet, 7 miles and 200 feet, 12 miles and 500 feet, respectively. From experience, I know about how about how long each ride will take me, 110 minutes, 160 minutes, 40 minutes, 60 minutes. Thus, my schedule provides for 370 minutes of riding containing a reasonable mix of intensities. By listening to my body, I can determine if this schedule is too hard and adjust if necessary. But what if this schedule is not as consistent as it seems? In particular, I don't always ride the same route at the same speed, what is the impact of riding a particular route fast or slow?

It is fairly obvious why my speed might matter. The fatigue generated by a ride is a function of both how long the ride lasts (volume) and how fast I ride it (intensity.) The problem is how to quantitate the intensity of a ride. It is clear to anyone who has done such rides that a 20 mph ride is more than twice as tiring as a 10 mph ride, but how much more? Training intensity is normally described in terms of zones. The zone in which one is riding can be determined by measuring relative heart rate, relative power output, or subjectively, using relative perceived exertion - how hard the ride feels. Many coaches provide tables that list the heart rates and power levels at the boundaries of the different zones or that describe how each zone feels. There are some differences but a lot of commonality between the tables provided by different coaches. Coach Joe Friel, one of the first coaches whose books I read, uses a seven zone system, naming the zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5a, 5b, and 5c. Historically, this is the zone system I have used on this blog. Coach Hughes, who I now follow, uses a six zone system, naming the zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The Hughes zones are very similar to the Friel zones except that Hughes combines the Friel zones 5a and 5b into zone 5 and names the Friel Zone 5c as Zone 6. As of this post, I am switching from the Friel zone system to the Hughes zone system. Back in Texas, I determined the zone in which I was riding using heart rate (HR) but since moving to California, I determine my zones using relative perceived exertion (RPE). (I have never had the pleasure of using a power meter.) What is missing from all of these zone systems is a quantitative measure of the impact of each zone on fatigue, fitness, or health, the three main consequences of training.

As I have previously blogged, I deeply distrust the metrics used to translate training zones into quantitative intensity levels in the training books I have read. Rather, my estimates of quantitative intensity has been heavily influenced by a paper I reviewed not once but twice on this blog, a paper I refer to as Gillen et al. This paper looked at the impact of intensity on health. The dramatic claim of this paper is that 1 minute of training in Zone 6 (High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT) has the same health benefits as 45 minutes of training in Zone 2. Even if one accepts the claims of Gillen et al., it is not clear that training in Zone 6 would also have 45 times the impact on fatigue and fitness as training in Zone 2, but in the absence of better data on the topic and for the purposes of this post, I am going to both accept the claims of Gillen et al. and assume that they apply to fatigue and fitness as well as to health.

Gillen et al. only compared rides in Zone 2 and Zone 6. However, a long standing claim of the medical community is that vigorous rides (Zones 3 or 4) have twice the benefit of moderate rides (Zone 2), so, relative to a ride in Zone 2, arbitrarily set to an Intensity of 1, I set the Intensity of Zone 6 to 45 as per Gillen et al. and then Zones 3 at 1.5 and Zone 4 at 3 interpolating and extrapolating the "Vigorous" intensity of the Medical community. To estimate values for Zones 1 and 5, I plotted the values for Zones 2, 3, 4, and 6 as determined above, connected them with a smooth curve, and read intensities for Zones 1 and 5 from the graph. In the case of Zone 1, I adjusted the value because didn't match my experience and common sense. The graph gave Zone 1 an intensity of 0.1. The medical community might agree with that value in terms of impact on health, but my experience says that the impact on fatigue is greater than that so I arbitrarily assigned it an intensity of 0.5. These values are listed in the figure at the top of this post.

I feel like I can do a fair job at estimating my RPE at any point in a ride, but what I cannot do with any degree of accuracy is to say, over the course of a variable and hilly ride, what percent of my time I spent in different intensity zones. Four or five months after moving to California, I wore my heart rate monitor on my Alpine ride. By chance, the speed I rode that particular day was my average speed for that ride, 12.3 mph, making this data maximally useful. The software that came with the monitor gave me the percentage of my time in each of the intensity zones as determined by heart rate. This was the data I used to determined that a mix of rides in California would give me approximately the mix of intensities that most coaches would recommend. Shortly after I did this measurement, my heart rate monitor died so I have no way at present to determine how this might change as my ride speed varies. Is there some way I might estimate that? Back in Houston when I was riding around and around the Rice track, always with a heart rate monitor, I did an experiment where I started riding at a heart rate of 120 bpm, recorded my speed, then increased to 130 bpm and 140 and so on until I reached a maximum heart rate of 173 bpm at which point I was riding at 23 mph. From that I concluded that each heart rate zone corresponded to an increase in speed of about 1.5 mph. Applying that to my current Alpine ride is quite a stretch, but in the absence of any better information, I will assume that if I increase my speed on the Alpine ride by 1.5 mph, the intensity zone of the various segments of this ride (uphill, downhill, flat, ...) will increase by about one, e.g. Zone 2 becomes Zone 3 and so on.

So how much does my speed on my Alpine ride vary? As I blogged last time, the last three months have included both the fastest (14.1 mph) and slowest (11.3) speeds on that ride. What determines how fast I ride it? The speed I ride is determined by how I feel. If my legs are feeling strong and I am feeling motivated, I might ride at at an average speed of 14.1 mph. If my legs are sore and I am not feeling motivated, I might ride at at 11.3 mph. I do confess that internal competition has a lot to do with it. If I ride it faster than 13 mph, I feel like that means I am in good shape and it makes me feel good about myself, so when I feel up to it, I am highly motivated to go for a fast time. To be clear, in all cases I am "just riding", even the fastest rides are fun and comfortable. That is not to say that the fast and slow rides are the same as measured by RPE. Even if the faster ride is more comfortable and more fun than the slower one, using RPE, I can definitely tell that the faster ride is harder. And this brings me to the point of this post: what impact does this variable ride speed have on my carefully planned ride schedule? For the sake of simplicity, let's consider two rides, the average 12.3 mph ride for which I have heart rate data and an hypothetical ride at 1.5 mph faster, 13.8 mph. If I take the percent time spent in each zone for the 12.3 mph ride and increase it by 1 as described in the previous paragraph and then translate each of these zones to an intensity as listed in the figure at the top of the post and sum the intensities over the two rides, this indicates that the 13.8 mph ride generates about twice the fatigue of the 12.3 mph ride. This calculation rests on a lot of shaky assumptions stacked on top of one another and therefore is highly suspect, but I have to say, the result feels right to me.

In retrospect, the conclusion of this analysis seems obvious: if I want to avoid overtraining, I should not ignore how fast I am riding. If I want to get the right balance of ride intensities from the hills of California, I need to have that set of intensities be consistent which means riding at a consistent speed. A week where I ride my two longest and hilliest rides at greater than 13 mph is a very different week than one where I ride them at less than 12 mph. How could I have missed something so obvious? It is, I think, because I viewed ride speed as a "message from my body" telling me, on a day I rode quickly, that all is well. While true, it is also true that how fast I ride is a decision I make which affects my training outcome. Another factor was by my natural competitiveness, I really like arriving home with an average speed over 13 mph. Do I now have to become a mindless drudge, reigning in my enthusiasm and squeezing all spontaneity and joy from my rides? Maybe not, maybe there is a middle ground. Perhaps it is OK to go all out on Monday and see how fast I can do the Alpine ride on a day when I am feeling strong, but then on Wednesday, I should make a point of holding back on the Cañada ride even if I feel like I could be riding it faster. Moderation in all things, as my Grandmother used to say.

So is this the answer to the question that inspired this post, are my annoying periods of feeling tired the result of prior rides that were ridden too fast? My intuition tells me that, at most, this is only part of the answer. It is certainly the case that coaches warn over and over again against exercising more than you think you are, more than you should, and there is the statistic that 65% of cyclists train too much as compared to 25% who train too little. Still, there are other potential reasons I might feel tired: stress from things going on in my life, a sub-symptomatic illness, or trying to ramp up my training too rapidly at the beginning of the season. But at the very least, being aware of the impact of my ride speed on fatigue gives me one more way to respond to the signals my body sends me.

Its Not About the Bike

I currently am riding five bikes:

• A 2016 Public bike, an upright urban bike with an eight speed hub.
• A 2010 Surly Cross Check, a cyclocross/gravel/do everything road bike.
• A 2007 Bianchi Volpe, a cyclocross/gravel/do everything road bike.
• A 1967 Hetchins. Originally a fast touring bike, now a road sport frankenbike.
• A 1960 Bianchi Specialissima. A vintage, top of the line road racing bike.

I have blogged about these bikes over the years so I won't say too much more about them here. Over the last year, I have been rotating them through my LBS, Veloro Bikes, to catch up on maintenance. Each time Veloro finishes with one bike, I ride the next one to be worked on into their shop and pick up the one they have just finished. A few weeks after the Golden Hills Metric Century last October, I took my Hetchins in and picked up my Volpe, and a stunning thing happened: my speed on my standard rides increased dramatically. One of the routes I have ridden the most often, over 130 times, is one which I call the Alpine ride. Until I picked up my Volpe, my speed on that ride varied between a low of 11.3 to a high of 13.2 mph. The first time I rode it on my newly overhauled Volpe, I rode it at 12.5 mph, a pretty average speed. However, the next time I rode it, I rode a new personal best, 13.4 mph. For a variety of reasons, I did not ride another Alpine ride for a while, but my speed on my similar 34 mile ride strongly supported the notion that this was not a fluke. Then in February, I did my Alpine ride at an astonishing (for me) 14.1 mph! I became a believer, Gebhard of Veloro Cycles must have done something magic to my Volpe to make it a full mph faster than any of my other bikes, though for the life of me I could not imagine what that might have been. As it happens, my subsequent training results have debunked that myth, my speed on that Volpe has returned to normal. I have always believed that my Volpe was my fastest bike (with the possible exception of my Specialissima) and Gebhard did put some pretty nice tires on it so it is possible that a small part of that November to February high was due to the bike, but the bulk of it must have been something I accidentally did right in my training. What might I have accidentally done right in my training and what accounts for the fall in my speed thereafter?

I have previously blogged about my training leading up to my last two Metric Centuries of 2019.  I thought I might end the 2019 season on December 8 with a third-in-a-row metric century, another solo ride, but the week before I would have done that ride was rainy and I decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner that week so was unable to prepare and my season ended in November. What happened thereafter was not particularly planned except that I had a determination to maintain the 300 minutes a week of cycling needed for my health and a vague notion that if I could ride a 34 mile ride each week I could get ready for a future metric century relatively quickly. As a result, in December through February I usually did one 34 mile ride each week combined with a variable mixture of shorter rides to add up to something between 300 and 360 minutes. At that point, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. At first, the shelter in place orders used to control the pandemic meant that my rides had to be kept close to home so my 300 minutes of riding consisted of five to six short rides around my neighborhood and the 34 mile ride had to go. After about five weeks, the rules changed so I could do longer rides, including that 34 mile ride, so despite the absence of a season for which to prepare (as a consequence of the pandemic) I decided to ride as if I were preparing for one anyway. In the past, I have found that the 80:20 rule definitely applies to my training, very easy riding keeps me pretty fit. Also, I have recently made my short, neighborhood ride both longer and hillier, and when that was my only ride, I was riding it faster, so I had hoped that when I restarted Alpine rides, I would go back to riding them at 13+ mph. Nonetheless, I took things a bit slow at first and rode nothing longer than 23 miles for two weeks before resuming my 34 mile rides. My plan was to get back to my maintenance schedule of four rides a week of length 12, 12, 23, and 34 miles, maintain that for six weeks, and then up the difficulty. To my disappointment, all of my Alpine rides had speeds of less than 13 mph, and some of them fell below 12 mph. Further, after three weeks of my maintenance schedule, my body was complaining and my speeds were dropping, so I reduced my effort for the next four weeks in response. So, good performance on the last two metric centuries of 2019, outstanding performance on routine rides for the next three to four months of less challenging riding, and then after five weeks of short rides only, my performance fell back to average when I resumed longer rides, and further, I found what had in the past been an easy schedule to be exhausting.

I have a bad habit of over-analyzing my rides, but with that warning, here is how I am currently thinking about what happened. I think the training I did for my 2019 "metric century"* season, especially at the end, left me in very fit. That fitness persisted for a few months at the same time as an easier training schedule allowed me to eliminate virtually all my fatigue. That resulted in the fast rides I initially attributed to a "magic bike." However, by March, the extra fitness from 2019 was gone and then when the pandemic forced me to cut back even more, my fitness fell even further. This manifest itself by slower speeds once I was able to return to my Alpine (and longer) rides but also in a reduced ability of my body to take advantage of training, I need to "get in shape for getting in shape" as the coaches say.

As I look back on my 2019 season, I find myself amazed at how foolish some of my decisions seem in retrospect. That said, a recurring factor limiting my performance has been a feeling of being tired much of the time. What is the cause of that tiredness? One obvious candidate is overtraining, but there are others. The last three years of my life have been extremely stressful, beginning with the loss of my wife rapidly followed by a move to California with all the general disruption that caused as well as the impact of that move on the kind of riding I could do. The most recent stress is the COVID-19 pandemic.When I discussed my recent tiredness with my son, his immediate reaction was that my sense of being tired was most likely a response to the stress of the pandemic.  Perhaps I should not think of my cycling career as having started in 1965 or even in 2008 but in 2017 when I moved to California and only then could starting figuring out how to train in the hills of California with a highly stressed 70 year old body. Perhaps I had a lot to learn in 2019, lessons that I had no choice but to learn from experience. 

So what now? One overwhelming factor affecting what I do now is the virtual absence of a 2020 group cycling season. Due to the pandemic, the "metric centuries" I had planned to ride I will not be held this year. I could plan solo metric centuries or arrange rides with my son with whom I am sheltering. The huge difference in our abilities would be a factor, but he is very understanding and we could arrange it so that my challenge rides are his easy rides. That is what I had in mind when I restarted more serious training seven weeks ago, but once again, feeling  tired impacted my plans. One big difference between group challenge rides and solo challenge rides is that the group rides are fixed date so ready or not, I have to ride them when scheduled (or not at all.) Does this force me to be disciplined, to stick to a schedule despite my subjective feelings? Or rather, are the solo rides better because they allow me to listen to my body to optimize my training plans? Only time will tell, stay tuned.

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* That season consisted of five rides, three of which were metric centuries (Art of Survival, Golden Hills, and a solo metric century.) The other two were Eroica California, an easy 35 mile ride, and my one pass version of The Death Ride, shorter than a 62 mile metric century but harder due to the amount of climbing.

I Am Not Average

In case it is not obvious, this is not a real ad. Photo from U.S. News and World Report.

[Part 3 of 3 in a series on whether I should give sprint workouts another try.]

The Problem

Since before my first blog post back in 2012, I have been trying to decide if sprint workouts, AKA brisk or high intensity workouts, would be beneficial for me. On the one hand, when I have introduced sprint workouts into my routine, I have not noticed a lot of benefit. Rather, I find that they frequently drive me into overtraining. On the other hand, everything I have ever read about training highly recommends them.

So what have I been reading? The first thing I started reading were training books written by cycling coaches. I have had a bipartite cycling career, the first part running from 1965 or so and continuing full force through 1970 and then slowly petering out until 1978 when it stopped completely. The second part started in 2008, stopped in 2009, started again in 2010, and has continued with ups and down but no significant breaks into the present. Even back in 1965-1970 when I was racing, I did not have a particularly organized training plan, I just rode from challenge to challenge. When I restarted cycling in 2008, I took the same approach. However, when I tried to train for a 200K (124 mile) brevet (challenge ride), I found it more difficult than expected, and my wife bought me "The Complete Book of Long-Distance Cycling" by Burke and Pavelka, where I first encountered the concept of an organized training plan. Following the plan in that book I successfully prepared for a 200K brevet in the spring of 2012. However, I quickly ran into problems and developed questions which lead me to read a variety of such books. I have found these books extremely helpful as a source of ideas, but my experience has been that some of those ideas seemed to work for me while others didn't. In retrospect, I think this was due to a fundamental limitations of such books. It seems to me that central to the concept of coaching is the interaction between coach and trainee. The coach tries workout ideas, sees how their trainee responds, and adjusts accordingly. This central interplay is, of course, missing from the book experience.

As I continued to explore the world of training advice, I encountered scientific studies that compared the virtues of different training plans. Coaching is based on intuition and experience. These studies are based on science, and as a retired scientist, I found that most enticing. There is a whole ecosystem around such studies: they are reported with varying degrees of inaccuracy by the popular press, they are summarized by scientific, medical, and government entities into guidelines and are one source of ideas that coaches use to develop suggestions for their trainees and to put into their books and articles and blog posts, all of which I read compulsively. In all cases, I try to go back to the original scientific publications and read them critically but with an open mind. To date, I have reviewed about ten different scientific studies on exercise on this blog. In part 1 of this series, I reviewed a scientific study that examined the benefits of sprint workouts for health in the elderly (e.g. me.) In part 2 of this series, I reviewed a scientific study that looked for correlations between training intensity and improvement in cycling performance. In the case of almost all of these studies, I seem to find something in them that makes me question their conclusions. Issues I have commented on to date include:

1. There are too few subjects in a study so the results are not statistically significant.

 

2. There are problems with the study design, things like changing more than one variable at a time, that make the results difficult to interpret.

 

3. The study is observational rather than experimental and as a result, cause and effect cannot be proven.

 

4. The study is a biomarker study and as a result, it is not clear that what I care about (e.g. health) is improved just because the biomarker (e.g. VO2peak) is improved.

 

5. The subjects are very different from me (younger, more athletic) making it unclear if the conclusions of the study apply to me.

I would like to invest a few more words on Issue #5 and focus on one way in which the participants in most studies differ from me: they start with subjects who are not currently exercising. In contrast, I have been cycling more or less continuously for well over a decade. Why do so many studies start with sedentary subjects? I have yet to read an explanation but I have my guesses. One guess is that someone who is not exercising and then starts will exhibit a large increase in fitness. Large effects are easier to study, making this choice attractive to the scientists conducting the study. A second guess is that being sedentary is a fairly uniform state, people who are not exercising at all are relatively similar one to another. If you did a study on people who are already exercising, it is likely that they will have different exercise schedules and thus will be starting from different places relative to their maximum fitness. Thus, the same exercise program would be a step up in difficulty for some, and a step down for others. Is this really a problem? Would we not expect that the exercise program that best helps someone get into shape would be the same that would help someone stay in shape? Maybe, but given the popularity of periodized training, I suspect most coaches would not agree. The training that is best at the beginning of the season when you first restart training is very different than the training that is best at the peak of the season, and I would expect that the training approach which is best when you first start cycling is different than what is best after you have been riding for a few years.

Finally, I would like to introduce one more related issue with almost every scientific study ever done on exercise:

6. Results from such studies are the values averaged across a number of subjects.

 

The problem with that that nobody is average, everyone is unique. I have posted a lot on this blog about individual variation. If everyone is different, does it make sense to do studies at all? If everyone is different, doesn't that mean that everyone just going to have to figure out the best exercise schedule for themselves? I actually don't think so, not from scratch. Although no two people are exactly alike, we do have a lot in common so that, though not perfect, studies comparing exercise protocols which report a average across multiple participants are way better than no study at all and I appreciate having such studies very much. Sure, I have to test their conclusions for myself, but knowing the average response to a particular training routine helps me know where to start. That said, I think it is possible to do such studies in a way that would make them even more useful. 

Aren't statistics necessary for helping to determine if the results of a study are real or are due to random chance? Yes they are, but there are different ways of applying statistics and how statistics are used needs to match what is trying to be accomplished. In the context of training for cycling, there are two sources of variability in performance. The first is day to day variability. For a variety of reasons, people have good days and bad days. Usually, that is not very interesting and it gets in the way of comparing different training programs. Imagine I want to determine if a polarized plan or a moderate intensity plan is better to help me prepare for a metric century. I do the polarized plan, ride a metric century, but as luck would have it, I have a bad day that day, so my speed is slow. For the next ride, I prepare using moderate intensity training. That day, I have a really good day, so my speed is fast. I conclude that moderate training is better for me, but this is a flawed conclusion, the random noise introduced by good days and bad days has obscured the true result. I need some way to average out those good days and bad days. The way most studies do this is by averaging the results of several different riders, some of whom are having good days and others having bad days. The problem with that approach is that there is a second source of variability, and that is person to person variability. Let me explain with one example. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that as one ages, one needs more recovery between hard rides. Imagine a study to determine the optimal number of rides per week; 3, 4, 5, or 6. Imagine the study groups contained a mixture of riders of different ages. If one looked at the older and the younger riders separately, one might find different optima, maybe 4 days a week for the older riders and 6 days a week for the younger, but if you average everyone together, one might find an average optimum of 5 days a week, optimal for neither group. One obvious way to deal with that particular problem is to subdivide the study groups into groups of similar riders; men vs. women, older vs. younger, serious vs. casual; those who have been riding a long time vs. beginners, and so forth. One problem with that approach is that studies become very large, they require lots of participants to cover all the different subgroups. Another problem which I consider to be even more serious is that I believe there are subgroups of riders who will give very different results in a study who cannot be easily identified, people who look the same but who differ genetically in ways that affect their response to exercise. The solution to that problem is described in the Wikipedia article on N of 1 trials. Rather than average the results of several subjects, one averages the results of several tests on the same subject. In principle, this allows a study to reduce the noise generated by good days and bad days but retain the information on person to person variability. This approach is not perfect either. In the first place, each subject is accumulating training, building up fatigue, and aging as the study progresses. In the second place, it requires very long studies to provide the time needed to test different exercise protocols on each of the subjects in a study. Ideally, a mixture of N of 1 protocols and more conventional protocols on well defined subgroups would complement each other, providing more information than either would alone. However, this only aggravates the problem of needing very large numbers of subjects and long study times.

A Proposed Solution

At long last that brings me to the picture at the top of this post. As a senior, I get a benefit from Medicare and my supplemental insurance plan called "silver sneakers", a free gym membership. Neither Medicare nor my insurance company provide this out of the goodness of their hearts, they provide it because if I exercise, I will be healthier and and as a result they will save money on my medical care. Might that be true for younger people as well? Might it save insurance companies money to encourage exercise by paying for gym membership even for younger customers? Medicare, though it does not cover these younger people, might decide that on top of whatever immediate improvement in health exercise provides to the young, exercise now will make them healthier later when they reach their 60s and begin to be covered by Medicare, and thus save Medicare money in the long run. For the purposes of this post, let's assume that one or both of these is true, and that as a result, a significant number of people become eligible for subsidized gym membership. A requirement of such a subsidy might be that participants agree that in return, they will participate in studies comparing different exercise protocols. This could be a small ask, such studies could be designed to have minimal impact on a participants training plans.

Full disclosure, I have not taken advantage of my Silver Sneakers benefit because my preferred exercise is cycling and the gyms that currently participate in Silver Sneakers don't particularly support cycling. What I have considered is working with Five Rings Cycling Center, an organization that provides coaching for a wide range of cyclists from serious racing cyclists to casual cyclists like me. If my plan to improve the usefulness of scientific studies on cycling were to happen, besides increasing the number of participants, Silver Sneakers would have to increase the range of providers to include groups like Five Rings. What would be the requirements for an organization to participate? First, that they provide a program that the medical community agrees improves health. I would expect that most coaching organizations would easily meet this requirement. Second, that they participate in the scientific study part of the program. A requirement for coaches employed as part of this plan is that they abide by government guidance in designing the plans for their clients. Is any of this at all likely? That is an interesting question, but one well beyond the scope of this post. The thought experiment which is the subject of this post is to imagine, if some of the current constraints were relaxed, how might scientific studies on the benefits of different kinds of exercise be improved. For the purposes of answering that question, assume that the expansion of Silver Sneakers proposed here happened. 

How would that impact scientific research on exercise in general and cycling in particular? Specifically, how would the above plan solve the six common problems with research studies outlined at the top of this post?

1. "There are too few subjects in a study so the results are not statistically significant." The number of potential subjects available to studies would be dramatically increased. My guess is that this problem would become a thing of the past.
2. "There are problems with the study design, things like changing more than one variable at a time, that make the results difficult to interpret." At first glance it might appear that this plan might not help with this problem, but in an organized system like the above there would be more opportunities for investigators to interact with each other which should improve the quality of studies and reduce problems with experimental design.
3. "The study is observational rather than experimental and as a result, cause and effect cannot be proven." Coaches would ask people to do one or another plan. Those that were unwilling would not be included in the study.
4. "The study is a biomarker study and as a result, it is not clear that health is improved just because a biomarker is." Because the studies would go on for a long time, actual health data could be obtained.
5. "The subjects are very different from those wanting to use the results of the study ...  studies start with sedentary subjects." With lots of subjects available, many more subgroups similar to many more users will be available.
6. "The results of almost all studies are reported as an average of a number of subjects." Because subjects are in long term, N of 1 protocols become possible.

Given that the proposed changes in Silver Sneakers has not happened, does this thought experiment have any value? I believe that it does. By clearly imagining what a more ideal study would look like, I feel I am better able to evaluate the studies that actually exist.