The Cañada and Stephens-Alpine Go-To Routes

 

Since the last time I talked about Go-To routes, I have added three new ones. The table at the top of the post is a list of my current Go To routes with the new ones highlighted in yellow. I have also renamed two routes, New Alpine has been renamed to simply Alpine, and similarly, New Alpine-Cañada to Alpine-Cañada. The previous routes which used to have those names I renamed to Old Alpine and Old Alpine-Cañada. The routes are listed from most difficult to easiest.

Miles is how long the ride is, in terms of distance. Minutes is how long it is in terms of the time it takes to complete. A hillier ride will take longer per mile, and also this number varies from ride to ride, depending on how fast I decide to ride the route. Feet is how much total climbing there is on the route, and Feet/Mile provides one metric of how hard the ride is, though of course I always have the option, within limits, of taking it easy up the hills. Subjective Intensity is how hard or easy a ride is per minute of riding. A one hour ride on a hard route leaves me more tired than a one hour ride on an easy route. If you look at the table closely, it may seem that the Subjective Intensity of the Emerald Hills ride is out of line. The reason is that I almost always do that ride on my eBike which reduces the effort required to complete it.

Is every route I ride on this list? No, only the ones I ride fairly regularly. Arguably, the Lake Loop route should now be removed from the list and there are one or two that maybe could have been added. These decisions are fairly arbitrary and will almost certainly change over time.

In the descriptions below, I explain the purpose of the three new routes and what they add to the routes I was already riding.

Cañada

The new Cañada route is something of an alternative to the Alpine route. It is a bit shorter, but the important difference is that it is significantly more pleasant to ride. It has a lot less traffic and it is prettier. Whatever I am planning, however low my enthusiasm might be, I always try to get in 300 minutes a week of what the medical community refers to as moderate intensity rides in order to maintain my health. I can easily ride on my trainer at the lower end of that intensity and this new Cañada ride is at the high end of that intensity. If I alternate Cañada rides and Trainer rides, taking off one day a week, this adds up to 330 minutes, more than enough to maintain my health.

Stephens-Alpine and Stephens-Cañada

I developed the “Old Stephens-Alpine” and “Old Stephens-Cañada” routes while living in San Carlos as longer rides to help me prepare for a metric century. The current versions are very similar to the old versions, relating to them in exactly the same way that the newer Alpine and Alpine-Cañada routes relate to the old ones. The map above shows the Stephens-Alpine route. The Stephens-Cañada route relates to that one in the same way the Alpine-Cañada route relates to the Alpine route. If you look back at the Cañada route, it has a stem-loop structure. The Stephens-Cañada and Alpine-Cañada routes are created by inserting 11.4 miles out and back on that stem into the Stephens-Alpine and Alpine routes.

Why am I adding these routes to the Go To list now? For a couple of reasons. The first is that originally, I tried a number of different longer routes to prepare for a metric century and I now think I have settled on these. The second is that I have started riding the Stephens-Alpine route more regularly, not just when I am preparing for a metric century, but sometimes when I am just in the mood for a longer ride or when I feel like it might benefit my fitness.

In the late winter/early spring of 2020, a house came on the market just steps away from my grandkids. As I was debating purchasing it, my son argued that “better cycling” was a plus in that consideration. He argued that the scenery in Emerald Hills was much nicer than in San Carlos. He was right. I argued the opposite, that “worse cycling” was a minus in that consideration. I argued that the hills would make it hard for me to find a riding schedule I could sustain. I was right. Immediately after moving into this new house, my Form (my ability to ride fast and/or long, increased by Fitness and reduced by Fatigue) seemed to improve. However, that improvement was not sustainable. After about four months my Form began to fall and then stayed low for the next nine months. As a result of that, I was unable to prepare for the 2021 running of the Art of Survival Metric Century. I believe that both the early improvement and later decline were the result of the hills in my neighborhood which resulted in an increase in my training Load, an increase which first increased Fitness but which also produced an increase in Fatigue. Since then, I have done three things to decrease my training Load: 

1. I began using my trainer for easy rides.
2. I began using my TranyaGo sports watch to help me avoid riding too fast.
3. I developed new routes, including the routes described in this post. 

The goal of these changes was to reduce the training Load of my schedule and it seems like these efforts have succeeded. I firmly believe that the routes described here have contributed to that success.

Using the TranyaGO

Heart rate on a four hour ride in which I attempted to ride at Heart Rate Zone 2 (110-135 bpm.) I was mostly successful doing that for the first 2½ hours but then my heart rate began to drift upwards even while I kept my effort constant, a phenomenon known as decoupling.

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Two posts ago I described the inexpensive fitness watch I recently purchased, a TranyaGO. I have now been using it for about 4 months and 50 rides. It continues to work almost* flawlessly. I would revise nothing in that post. It has also changed the way I ride, and that is the topic of this post.

I need to begin with a confession. I am not yet using the heart rate data provided by this device 100% correctly. Specifically, I have not properly defined my heart rate zones. Different heart rate zones are supposed to correspond to different physiological states such that exercise in these different zones have different training benefits. Most important to me at the moment is that, according to most coaches, including Coach John Hughes who I follow, training to improve endurance should be done in Heart Rate Zone 2. The problem is that the heart rates corresponding to Zone 2 will be different both for different coaches and, even for the same coach, will be different for different athletes. Because I am following Coach Hughes, the coach-specific part of this is taken care of; Coach Hughes says Zone 2 has a lower boundary of 69% of my anaerobic threshold heart rate and an upper bound of 83% of my anaerobic threshold heart rate. My responsibility as an athlete is to determine my anaerobic threshold heart rate. But what is an anaerobic threshold heart rate and how would I go about determining mine? I have blogged a very detailed discussion of the physiology relevant to that threshold but operationally the usual way to determine that is to measure my average heart rate during a time trial. Different coaches have different versions of this. In 2014, the version I was using was the average heart rate during the last 20 minutes of a 30 minute time trial. Back then, I rode three such  time trials and my average heart rates were 161, 162, and 163 bpm for those three rides. For the sake of simplicity and as an acknowledgement of the uncertainty in that measurement I called it 160 bpm. That was fine back in 2014 but most definitely should be updated now, eight years later. I have some weak evidence from the 50 or so rides I have tracked with the TranyaGO that my anaerobic threshold heart rate may not be very different from what I measured back in 2014 so that is what I am using until I can repeat that measurement. Using the 2014 value of 160 beats per minute means that, for me, Zone 2 extends from approximately 110 to approximately 135 beats per minute. (Again, I rounded the numbers slightly for convenience.)

The first ride I did with the TranyaGO was to wear it while riding on my trainer as an easy way to see if it worked. I learned two things from that ride: 1) It works. I varied my pace and compared my heart rate as determined by holding my fingers against my wrist and counting beats to what was reported by the TranyaGO and they were the same. 2) I mostly use my trainer for recovery rides, 30 minute rides at 60 rpm at low resistance. It turns out that my heart rate on such a ride is just below 90 bpm, definitely a Zone 1 ride which is what a recovery ride is supposed to be. That said, based on this result, I have revised my Trainer ride slightly. Looking back on all the heart rate zone recommendations I have accumulated over the years, I rediscovered one from the Mayo Clinic. For training purposes, I am sticking with the recommendations of Coach Hughes, but the Mayo recommendations concern not training but exercise for health; they are about what constitutes “Light”,”Medium”, and “Vigorous” exercise according to the medical community. The recommendation of the medical community is that I engage in at least 300 minutes a week of Moderate exercise or 150 minutes a week of Vigorous exercise or any combination of the two. The medical community gives no credit for Light exercise. A complication in calculating the Mayo numbers is that they are based on my Maximum Heart Rate rather than my Anaerobic Threshold Heart Rate. Maximum Heart Rate is much more difficult to measure and arguably, my doing so would be risky for an old man like me. What I have done is estimate my Maximum Heart Rate at 180 bpm based on weak evidence from the TranyaGO rides I have done to date. Using that estimate, the Mayo “zones” are below 90 bpm for Light Exercise, 90 to 126 bpm for Moderate Exercise, and 126 to 153 bpm for Vigorous exercise. These zone definitions have all sorts of implications but for the purpose of this post I will just note that my Trainer rides are, for training purposes, supposed to be in Zone 1 which, according to Hughes, is below 110 bpm. However, if I ride them above 90 bpm, they count as Moderate exercise for health purposes; I get credit for them! Thus, I have been wearing my TranyaGO on the trainer and monitoring it as I ride to try to keep my heart rate between 90 and 110 bpm during these rides.

A few days after the Trainer ride described above, I wore my TranyaGO on an Alpine-Like ride. Alpine-Like rides are some of my most frequent rides as well as the rides I had been using to assess my fitness. (This is the one ride for which I have heart rate data from my old heart rate monitor.) For that ride I used the TranyaGO real time; I kept my eye on my heart rate as I rode and based on that attempted to keep my ride within Zone 2. Even doing that, 14% of the ride was at a heart rate above Zone 2. Before getting the TranyaGO I had been arguing that it was impossible for me to do a pure Zone 2 ride in the hills in which I live, and the TranyaGO seems to confirm that pessimism but also suggested that if I cannot do a perfect Zone 2 ride, I can do a better one. Before getting the TranyaGO, a typical Alpine-Like ride was 50% above Zone 2. Reducing the "too strenuous" fraction of an Alpine-Like ride from 50% to 14% is such an improvement. But there is a price for that improvement, my average speed on that ride fell dramatically. My overall average speed on all my Alpine-Like rides is 12.3 mph, and in fact the ride where 50% of the ride was "too fast" was ridden at 12.3 mph. When I used my TranyaGO to keep the "too fast" part of the ride down to 14%, my speed fell to 10.8 mph, a speed at the lower 2% of my rides. More recently, I wore the TranyaGO on an Alpine-Like ride where my goal was not to stay in Zone 2 but to see how fast I could comfortably ride it as a way to estimate my current fitness. I rode it at 13.3 mph, in the top 3% of my ride speeds. My heart rate during that ride was above Zone 2 almost 100% of that ride, it was essentially a Zone 3 ride. I have been speculating for some time that how fast I ride an Alpine-Like ride is an important parameter affecting my training program and the TranyaGO has confirmed that.

As described in my previous TranyaGO post, using the TranyaGO real time, watching my heart rate while I ride, is difficult on the road. (It is more do-able on my trainer.) In fact, the one ride described above is the only road ride where I have tried to do that. In every other road ride with the TranyaGO, I put it on, set it to record, and then ignore it until the ride is over. I then upload the results to my computer and compare them to what I was attempting to do, providing feedback that helps me evaluate the training I actually did rather than what I had planned to do and helps me better calibrate my next ride.The subtext of this is that I am bad at using Relative Perceived Exertion (how fast I feel like I am riding) to assess the Intensity (strenuousness) of my rides. Recently, I have been riding my 1963 Bianchi Specialissima over one of my old routes from my San Carlos days. (I will be discussing that route in more detail in a future post.) One reason I started doing those rides was, because this route is less hilly than the rides I can do in Emerald Hills, I thought it might be easier to maintain my Intensity in Zone 2. In my first attempt, over 50% of my time was spent below Zone 2, in Zone 1. That ride was much too easy, giving me too little training benefit. So, a few days later, I tried again. In that second attempt, more than 50% of my time was spent above Zone 2, the ride was too strenuous to provide a maximal increase in my endurance, which is what I am working on. On the third attempt, 9% of my time was spent below and 8% above Zone 2, so that over 80% of the ride was in my target Intensity of Zone 2. This is how the TranyaGO is helping me, it gives me the feedback I need after a ride to help me calibrate the Perceived part of my Relative Perceived Exertion.

I want to mention one more thing I have learned from my TranyaGO. Recently, I have been trying to do some longer rides on a routine basis. The route that I am using for that is 45 miles long and takes me about four hours to complete. My next longest “GoTo” ride is 33 miles long and takes me just under three hours to complete. I have gotten pretty good now at keeping my 33 mile ride in Zone 2 but on the 45 mile ride, that breaks down after about two and a half hours: my heart rate drifts upwards. What I believe is going on is something the coaching community calls decoupling. I think if I had been using a power meter to measure my output on that ride I would have found that I was not riding more vigorously for the last hour and a half but rather my heart rate was increasing at constant effort, the definition of decoupling. That actually makes a lot of sense. My body is used to riding for two or three hours, but when I go beyond that, the length of the ride itself becomes a stressor and in response my heart rate increases. What this means is that my 45 mile ride generates much more fatigue relative to my 33 mile ride than just the difference in durations would suggest.

I feel like the TranyaGO has really benefitted my training, a conclusion I admit is subjective. Because it encourages me to slow down to stay within Zone 2, I feel like I have been able to ride more miles with less fatigue. Before the TranyaGO, I felt like my risk of overtraining after my move to Emerald Hills had increased. I now feel like the TranyaGO has reversed that, that now my risk of overtraining is lower than it was before the move. But only time will tell. Stay tuned.

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* I have had between 3 to 5 instances of “glitches” with the TranyaGO. Some or all of those might have been due to user error.

Ride the Rogue

Back in May I was scheduled to ride The Art of Survival with my high school buddy Roger and my training for that event had gone flawlessly but the weather didn't cooperate and I did not attend. About a month ago I got an email from Roger: “Call me about Ride the Rogue.” Ride the Rogue is a metric century starting in the town of Rogue River, Oregon. There is a river named The Rogue River, and it is after that river that the town and the ride are named. The start and finish of that ride are about a half hour away from the town of Jacksonville, Oregon where Roger’s brother-in-law, David lives with his wife Sarah. Both David and Sarah were riding, as were Roger and his wife Janet and then they invited me along. This is the same group of us who attended Eroica back in April We were getting the band back together!

A month was not enough time to complete my standard* training schedule for a metric century but I had been training quite a bit and so felt I was in pretty good shape, and besides, I had been rethinking that standard training plan. Conventional wisdom is that when preparing for a ride where the main challenge is the length (a brevet, a century, a metric century, etc.) the longest training ride should be between ⅔ and ¾ as long as the challenge. Ride the Rogue is 63 miles long, and thus my longest training ride should, by that standard, be between 42 and 47 miles long. The second longest and longest rides in my “standard” plan are 45 and 56 miles long, the 56 mile ride is longer than it needs to be and in fact the second longest should be long enough. By eliminating the 56 mile ride, I would be able to complete my training for that ride, and that is what I did. An interesting implication of that is that had I used this new plan for Art of Survival back in 2021, I would have completed the plan and attended the ride, avoiding a major trauma in my recent cycling history. That said, it is not clear that would have been wise given how tired I was feeling back then, but it does make me wonder.

Roger and David are much stronger riders than I, a fact I don’t see changing no matter how I train. For that reason, when I rode with Roger and Janet and David and Sarah at Eroica, I did a shorter ride with Janet and Sarah rather than the longer, harder ride that David and Roger did. Thus, when Roger invited me on Ride the Rogue, I wondered if I might do that again. “No,” Roger said, “bring your eBike, David and I will draft off of you.” I hoped he was joking, for I knew, even with my eBike, we would be evenly matched at best. That said, it sounded like a plan so that’s what I did. My Orbea Gain eBike had been riding a bit rough recently, so I took it in to my LBS, Veloro Bicycles and they fixed it up in time for my 45 mile training ride. It has never ridden better, thank you Veloro!!

David and Sarah had invited me to stay in their gorgeous home. Roger and Janet were staying there as well which made for a wonderful social experience. I arrived late Friday afternoon, we got up early the next morning to drive the 30 minutes to the 8:30 am start, and we were off. 

Sarah and Janet were supposed to start their 40 mile ride at 9:30 but because the beginning of their route and ours were the same, they started early with us so that we could all ride the beginning together. The metric century featured three rest stops which were first rate, having all the essentials; bathrooms, water, and a variety of snacks including the cyclist favorites, PB&J and bananas. The ride never felt crowded. We would see other cyclists occasionally along the route and there would be several at each rest stop but most of the time it was the three of us riding alone. The first part of the ride was on very quiet roads through beautiful mountains covered with pine forests. Virtually all of the 2200 feet of climbing was in this part of the ride. This was followed by a stretch on flatter, busier roads, not as magnificent as what came before but perfectly acceptable. The purpose of this event was to raise money to extend the bike paths that run along the Rogue River, so appropriately, the last stretch was on the paths we were supporting. The paths were wonderful. In case it is not obvious, I heartily recommend this ride!

So how did my ride go? Was my training sufficient? How does a metric century with eAssist compare with a metric century on a conventional bike? How was my Orbea as a long distance bike? The ride went well, I was able to keep up with Roger and David and I never got too tired, suggesting my training was sufficient (and also not excessive, which would have left me fit but too tired to make use of that fitness.) The fact that I was able to keep up with Roger and David is a tribute to the eAssist. My Orbea has three levels of assist as well as a no-assist option (level 0.) I rode my 45 mile training ride entirely at level 0 to increase the training that ride provided. When I ride around my neighborhood at Level 1, at the end of 3 hours of riding, I have about 21% of the battery charge left, not enough for a 4th hour. I estimated that this metric century would take me about 5 hours to complete, so I knew I could not use the assist, even at level 1, for the whole ride, so during the ride I turned it off when I could keep up without it and only turned it on when I needed it. At the end of the ride, which lasted 4 hours 49 minutes, I had 22% of my charge left. Both times I rode the Golden Hills Metric Century, I averaged 13.3 miles per hour. In this metric, I also averaged 13.3 miles per hour. This would seem like the eAssist gave me no benefit, but this ride had 2201 feet of climbing whereas Golden Hills only had 1517 feet of climbing, so the eAssist basically made up for the extra climbing. Also, I think I was less tired at the end of this ride than I was at the end of those two Golden Hills Metrics. My Orbea was great to ride, it only had one issue. Near the end, I had a puncture caused by a thorn from where I parked my bike at the last rest stop. That is not, of course, a problem with the bike, but how hard it was to repair was. It took many tries with the three of us working together to first get the tire off and then back on. I am pretty sure that I would be unable to repair a flat by myself which, if I cannot remedy this, limits the usefulness of this bike.

Anyway, we did get the flat fixed, made it to the end, and rejoined Sarah and Janet who had been waiting for us for a couple of hours. Fortunately there was both beer and a band at the start/finish line so they didn’t mind. Here is the group picture we took at the finish line:

As a final point, I am starting to feel like 2022 might be the year I came to peace with COVID. I have argued in previous posts that the reason I did not attend the 2021 The Art of Survival metric century was because of training issues. I have to confess, however, that a contributing factor was my concern about COVID. The delta variant had just started to surge back then, undermining the confidence that the COVID vaccine had just given us. I’m not sure that, logically, anything has changed all that significantly since then. Then we had the Delta variant, now we have the Omicron variant. Very recently, a vaccine specific for the Omicron vaccine has become available, but I was unable to get vaccinated before this ride so that couldn’t account for my new confidence. While it is true that back in 2021 Delta was waxing and in 2022 Omicron is waning, I don’t feel like that explains it either. Perhaps one more year of experience with this virus, seeing what benefits the vaccine can still supply, is what did it. Whatever the cause, the fact is that last year, in 2021, the prospect of navigating gas stations, bathrooms, and the like during the seven hour drive to and from the ride seemed overwhelming this year a similar drive seemed manageable. The net result is that in 2020 and 2021, I rode no group rides, whereas in 2022, I have ridden two. Let’s hope 2023 is even better!

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* I have successfully completed this “standard” training plan (including the ride itself) only once, for the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century. However, that ride went so well I declared the training plan I used for it a standard.

The TranyaGO Sports Watch

Ever since moving to California I have been ambivalent about the usefulness of a heart rate monitor. My main use for one back in Texas was for my MAF test rides. Those rides were done on the Rice University Bike Track. I can not do MAF tests here in California because there is nothing near me at all equivalent to that Bike Track. Thus, it would appear that I have no use for a heart rate monitor, so when mine broke, I wasn't very motivated to replace it. Contributing to my reluctance to replace my heart rate monitor is that I don't really like wearing the chest straps that were a feature of all the heart rate monitors I had used up to that point. And yet, I kept finding myself asking questions about my training that could have been answered with heart rate data and and I kept finding that I was relying way too much on the one California ride where I did have heart rate data. I looked longingly at the Apple Watch: heart rate data without a chest strap. However, this solution had two potential problems: 1) Although it would get rid of the chest strap which I dislike, for that very reason I was not convinced that its heart rate measurement would be accurate and reliable. 2) It is crazy expensive. So back and forth, back and forth, month after month, until finally, the other day, I decided to just do something spontaneous, to purchase a cheap ($40) sports watch. Perhaps I would learn how accurate and reliable wrist-based (as opposed to the chest-strap based) heart beat detection is. More generally, it has been my life experience that often the best way to figure something out is to just play with it, there is often no substitute for real world experience. Perhaps by playing with a sports watch I would have a clearer idea of what I wanted. Perhaps it would even be useful in its own right. After browsing the ratings on Amazon, I settled on the TranyaGO.

Given the price, my expectations for this device were low, though I was hoping to be surprised. In particular, I was hoping it would be able to be interfaced with Strava. When my bike computer (and thus my heart rate monitor) stopped working a few months after I arrived in California, I switched to using the Strava app on my cell phone to track my rides. It has very similar functionality to the Garmin, doesn't require any equipment other than my cell phone, and is free. There is a paid version with enhanced functionality, and although I don't object in principle to paying for Strava, I have not felt a need for any of the enhanced functions so continue to use the free version. If the TranyaGo had been able to interface with Strava, the biggest missing piece of functionality, heart rate data, would have been seamlessly added to my current tracking system. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get that to work. Should that change, I will at least add a comment to this post or maybe even write an all new post but for now I am assuming that functionality is not available. What the TranyaGo will interface with is their own cell phone app which they name GloryFit (I kid you not.) So for the remainder of this post I will be reviewing the TranyaGO/GloryFit combo.

The TranyaGO is nice piece of hardware, astonishingly so given the price. When my son first saw me wearing it, he mistook it for an Apple Watch. On the other hand, in terms of functionality, it is closer to what I imagine a FitBit to be. (I have never used a FitBit but I have seen it being used by my son.) The TranyaGO has an odd, hodgepodge of functionality primarily directed towards the folks who are working on their fitness by accumulating "steps" (walking), e.g. the FitBit crowd, but with odd additions presumably designed to attract other users. For example, text messages from my phone appear on this watch, an Apple Watch-like bit of functionality. And, although the TranyaGO seems to be focused on counting steps, it does have the ability to track a large number of different sports, outdoor (normal) bicycling and stationary bicycling being the ones of interest to me. I have tried both and actually don't know what the difference between the two might be, the outputs look the same to my eye.

The critical piece of functionality from a hardware perspective is the ability of the TranyaGO to measure my heart rate. One of my main justifications for purchasing this watch was to compare the ability of a wrist-based sensor to that of the more conventional chest-based sensor. In terms of that, I could not be more delighted. Ideally I would have tested it by wearing both the TranyaGO and a chest sensor and compare the outputs, but I do not currently have a functional chest strap and am not willing to purchase one for such a test, so my evaluation is not very rigorous, I have based it on "plausibility", does the heart rate data I get from the TranyaGO seem reasonable, and a few spot checks where I compare what the TranyaGO reports to what I measure by putting my fingers on an artery (the conventional, old fashioned test.) With the chest straps I have used, reliability has been an issue, some days they would not work and eventually all of them stopped working altogether; the only solution was to replace them. So far, I have not had even one single issue with the TranyaGO. To be fair, I haven't used it that long and with the chest straps problems seemed to have developed over time, so we will see, but so far, so good. And finally, its wrist based heart rate detection is totally comfortable. I now wear the TranyaGO on every ride because it only takes a second to put on and I don't even notice I am wearing it.

So what is the functionality that is available to me? It was more or less what I had realistically expected when I purchased the watch and can be divided into two parts:
1) Real time functionality.
2) Downloadable (after the ride) functionality.

Real Time Functionality: Back when I was using my Garmin heart rate monitor, I purchased a standalone Polar heart rate monitor as a backup. The way I used the Polar was to strap it onto my handlebars where I could see it and keep my eye on my heart rate as I rode. That allowed me to keep my heart rate between 130 and 140 beats per minute (BPM) while riding a MAF test. I hoped to use the TranyaGO in the same way during my Alpine rides to see if I could complete them while keeping my heart rate between 110 and 135 BPM, Coach Hughes' version of Zone 2. It turned out I could do that but just barely, the Real Time functionality of the TranyaGO was less than that of my old Polar. The problems are three-fold: First, unlike the Polar, which used a chest strap, because the TranyaGO contains its detector which measures heartbeat from my wrist, it can never be moved to the handlebars like the Polar. Second, the TranyaGO turns off the screen after 15 seconds (presumably to extend battery life). I can reactivate it by lifting my arm, not impossible but annoying. Third, the visibility of the TranyaGO screen is lower than that of the Polar. This prevented me from wearing my cycling sunglasses, I simply cannot read the screen with them on. Although I can barely read the screen without glasses, I can both provide a little eye protection and improve my ability to read the screen by wearing my normal, prescription glasses. (My sunglasses are not prescription because my distance vision is fine, I wear prescription glasses for reading.) From a riding perspective, this is not as good as wearing the sunglasses but is not unacceptable and in fact I completed a 2 hour ride this way and in the process accumulated some interesting information (which I will describe in a future post.) However, it is sufficiently awkward that I do not expect to do this very often. Rather, I expect to mostly use the downloadable functionality.

Downloadable Functionality: My Polar watch did not have any download capability. At the end of the ride there was some kind of summary on the watch face which I basically ignored. The TranyaGO works with the GloryFit app on my phone to download a summary of the ride. That summary consists of two screens: one displays how long the ride lasted, minimum, average and maximum heart rate, and estimate of calories burned. This can be uploaded to my computer as a screenshot but it is easier to simply transcribe any of those numbers that are of interest from the app. The second output has turned out to be much more useful. It is a graph of heart rate over the course of the ride:

The procedure I have developed, using my favorite image manipulation application, Graphic Converter, is to add guidelines to indicate the boundaries of Zone 2:

All by itself this is useful because I can see at a glance how I effective I have been at maximizing the Zone 2 training that should be the foundation of my training. But for a little extra effort I can use this same software to estimate the percent of my ride spent in, above, or below Zone 2. (Extending this into other Zones is straightforward should I ever want to do so.) This process is a little labor intensive but not so much so that I can't do it as part of my general process of ride logging; I can easily complete it right after finishing a ride.

So is TranyaGO everything I need, am I done with my heart rate monitor quest? Maybe. Arguably, even the TranyaGO is more than I need, that is the debate I had been having with myself before its purchase. However, at the time of this writing, I have used the TranyaGO on 22 rides and already I am addicted; I feel that I have both a better understanding of the intensity of my rides and better control over the amount of time I spend riding in different intensity zones. It would be nice to have more detailed heart rate data and to have the Time In Zone information calculated automatically rather than having to be dragged out of an image, but I see this solution being good enough to keep me from putting in the effort to acquire anything better, so yes, I am done with the heart rate monitor quest, at least for now. I can't wait until I have accumulated enough data to be worth another blog post.

 

Coach Hughes on Riding for Health

Coach John Hughes publishes regularly on the Road Bike Rider website, both downloadable eBooks that can be purchased and columns that can be read for free. This post is about one of those columns, the one entitled "Anti-Aging: The Optimal Training Weeks*", dated June 24, 2021. One of the things that originally attracted me to Hughes is that he covers training for a wider variety of goals than any other coach I have encountered. In this column he covered something that has been on my mind a lot. That is, when I am not training for an event, when I am just training to maintain fitness and stay healthy, what is a reasonable ride schedule? Not only did he cover it, he covered it with older riders like me in mind.

Coach Hughes' schedule for health, shown in the first three rows of the chart above, contains rides at three levels of Intensity (effort): Recovery, corresponding on an easy ride in Heart Rate Zone 1, Endurance, corresponding to a ride at moderate effort in Heart Rate Zone 2, and Tempo, corresponding to a ride at moderately high effort in Heart Rate Zone 3. This schedule is part of Coach Hughes overall "Anti-Aging" plan which closely follows the recommendations of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). The overall plan also includes strength training, flexibility training, and balance training (none of which I will be discussing in this post). When I say Hughes has older riders in mind, I mean two different things: 1) He discusses what an older rider is still physically capable of doing. 2) He discusses what an older rider should do to slow their rate of aging. 

Where did Hughes get his Normal/Fit/Vigorous weekly exercise schedules? Very generally, they come from the ACSM but with some pretty significant changes. [Clarity Note: Unfortunately, Hughes and the ACSM use the word "Vigorous" for different things. Do not confuse the ACSM's use of Vigorous for an Intensity Level (equivalent to Hughes' "Tempo") and Hughes use of the word Vigorous to describe a weekly exercise schedule.] The ACSM's recommendation is for a minimum of 150 minutes a week of Moderate Intensity aerobic exercise or 75 minutes of Vigorous Intensity aerobic activity a week or any combination of the two (e.g. 100 minutes of Moderate Intensity and 25 minutes of Vigorous Intensity.) Their goal is twice that, 300 minutes a week of Moderate Intensity or 150 minutes of Vigorous Intensity or any combination of the two. They note that there may be additional benefits of exercising even more than their goal. What does the ACSM mean by Moderate and Vigorous Intensity? This has always confused me because there are many different definitions of these terms (which are widely used in the medical literature) but for the purposes of this post it is reasonable to suggest that Moderate Intensity is Heart Rate Zone 2, described as Endurance Training by Hughes, and that Vigorous Intensity is Heart Rate Zone 3, described as Tempo Training by Hughes. Anything below Moderate (e.g. Zone 1/Recovery) is termed Light Exercise by the ACSM and they believe it has no medical benefit.

Coach Hughes defines four levels of weekly exercise; below the ACSM minimum, at the ACSM minimum, at the ACSM goal, and above the the ACSM goal. He names these levels Unhealthy, Normal, Fit, and Vigorous. Here's where Hughes' recommendations differ from those of the ACSM:

• Hughes recommends some riding in Zone 1 which the ASM sees as having no value.
• The total of Hughes minutes of exercise (even excluding the Zone 1 rides) is significantly above that suggested by the ACSM. 
• ACSM assumes all rides are about the same length whereas Hughes recommends varying the length of rides pretty significantly.
• The ACSM has no preference for Moderate vs. Vigorous exercise, they suggest athletes mix and match these as they wish. Hughes believes that it is valuable to exercise at specific Intensity levels for specific amounts of time, e.g. 75 minutes/week in Zone 1, 300 minutes/week in Zone 2, and 45 minutes/week in Zone 3 in his Fit schedule.
• Hughes includes warmup and cool down in the time he gives for each ride, ACSM does not. That means that when the ACSM suggests a 60 minute ride Coach Hughes would include warmup and cool down so would describe the exact same rides as a 75 minute ride. (This is not a difference in recommendations but is important for comparing the recommendations of Coach Hughes to those of the ACSM.)
• Hughes suggests warmup and cool down for Zone 3 and above, ACSM for Zone 2 and above.

I have included a line on the figure at the top of the post illustrating one way of achieving the ACSM recommendations. To make it comparable, I have included the recommended warmup and cool down to the times. That said, it will be Coach Hughes recommendations I will be discussing for the remainder of the post.

When I looked at Coach Hughes' three plans, especially at the "Total Minutes" column, my first reaction is that the Vigorous schedule is almost certainly beyond my reach and even the Fit schedule might be a stretch. Next, I despair at implementing any of his plans in that they all involve doing rides at controlled Intensity: Recovery (Zone 1), Endurance (Zone 2), and Tempo (Zone 3.) I find it impossible to maintain a fixed Intensity on the hilly rides that are my only option here in California; inevitably my Intensity going up hills increases. I confronted this before when I wanted to convert the Hughes plan to prepare to ride a 200 Kilometer Brevet into a plan to prepare for a 100 Kilometer Metric Century. What I did was to replace the higher Intensity rides with additional minutes added to my mixed Intensity hilly rides with the idea that my higher Intensity on the hills of my medium Intensity Endurance rides would provide the same training, and that is what I did here as well. Instead of Endurance and Tempo rides, I have Mixed Intensity rides that include both. I have added a line to the figure at the top of the post illustrating a set of rides I might do here in Emerald Hills that add up to Hughes' Fit week and a second line illustrating a somewhat more modest schedule which is more like what I am doing today.

If I substitute my mixed intensity rides, especially now that I have moved into a more hilly part of California, does that work out to be the right amount of time in the different zones? Unfortunately not. In my post where I developed my schedule to ride a metric century a month, I initially calculated that they did. However, in my very next post I noted that Hughes' had different heart rate boundaries for his Intensity zones that the ones I had been using. It seemed most appropriate to use Hughes zones to follow a Hughes plan, and when I did that, I found that I had too much time in Zone 3 and too little in Zone 2. In the case of the Riding for Health plan I am attempting to replicate here, Hughes calls for roughly 20% of ride time in Zone 1, 70% in Zone 2, and 10% in Zone 3. When I substitute my mixed intensity rides, I end up with roughly 20% in Zone 1, 40% in Zone 2, and 40% in Zone 3. I will address possible solutions to this problem in future posts.

What is the purpose of having the three plans, Normal, Fit, and Vigorous? As is often the case with Coach Hughes, there are a multiplicity of purposes, he is nothing if not flexible. For example, one thing he suggests is the following: "These weeks could also correspond to different seasons. In the summer your cardio [aerobic exercise] could resemble the Vigorous week, in the spring and fall the Fit week, and in the winter the Normal week." However, another purposes is based on "the more the healthier." The following is summarized from his column:

• Unhealthy: Aging happens rapidly.
• Normal: Fitness declines normally.
• Fit: Fitness declines more slowly.
• Vigorous: Fitness declines very slowly.

In the "the more the healthier" approach, one should strive to be has high on this fitness hierarchy as possible. As always, Hughes suggests a progressive approach, working your way from a Normal to a Fit to a Vigorous exercise schedule. To tell which weekly plan to start with and when to graduate to the next level, Hughes uses a point system. You earn points by exercising for multiple years, by maintaining a schedule that accumulates a significant number of miles each year, and by completing one or more long rides each year. You get 1 point if you have been riding 1-2 years, 2 points for  3-5 years and 3 points for 6 or more years. I have been riding pretty continuously for 13 years so I get 3 points. For miles per year, the ranges are that less than 3,000 miles per year gets you 1 point, 3,000-3,500 miles per year gets you 2 points, and greater than 3,500 miles per year gets you 3 points. For some perspective, randonneurs^ are expected to ride at least 5,000 miles per year, and at my peak in 2013 I reached 5,571 miles per year and between 2013 and 2014 had 54 straight weeks where I was above 5,000 miles per year. I stayed above 4,000 miles per year until 2017 when my wife's cancer got worse and she needed more care. I was below 3,500 miles a year a month later and, with one brief exception, have not since been above that level since. I dropped below 3,000 miles per year near the end of 2021 and am currently at 2,532 miles/year so only get 1 point. Finally, there is the longest ride in a year with the kicker that it must be ridden at at least 12.5 miles per hour. Those who follow my blog know that, for me, that is a pretty fast ride. For comparison, in randonneuring, to qualify for a 200 kilometer brevet (124 miles) one only needs to ride it at just above 9 miles per hour. In 2018 and 2019 I rode metric centuries (62 miles) and I think in each case I managed to ride them faster than 12.5 miles per hour. However, I have not been able to ride Metric Centuries for the last two years  (mostly for reasons having nothing to do with my fitness.) The one ride over 50 miles I have done in the last year was done at 11.2 miles per hour so doesn't count. The three groups in this case are less than 50 miles gets 1 point, 50-100 miles gets 2 points and above 100 miles gets 3 points. Thus, technically I am in the less than 50 mile group and only get 1 point. This gives me a total of 5 points. To qualify to ride a Normal schedule requires 3-4 points, Fit requires 5-7 points, and Vigorous requires 8-9 points. This puts me into the Fit group.

What are my prospects for training myself into the Vigorous group with its promise of a longer, more fit life? At this point I am going to address a problem I see in this column by Hughes, the absence of any consideration of the effect of hills on riding speed. A hilly route is slower than a flat route. In the context of his recommended schedule, this is not a problem because his schedule is expressed in minutes instead of miles. One can spend an hour doing a short, hilly ride or an hour doing a long, flat ride and they are the same in terms of Coach Hughes' schedule. That is why I switched from tracking miles to tracking minutes when I moved from the flat geography of Texas to the hilly geography of California. When this becomes a problem is when Hughes switches back to using miles in his evaluation plan, total miles ridden in a year and miles per hour on the longest ride. Reaching 3,500 miles per year was much easier in Texas than it is here in California, and riding faster than 12.5 mile per hour is similarly so. I might be inspired to do something about that, revise these criteria, if I really felt I could handle Hughes' Vigorous schedule, but I don't so I won't.

Why do I believe I can't handle Hughes' Vigorous schedule? Based on my 13 years of riding as an old man I believe that how much I train is limited less by what I decide to do and more by what I am physically able to do. Bearing that in mind, let's work through what it would take to "qualify" for that schedule using Hughes' evaluation plan. Right now I have 5 points and would need 3 more to reach the 8 points needed to qualify for a Vigorous schedule. I am maxed out on years of riding so those 3 points would have to come from increases in both miles per year and longest ride ridden faster than 12.5 mph. On November 10 of 2019, I rode 65 miles at 13 mph which would have earned me 2 points in the longest ride category. I have had a mileage above 3,000 for the previous year from March of 2019 through September of 2021, but only had a mileage above 3,500 for three weeks in the middle of that. If I give myself 2 points for annual mileage, that gives me 7 points, still 1 below what is needed for the Vigorous category. Sure, it is not impossible I could push my annual mileage above 3,500 and sure, I feel like I'm being penalized for the hills in which I live, still, I think the most reasonable interpretation is that, according to Hughes' guidelines, I ought to be following his Fit schedule. That, combined with my intuition based on my experience says the Vigorous schedule is a level of training I could not sustain. I guess I just have to resign myself to dying young.

After all that, what did I learn from this column by Coach Hughes? First, for those of you who prefer their humor flagged, the last sentence of the previous paragraph is a joke. The ACSM recommends 150 to 300 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise (or half that of vigorous aerobic exercise) a week, and I am currently averaging significantly more than their upper recommendation. It is generally agreed that, with aerobic exercise, more is almost always better, but Coach Hughes' Vigorous schedule is completely arbitrary,  there is no strong argument for my trying to meet that level of exercise specifically. On the other hand, it is reassuring that the maximum amount of cycling I have come up with on my own and the amount that Hughes' guidelines suggest for me are essentially the same, it seems I have gotten fairly good at listening to my body. Finally, I was reassured that, based on this column by Coach Hughes, my long rides are not too long, my easy rides on the trainer are worth riding and I am doing about the right number of them, and that I am getting plenty of high Intensity riding. Good job, Zombie!

Luck and the Art of Survival

 

Some of the more common rides originating at my current home in Emerald Hills. Two exceptions are the rides shaded in yellow which originate from my previous home in San Carlos which I included for comparison. Strava provided the length of the rides in Miles and Minutes as well as the total feet of climbing. From that I calculated Feet/Mile as one way to estimate Intensity. The Feet/Mile number for the Emerald Hills ride italicized because I do that ride on an eBike and the electric assist reduces my effort by an unknown (to me, now) extent. The other way I estimated Intensity  is how the ride feels, shown under Subjective Intensity. All of the current rides are described below except for the Emerald Hills ride which I have described previously.

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In 2018 I attended my first post-Texas group ride, the Art of Survival, a metric century (100 kilometers, 62 miles) in the town of Tulelake, located at the far northeastern corner of California. I attended again in 2019, but in 2020, the COVID19 Pandemic hit, preventing me from attending. By 2021, COVID seemed sufficiently under control for me to attend but training problems prevented my going. This year, in 2022, I overcame those training problems and was all set to go when bad weather caused my friend Roger and I to cancel our plans to attend. That is the (bad) luck referred to in the title of this post. The good news is that, unlike last year, I was able to complete my training plan for this ride. For that reason, I am going to use this post to describe my recent training.

What do I mean when I say I was unable to complete my training plan in 2021? Let’s start with what that training plan was. Assuming I have been riding a reasonable amount fairly regularly, it involves replacing one of my weekly rides six, four, and two weeks before the metric century with increasingly long rides of 33, 44, and 55 miles respectively. (The 33 mile ride is often part of my routine riding so I may or may not need to add it explicitly.) In the runup to Art of Survival in May of 2021, I completed the first two of those longer rides but never felt strong enough to complete the third, I was just too tired to try. In the fourteen years since I returned to cycling and the ten years I have been blogging about it I have had the growing experience that the only metrics that work for me are subjective metrics, I have yet to find an objective metric for my ability to ride. That said, given that my feelings were subjective, should I have just powered through, forced myself to go on that third training ride even though I didn’t feel like it? Maybe, I honestly don’t know, but my judgment at the time told me that to attempt that ride would be a mistake. 

The failure described above had an immense impact on me. For one thing, it made me extremely pessimistic about my cycling future. For a second, it motivated me to think hard about what had gone wrong. This is my fourth blog post in response to that failure. The first two were some of the densest and most technical of all my blog posts, building a statistical framework for using a subset of my rides (the so-called “Alpine-Like” rides) as a measure of how well my training is working. Since writing those posts I have continued to use those tools but will be taking a different, more descriptive, more subjective approach in this post.

It is far from clear that my failure to complete my training program for the 2021 Art of Survival was due to my training, I could have just been having a bad few days, it might have been due to the stress of my recent move or other events in my life, I could have had a subclinical illness, etc. However, the only explanation over which I have control is my training so I have looked very hard at that training in case there is a problem there I could correct. Specifically, I have speculated that my move to the hilly neighborhood of Emerald Hills accidentally led to a training program that was too hard, that my failure to prepare for the Art of Survival was due to Fatigue resulting from excessive training. I confess I lack the tools to address that speculation with any degree of rigor, my evaluation of the Intensity of my rides is entirely subjective. Unfortunately, I only have the information I have and just have to do my best with that. So what did I decide to do, first, in advance of my failed training for the 2021 Art of Survival and second, between that failure and my successful training for the 2022 Art of Survival?

My move from the relatively flat neighborhood of San Carlos to the much hillier neighborhood of Emerald Hills occurred nine months before I started training for the 2021 Art of Survival. I only lost a week of riding because of the move and I had a pretty typical riding schedule leading up to the move. After the move, however, I could not easily ride the same routes that I had been riding from my home in San Carlos so had to come up with some new routes. Two routes that I could continue riding more or less unchanged were my Alpine and Alpine-Cañada rides (renamed New Alpine and New Alpine-Cañada to note the minor changes), two and three hour rides, respectively, that I describe as moderately hilly. I had one candidate for a new ride, my son had shown me one of his favorites, to Huddart Park and back. I found it to be very pretty but also hilly. For the first six weeks after my move, my typical week would consist of those three rides. On the surface, there were a few problems with that schedule. First, the experts recommend dividing the week into four or five days of rides, three being considered too few. Second, simply on a minutes of riding basis, it was on the higher end of what I had found sustainable before. Third, up until now I had been mostly doing a mix of the moderately hilly Alpine-like rides and easy rides. Now I was doing a mix of those same Alpine-like rides but with an even more hilly ride substituted for the easy ride(s). Consistent with this, at the end of that six weeks I was feeling tired. 

In an attempt to make my weekly riding sustainable I looked for a replacement for the easy rides I had left behind in San Carlos and as a result of that search I developed the Lake Loop ride. The problem was, it was not as easy of a ride as I had hoped. Long term I am working to better classify the Intensity of my rides but without going into the details, if I subjectively classify my rides as Very Easy, Easy, Moderate, Moderately Intense, Intense, and Very Intense, with my Alpine-Like rides being Moderate, the Lake Loop, which was supposed to be Easy turned out to be Moderate. Until I figured that out, my typical schedule was two Alpine-Like rides and two Lake Loop Rides. That continued for the next 13 weeks and brought me into December, which is the rainy season. In response, I set up my trainer to be able to ride on rainy days. Having done so, I realized I had finally come up with an easy ride. Because I can make a trainer ride as intense or as easy as I want, my trainer became the place for easy rides. For the next twenty weeks leading up to my failed attempt to train for the 2021 Art of Survival my typical week became one Alpine-Cañada ride, one Alpine ride, and two Trainer rides. One thing this meant was that I didn’t need to “add” a 33 mile ride to my metric prep because it was already part of my routine training.

In retrospect, I certainly cannot make the case that my inability to prepare for the 2021 Art of Survival was due to overtraining, but that is what I believed at the time and I responded accordingly. I backed off slightly on training and after four months Form as measured by speed on my Alpine-Like rides seemed to be coming back from a low that occurred about the same time as my failed training for Art of Survival. I would like to reemphasize a key point here: poor Form can be due to Fatigue without that Fatigue coming from overtraining. Fatigue can come from stress, illness or other causes. The good news is that the correct response is the same either way, cut back on training. I did, and apparently it worked.

Unfortunately, right after my revival of form in September I suffered from colds in October and December that resulted in three weeks off the bike altogether and many more weeks of light riding. Presumably as a result, I lost a great deal of Fitness. Starting in January of 2022 I was able to work my way back up in anticipation for another try at the Art of Survival. Minutes of riding is far from a perfect measure of training Load; it ignores the differences in Intensity caused by hills and by how fast I ride. Nonetheless, it is something, and in particular, reveals how dramatic my reduction in riding was:

The red dots represent the 2021 and 2022 Art of Survival rides and the green dot the rebound in form I experienced in September of 2021.

So what does this all mean? The big takeaway for me is that I developed what I now believe to be an incorrect impression that I was training too hard due to the increased hills in my neighborhood after my 2020 move. It was probably true that I was training both too hard and too infrequently in the first six weeks after the move and it is true that it took me a while to find a way to do easy rides in this neighborhood but neither were responsible for my failure to train for the 2021 Art of Survival. I do think I was suffering from Fatigue and that was what kept me from completing my training but I now think that Fatigue was not the result of my training but of something else. What were the consequences of this incorrect impression? Very few, I think. I do listen carefully to my body and Fatigue, no matter the source, is appropriately addressed with a reduction in training. Perhaps I reduced my training a bit more than strictly necessary, but that is hardly a disaster. Unfortunately, reaching these conclusions is a step backwards. Previously, I had a possible explanation for my inability to complete my training for the 2021 Art of Survival and now I am rejecting that explanation without providing an alternative. Stay tuned to see where I go from here.

My First and Second Cycling Careers

The inspiration for this post comes from the fact that, as of 2022, my first cycling career, which ran from 1965 to 1979, and my second cycling career, which so far has run from 2008 to 2022, are now equal in length. Interestingly, the gap between those careers was 29 years so that next year, in 2023, the sum of my two careers will equal that gap. Will this be an excuse for another post?

Forget about another post, is this post even justified? By what logic did my first cycling career not start until 1965? I have (and have posted) a picture of me with my first bike which was taken in 1956 and I haven't been without a bike since. I did at least one recreational bike ride back then, a long ride a friend and I took, way out into the countryside around Santa Rosa. (I have no idea what "way out" meant to me back then.) By the same token, the 29 year interregnum between my first and second cycling careers was not entirely devoid of cycling, I remember at least one ride with my son, Michael, when he was in elementary school. (If memory serves, I rode my old 3-speed.) And then there was my year and a half gap at the beginning of my "second" cycling career. Perhaps my second cycling career should be dated from 2010, not 2008. All good points, but in the end some arbitrary decisions had to be made and I am sticking to the dates in the previous paragraph.

What happened in 1965 that defined the beginning of my first cycling career? It was the purchase of my first "10-speed", a 1963 Schwinn Continental from my Uncle Leonard who owned a bike shop in San Jose, California. It was once I had that bike that I began taking recreational rides regularly. I have no photographs of that bike so cannot be entirely sure when I purchased it. It could not have been before 1963 because I remember enough about that bike to be able to date it’s model year but I might have purchased it a while after the nominal model year and it might have been a while before I started riding it seriously.

Although I have no pictures of that bike, I do have a picture of a friend and I, exhausted after a ride, that was taken in 1965, so I have chosen that year as the start of my first cycling career.By February of 1966 I had replaced my Schwinn Continental with a true racing bike, a Peugeot PX-10. In the spring of 1966 I had raced in my first ABL of A race, a criterium in Lindsey, California. By that summer I had ridden my first multi-day tour, a five day ride that went over the highest road crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains, Tioga Pass at 9,941 feet. I raced as a Junior during the spring of 1967, spent that summer bicycling through Europe, and raced as a Senior when I got back. I continued racing through my Junior year of college, the 1970 season, but then got too busy with my studies to continue racing. When I started graduate school in the Fall of 1971 I continued riding mostly because I met the love of my life, Agi, who enjoyed riding with me. For our summer vacation in 1979 we bicycled from one Inn to another in Vermont. That was to be our last significant bike ride for 29 years, years during which we established our careers and built our family, and thus, that was the end of my first cycling career. 1965 through 1979 is 14 years. 

My second cycling career started in 2008 when I took my 1963 Bianchi Specialissima into Daniel Boone Cyclery and had it restored to rideability and continues through today, 2022, 14 years later. How has it compared to the first? The obvious, most important difference is my age. My first cycling career ran from age 16 to 30, my peak athletic years. So far, my second has run from age 59 to 72, both starting and continuing well into the inevitable decline of old age. I have never been an exceptional athlete so even in my first cycling career there were always cyclists who were much faster than me; I didn’t win a lot of bicycle races. On the other hand, completing a ride was rarely a problem. The closest I came to confronting my limitations came during the summer of 1967 when I cycled through Europe and discovered that I could not ride every single day for weeks on end without a day off now and then. My second cycling career, on the other hand, has been dominated by disappointment. I plan to accomplish something in my cycling, not something unreasonable but something that seems almost modest, and over and over again, I am unable to accomplish it. The biggest accomplishment of my second cycling career (other than maintaining it for 14 years) was the completion of two 200 kilometer brevets in 2012 and 2013. That sounds great until you realize that what I had hoped to accomplish was to follow that first 200 kilometer brevet with a 300, 400, 600 and then on to a Grand Randonée, 1200 kilometers long. Many cyclists, some older than I, have been able to do that. Not me. 

Not as significant as my age but another big difference between my first and second cycling careers is the impact of computers and related technologies. This started with the plain old desktop computer and its word processors, spreadsheets, and databases and continued with cycling computers for tracking speed, distance, heart rate, cadence, etc. Let’s begin with the gathering of ride data; distance, time, average speed, etc. During my first cycling career, all the options were mechanical. The only device any of us ever used was a small odometer mounted on the front fork. It consisted of a small counter attached to the fork and a mechanical activator attached to a spoke. Every time the wheel completed a rotation, the activator would hit a gear-like mechanism on the counter and via some mechanical mechanism, that would be converted to miles. These caused a bit of drag and also were not entirely robust to high speeds, e.g. descending a mountain pass. At high speed the activator would hit the counter so hard it would advance more than it should resulting in an overestimation of miles. At the extreme, this would damage or destroy the counter. My memory is that over time we all stopped using them. We did occasionally estimate ride length in miles, but did so by measuring the distance on a paper map. Even more rarely, we would measure ride time using a mechanical stop watch (especially for sprints) or a wrist watch and using the two together could calculate speed. All of this is probably moot because if memory serves, we made little or no use of any data we collected and in particular did not record or save it. 

I purchased my first computer in 1982, after my first cycling career had ended. In 2008, at the start of my second cycling career, computers were an everyday part of my life and that turned out to have a great deal of impact on my cycling. When I got home from my first 5 mile ride, I decided to start recording my rides in a spreadsheet on my computer. Within a few months, I had purchased a Catseye bike computer that tracked miles, time, speed, etc. When I went for a ride, my cycling computer recorded the data from the ride which I transfered, along with any subjective comments I want to make, to a spreadsheet or word processor document and as a result I now have a reasonably detailed record of every bike ride I have taken during my second cycling career.  In contrast, I have no record of my rides from my first cycling career other than photographs and the odd souvenir. 

Another very impactful aspect of computer technology was the Internet. This blog is one example, but the availability of an almost unlimited source of information about cycling is another. I am pleased that I still have my childhood encyclopedia, the 1956 World Book, which was considered a good encyclopedia at the time. How does it compare with Wikipedia? There are differences due to both age (1956 vs today) and scope but since this post is about then and now I will lump those together. World Book had about two pages on the topic Bicycle, one taken up entirely by photographs (including the one to the right) which is pretty much the only place I could find any cycling information. My encyclopedia did me no good back during my first cycling career. By comparison, Wikipedia has been and continues to be an invaluable source of information during my second. Wikipedia is invaluable, but nowhere near the most important cycling asset on the Internet. That honor would go to the plethora of websites dedicated to every imaginable cycling subtopic.

Another big change that computer technology has brought to our lives is digital cameras. When I first started thinking about this post, I assumed this would be significant, but as best I can tell, it has not been. I confess I have been too lazy to count all the photographs I have from my first and second cycling careers, but glancing at the two collections, they do not look all that different in size. There is no doubt that digital photography has made photography cheaper, easier, and better, so all I can figure is that the rate limiting step in how many cycling pictures I take is something else, perhaps the inconvenience of interrupting a ride to take that picture.

How about changes in cycling technology? I have blogged a lot about how disorienting I found those changes, but upon reflection, I think they have been very beneficial to my second cycling career. I am working on a future post discussing my current bicycles. Here is a quote from that future post: “I love my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima … [but] it has never been a practical bike (at least not since the 1970s).” Not since the 1970s, that is, not since my FIRST cycling career. Back then, I usually only had one bike and it was always one very much like that Bianchi. I rode such bikes for everything and everywhere with never a thought they were in any way deficient. I now find my one survivor* from that time almost unacceptable compared to my more modern bikes which range from modern but retro to full out cutting edge modern. Why is that? To be honest, I don’t completely know, but I can imagine two possibilities:

• What was comfortable for my young body is now uncomfortable for my old body.
• Back then, I had nothing to compare the Specialissima to so it did not suffer by comparison. 

Some specific then and now comparisons: 

• Clipless pedals are way better than pedals with toe clips and cleats. Clipless pedals were invented after the end of my first cycling career. 
• Lower gears, which I now need, are much more available than they used to be. 
• I think that my modern bikes have much more relaxed geometries than the Specialissima, something my aging body now needs. I don’t think those geometries were available during my first career. 
• Clincher tires are much better now than they were during my first cycling career, and thus I can take advantage of their practicality with no significant loss in performance. 
• Brakes have gotten much better over time.

A recurring topic on this blog is different ideas about training and how I could apply them to my own cycling. How does that compare to how I trained during my first cycling career? As best I can remember, I had no formal training schedule back then, I just rode as whim suggested and occasion allowed. I did have some sources for training information. In the first place, my bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen, had a coach, the only time I have used a coach in my life. Unfortunately, we did not take nearly the advantage of him we should have and I could probably write an entire blog post as to why. Another potential source of training guidance was “American Cycling” magazine, predecessor to today’s “Bicycling” magazine. I don’t recall that we ever used that guidance and I am really not sure why not. Finally, I still have two small books about British bicycle racing, “Cycle Racing” by Kenneth Bowden, published in 1958 and “Scientific Training for Cycling, third edition” by C. R. Woodard, published in 1961:

“Cycle Racing” is only 129 pages long and only 12 pages are about training. Here is Bowden’s training schedule for excelling in the 100 mile time trial:

• At the end of the season, take off two weeks.
• For the next 20 weeks, take 50 to 120 mile long rides, riding at 15 to 17 miles per hour, rides that should be “relaxed, warm, comfortable, companionable - pleasure miles”. That said, do not stop, carry your food with you, and do all your eating while riding. The total of these rides should be about 2,000 miles. (This works out to about 1 to 2 rides a week - the Zombie.)
• For the next 2 to 4 weeks, ride six days a week. Three of these rides should be short (less than 10 miles,) easy, utility or pleasure rides. One ride should be 80-120 miles long ridden at 16-18 mph in a 68” to 72” gear. One ride should be 20 to 30 miles long ridden at 20 mph in a 70” to 72” gear. The third ride should be 40 to 60 miles long ridden at 18 mph.
• From the end of that 2 to 4 week period  to the beginning of the racing season, ride a similar schedule except up the speed and gears a bit and ride a few 250 to 300 mile weekends.
• Thereafter, racing will provide most of the training you need.

It goes without saying I could not complete this schedule today, even if - quite literally - my life depended on it, but how about during my first cycling career? I do recall that pretty regularly we would do 100 mile long rides into the Sierra Nevada Mountains on weekends, so perhaps the initial 20 weeks of training described above would not be too different from what we did, but beyond that, I can say no more. Even if our training did follow this book, I don’t think it was deliberate. Rather, I think any resemblance between our training and that book was purely coincidental.

Scientific Training for Cycling, by comparison, was comically less useful. Looking back through it today I was reminded of the hysterical laughter it invoked when we first got it and I have exactly the same reaction today. Out of kindness, I will say no more.

The final thing that has differentiated my first and second cycling careers is that cycling has gone from being an almost invisible niche sport during my first cycling career to being a mainstream sport in my second. This has resulted in the proliferation of different kinds of bikes and the amount of content on the Internet described above but has also made many more books on cycling available, some of which I have reviewed on this blog, which is where I get many of my training ideas. Back during my first cycling career, I had no idea about what the community thought was the right way to train. During my second, I am inundated with those ideas. I occasionally wonder, what if I had a time machine and could go back and advise my 16-year old self how to train, would it make a difference?

So which was better, my first or my second cycling career? I was inspired by writing this post to give that question a great deal of thought. I went down a rabbit hole of psychology and philosophy trying to understand the meaning and purpose of happiness and came to a firm conclusion: that question is not interpretable, much less answerable. What I can conclude is that my cycling has been a tremendously positive force during both of those careers, and that my life would have been much better without the interregnum separating them. More than that, I cannot say.

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* I actually have two surviving bikes from my first cycling career. The first is the 1963 Bianchi Specialissima which is the focus of this post, a bike I acquired used in 1970. The second is the 1967 Hetchins Mountain King I acquired new the summer of 1967. The reason I am focusing on my Specialissima is that it is virtually identical to the way it was during my first cycling career. In contrast, when I got the Hetchins back 50 years after I sold it, all I got back was the frame and even that had been modified. As a result of being built up with all new components, it has a much more modern and comfortable feel than the Specialissima.

^ There have been some retrospective posts on this blog about my first cycling career but that first career has not been covered on this blog in nearly as much detail as the second.

 

Eroica California 2022

This post is very much a follow-up to my post about Eroica California 2019 so if you haven’t read that older post you might want to do so. Towards the end of that post, I said “As I think about it, whether I go back next year or not depends on Roger and Janet and David and Sarah. If they go, I go. The best part of the event was hanging out with them.” They decided to go back, so as the 2020 running of Eroica California approached, I signed up. And then COVID struck. Eroica was postponed from April to September, and then as the pandemic continued, it had to be postponed again until April of 2021 and then again until April of 2022. Roger and Janet and David and Sarah still wanted to go, so I went as well.

Just like in 2019, the two events in which I participated were the Concours d’Elegance on Saturday, April 30, where I again showed my 1963* Bianchi Specialissima, and the 35 mile long Pedras Blancas ride on Sunday, May 1. As was the case in 2019, none of my friends participated in the Concours and Roger and David rode the much more difficult 73 mile Santa Lucia route. However, this year Janet and Sarah joined me on the Pedras Blancas ride. The two rides left at the same time and the photo at the top of the post is the five of us ready to go. 

I had a whole bunch of Lessons Learned from 2019 that I planned to use to make my 2020 (2022) experience better. Quoting from that older post: 

• “I don't think I should use my Specialissima as both a display bike and a riding bike.” What other option did I have? Well, between 2019 and 2020 my 1967 Hetchins became rideable while remaining Eroica Legal. At first riding it wasn’t an option because my son planned to ride the Hetchins but even when he dropped out, the logistics of taking and managing two bicycles seemed daunting. In retrospect, I think my concern on that point was well justified, I had enough trouble taking care of my Bianchi without worrying about another bike. So, once again, I was forced to ride the Bianchi with all its limitations. Again, because I opted for the short (35 mile) ride, those limitations did not prevent me from completing the ride. 
•  “Either I have to find another bike for the ride, or give up on the Concours.” Just as in 2019, my beloved Bianchi won no prizes at the Concours in 2022. This is despite the best efforts of
  
  Gebhard at my LBS to make it ready, correcting as many of the problems the judges had with it in 2019 as possible. Unfortunately, there are two fundamental problems with my Bianchi that Gebhard could not fix. First, I have used and maintained this bike. When parts broke or wore out (which they do when you use a bike) I replaced them. Insofar as possible I replaced them with the same item that had originally been on the bike. As just one example, when the original Brooks B17 saddle fell apart in 2008, I replaced it with an identical Brooks B17 saddle. (The design of the Brooks B17 has not changed since it was first released in 1898.) The judges noted, however, that the saddle, despite now being 14 years old, is much newer than the bike, and that was a strike against it. Second, Bianchi Specialissimas from the 1960s are fairly common, it is not a particularly unusual or interesting bike. Nothing can fix these deficiencies. For these reasons I have decided that 2022 will be the last year I will show this bike. That said, now that I am free to drastically modify it to make it more rideable, I am finding I don’t want to. Partly it is because the Hetchins is available to fulfill my desire for a classic yet comfortable bike. So, although I plan to stop using my Bianchi as a show bicycle and start using it as a bicycle to ride, I don’t anticipate it changing much. Rather, I plan to live with all the problems I experienced in 2019 and 2022, at least for now. 
•  “Whatever bike I choose for the ride, and whatever clothing I select, should be ready weeks in advance so that I have plenty of time to test them and I don't run into problems like I had with the shoes this year.” Because I wanted to keep the Bianchi clean for the Concours, I could not do that. There were some things I managed to test, my shoes for example, and there are some things I probably could have tested, should have tested, and just didn’t, my handlebar bag for example, but the big thing I couldn’t test was the bike itself. Fortunately, it worked flawlessly. Thank you, Gebhard! 
•  “I was lucky with my sew-ups, they survived for 35 miles despite being in rather rough shape, but I would not want to count on that again, certainly not if I opted for a longer ride. So whatever bike I ride should have clincher tires so I can easily fix any flats along the way.” Gebhard put new sewups on the Bianchi. These are not as easy to change in the case of a flat as are clinchers, but being new, they were less likely to fail. 
•  “[D]espite the fact that the gears on the Bianchi worked fine for the short ride I did, I definitely would want lower gears before attempting a more challenging ride.” Since I did not choose to do a more challenging ride, it was not necessary to lower the gears (although it would have been nice.) 
•  “One argument in favor of purchasing [a Peugeot PX10 bike that was offered for sale in 2019] at this year's event was that it [could be made into] a comfortable but Eroica-legal riding bike and I am still wondering if I should have grabbed it for that reason alone. But, ‘A man's got to know his limitations’. Frankly, I have way too many irons in the fire these days, I don't need another project bike. And who knows? Maybe one of those other irons will pan out.” The Hetchins was one of those irons and it has most definitely panned out. If I want a more practical Eroica bike, the Hetchins is the logical choice. 

So, given all that, how did the ride go? The biggest problem with my ride in 2019 was that my shoes hurt my feet. Since then, I put considerable effort into stretching those shoes and in addition decided to wear them without socks. These two steps took these shoes from not acceptable to barely acceptable. Should I ride Eroica again and should I find better shoes, I would buy them, but if not, I would be willing to wear these same old shoes again. However, before the ride I did not know that, so I wanted backup. To that end I decided to bring along a pair of sandals, adequate for both walking and riding. But how to carry them? In 2019, I carried my spare tire in a blue seat bag. Although it was, in fact, from the correct period, it looked funny on my Bianchi. In any case, there was no way sandals would fit in that bag. I had an inspiration: I would use the black canvas handlebar bag I used for thousands of miles

between 1966 and 1979, which looked better on the bike and could hold much more. The problem was that some of the stitching had failed and one of the straps had come off. I had been planning to repair those straps for a long time so I took this opportunity to do so. As I was repairing the strap that had come off, another came off and I repaired it as well. That should have been a warning. As I was packing up for the ride Sunday morning, a third came off and I had to do an emergency repair with safety pins. Also, the bag tended to rub on the front tire. These kinds of bags are supposed to be used with a front rack but we never did that “back in the day” so it did not occur to me that this was going to be a problem. I managed to finish the ride with only an occasional rub, so that was OK. The big problem is that the bag restricted my hand positions on the handlebars. That plus the fact that the handlebars are already too low for my aging body led to painful shoulders by the end of the ride. I would not use this bag again. 

The ride started at 8 am at which time the temperature was 47 degrees, at least according to Google. I felt like I had not brought enough warm clothes for 47 degrees so wore everything I had; a helmet with a Bianchi cycling cap underneath, a windbreaker over my Bianchi Jersey over my Icebreaker wool underlayer, wool cycling shorts, and my 1960s cycling shoes (without socks.) In fact, the day felt warmer than the numbers so I ended up removing the windbreaker before starting and that turned out to be perfect for the ride. Both my Bianchi cap and my Bianchi jersey were visible, putting me into the spirit of the event.

Unfortunately, there was confusion about the route. There were two maps available on the website, one for 2019 and one for 2020. The 2020 route was similar to the 2019 route with two changes. First, the 2019 route had left Highway 1 in spots on the way back to both get us closer to the ocean and to add a few miles. In 2019, most riders ignored this, continuing back on Highway 1 the way they came. Perhaps as a reaction, the 2020 route followed the lead of the 2019 riders, making up the missing miles by continuing past the rest stop at the lighthouse before stopping on the way back. Since 2022 was just the delayed version of 2020, I assumed the 2020 route was correct. Janet was less sure, introducing some uncertainty in our minds. In my post on the 2019 ride, I complained about the lack of signage along the route. At least back then there was a printed map in the registration packet so that, when in doubt, I could refer to the map. This year, not only was there no signage along the route, there was not even a map with the registration packet. Janet commented that even a poster at the start showing the route would have reduced our confusion. As a result of this confusion, when we got to the turnoff to the lighthouse and there were people there halting traffic and waving us in, we went along with that. On the way back, I noticed some riders taking the 2019 route, but again due to lack of certainty, we continued on Highway 1. I ended up making up the missing miles by riding to and from the start from my AirBnB which was about 2 miles away, but I found the uncertainty annoying. 

Last year I complained about the food at the rest stop. I had no complaints this year, the food was delicious and plentiful. That said, Roger and Dave had complaints about the availability of food and especially water on their longer ride, supplies were not where they were most needed. Last year, I noted that a lot of my concerns were echoed in the Classic and Vintage forum of the Bike Forum website. There were fewer complaints this year and there were a large number of participants pushing hard on the message that this was a remarkable achievement in the face of the COVID delays and that despite everything, it was a wonderful experience. Though they were few in number and though the pushback from the voices of positive thinking were strong, the critics made their opinions heard, including some who speculated that Eroica California was dying. After the ride, we all went to Roger and Janet and Sarah and David’s AirBnB and talked about how we felt about the event. Roger has been going to this event for years. He is much more enthusiastic and knowledgeable about old bikes than I am. And yet, he wondered if this would be his last Eroica California. After 2019, he had no such doubts. 

Is this negativity towards Eroica California unfair? After reflecting on it, I feel like that is the wrong question. The question I am asking myself is what does Eroica California have that I want? Let me start with some positive reflections. I like remembering my long history of cycling. I love that the bike that I was riding and showing was the same bike I raced on during the 1970 season and the same bike I rode from Boston to Montreal in 1972. I love that the handlebar bag, which admittedly wasn't so practical,

was the same handlebar bag I used so often so long ago. This is all very personal but it is not just me who feels this way. Janet took her husband's Modesto Roadmen Jersey and retailored it to fit herself. That is the jersey she wore for Eroica California 2022. Nonetheless, if I add it all up and decide it is not enough, then it is hard for me to see why I should attend. Eroica California is not a charity, if there are systemic benefits to the community from its existence, I am not aware of them. “But if you don’t support it, then where will we go to celebrate classic bikes?” This question assumes that I feel a strong need to celebrate classic bikes and that Eroica California is effective, or at least potentially effective, in accomplishing that goal. Reasonable people might disagree as to the value of Eroica California and I would enthusiastically encourage those who see more value in it than I do to keep it going, in no way do I want to discourage them. I am just wondering if I am really part of that group. Towards the end of our time together, Roger's decision to not attend in 2023 began to waver. Ideas (which I will not leak) for fun ways to participate in future Eroicas began to occur to him. So in the end, I am right back where I was in 2019. If Roger goes, and better yet, Roger and Janet and Sarah and Dave go, I will probably go as well. 

 

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* I have previously described this as a 1960 Bianchi Specialissima. I purchased it used in 1970 so I don’t actually know the model year. That 1960 date was based on the bike’s serial number. If there is an official database of Bianchi serial numbers, I have not been able to find it, but there is some user-derived information available here and there online. Either because I am reading the information differently or because that information has changed, I am now thinking my Bianchi is more likely to be a 1963.