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.
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.
