In my second post after moving to California I described my new Go-To ride, a ride I would do when I couldn't think of anything better, a ride I later named my Alpine ride. Fairly quickly, I noticed that how fast I completed that ride seemed to be an indicator of my level of Form, where Form is a measure of my ability to ride fast and/or for long distances. Form is increased by Fitness but also decreased by Fatigue: Form = Fitness - Fatigue. About a year after developing the Alpine ride I was looking for a ride that was a bit longer and found an extension that added about 11 miles, taking it from 23 to 34 miles. When I moved from San Carlos to Emerald Hills in 2020, I was able to continue these two rides albeit with minor modifications that reduced their length to 22 and 33 miles. In 2021, I posted a statistical analysis that indicated that my average speed on all four of these rides was very similar such that I could average them all together for estimating my Form. The graph at the top of this post is my monthly average speed on those four rides from when I first moved to California and started doing them until mid-2021 when my riding changed such that my speed on those rides stopped being comparable, changes which I will explain at the end of this post.
In a follow-up to the post showing I could average my Alpine-Like rides I compared my monthly average speed to how many hours I trained each month. There was no measurable correlation between the two. Clearly, that can’t be true in an absolute sense, if I never trained, my performance would have to go down eventually, but the reason it seemed to be true is that I ride pretty regularly, so there aren’t big changes in my training from month to month and also because an increase in training will have two opposite effects; it will increase my Fitness but also will increase my Fatigue such that these opposite effects of training will, to some extent, cancel each other out. And yet, there have been significant month to month changes in my Form. The most noticeable thing about the graph at the top of this post is the big peak in my Form that occurred at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. The purpose of this post is to think about possible causes for that peak.
This is not the first post in which I wondered about that peak. In June of 2020, four months after that peak, I described a wild goose chase I had followed. By chance, I had retrieved my Bianchi Volpe after an overhaul at my local bike shop, Veloro Bicycles, right before this peak in Form and so developed the false hypothesis that Veloro had somehow made this bike much faster. By the time I wrote the post I knew that was not the correct explanation, but all I had to offer as an alternative was “it must have been something I accidentally did right in my training.” Besides being uselessly vague, that was actually an invalid conclusion, characteristics of my bike and training are not the only possible explanations. As just one example, the overall state of my health could also be a factor. And finally, none of these explanations are exclusive. Perhaps I had a run of good luck in terms of avoiding colds and other illnesses, that perhaps Veloro did make my bike a bit faster, but that in addition, my training contributed, though as noted above, it wasn’t by simply spending more (or fewer) hours on the bike. What could be true is that the quality of my training improved, even though there was little change in quantity. One important variable is Intensity, how hard (e.g. fast) I ride. About a year ago, I blogged about how I might include measures of Intensity in the evaluation of my training and how my acquisition of my TranyaGo heart rate monitor might make this possible going forward. However, that doesn’t help me looking back at that peak.
The new idea that inspired this post is that my peak of performance in 2019/2020 might be due more to the events I rode than the training I did for them. In the figure at the top of the post I have added colored stars to the graph, each star (but one) representing an event I rode. (The exception is the red star at the right side of the graph which represents the Art of Survival event which I did not ride because I was unable to complete the training for it.) Red represents the Art of Survival. Black represents the Death Ride. Yellow represents Golden Hills. Blue represents a local, solo metric century I rode. Note that the beginning of my peak of performance began with the first of these in 2019, The Art of Survival. I rode that event with my high school buddy, Roger, who is a much stronger cyclist than I, and I found it tremendously challenging. Fortunately, I recovered from that ride pretty quickly, which is where the good luck/health may have come in. I then trained very hard for the next event, the Death Ride, which was one of the most difficult rides of my life. I then had a couple of months of relatively light riding, in part because my son’s wedding occurred during that period, and then jumped into very focused training for the Golden Hills Metric Century. I did not suffer the exhaustion on that ride that I did for the Art of Survival and the Death Ride, but I did have 25 miles in the middle where I was keeping up with my much faster friends, Roger and Dave, and was riding as fast as I possibly could, so again, a real stretch. At that point I was feeling quite fatigued, but managed to complete a solo metric century a month later, at which point my fatigue, the weather, and family events conspired to reduce my cycling. In summary, each of these events produced an enormous amount of training Load that resulted in a tremendous amount of both Fitness and Fatigue. Once I allowed time for that Fatigue dissipate, this left me with a higher level of Form for the next event, and so on.
What did I learn from this very good year? First, I have to acknowledge that luck played a significant part in it. Besides having good health during that year, I also somehow managed to push my riding right up to the limit of my body’s capabilities without quite going over. However, one thing did occur to me that has the advantage of being something I might be able to use in the future: a good training strategy for me seems to be very intense efforts followed by a lower level of effort until I feel my fatigue is completely gone. This is contrary to my natural tendency to ride very regularly, not ignoring how I feel, but perhaps not giving those feelings as much attention as I should. I don’t yet know how I will incorporate this new hypothesis into my training, but it has given me something to think about.
So how and why did I change the way I ride my Alpine-Like rides such that I can no longer use them as a measurement of my Form? In May of 2021, I failed to complete the longest ride in my preparation for the Art of Survival Metric Century. I realized I was fighting Fatigue and cut back on my training. One way that I did that is that I consciously made the decision to ride my Alpine-Like rides more slowly, thus making them not comparable to my previous Alpine-Like rides. This decision was cemented about six months ago when I acquired my TranyaGo heart rate monitor. Previously, my Alpine-Like rides had been ridden about 50% in heart rate Zone 2, 50% in heart rate Zone 3. Now I make a conscious decision about what heart rate zone I want to complete the ride in, usually Zone 2, and use the heart rate monitor to enforce that decision. Finally, I am doing many fewer Alpine-Like rides than I used to because there is a new Go-To ride in town, the Cañada ride, which I strongly prefer. All of this has left me with no way to estimate my level of Fitness, something I am working to correct. Stay tuned to see what I come up with.
