50,000 Miles ... and now what?

This is my third round number of my miles posts. I posted The first one after I had completed 20,000 miles of riding. I started out that one with a quote from my wife: "You should be proud of yourself for sticking to cycling so long." That continues to be the most important thing about my cycling, that I have now stuck with it for more than 15 years. I believe that the impact of that consistent exercise has been enormously beneficial for my health. My second post came after 40,000 miles of riding. In that post, I predicted I would reach 50,000 miles in September of 2023. That was a bit optimistic, but I am extremely satisfied to have reached that milestone even if a bit late. 

Here is another optimistic prediction from that 40,000 mile post: "It is not impossible that, even riding against [the] headwind [of my old age], I might still be able to get a bit more fit than I am today." I no longer believe that is possible. Rather, I believe that I am engaged in a rearguard action to delay my decline and continue cycling in at least some form for as long as I can. 

Each of my three round number of mile posts have opened with a similar graph - my accumulated miles since I restarted cycling in August of 2008 through the present. For this one I added a trend line (in red) to help reveal times during those 15+ years when I have ridden more or less than average. Looking at my progress compared to that trend line, it is apparent that I am slowing down. Given that, how much longer can I keep this up? There is no way to know, of course, life just happens, but one can ask about the odds. A good starting point is to ask how much longer I might expect to live. Social Security provides a very basic prediction based only on my sex and current age and predicts I will live 12 more years, to age 86. To provide a more personalized and possibly more accurate prediction, I searched the Internet and found a government funded, peer reviewed (which is to say believable) research project at Boston University named Living To 100 that asked me a large number of questions about my weight, drinking, smoking, exercise, etc. Based on all this data about me, their algorithm also predicted I will live 12 more years, to an age of 86. But that is just an upper limit. It would be lovely if I could finish a bike ride, sit down by the side of the road, and peacefully pass into the hereafter, but the fates are seldom that kind. It is likely that I will be unable to continue cycling some time before the end of my life. 

To help me think about what the future might hold I have collected stats on all my previous 10,000 mile landmarks, whether I blogged about them or not, and then made some reasonable assumptions and projected forward to the next three 10,000 mile landmarks:

The key column in this table is the last, labelled Years. The more years it takes to complete 10,000 miles, the less riding I did on a per year basis. As can be seen on both the graph at the top of this post as well as in the table above, my first 10,000 miles were an outlier. One reason for that is, as I noted in my 20,000 mile post, the start of my second cycling career on 8/1/2008 was something of a false start. After cycling for about six months I stopped cycling for well over a year before restarting again on 5/3/2010. This long gap with almost no rides and thus almost no miles dramatically distorts the statistics. I tried a number of different ways of correcting for that and all of them make that first year less of an outlier, but in all cases the First 10,000 miles was slower than the Second 10,000 miles. From this I conclude that my cycling was improving during those first 10,000 miles. This is the second reason that the First 10,000 miles is an outlier: after that landmark, everything is downhill.

For each 10,000 miles (except for the first) the number of years required to complete those 10,000 miles is greater than the 10,000 miles before by about 6 months. To project what I might be able to do in the future, I assumed that trend would continue. Will I be able to reach a 6th 10,000 miles? There certainly aren't any guarantees, but barring any problems (a bit of an assumption at my age) it is certainly possible. How about a 7th? Should I be able to do that, I would count myself lucky indeed! I would say a 7th 10,000 miles is unlikely but not impossible. To complete an 8th 10,000 miles would require me to ride two years past the date projected for my death. Of course, the date of my death is impossible to predict precisely, and so nothing is impossible, but I am definitely not counting on reaching that milestone.

There are other reasons I believe my fitness is decreasing:

• From 2012 through 2015 my goal was 200 kilometer long rides. By 2018, I had lowered my goal to half that, 100 kilometer long rides. Of course, it is more complicated by that. By 2018 I had moved to hilly California from flat Texas and my goal was one 100 kilometer ride a month rather than one 200 kilometer long ride a year, but all things considered, I believe this was a step down in ambition.
• In 2021, I failed at even this less ambitious goal. I attempted to train for the Art of Survival Metric Century (100 kilometers) and fatigue prevented me from doing so. (I have blogged about that failure ad nauseum and may do so again.)
• In 2023 my back got worse. Although this does not affect my cycling directly, going for a ride is one of the most comfortable things I can do with regards to my back, but my back pain does create fatigue and thus inhibits my cycling indirectly.
• Recently, I realized my dream of riding a Metric Century a Month was never going to happen. Although this is not an event but rather the acknowledgement of a reality, I think I wouldn't have been driven to this acknowledgement except that I am no longer feeling as strong as I did when I first had that dream.

Cycling for Health

The primary reason I restarted cycling back in 2008 was because I realized my lack of aerobic exercise was threatening my health. The Medical community recommends I accumulate a minimum of 150 minutes a week of Moderate Intensity or 75 minutes of Vigorous Intensity aerobic exercise a week. Ideally they would have me accumulate twice that, 300 minutes Moderate or 150 minutes Vigorous Intensity a week. They also recommend that exercise be spread out over the week. For example, they suggest a 60 minute Moderate exercise session five days a week, with a recommended minimum of 3 days a week. For the purposes of this post, I am calling all my cycling Moderate Intensity even though I know that is not completely true. I am hoping it is a close enough approximation but will call out one case where I think that assumption might be problematic.

For the purposes of evaluating how my health-targeted cycling is going, I am going to look at two statistics: for what percentage of the weeks did I accumulate 150 or 300 minutes of cycling, and for what percentage of the weeks did I ride for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 days? During my most recent landmark, 40,000 to 50,000 miles, I rode 150 or more miles during 78% of the weeks and 300 or more miles during 51% of the weeks. I did five or more rides during 39% of the weeks and three or more rides 77% of the weeks. So, not nothing but far from perfect.

Historically, I have not worried about riding for health per se, I figured my recreational riding should provide the health benefits I was seeking but is that true? My gut says yes but my annoying brain remains skeptical. I have blogged about the medical community's aerobic exercise recommendations a fair bit and plan to blog about it more in the future but very briefly, I take comfort from the following quotation from "Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition" by The Department of Health and Human Services USA, 2018: "Some physical activity is better than none. Adults who sit less and do any amount of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity gain some health benefits." Similarly, I am inspired by the following quotation from the same source: "Additional health benefits are gained by engaging in physical activity beyond the equivalent of 300 minutes (5 hours) of moderate-intensity physical activity a week." So mostly I am going to go with my gut on this one. What I am doing is way better than nothing but I should continue to strive to bicycle as much as I can.

What does it mean, "mostly go with my gut"? Well, my brain has an important role to play here, and that is keeping me honest. One example of where this is an issue is the Recovery Rides on my trainer. One thing I hope to blog about in the future is the difficulty in distinguishing between Light, Moderate, and Vigorous aerobic exercise, but for the purposes of this post I am going to claim that those Recovery Rides are at an Intensity below Moderate so that I should not count them towards my health benefits. Unfortunately, the statistics I quote above do include them. At the time I was recording them, I believed they did count as Moderate exercise and now it would be too much work to go back and remove them. Does that mean I am doing even worse than I thought? Maybe not. Although I counted my Recovery Rides when I shouldn't have, I also ignored that part of my riding that is clearly qualifies as Vigorous or even HIIT. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. Here is what The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says about HIIT: "Recent research has examined high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which may provide similar reductions in cardiovascular disease risk factors as those observed with continuous moderate- intensity physical activity." HSS goes on to say that research remains to be done on exactly how much HIIT should count. The research I am reading says that, whereas minutes of Vigorous exercise counts double, minutes of HIIT may count as much as 45 times as much as Moderate exercise. So, for the purposes of this post I am going to hope that erroneously counting my Recovery rides is offset by failing to fully credit the parts of my rides that are Vigorous or HIIT. Of course, this assumes that I don't over-use my trainer (see below.)

Finally, how does my success during my last 10,000 miles compare to my previous 10,000 mile landmarks? During none of the five 10,000 mile landmarks was I perfect; I did not cycle 300 miles or more and 5 days or more for 100% of their weeks. The graph below illustrates how much I did ride for the last four landmarks:

I didn't include my first 10,000 miles on this graph because, as noted above, it was an outlier and including it made the graph harder to understand. The red line on the graph is average minutes per week, equivalent to the how many years it takes me to finish 10,000 miles already noted above as a declining indicator, and it is indeed declining. This is related but not identical to the percent of weeks in which I rode greater than 300 miles. The key difference is that, for the latter metric, it doesn't matter by how much I exceed 300 minutes whereas for the average, it very much does. My longest week, the week of my first 200 kilometer long ride, I accumulated 909 minutes while riding 197 miles. This week dramatically affects the average but counts no more than a week with 301 minutes towards the percent of weeks >300 minutes.

Looking at this graph, it is the case that my second 10,000 miles had the best score in all categories, but for the third, fourth, and fifth, each landmark may be better in one but worse in another. Especially relevant to this post, my most recent 10,000 miles had the worst score for percent weeks with greater than 300 minutes, but a pretty decent score for number of weeks with five or more rides; my consistency is good but my rides are too short. I feel like the overall message is that my performance on these metrics is declining overall but with some ups and downs along the way.

Cycling for Fun

I reached the 40,000 mile landmark during September of 2020, just about the time I moved from a relatively flat part of San Carlos to the well named Emerald Hills where I now live. This was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and as a result all 2020 cycling events were cancelled. However, that didn't mean I had no fun. Rather, it meant the fun I had was that of exploring a new neighborhood and figuring out how to deal with its challenges, especially the hills. After the move, I could continue to ride my two favorite GoTo rides, my Alpine and Alpine-Cañada rides, almost unchanged. As for new rides, my son shared one of his favorite rides with me, the Huddart Park ride. It is a delightful ride in many ways, low traffic, amazing scenery, and at first I did one of these rides a week, but it is also a very challenging ride and I found I was building up fatigue and, as a result, started looking for alternatives. I tried coasting downhill from my new home to my old haunts in the flats of the East Bay to do some of my favorite rides there but always ran into the same problem. The hills back to my house from the east are all very steep and this converted what was supposed to be an easy ride into a hard one. (The reason the Alpine and Alpine-Cañada rides work is because they bring me home from the west where the hills are less steep.) Similarly, when I tried to explore my new neighborhood (one of my favorite things to do on a bike) the very steep hills made that extremely challenging to impossible, even for my Bianchi Volpe, my bike with the lowest gears. In fact, the new neighborhood had reduced my formerly respectable stable of bikes to a single usable bike, the Volpe being the only one with gears even close to low enough for the neighborhood. I knew I needed to find an easier ride. My first attempt was the Lake Loop. I rode that ride so many times I became a Legend on Strava. The ride itself was fine, but getting home from it was still too hard. Several years ago I had purchased a trainer but found it so boring I didn't end up using it very much. I set my trainer up in my bedroom with my Surly Cross Check dedicated to it, making it super convenient to use, I just hop on and go. It is still boring, but it allows for a very easy ride to help balance all the hills and so I find myself using it a couple of times a week. 

In early 2021, my son decided that I needed an eBike. Because of the pandemic, bikes were hard to come by, but he found an exceptionally good bike that I could get right away, an Orbea Gain. It arrived March 24, 2021 and by March 28th I had it set up and completed my first ride, that exploration of the neighborhood which that eBike finally made possible. The other thing it made possible was keeping up with riders who are much faster than I am, my son and my friends Roger and Dave for example. One of the most fun set of rides I did on that bike was one we called the Hot Chocolate Ride. The pandemic was still in full force so eating indoors at a restaurant was out and restaurants had not yet had time to build out the outdoor seating which they all have now. However, there was one restaurant that had always used outdoor seating and so Sundays, we would ride over the (steep!) hills to that restaurant, Michael on his normal bike, his wife Robynn on a cargo eBike with Julia and Elliott aboard, and me on the Orbea. When we started these rides, I was on my Volpe but Michael and Robynn had to slow down so I could keep up. Once I had my Orbea, they could ride as fast as they liked and I could keep up with them.

By 2021,  Art of Survival had come back after the pandemic, but when I attempted to train for it, fatigue prevented me from doing so, something about which I have blogged ad nauseum and which I may blog about even more in the future. I concluded at the time that this failure was due to overtraining and reacted accordingly. As time goes by, I become more and more skeptical of that conclusion and worry that my response to that hypothetical overtraining may be doing more harm than good, an issue to which I will return later in this post. One consequence of that was between the middle of 2020 when I moved to the start of 2022, with the exception of the Hot Chocolate rides, the only ride I did with anyone else, that I did not do all alone, was one ride with my friends Paul and Fringy.

2022 was a very good year. I began by riding with Paul and Fringy in February, April and July. In March, I completed a ride on my Hetchins with the local Classical and Vintage bike group. At the end of April/beginning of May I attended Eroica California. I successfully prepared to ride the Art of Survival at the end of May, but then couldn't attend due to bad weather.  Instead, I was able to attend Ride the Rogue in September of that year. This was also the year I got my TranyaGo sports watch and restarted tracking my heart rate.

2023 started out as another bad year due to a combination of my back getting worse and coincidentally, some severe dental problems. These exhausted me and my riding suffered. This reached a nadir in May, making attending Art of Survival impossible. Starting in July, my riding got better so I might have hoped to attend Ride the Rogue, but I had a scheduling conflict. By October, my riding again got worse due to a random combination of interruptions, weather, and illnesses. January 2024 was a continuation of that poor performance, but by February I started to improve again. If this continues, I am hoping to attend Art of Survival this year.

Final Thoughts

My gut is telling me that the big picture presented by the time course of my 50,000 miles of cycling is that I am getting older and that my ability to ride is fading as a result. My brain is not entirely convinced. One argument that my brain makes is to point out a possible wrong turn in my training that I may have made back in 2011. One explanation of my poor performance that year was overtraining and I really leaned into that one possibility. Two things I did which my brain is questioning are 1) I started overusing my Trainer, and especially riding too often at too low an Intensity. These are not training rides. One or two of these a week after a strenuous ride might help me harvest the benefits of that strenuous ride, but in excess of that, represent junk riding of no significant benefit, and yet I am counting them in my training statistics, giving myself a false sense of progress. 2) I started riding my long rides more slowly. There were logical reasons for doing that, the 80:20 rule (aka Polarized Training aka Zone 2 training) recommended by many coaches, for example. What my brain argues is that maybe I overemphasized the 80 and underemphasized the 20, that when I made my long rides easier I was not careful to make sure I included enough fast rides and to make sure that they were fast enough. Similarly, when I made my long rides slower, maybe I should have made them longer at the same time. Now my brain will concede that this is just a possibility, that I definitely need to listen to my body, and when my body says it is tired, I should act accordingly. In retrospect, however, even my gut will concede that I really overdid the easy trainer rides. In summary, maybe I should make sure that when I am riding less it is because I am tired not because I am lazy. Who knows, Paris-Brest-Paris* for my 90th birthday? (Just kidding.)

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* Paris-Brest-Paris is perhaps the most prestigious group ride there is. It is about 750 miles long and must be completed in 90 hours to qualify for an award. Sleeping is allowed but it does count against your time so sleep deprivation is common. It is tough, even for a very fit rider in their prime.