Preparing for Survival

 

...the Art of Survival Metric Century that is. This post can be seen as a companion to my 2019 post "Training for the Golden Hills" and could have had a similar title but, for better or for worse, I tried to be clever.

I have ridden The Art of Survival three times now, in 2018, 2019, and now in 2024. In 2020, the event was cancelled due to COVID. In 2021, I had trouble training for the ride so decided not to go, a decision I still question. In 2022, I feel like I was as prepared for this ride as I have ever been but didn't go at the last minute due to severe weather. 2023 is the year my back decided to get much worse and so I couldn't go again. For 2024, I desperately wanted to get my cycling back on track and successfully completing The Art of Survival was an important milestone on the way to doing that. I did attend and I did finish but somehow that was not enough. Why not? Or to ask that question in a different way, what do I mean when I say successfully completing the ride?

In my post about Training for the Golden Hills, I defined success as "a comfortable ride from beginning to end" and this year's Art of Survival certainly was not that! To be fair, a lot of my discomfort had nothing to do with my training. This year's ride was extremely windy. Many of the roads on this ride suffer from frost damage which results in cracks across the road and riding over them felt like someone hitting my handlebars with a sledgehammer about once a second. And then there were the swarms of insects. Yes, I am something of a whiner, but as I was enjoying the excellent lunch provided at the end of the ride I noticed I was far from the only one complaining about these things. Some of my discomfort resulted from the effort required to get to the ride. The seven hours of driving followed by moving my luggage and bike in and out of a second story hotel room left my back very sore. Cycling does not make my back worse but neither does it reduce any back pain that might be there. On top of that were other aches and pains of old age, my left knee, my right shoulder, etc. A final issue was psychological. If I perform well on a ride the happiness produced by that success makes that ride a lot more fun. I did not feel like I was performing well on this ride.

All three times I have ridden The Art of Survival I have ridden it with my High School riding buddy, Roger. In 2018 and 2019 I rode a normal bike (not an eBike) and both years I had trouble keeping up with Roger but I did finish under my own steam. For the 2022 Ride the Rogue, Roger and his brother-in-law David suggested that I ride my eBike to make it easier to keep up and that worked. Most of the time I rode with the eAssist turned off but when we got to a hill that made it hard for me to keep up I would switch it on. Because the eAssist was mostly off, I still felt some satisfaction from the ride. This year I hoped for a similar experience. In my optimistic moments, I even hoped I might not use eAssist at all. What actually happened was quite the opposite. I used the eAssist for almost all the ride and there were times I struggled to keep up with Roger even using eAssist. Although this was not physical discomfort, it was demoralizing and contributed to the lack of a feeling of success. After all, it was an electric motor that brought me to the finish, not my training.

But what does any of this have to do with the title of this post? How had I prepared for this ride and how did that preparation work out?  My training plan for the 7 weeks leading up to the ride was as close to a well thought out plan as I have managed in a very long time. As I result, I had hoped for a successful ride. There were, however, warning signs. The longest training ride I did in preparation for Art of Survival was 47 miles, 78% of the length of the ride which is plenty long, but I found it very difficult to complete and my average speed on that ride was low. Back in 2021 I decided not to attempt The Art of Survival because, although I completed a very similar 43 mile ride, my speed on that ride was only 11.2 miles per hour and I could not follow that up two weeks later with a 54 mile long ride. This year, my first 47 mile long ride was ridden at 11.3 miles per hour and two weeks later, although I completed a 46 mile long ride, I could not extend that ride to 57 miles as I had hoped I might. Thus, my successful training plan of 2024 looked a lot like my failed training plan of 2021. I was OK with that for several reasons. First, I thought I probably should have ridden Art of Survival in 2021. Second, my 46 mile long ride in 2024 was faster (11.6 miles per hour) and more comfortable than the ride two weeks earlier. Third, I have reconsidered the schedule I developed for The Golden Hills in 2019. I think a 55 mile long training ride is excessive as preparation for a Metric Century. To summarize, I think that it was the right decision to go ahead and ride this year and although my preparation was just fine, both the the length of my longest training ride and the speed I was riding were lower than in 2019 and so I think I can reasonably conclude my fitness was lower.

Why was my fitness lower? Starting with the most likely reason, I am 5 years older in 2024 than I was in 2019 and, at my age, that has to make a huge difference. All by itself, this could be the whole explanation for why I was more fit in 2019 than I am today. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about my age. Might there be contributing factors, something under my control? There are. In 2024, there was a lack of year around consistency in my training. Although the training schedules for 2019 and 2024 (shown above) look similar, some of that is an illusion. Seven weeks before The Art of Survival I began a very sensible training program but 10 weeks before that my fitness was very low because for the previous 18 weeks I did very little riding. Thus, as good as my 7 week program was, I was starting in a hole. My 2019 Golden Hills came at the end of a very active season and thus benefitted from that entire season of riding. In 2019, rather than starting in a hole, I was starting on a hilltop. To put that in concrete terms, I rode 3025 miles and averaged 338 minutes a week during the year before The Golden Hills but rode only 2625 miles and averaged only 283 minutes a week the year before Art of Survival. The good news is that I seem to be making some progress on this front, a topic for a future post. Finally, as good as my training during the 7 weeks before The Art of Survival were, there might be some room for improvement there as well. As just one approach towards that end, I continue to experiment with the Banister model of Form, Fitness, and Fatigue, most definitely a topic that needs to wait for a future post. Stay tuned.