Birthday Ride

There is a tradition in the cycling community of The Birthday Ride. Classically, the tradition is to ride your age in miles on your birthday, though there are variations. This year I turned 75. To me, this felt like a big deal: three quarters of a century! Short of living to be 100, I don't think I will ever have a more special birthday. Never in my life had I ridden a Birthday Ride but it seemed like if I ever were to do one, this should be the year.

I can't remember when it occurred to me that I should to do a birthday ride this year. I did consider a birthday ride in 2021. Back then, that ride would have been 72 miles long. What inspired this was that I was having a bad year. I had just failed to complete my training plan for the Art of Survival metric century and I thought I might be able to compensate for that failure with a Birthday Ride. Unfortunately, the same problems that kept me from preparing for the 60 mile long Art of Survival kept me from preparing for a 72 mile long Birthday Ride. I did have a plan to attempt a 75th Birthday Ride by last February because I mentioned it in a blog post. So it was probably sometime between May of 2021 and February of 2024 when I decided to attempt a 75 mile long birthday ride this July.

The Plan

I knew that completing 75 miles would be a challenge for me at my age and at my level of fitness so I focused on doing everything I could to make it possible for me to complete the ride. To that end, I decided the ride should be flat. To keep things simple, I decided to make the ride local. When I thought of rides that met those criteria, I decided that a ride along the Bay Trail was most promising. The Bay Trail is not yet complete, the current version consists of a collection of disconnected segments. There are two of these segments I ride regularly which I have named Bay Trail North and Bay Trail South. Back in 2019, I did a solo metric century in order to test my Metric a Month training plan and the route for that consisted of both of those segments as well as the city streets needed to get from one to the other. After a lot of thought, I decided that doing that for my Birthday Ride would make the ride too difficult so eliminated that option. If I were to ride only one of these segments, how would I get enough miles? In 2019, the parts of Bay Trail North and Bay Trail South with which I was familiar were similar in length. Since then, I have extended my knowledge of Bay Trail South, and, in addition to the Bay Trail itself, have explored four other high quality trails that connect with this segment of the Bay Trail: The Permanente Creek Trail, the Stephens Creek Trail, the Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and the Guadalupe River Trail. Thus, I decided to string together a subset of these to construct a 75 mile long ride. The ride I actually did is shown in the figure at the top of the post and is discussed in more detail below.

Historically, I have favored bike rides that start and end at my house. More recently, I have been doing more rides where I put my bike on the back of my car and drive to the start point. I am working on a blog post explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each of these options but briefly, driving to the start of a ride opens up a lot of possibilities, especially now when I live in such a hilly neighborhood. For my birthday ride, I drove to the parking lot for Shoreline Lake Park which became the start and finish for the ride.

The Route

This ride took advantage of some of the wonderful cycling infrastructure provided by various governments in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to The Bay Trail about which I have previously blogged, I considered the four other trails listed above for inclusion into this ride. In the end, of the four other trails I considered, the ride included two: the Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and the Guadalupe River Trail. I had ridden the full length of the Guadalupe River Trail during my metric century three weeks before and based on that experience decided to include only the first 6.7 miles of that trail in my Birthday ride. In earlier rides, I had ridden the first part of the Tomas Aquino Trail but had never ridden its full length, so took the opportunity of my Birthday Ride to do so. In the end, these two trails added 24 miles to the ride

The current version of the San Francisco Bay Trail has a somewhat complicated topography: it has gaps, it has branches, it merges with itself, and it has alternative routes. Sometimes it not obvious if one is on the Bay Trail or not and sometimes what the official map shows does not match what is on the ground. Given all that and knowing this section of the Bay Trail as well as I do, I decided that I would declare that everything that wasn't explicitly on one of the other two trails to be on the Bay Trail. Given that assumption, the Bay Trail accounted for 51 miles of the ride. 

Final statistic: If I leave off all the side trails and loops, a ride on the Bay Trail South segment from Cooley Landing to Alviso and back is 34 miles. A similar ride on the Bay Trail North segment from the Belmont Sport Complex through the Coyote Point Recreation Area and back is 20 miles.

The Training

2024 was something of a comeback year for my cycling. As noted above, 2011 was a bad year for my cycling. At the time, I blamed that bad year on my move from a relatively flat neighborhood to a very hilly one, though over time I have become somewhat skeptical of that idea. 2022 was a good year. In 2023, back problems interfered with my cycling, making that a bad year. On February 1, 2024, my level of fitness had reached to a very low level and it was from that low point that began a training program to prepare myself to ride the 2024 Art of Survival Metric Century at the end of May. By then, I had also decided to attempt a Birthday Ride, but did not have a clear plan for training for it. As I trained for and then completed The Art of Survival, I decided to use the Metric Century a Month training plan I had developed back in 2019 to prepare for my Birthday Ride. This plan was not a perfect fit in that the Birthday Ride was to be 75 miles long, longer than the 62 mile long ride for which the plan was developed, but I decided to ignore that mismatch. One implication of that plan is that I would need to ride an additional Metric Century between Art of Survival and the Birthday ride; the monthly Metric Century is an essential part of this training plan and there was two months between those two rides. I decided to do a solo metric century at the end of June to accomplish that requirement.

The Metric Century a Month Training Plan assumes a metric century ride every four weeks. This is somewhat unrealistic, metric century rides are not distributed that regularly across the calendar, and in response to that, it can be adjusted a bit by adding a week or two by repeating week 2 of the schedule, so I had planned to ride one four week schedule and one five week schedule, giving me some flexibility as to when to do my solo metric century; I could do it June 22 or June 29. As seems to always happen for me, my training schedule got disrupted so I was unable to ride my solo metric century on either of those weekends.  How did that happen?

The first four week block of the Metric a Month schedule went according to plan with the exception of one apparently minor change: the first week of that block, the recovery week, contained a few more miles than it should have. That was the result of me being undisciplined. I was feeling good that week and rode 33 miles on a day I was scheduled to ride 17. In retrospect, that may have been more of a mistake than I realized. But it was at the end of this block that my training plan really fell apart. The reasons for that were threefold:

1. I had a bunch of extra, unexpected babysitting to do. (Babysitting takes precedence over even a 75th birthday ride.)
2. There was a heatwave which made it unwise for a 75 year old to ride on some days.
3. The Art of Survival left me more tired than I expected and it took me longer than I expected to recover from that to a point where I felt I could ride a metric century.

These three things are not mutually exclusive, of course. The extra babysitting could have generated fatigue that contributed to my slow recovery, for example. The other thing that could have contributed to that slow recovery was the extra riding four weeks earlier, mentioned above. The result of all this is that I failed to ride a metric century four weeks after The Art of Survival and then again at five weeks. At that point, I was extremely discouraged, I was 90% convinced that I was not going to be able to do the Birthday Ride. What changed that was that one week later, six weeks after the Art of Survival and three weeks before my 75th birthday, I woke up one morning feeling pretty good. I decided to drive out to Shoreline Lake with no preconceptions to do a little scouting and to see just how good I felt. In the end, I rode 61 miles without undue fatigue. At this point, the Birthday Ride was back on, but how to train with three weeks to go? The following week, I rode the first, easy week of my Metric a Month schedule - which is what I should have ridden after the Art of Survival but didn't. Although I hadn't found the 61 mile ride tiring at the time, I felt quite tired during that week - I was having the same trouble with slow recovery as I had had during the previous five weeks. So instead of moving to a harder schedule for the second week, I rode the easy week of that schedule again. As I listened to my body, I had the feeling I was finally recovering from my solo metric century just in time for my Birthday Ride, suggesting this adjustment was a good one.

How Did It Go?

The day was magnificent both as a bike ride and as a birthday celebration. My son Michael decided to join me on the ride. We began by riding 45 miles southwest from Shoreline Park and back before stopping at the delightful restaurant in the park for lunch. My sister and brother-in-law. my son Matthew and his son Graham (age 2), and Michael's wife Robynn and their two children Julia (age 8) and Elliott (age 6) met us there and we had a delightful lunch, including a slice of birthday cake complete with a 75th birthday decoration provided by my cousin Rebecca. Michael and I then did a 3 mile loop around Shoreline Lake with Julia and Elliott so they could be participants in the ride. They are beginning cyclists and so found that loop just enough of a challenge to be exciting. Then Michael and I rode northeast to just past Cooley Landing and back which brought us to 69.7 miles total. We finished things off with two more laps 

around the 3 mile lake loop to reach our goal of 75 miles.

I felt comfortable and strong during almost all of the ride, it was only at the very end that I began to feel some fatigue. However, by the time I got home and took a shower, I was exhausted, a feeling that lasted through the following day. I am definitely riding a recovery schedule for the week after this ride!

My goal for this ride was that it should feel special. During the weeks before the ride when I was feeling like it might not happen, everyone I talked with urged me to scale back my ambitions rather than abandon the ride entirely. These suggestions ranged from riding 75 kilometers (47 miles) to making the visually minor adjustment of reducing it from 75 miles to 7.5 miles. None of these would have felt special. This 75 mile long ride was the longest ride I have done in over 10 years, the longest I have done since moving to California. That's special! Between the challenge of the ride, the delightful lunch, and the participation of my family, I cannot think of a better way to recognize this very special birthday.