My last post, which was about my 75th Birthday Ride, was one of the posts that was the most fun to write because it was about a high point in my life. However, lurking in the background was a darker theme, one that I have been blogging about more and more: I am getting old, and getting old comes with limitations. Although neither a prediction nor a promise, I doubt I will ever do another birthday ride. One reason is that my 75th Birthday Ride was so special that future Birthday Rides would suffer by comparison. The more important reason is that part of what made my 75th Birthday Ride so special is that it was a challenge, a challenge that was quite difficult for me to meet, and each year that challenge will get greater. Obviously, adding 1 mile to the length of the ride each year is not a big deal (at least for a while) but each year I am also getting a year older and at this point in my life that is significant. What was a fun and healthy challenge in 2024 will quickly turn into an inappropriate risk as the years progress.
Given that, what have I been doing since the birthday ride? Have I been doing any riding at all? Is there any plan to that riding? Yes, I have been riding and yes, there is a plan. For the first four weeks after my birthday ride I was feeling very tired, which is as expected. To recover, I rode three to four moderate length (1½ to 2 hour) rides at low intensity (Zone 2 on a scale of 1 to 7) a week. By the end of those four weeks, I started feeling less tired so started upping the intensity of those rides from pure Zone 2 rides to rides that were about a 50:50 mixture of Zone 2 and Zone 3. Why did I make that change in particular? The answer to the question is the topic of the remainder of this post. As is shown in the graph at the top of this post, my ride speed has been dropping for the past several years and for the remainder of 2024 I am going to focus my training on trying to increase that ride speed.
What does it mean to say that "my ride speed has been dropping"? The usual way this would be determined, the way recommended by most coaches, is by riding periodic time trials, a ride on a fixed course ridden as fast as possible. I don't do that. Another way, which I would argue is every bit as good, is to do that ride not as fast as possible, but at a fixed heart rate. The name for such a ride is a MAF test, and between 2012 and 2017 I rode a total of 478 MAF tests. Once I moved to California, I was unable to ride MAF tests and eventually hit upon the idea of averaging my speed on a set of rides I refer to as the Alpine-Like rides. In theory, this is not nearly as reliable as a time trial or a MAF test, but in practice it turned out to be good enough to be useful, and the message of those 341 rides (displayed in the graph at the top of the post) is that I am getting slower. Since I move to California in 2017, my speed on these rides has gone up and down but overall, has decreased by about 1.6 miles per hour since the move. I have done this estimation in a variety of different ways, sometimes comparing average speed, sometimes comparing maximum speeds, and the overall decrease is always about 1.6 miles per hour.
Why did my speed on Alpine-Like rides decreased by 1.6 miles per hour between 2017 and 2024? There are many possible explanations. The obvious one, foreshadowed at the beginning of this post, is that it is due to the fact that I am getting older. Another explanation might start with the observation that I have not gotten slower at a slow, steady rate, but rather my speed has gone up and down. Most dramatically, my average speed increased by about 0.4 miles per hour between the middle of 2017 and the beginning of 2020, and then decreased by about 2 miles per hour thereafter (again, with ups and downs.) Perhaps I made different training decisions at different times and that it is the training decisions I have made since 2020 that are responsible for my current low speed. There are other explanations, of course, and these explanations are not, in general, mutually exclusive; poor training decisions combined with the effects of aging could have worked together to produce my current sad state. It occurred to me that deliberately focusing my training for the rest of 2024 on attempting to increase my speed on my Alpine-Like rides might have a number of benefits. First, it would give my training a focus, it would make it more fun and interesting. Second, I might learn something. To the extent my slowness is due to age, I should not be able to train my way out of it. To the extent it is due to training, then I should. Finally, if I do succeed in increasing my speed, that should benefit both my health and my ability to do more challenging rides in the future, perhaps even with my faster friends.
How would I change my training to focus it on speed? My guess is that well in excess of 90% the massive amount that is published about bicycling claims to provide answers to that question. This literature, besides being massive, is confusing, complex, and contradictory. At some point I decided to bypass all that by taking the advice of only one coach and and the coach I selected was Coach John Hughes. One of his eBooks that I use a lot is "Intensity Training for Cyclists". Hughes suggests that, to build speed, a rider like me might spend something like 20% of my training time in Zone 1, 40% in Zone 2, 30% in Zone 3, and 10% in Zone 6.
I confess that Coach Hughes was not my first stop in pursuit of speed. I first came up with a training plan on my own. It was based on my history, my intuition, and listening to my body. One additional explanation for my falling speed, and one with particular relevance to my Alpine-Like rides, is that in 2021 I deliberately slowed my speed on those rides as a response to falling performance. So the first part of my plan was to reverse that decision. It even occurred to me that my recovery might be instantaneous - I might be riding slower just because I decided to ride slower. I quickly found out that was not the case. Even when I tried my best, my speeds on my Alpine-Like rides, both my top speeds and my average speeds, were much lower than back when I first moved to California.
My second thought was that if I maintained my higher speeds on my Alpine-like rides, I could train myself back to where I had been. There were two logical flaws with that line of thinking. The first was that from the day I arrived in California, I was achieving higher speeds on my Alpine-Like rides than I am now despite having arrived with a training history that was extremely weak. I had not trained my way into those higher speeds and so I should not have to train my way back into them. The second logical flaw is that my slow training in 2021 was based on some of the most respected and widely accepted training advice in the cycling community, the value of Zone 2 training. Even to myself, increasing my speed seemed more like flailing than an upgrade.
Besides increasing the speed with which I rode my Alpine-Like rides, the other change I decided to make was to try "sprint workouts" one more time. Specifically, I decided to try adding the Tamarack Sprint back to my schedule. In retrospect, my thinking on these kinds of "brisk" or "high intensity" or "sprint" workouts was extremely naive: simply dropping a ride of random intensity into my schedule was logically questionable.
So did I throw all the above ideas out when it finally occurred to me to look at what Coaches Hughes had to say? No, but I did modify them. Either by chance or because I have internalized the ideas of Coach Hughes, the training ideas I came up with on my own were not all that inconsistent with those of Coach Hughes. The main effect of looking at Coach Hughes' recommendations was to moderate my plans, to make my changes less drastic.
One of the things I really tried to figure out this time around was the benefits that are supposed to accrue from interval training in different training zones. The Tamarack Sprint is a Zone 6 workout. Hughes is less than helpful in helping me figure out the benefits that come from Zone 6 workouts, he says somewhat cryptically that they improve "VO2 Max", but he does recommend Zone 6 workouts for riders like me, so I will keep the Tamarack Sprints in my current training plan. Besides, these rides give me an opportunity to enjoy my antique 1963 Bianchi Specialissima.
The word "speed" appears in Hughes' Intensity descriptions for two Intensities. He describes the purpose of Zone 5 workouts to "Increase Racing Speed" and the purpose of Zone 3 workouts to "Increase Cruising Speed". I'm not a racer and in any case I find it hard to do controlled Zone 5 workouts but increasing cruising speed seems like exactly what I am looking for. When I read Coach Hughes recommendations slowly and carefully I think there is more subtlety than is suggested by the above. What I think he is saying is that to increase my speed I should first do more riding in Zone 3, and then later in the Sweet Spot (an alternative Zone that is on the border of Zones 3 and 4) and only then start including workouts in Zones 4 and 5. When I say that I am riding my Alpine-Like rides faster, that translates to going from riding them almost 100% of the time in Zone 2 to some mix of Zones 2 and 3, with a little bit of Sweet Spot, Zone 4, and Zone 5 mixed in as a bonus, pretty close to what Coach Hughes recommends.
One surprising recommendation from Coach Hughes is that I should be doing more of the recovery rides on my trainer than I had planned to do. Something I struggle with is perverse incentives driven by my compulsive record keeping. Recently, my body has been quite clear in telling me not to overdo my training. What that meant is that when I choose to ride faster, I have to compensate by riding fewer minutes. However, when I project that the minutes I am going to ride in a given week may not reach the arbitrary minimum I have set for myself of 300 minutes, I am tempted to throw in an extra recovery ride just to get 30 more minutes. That logic is terrible! Every ride should have a purpose and gaming my training statistics is not a purpose. However, Coach Hughes has a recommendation for the percentage of my minutes that should be ridden as recovery rides, and the plan I had come up with on my own was well below his minimum, so I now plan to include more recovery rides in my schedule.
Another change reading Coach Hughes had on my training plans for the remainder of 2024 is to include more total minutes and more Zone 2 time in my schedule than I had planned. As noted above, my body is telling me to not overdue the total amount of my training, so if I am going to take that suggestion, I will probably need to cut back somewhere else. Thus, I am now planning fewer of the Tamarack Sprint intervals and fewer fast Alpine-Like rides that I had originally.
Some of this seems like I am giving up and just going back to what I had been doing before. That is an exaggeration. I think the characterization I made above, that I am moderating my changes, is more accurate. However, there is another point to make. If you look at the ups and the downs of my speed on the Alpine-Like rides, the trend for 2024 is quite encouraging. Thus, all things considered, while I still think it is appropriate to change the focus of my training as I am describing in this post, I now see that as a minor adjustment to a training plan that was already working fairly well rather than a major course correction. How will this work out? Stay tuned to find out.
