Winter Break

In the blog post I published at the beginning of December, I promised "I will do my best to maintain as much fitness as I can given the weather and will refocus come February 2025." I was probably a bit overconfident in picking February as the precise time when the weather would improve, it is March and the weather is still sketchy, but other than that I feel like I am more or less doing what I had promised, and I will talk more about that below. However, I want to underline what I assure you was a deliberate pessimistic tone to that promise; '... do my best ... given the weather ...'. What's that about?

The Weather

California has a very strong wet season/dry season pattern. During the last seven years, the wet season has run from some time in November or December through some time in February or March. If you look at my cycling log, the impact of this seasonal pattern is unmistakable. My goal for 2024/2025 was to reduce the impact of the rainy season on my fitness level.

Weather impacts my cycling both directly and indirectly. It impacts my cycling directly because, for safety reasons, I don't ride outdoors when the roads are wet. It impacts my cycling indirectly because I know that there will be days that rain prevents me from riding my scheduled ride making it unrealistic to try to work towards any goal that requires a fixed schedule. During the rainy season, my goals have to be both more modest and more flexible, I just try to do the best I can to somehow do enough cycling to maintain my health. This year, the schedule I came up is as follows:

• When the weather cooperates I ride my Cañada route, 17 miles, 90 to 100 minutes, three times a week and recovery rides on my trainer, 30 easy minutes, two times a week, a schedule I referred to hereafter as my Outdoor Schedule.
• If it rains once or twice during the week, sometimes I can move my rides around so I can still stick to the schedule above.
• When I can't just work around the rain, when it rains every day, for example, I ride on my indoor trainer, and therein lies a story.

My Best

I am a huge Clint Eastwood fan, and one of my favorite of his lines is "A man's got to know his limitations." As is the case for many people, a lack of willpower is responsible for much of my suboptimal behavior. I am of the belief, a belief I think most psychologists would support, that simply trying to conjure willpower out of thin air is doomed to failure. Rather, one must treat willpower as a limited resource and deploy it to best effect. I find riding on my trainer boring at best and miserable at worst. The harder I ride on the trainer, the less I can tolerate it. Thus, in the interests of preserving willpower, this year I worked to find routines I could do on my trainer that required a minimum of willpower while generating a maximum of fitness.

I originally set up my trainer for recovery rides, short rides at low intensity (Zone 1*) which have as their purpose facilitating recovery from an earlier, hard ride rather than generating fitness on their own. I was inspired to do this when I moved into the well-named Emerald Hills; those hills made low intensity rides on the road impossible. I find the trainer extremely boring so I originally assumed that recovery rides was all it was good for. This year, I decided to reconsider if I could also use that trainer as a way of dealing with bad weather. The key was not letting Best be the enemy Good. While it is true that given my limited tolerance for boredom meant that my trainer could never be a complete replacement for rides on the road, perhaps there were rides I could do on the trainer that would be better than an uncalled for recovery ride. 

I had previously found one possibility, my Gillen Interval Ride, six sprints in Zone 7. During the last few months, I have found another. While doing the riding that lead to my Counting Talk Test post, I convinced myself that a ride on my trainer in a 71" gear at 70 RPM was a legit Zone 2 ride while at the same time not being that much more unpleasant than a recovery ride at 55 RPM. Thus, on a day where I felt that a recovery ride wouldn't do, I could simply up my RPMs. To be honest, this is still not a great workout but it is much better than nothing and better than a recovery ride. Best of all, this ride is quite sustainable, I can ride it six days a week. If I am feeling especially motivated, I found I could increase the length of that ride from 30 minutes to 60 minutes, doubling the benefit. However, I confess that by the end of those 60 minutes my willpower is exhausted such that I would find it difficult to do more than one of these in a week. So, a sustainable schedule is six Zone 2 trainer rides a week, five of them 30 minutes long, one of them 60 minutes long. Hereafter, I will refer to this as my Indoor Zone 2 Schedule. By way of comparison, the Gillen Intervals take me about 45 minutes to complete and again, I can only manage one of these a week. So my final of the three schedules discussed in this post is five 30 minute trainer rides in Zone 2 and one Gillen Intervals ride, hereafter referred to as my Gillen Schedule.

Sometimes, depending on weather, I do a mix of my outdoor schedule and one one of these trainer schedules. Finally, I occasionally break out of my rut and do something altogether different, but for the remainder of this post I will focus on the three basic schedules described above, my Outdoor Schedule, my Indoor Zone 2 Schedule, and my Gillen Schedule.

Before moving on, I would like to share a thought: I am very lucky to have found outdoor cycling, which I can do most of the year, as a form of exercise I enjoy. Even on a day that I am not in the mood for a ride, a 90 minute outdoor ride is more pleasant and easier to complete than an easier (lower intensity) 30 minute ride on my trainer, and when the weather is nice and I am in a mood to ride, a 400 minute ride can be quite fun.

How Did I Do?

My goal was to do the best I could, given the weather, to cycle enough to maintain my health. Back in 2022, I blogged about cycling for health, describing routines recommended by Coach Hughes, the coach I follow, and by the Medical Community. I am not going to repeat that post, so if you are interested in the details, look there, but briefly, both recommend a Minimal Schedule and an Optimal Schedule. (Coach Hughes also recommends a Super-Optimal schedule which is well beyond my reach so I will speak of it no further.) 

My Outdoor Schedule exceeds the requirements of the Medical Community's Optimum Schedule and Coach Hughes Minimal Schedule. It does not meet Coach Hughes Optimal Schedule but it comes close, it checks all the boxes and has about 80% of the recommended minutes.

My Indoor Zone 2 Schedule exceeds the Medical Community's Minimal Schedule and has about 70% of the minutes of the Medical Community's Optimal Schedule. Coach Hughes is very prescriptive in terms of recommending a specific number of minutes at specific Intensities, but if I can be allowed to count minutes in Zone 2 as minutes in Zone 1, then this schedule meets Coach Hughes minimal schedule except for the minutes in Zone 3. In my opinion, this counts as quite close. However, it comes nowhere near Coach Hughes Optimal Schedule. Clearly, this schedule is way better than nothing and is way better than what I have done in prior years but is clearly less desirable than my Outdoor Schedule.

My Gillen Schedule is the trickiest to compare in that neither the Medical nor Coach Hughes recommendations anticipate the High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) that is central to this schedule and so I have to estimate some equivalences to make that comparison. For comparison to the Medical Schedule, I am going to use the equivalence claimed in the original Gillen et al. paper that one minute of HIIT is equivalent to 45 minutes of Moderate Intensity exercise. Using that equivalence, my Gillen Schedule easily exceeds the Medical Community's Minimal Schedule and has about 80% of the minutes of the Medical Community's Optimal Schedule making it a bit better than my Indoor Zone 2 schedule. My Gillen Schedule comes nowhere near Coach Hughes Optimal Schedule. Compared to his Minimal Schedule, the total minutes, given reasonable equivalences, is pretty close. I would say it comes about as close as my Indoor Zone 2 schedule but interestingly, deviating in the opposite direction. My Indoor Zone 2 Schedule is missing High Intensity and my Gillen Schedule is missing Low Intensity. This might suggest some mix of these two schedules could be my best compromise for maintaining my health.

In summary, doing the above analysis has left me pretty satisfied that I did a reasonable job this winter of working around both the weather and my distaste for riding on my trainer with schedules that maintain my health. How does this year compare to last year?

Compared to this same time last year, the amount of riding I have been doing has gone up but my speed has gone down. I compared December 2023/January 2024 to December 2024/January 2025. Last year I averaged 208 minutes per week of riding as compared to 291 minutes a week this year. To compare speed, I considered rides on the Cañada route where my intention was a Pace ride (Zones 2 and 3) and where I completed the ride on my Bianchi Volpe (no eAssist.) Last year, I rode 11 rides that qualified and completed them at an average speed of 10.7 miles per hour. This year, I rode 10 rides that qualified and completed them at an average speed of 10.1 miles per hour. There are a lot of ways to look at this data to try to explain away this decrease, and to be honest, I don't think my speed has really decreased by 0.6 miles per hour in just one year, but I think there is no doubt my speed has been decreasing over the last several years, and that decrease does not come from a reduction in training.  This is illustrated in the next two graphs.

The first graph illustrates the drop in my ride speed since my move to California in 2017. This is one of several analyses I have done which show my speed falling over this time period. I have posted about this before. In this analysis, I collected the highest speed on the Alpine route for each month since my move and plotted that as a function of time:

The blue points connected by the jagged line are the data. The red line is the best fit to that data. The R² value of 0.34 suggests that about 34% of the variation is my monthly maximum speed can be explained by its decrease over time and that about 66% is something else. The probability that there has been no decrease in my maximum speed over time is very low. Having said that, what has caused that correlation is open to many explanations. One obvious explanation is that for whatever reason (e.g. increasing boredom) how much I have trained has decreased over time. The next graph addresses that possibility:

Here I have plotted the total number minutes I have cycled each week since my move to California. Again, the data is in blue, the best fit line is in red. Although my training has varied a lot week to week, on average, there is no correlation of that with time. Of course, there are many ways my training could have and has changed that would not be reflected by time on the bike and I have looked for and will continue to look for changes that might be relevant, but this does suggest that my decrease in speed is not due to a change to my training. The next most obvious explanation is that my decrease in speed results from aging. Eight years is a significant length of time at my age so that certainly is a reasonable suggestion.

Whatever the cause, this decrease in my speed has been very impactful. I feel like I can no longer keep up with my friends Roger and Dave even with the help of my Orbea Gain eBike. Not being able to ride with them eliminates what had been a great source of inspiration.  In the past, the need to get ready for rides with Roger and Dave gave me the inspiration to ramp back up come spring, but absent that, what do I have to look forward to this year? Last year, I compensated for that a bit with my Birthday Ride. However, as I noted at the time, that seems like that was a one time thing rather than an ongoing source of inspiration. Coming up with a new source of inspiration, with new ways to have fun on my bicycle, is perhaps my most important cycling-related goal right now.

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* How hard I ride, e.g. how fast, can be expressed in terms of Training Zones, Zone 1 (very easy) through Zone 7 (very hard.)