Consistency

This post is closely related to last month's post; it might be seen as its mirror image. Thus, I deliberately decided to use exactly the same image at the top of the post, a snapshot of my weekly training record. Last month, I focused on the third from the right column, labelled 'mi/yr'. This month, I am going to focus on the sixth from the right column, labelled 'Weekly Min.'

There's making the plan. And then there is sticking to the plan. On this blog I have mostly talked about making the plan. That makes sense, there is a lot to be said about the different possible plans, which one I should pick, how to customize the plan I pick to fit my particular needs, etc., whereas it would seem that the only thing that can be said about sticking to the plan is yes, I should do that. However, in this post, I am going to say a bit more. The fact of the matter is that sometimes I am better at sticking to whatever plan I have, and sometimes I am worse. Why is that? Is there anything I can do about it?

Depending on what I am trying to accomplish with my cycling, I have different plans at different times. However, whatever specific plan I am following, it is on top of the plan prescribed  by the medical community, that I should engage in 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity (e.g. bicycling) per week. The longest I have consistently ridden 300 or more minutes a week is 67 weeks in a row. That run started the week of April 8, 2019. As it happened, those 67 weeks were also my most successful cycling period (e.g. highest average speed on my standard rides) since moving to California. As of the moment of this writing, I rode 300 miles or more for 25 weeks in a row, and then last week, failed to do so, ending my run.

My pattern of runs and fails over a 23 week period is shown in the figure at the top of this page. The sixth column from the left, under the heading "Weekly Min.", is how many minutes of riding I completed each week. These are color coded in yellow for those weeks were I met the goal of 300 or more minutes a week of riding, in green where I met the medical communities lesser goal of 150 to 299 minutes a week, and white where I failed to meet even that lesser goal. Over these 23 weeks, I failed to meet the 300 minute goal for the first week, had a two week run of successes followed by two weeks of failure followed by three weeks of successes followed by one week of failure, followed by a long run extending to the bottom of the figure, that being the 25 week run referred to above.

How much does it matter if I fail to reach 300 miles for one week? My best guess is not at all, it might even be beneficial to take a week off now and then. The coach whose advice I follow, Coach John Hughes, recommends doing just that. Why, then, am I pushing these long, continuous runs? The value of these runs is psychological rather than physiological. Once I miss a week, the spell is broken and I am more likely to miss future weeks, more weeks than Coach Hughes would consider wise. I think that if I had a plan for taking off a week now and then this might not be true, but I don't. For me, it has always been either an unnecessarily strict adherence to a 300 minute minimum or long periods of suboptimal cycling.

What causes me to break a run, to fail to reach 300 minutes of cycling for a week? There is a long list of reasons. Here are a few of the most common ones:

1. Illness.
2. Conflicts (e.g. out of town trips.)
3. Rain.
4. Feeling tired.
5. Feeling discouraged.
6. Not feeling the joy of cycling that week.

I tried to arrange these causes from the most to the least justified: 

1. I absolutely should not be cycling when I am ill. 
2. I can try to work around conflicts, but if I am out of town with no access to a bicycle for a week, there is no room for rearrangement. 
3. I feel no shame for not going outside for a bike ride when it is raining, I am much too old to risk falling on slippery roads. In that case, I can ride indoors on my trainer but I have previously confessed, because I find the trainer so boring, there is only so far I can use my willpower to push me to complete long trainer rides (though I will have more to say about that below.) 
4. ...and...
5. Being tired can be good reason for skipping a ride or even a week of riding. However, I have found that being tired and feeling tired are not always the same thing. Similarly, feeling discouraged can feel like being tired and being tired can feel like being discouraged. The way I deal with this confusion is when I am unsure, to start a ride that has options for returning early. When I am feeling tired but I am not actually tired, usually I start feeling better after a few minutes on the road.
6. What kind of pathetic reason for not cycling is "not feeling the joy"? Pathetic it may be, but if it keeps me from riding, I have to deal with it. To do that, I have been varying where I ride and varying the bikes I ride. This helped a lot at first, but over the past year, this novelty has worn off a bit and I am afraid I am going to come up with something new to keep motivated.

Normally, I try to post on the first day of the month or shortly thereafter. This post is going up near the end of the month. This is another symptom of the same demotivation that is affecting my cycling. Is this the end to my blogging? To my cycling? I definitely plan to have a post devoted to those topics! However, as a possible step in that direction, this will be my blog post for both October and November, I am skipping one of my monthly blog posts. Peace.