Alternatives to Periodization

I seem to be developing a "two in one" post style where the pictures in some of my posts tell a second story unrelated to the text, and today's post is an example of that. Today's pictures eulogize Bob Tetzlaff, one of the finest men I have known, an important figure in US bicycle racing in the 1960s, an all around good person, and an important influence on the Modesto Roadmen. The Modesto Roadmen worshiped Bob Tetzlaff and I would go out of my way to photograph him at the races we attended. In this picture, Bob Tetzlaff is the second racer from the left in a gold-colored jersey, one of his favorites.

This is the latest in my series of posts in response to the realization that my plans for randonneuring have been massively over-ambitious; I will not be ready for Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP) in 2015, and unless something unexpected happens, not ever. Using the plan I have been following, it appears that the most I can hope for is to ride one 200K brevet a year. Worse, I am extremely exhausted after that brevet, not immediately but in the weeks following, to the extent that I worry it is harmful to my health.

So what is this plan have I been following? As readers of this blog know, I have been trying different plans over the last couple of years, but all are similar because they are all based on similar plans for preparing for a century ride (100 miles) which I then adjust for the slightly longer distance (124 miles) of a 200K brevet. What all these plans have in common is a weekly long training ride that gets 10% longer each week until it reaches length 2/3 to 3/4 of the goal, 66 to 75 miles for a century or 83 to 93 miles for a 200K brevet. In both 2012 and 2013 I used these plans to prepare for a 200K brevet, the shortest of the brevet series. Both years, I attempted to complete a second 200K brevet that year, and in both years, I succeeded at the first and failed at the second, leading me to the conclusion that one 200K brevet a year is my limit. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Not liking these results and not wanting to be insane, I have resolved to try something different. But what? That is what I am currently trying to figure out.

This is Bob Tetzlaff racing in his US National Road Race Champion jersey. Besides being national champion, Bob was a member of the US Olympic cycling team in 1960 and 1968 and won a silver medal in the Pan American Games in 1963. Between being a very active and successful bicycle racer, a full time elementary school teacher, and a husband and father, he was obviously a very busy man. But he was not too busy to drive to Modesto as we were trying to organize the Modesto Roadmen to help us out and to go on a bike ride with us.

So, in reference to the title of this post, what does this have to do with periodization? I have previously discussed what I mean by periodization, and so as to avoid repeating myself more than necessary, let me, for the purposes of this post, define periodization as first building a base of fitness, next working my way up to a 90 mile training ride, then completing a brevet, and finally collapsing into exhaustion. It is to this which I am looking for an alternative.

A wonderful aspect of this blog is that, over this time, I have gotten lots of great advice from a number of different cyclists. One piece of advice on which I have yet to comment came from an anonymous poster who suggested the following:
training for a 125 mile ride you should do 50 mile rides consistantly. as in three 50 mile or longer rides a week. the old adage; you can ride 2.5 times farther than you are normaly riding
Would riding three 50 mile rides each week leave me more or less fatigued than one 90 mile ride? Even assuming it left me less fatigued, would I be as well prepared for for a 200K as I was in 2012 and 2013? Exploring this alternative seems intriguing, but for what it's worth, Joe Friel specifically advises against substituting multiple shorter rides for a single, weekly long ride. Practically speaking, between getting ready for, driving to, riding, driving back, and recovering from a 50 mile ride would take me all day. (The options for 50 mile rides starting from my door are limited, requiring the drive.) It would be hard for me to devote that much time to cycling three out of five weekdays each week. (Weekends are reserved for my wife.) For all these reasons, I have tentatively eliminated this plan as impractical. That said, what I like most about it is that it does not depend on an unsustainable leap to fitness, and I will try to incorporate that aspect into my training going forward.

We lost Bob Tetzlaff a couple of years ago. This photo is from his obituary that noted both his success as a bicycle racer but also that he was at least as well known as one of the finest elementary school teachers in his home town of Los Gatos, California, the kind of teacher that students idolize.

I have also been prowling the Internet for thoughts about periodization and the casual athlete, and came across an article entitled "Personal Trainers Shouldn't Periodize" that really resonated with me. It was written by a personal trainer whose clients were average adults who used his services to stay healthy or to lose weight; average, non-competitive folks like me. The article was written for other personal trainers to share the author's insight, that periodization simply doesn't work for people like us. The reason periodization doesn't work is that for most folks, athletics is secondary to every day life, and so carefully crafted periodization plans are interrupted by life events. This sounds like me. What this trainer came up with was a more flexible, modular approach that allowed easy adjustment when life impacts training. One example he gave was a client who had a family celebration coming up at which she admitted she planned to enjoy the food. In response, the trainer scheduled particularly demanding workouts before that event so that the overindulgence would go more towards muscle building and less towards fat. I don't see a way to use the specific modules designed by this personal trainer in my training, but I do see ways of applying his approach more generally. The generalization is that each week's training should be based on what is going on in my life at the moment as much as my long term strategy. For example, last week I was in California visiting family. I knew I was unlikely to be able to train much if at all for the six days of that visit.  In anticipation, the week before I trained harder than I would have otherwise, forgoing rest days and doing longer and faster rides. The logic is that, by doing this, my body would, to some extent, use the six day vacation to recover from my excessive training and to build rather than to lose fitness. Although it is impossible to be certain based on one experiment, I feel like this strategy worked in limiting the damage of the forced pause in my training.

In my next post, I will describe the training I have been doing the last couple of months and what conclusions I have drawn from it.

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It has been over three weeks since my last post, but I hereby resolve to stop apologizing for late posts. I started this post in a timely fashion, but sometimes I find it difficult to organize my thoughts and words to complete a post, and today's post is an example of that. Rather than apologize, I will instead use that energy to push as hard as I can to post on schedule (once a week) as often I can.

Terry Hershey Revisited

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post in which I recommended the hike and bike trail in Terry Hershey Park as one of "the crown jewels of the Houston biking infrastructure." I'm afraid I am going to have to withdraw that recommendation, not because the park or the trail has deteriorated, but because, in my opinion, cyclists have become increasingly unwelcome there. My original post referred to paths that traverse two adjacent parks, Terry Hershey Park and George Bush Park. My comments in this post apply mostly to Terry Hershey Park and only a little bit to George Bush Park; George Bush Park remains virtually as attractive to cyclists as when I originally described it.

What has changed in the last year? A number of things, some of them being changes in my perception, and some being changes to the trails. The final straw that inspired this post was the following comment on the Facebook page of Houston Critical Mass¹:

I have a tiny rant, and i wil prolly get flamed.. and that's fine.. I agree.. share the roads.. Cars need too. it's the law.. and they should do so with caution.. But i have seen more than a few times on here, other groups and in real live.. cyclsit getting pissy over the shared path at Terry Hershy and other Hike/bike paths.. That is a little hypocritical to me.. Yesterday afternoon I was at TH, broad daylight doing a causal cruise with kids.. nothing fast.. Park was packed.. It was a wonderful day... and here comes all these road cyclist riding through going 17-20 mph yelling at kids and such to move over and whatnot.. Dont be an ass.. It's a park.. for kids and families.. I use my brain.. if i want to have a nice fast ride on my roadie I won't go to a park that caters to families and kids at 3pm on a wonderful day.. If i want to haul ass i go early morning to George Bush.. You want cars to respect us on the road(and i agree).. respect the walkers/joggers, families and kids at the public parks.... End rant [] Ohh yeah.. and one "speed racer" dude yelled at my GFs 10 year old "MOVE OVER" again,. you wanna [b]e Lance armstrong don[']t go to a family par[k] at 3pm.. I don't.

Within the first day, this engendered about 30 comments, almost all agreeing with the poster, only one or two disagreeing. And this is not an anti-cycling group, this is Critical Mass, made up of some of the most vehement bicycling advocates on the planet. Regrettably, I am probably one of the "pissy cyclsit" the poster refers to, and this post details how that came to be.

I first rode the Terry Hershey/George Bush trail at the end of 2010 and it was love at first ride. A few weeks later I took my wife along and she was as enthusiastic as I was. What made these trails so attractive to us is that they are long (37 miles round trip, up to 40 miles with a few side trips) and there is no automobile traffic. Note that my wife and I are senior citizens and have health issues that make us even more fragile. Thus, the absence of cars is a big deal. The first time I rode these paths, I stopped and read the instructions on the signs that are scattered along the trails:

The rules seemed reasonable. In fact, the requirement that "Bikes & Skates Yield to Pedestrians" seemed positively attractive in that it acknowledged that bicycles were explicitly allowed on the trail. If I had been paranoid, I might have worried about the poorly defined rule "Excessive Speed Prohibited", not that, as an old man, I would expect to be one of the faster cyclists, but only because it begs the question, "What is excessive?" I will note that there is another sign (which I haven't photographed) that says something like "Speed Limit 10 MPH When Passing Pedestrians" but so long as I could bumble along at my 15 mph or so between pedestrians, that was fine with me. Besides, it was a beautiful day, why make trouble, right? Had I been paranoid, that might have caused me to similarly wonder about what exactly "Yield to Pedestrians" meant, but especially given the last rule, "Keep To the Right", it seemed obvious. The pedestrians would be keeping to the right (as would I) so as I came up behind pedestrians, if other users were coming the other way, I would wait, but when it was safe, I could pass on the left and continue on my way. I noted that common practice seemed to be to call out "On Your Left" or to ring a bell when passing so as not to startle the pedestrians, and that I did. Occasionally groups of pedestrians would take up both sides of the trail, occasionally they would be less than gracious when I called out "On Your Left", but that's life, I was following the rules, so no big deal. No big deal until one day a new group of signs appeared:

To the left is the old sign (shown at higher magnification in the previous picture). To the right (supporting my trusty Surly) is the new sign. As you can see, the new sign just repeats the second rule from the old sign,  "Bikes & Skates Yield to Pedestrians", except that it focuses exclusively on cyclists and adds a big red "WARNING" up top. So what, you might say, nothing new here, but I would beg to differ. Imagine you are a child again. Your family is going out to a fancy restaurant and, in preparation, you are admonished with a list of rules. One of these rules is "No Elbows On The Table." After you get to the restaurant, your mother looks at you and repeats, "No Elbows On The Table" with the "big red warning" being her tone of voice and facial expression. You look down, your elbows are not on the table as best you can tell. If you ever were raised by an actual mother, you understand that "nothing new here" is not the right response; you need to figure out, and quickly, what exactly you are doing that your mother equates with "elbows on the table." And thus for me and the new sign: what were cyclists (perhaps even I) doing that the government officials who have the power of signage construe as not yielding? I racked my brain with no avail so I turned for advice to what seemed to me to be the most mature and responsible of the cycling advocacy groups in Houston, "BikeHouston."

In order to feel like I had a right to seek the advice of BikeHouston as well as to support cycling, I paid for a one year membership. I knew they had a Facebook page, but wasn't sure how it was supposed to be used, so I sent an email to their "get information" email address, describing my question and asking how I might best initiate a discussion on that topic. Some days later I got an email back stating that my email had been posted to their Facebook page and comments to that post were attached to the email. The comments were scathing. Clearly I was a very rude cyclist indeed to even ask the question. I went to their Facebook page to attempt to discuss this, to figure out what I said that was wrong, and found that, not being a member of the Board of Directors of BikeHouston, I was not allowed to post there. I know, whine, whine, but I do think it is fair to point out that I never got an answer to my question; should I have wanted to reform my evil ways, I had no idea how to do so.

As I poked around on Facebook in a vain attempt to dialogue with BikeHouston, I discovered that Houston Critical Mass had a Facebook page. If there ever was a group more different that BikeHouston, the Ralph Nader of cycling advocacy, it is Critical Mass, the Ken Kesey of the same. However, I noticed the Critical Mass folks were very active and friendly, so when I came across a discussion that seemed to be on this topic, I put in my two cents which again were met with hostility. This time, I figured out where I went wrong. The point I was trying to make was that I wanted to know what these new signs meant, what the rules for using the trail were, and to advocate for rules that were fair to everyone and would allow my wife and I to continue to use this wonderful trail. Instead, I came off sounding like I was "anti-pedestrian". Because Critical Mass allowed me to post to their page, a dialogue resulted, the confusion was resolved, and I was given the opportunity to explain myself and apologize. The only problem was that after all that dialogue, I still had no answer to my question. At that point, I gave up. And there it lay until the "rant" with which I opened this post.

In the mean time, in the absence of clarification of the rules, what did I do? Besides triggering my paranoia, the new signage rallied the pedestrians who made their hostility towards cyclists (my wife and I included) ever more clear. As much as we, as elderly riders, appreciate the safety of the paths in Terry Hershey, we don't want to be hated by our neighbors, so we abandoned the park. It's not that we never ride there anymore, but we avoid it when it is busy, which is any weekend when the weather is nice This means my wife (who works) cannot use the park during ⅔ to ¾ of the year (early spring to late fall).

Interestingly, the "rant" and even moreso, the comments on the "rant", came closer to answering my original question than anything heretofore. To summarize that answer, I went through the comments and create a profile of what the cyclists of Critical Mass thought was the right way to cycle in Terry Hershey Park. Is it really appropriate to use a discussion between people on Facebook to define the rules for using a public resource? I would have said no, but in the absence of any official clarification, I feel like this is the best guidance I have about how to deal with a poorly defined yet contentious issue. With that proviso, here is what the Critical Mass suggested:

1. Ride slowly in Terry Hershey Park. (10 comments)
• Don't exceed 11 mph. (1 additional comment)
• Family/casual riding only in Terry Hershey, not constant riding at 15 mph. (1 additional comment)
2. Ride somewhere else (general category)
• Ride the trails in George Bush Park instead of the trails in Terry Hershey Park. (4 comments)
• Don't ride either the trails in Terry Hershey Park or the trails in George Bush Park. (1 comment)
• Don't ride on the trails in any of Houston's parks. (4 comments)
• Train on country roads, not in the park. (3 comments) 
3. Ride early in the day before there are crowds. (2 comments)
4. Shout "On Your Left." (1 comment)
5. Widen the path so there is room for everyone. (1 comment)
6. Don't criticize walkers no matter how much they ignore the rules. (1 comment)
7. Form a group to "deal with" problem cyclists. (1 comment)
• Yell at "asshole" cyclists. (1 additional comment)
8. Become ego-less. (1 comment)
9. Join a team. (1 comment)
10. Don't have kids. (1 comment)
11. The poster is wrong, there is no problem. (1 comment)

If I were to distill this discussion into a phrase, it would be "if you are annoying the pedestrians, then you are either riding too fast or at the wrong time." I don't agree with this sentiment, but in practical terms, that is exactly the behavior my wife and I have been driven to. In contrast to views expressed in some of the comments, moving our cycling to country roads is far from a perfect alternative. Although we ride on some country roads some of the time, between high speed limits and variable shoulders, we do not feel these are all that safe. As someone who pays plenty of taxes, I feel the government should provide infrastructure for bicycles, and the City of Houston claims to agree². Of course, funds are always limited and everybody cannot have everything they want. If a path usable for a cyclist like me through Terry Hershey Park is not in the cards, I have to accept that. That said, I am sad that my wife and I have largely lost the use of a wonderful resource, one that I would have thought could be shared.

How do I think the Terry Hershey trail could be shared, and why do I think that is appropriate? I have made my argument above as to why I think providing venues for cyclists (in addition to roads) makes sense. It is not possible in the foreseeable future that public money could be found for separate paths for pedestrians and cyclists; pedestrians and cyclists will have to share paths just as cyclists and cars will have to share roads. However, if these are truly going to be multi-use paths rather than pedestrian paths on which cyclists are occasionally tolerated, I think the rules for such paths should reflect that. Bicycles are not allowed on sidewalks and should not be allowed on some park paths; I think it makes perfect sense to reserve many such paths for casual strolling. I think that for paths that are defined as multi-use, the behavior of both cyclists and pedestrians have to be different than what cyclists would do on the road and pedestrians would do on the sidewalk. All users; walkers, walkers with strollers, walkers with pets, families with children, runners, skaters, and cyclists; should stay to the right side of the path. Dogs on the path should be trained to stay to the right (to heel). Young children on bikes should be enthusiastically welcomed, even knowing that they are slow and sometimes wobbly, but use of this path should be seen as a place to introduce children to the rules. Walking and talking in groups is a perfect use of the path so long as it is constrained to the right side. Cyclists need to accept that there will be occasions, more of them when the path is crowded, when they will come up behind a pedestrian, when it is not safe to pass, and will need to patiently ride at walking speed as long as necessary; pedestrians should never feel that they need to step off the trail to allow cyclists to pass. Once it is safe, cyclists should pass slower users with caution but slower users should expect to be passed and should behave predictably. To me, this would make perfect sense in Terry Hershey Park and would represent a good balance between competing uses of it beautiful path, currently advertised as multi-use. However, when even the riders of Critical Mass disagree with me, I have to admit defeat and mourn the loss of the Terry Hershey "multi-use" Path to cyclists like me.

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Footnotes

1) What Critical Mass is and is not is difficult to explain, but at this point in the discussion, it is probably simplest to think of it as a cycling advocacy group. A more nuanced and technically correct description of Critical Mass can be found on Wikipedia.

2. In a way, what has happened in Terry Hershey Park is a wonderful problem for the City of Houston to have, to have created a city service so popular that it is being over-subscribed. Would that it cause the city to deal proactively with the issue!

Is Periodization for Everyone?

Periodized Training as practiced by The Modesto Roadmen. 

In winter, we wore down jackets to train. In summer, we wore as little as possible. 

Actually, we practiced random training as recommended by Joe Friel.

Consider the aerobic exercise recommendations of the American College of Sports Medicine for a healthy adult: 300 minutes of exercise a week consisting of 5 days of moderate exercise, 60 minutes per day. Although there is some periodicity there, both daily (one does not exercise continuously over the course of the day but only for one hour, leaving 23 hours exercise-free) and weekly (one does not exercise for 2 days of the week), this is a pretty uniform plan. Week after week after week one does the same workout, 52 weeks a year. Contrast this to a conventional periodized training plan for a bicycle racer consisting of an annual macrocycle divided into three to eight mesocycles each of which consist of a number of weekly microcycles. Nary a week goes by that the pattern of rides doesn't change. What is the purpose for all this changing, what is the theory behind periodized training?

Before I begin I think it would be useful to explain what I mean when I use the term "periodized training." Part of the reason I feel a need to define this is a 2008 blog post by Joe Friel in which he argued that periodized training represented a broad range of very different training programs. In fact, he argued that everything except random training (which he recommended for novice riders) is a form of periodization. I would never argue about the definition of periodization with an expert like Joe Friel but I would like to use a narrower, working definition for this post. The definition I would like to use is based on the periodized training program described in Joe Friel's book, "The Cyclist's Training Bible." Very briefly, at the end of very racing season one takes a break, and then progressively trains according to a plan directed towards a few key races. Just before each race, one reduces the intensity of training as part of a phase called "taper" to reduce fatigue so as to maximize performance in that race. There is a great deal more to his plan than that, but this very brief summary will do for the purposes of this post.

As I understand it, four major factors underlie all periodized training plans:

1. When you stress your body (e.g. by completing a training ride) at first you become weaker because you are tired, but as you rest, you recover to a stronger state than when you started. (This is just the basic process of training.)
2. Although you need to leave time for recovery, you can put that off, sometimes for weeks, allowing you to train harder in the short run than you could sustain. This leaves you fatigued, which both reduces performance and which must also be paid back with future recovery.
3. If you do the same exercise for more than a few weeks, your body adapts to that exercise and as a result there is less stress and less improvement.
4. Continuous exercise (even periodized) without an annual break leads to an undesirable psychological condition known as burnout.

Point 1 is, I suspect, uncontentious. Personally, I am skeptical about Point 3, but it seems to be fairly universally accepted, so I will leave it be. My guess is that Point 4 varies a great deal from person to person but I also think that it contains enough truth that it ought to be taken seriously. For reasons I find it difficult to articulate, I suspect that Point 2 is the one that most readers will question. One reason it might engender resistance is that I don't recall ever having seen it expressed in this explicit a form. And yet, I claim it is implicit in almost all common periodized training plans. Note the following graph taken from "The Cyclist's Training Bible":

From "The Cyclist's Training Bible" by Joe Friel, page 112

As can be seen in this graph, fatigue (the grey line) builds up over the course of the season as does fitness (the red line). However, form (the yellow line), which determines your ability to perform in a race, stays constant or even drops because the harmful effect of fatigue balances the beneficial effect of fitness. To prepare for a race, the volume of training is reduced, fatigue drops, fitness drops a little, but form, the combination of fitness and fatigue that determines performance, reaches a peak. The main point I would make from this graph (based on real data from a real athlete) is that fatigue does build up over a period of weeks and months and that this can be used as part of a training plan. (One detail which I find intriguing is that very early in the season - mid January - before training has really started, fatigue is at a minimum and form is actually higher than on race day. Bike Snob comments on this phenomenon.)

I ended up adopting periodized training via a series of mistakes and corrections. When I first decided to attempt randonneuring in 2011, I was routinely riding 35 miles and attempted jumping directly to a 50 mile ride. Given how I felt during the 35 mile rides, it didn't seem like it should be much of a stretch, but it was; I did not complete that first attempt at a 50 mile ride. Early in my return to cycling, my wife had given me "The Complete Book of Long-Distance Cycling" by Edmund R. Burke and Ed Pavelka. I referred to that book and found that I should be increasing the length of my weekly long ride by no more than 10% a week. By following that formula, I was able to complete my first 200K brevet in May of 2012. However, Burke and Pavelka are less than explicit about what you do after reaching your goal, probably figuring that any idiot knew that to expect to maintain that level of fitness was impossible. Not being any idiot, that was exactly what I expected. I soon found otherwise, which stimulated more reading of the training literature and ultimately in the discovery of periodized training. Since then, I have been experimenting to find the parameters that govern my particular options vis a vis such a training plan, and it looks like it takes me over six months to recover from the preparation for and riding of a 200K brevet, by which time all increase in fitness from the previous attempt has been lost. In fact, in looking over my riding history from August of 2008 when I first resumed cycling after a 30 year hiatus until today, I made a lot of progress during the first few months, but much less since then. My endurance seems to have improved, but at the same time, my speed seems to have diminished. Has my dalliance with periodization lead me down the garden path to futility?

An alternative to periodization I have considered is to focus on sustainable fitness rather than peaks of form. Rather than grind my way up a series of long rides of 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 72, 80, and 90 miles followed by a 124 mile (200K) brevet and then a year-long collapse, maybe I should gradually increase the intensity of a constant, weekly workout, being careful to avoid anything I could not sustain pretty much indefinitely. If it is really true that any exercise plan repeated for too long stops working (Point 3, above) it might be wise to depart from a strict, linear increase, perhaps by working on speed for a period of time, and then to change my workout to focus on endurance, but all within the constraints of a constant stress load and long term sustainability. This weekly workout needn't be devoid of joy. After all, I can meet my health needs with a fairly light schedule. Anything beyond that should be for fun.

To be perfectly honest, I do not understand the theory behind a lot of the training literature I have been reading. At the risk of being arrogant, I wonder if anyone does? They need not of course, not even an expert like Joe Friel. The training plan of an expert is based on years of experience and produces excellent results, theory be damned. (Whether the experience of a Joe Friel applies to an unfit old man like me is an entirely different question, of course.) However, being a scientist by training and a human by birth, I cannot help but construct theories in my head as to how the various aspects of training work, theories which inevitably (if dangerously) lead to new training ideas. When I look at the above graph from Joe Friel's book, I wonder what happens to fatigue in a sustainable model. Is it a steady state equilibrium, the harder you train at steady state, the higher your level of fatigue? That would be a bad thing and could even lead to health risks. Alternatively, if I held my training plan constant, would fatigue decrease over time as I gained fitness? One assumes that, in either case, there would be an upper limit to what level of fitness one can sustain. Stay tuned as I continue to bumble my way towards whatever end state my tarnished karma demands.

Extreme Decoupling

A Modesto Roadmen training ride in1967.

Since the collapse of by randonneuring ambitions, ambitions which had previously defined how I cycled, any kind of training or even regular cycling program I had also collapsed. Since then I have been trying to develop a new training plan. That training plan is not an end unto itself, of course, the reasons I ride my bike are to stay healthy and to have fun; everything else is in service to those goals. The goal of my training is to provide enough exercise to stay healthy and to get me sufficiently fit to engage in as many fun rides as possible. I have gotten lots of valuable training advice from my readers for which I am very grateful, but of course I have to be the one who ultimately decides which of that advice applies to me, an old man with a badly neglected body. This post is an update on my current thoughts on reconstructing a workable training plan for my future.

Why train at all, why not just ride for fun? For that matter, what is the difference between training and riding for fun? There need be none, of course, if one is enjoying their training rides. To me, however, that "if" defines the difference; a training ride is a ride that you do if you are enjoying it or not, and that you do in a particular way (e.g. speed, distance) independent of what you might prefer. To put it another way, I very much fear that if I only rode my bike when it was fun, I would not be doing enough riding. So to answer the question, I train to make sure I ride enough to get the health benefits I am looking for and to get as fit as possible; as fit as possible because the fun rides I want to do are longer and faster than I can manage today. All of that said, it wouldn't bother me a bit if I found the required training fun.

As a starting point, I wanted my training rides to satisfy the American College for Sports Medicine's (ACSM's) recommendations for healthy adults. There are a number of different ways that could be structured (and I hope to experiment with some of those going forward) but for the moment, I am experimenting with daily MAF test rides to reach that goal. I have given a great deal of thought to MAF tests and have convinced myself that a MAF test ride qualifies as moderate exercise (equivalent to a brisk walk) and thus I should ideally be engaging in 300 minutes a week of MAF tests; a 45 minute MAF test ride almost every day. The "test" part of the MAF test, measuring and recording my average speed during the ride, is not relevant to the ACSM recommendations, but it does make the ride more fun and will, I hope, help guide my future training. On the other hand, wearing a heart rate monitor and riding at a fixed heart rate is an important part of meeting the ACSM recommendations. I use my heart rate monitor to make sure I don't ride too fast (easy for me to do) and that my MAF test rides are truly moderate intensity. (One more example of a difference between a training ride and a fun ride is that a training ride might be done while wearing a heart rate monitor whereas a fun ride probably will not.)

Let's Have Fun!

Why does recording my speed make my otherwise boring MAF tests more fun? The fairly obvious answer is because it provides a goal. As I ride, I note my speed and notice if I am having a good day or a bad day and if I am improving overall. That adds some interest to the ride and reduces the boredom by providing a goal. But that's not why I started tracking MAF test results. I started tracking MAF test results to monitor my training after reading Phillip Maffetone's "The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing". The concept in that book is that it is important to train at a relatively low speed, aerobic threshold or zone 2, to avoid overtraining, and that the success of this approach should be reflected in continuous improvement in a MAF test results. What Phillip Maffetone did not say was that the training rides should be MAF tests, which is what I am currently doing. Although both MAF tests and Maffetone's recommended training rides are ridden at the same speed, the MAF tests are 45 minutes long, whereas the training rides can be longer. My use of MAF tests as training rides satisfies ACSM's recommendations for health maintenance, but do they represent optimal training towards my second goal, maximizing fitness? To anticipate the rest of this post, almost certainly not.

One piece of advice I received on this blog was from skiffrun who said the following: "Throw all that training literature away -- it isn't written for someone 60+ years old with a fairly high resting pulse (60+), anyway." It is also not, by and large, written for a non-competitive endurance cyclists, but for racers. That said, I can't bring myself to throw it all away, I feel like there is value there, I just need to understand it and extract the bits that are relevant. Based on that belief, I turn to Joe Friel, one of the most respected authors of training books today. Friel's "The Cyclists Training Bible" does not (as far as I can find) recommend a test similar to a MAF test. Rather, Joe Friel's measure of endurance and aerobic fitness takes advantage of a poorly understood yet widely observed phenomenon called "decoupling." Ideally, heart rate during exercise should increase as effort increases. However, there are circumstances where that relationship breaks down. If one rides at constant heart rate, at first the power generated (roughly reflected in the speed you are riding) will be constant but eventually will start to decrease, a process called decoupling. Although this is a "bug" in terms of using heart rate as a measure of effort, it turns out to be a "feature" in terms of measuring endurance. Joe Friel suggests a test where you ride at aerobic threshold and record the time at which decoupling first starts to appear. You then include increasingly long aerobic threshold rides in your training until you can ride for two hours without seeing any decoupling. I'm not sure if the two hour figure is particularly relevant to me, but the phenomenon of decoupling definitely is. I first noticed decoupling about a year ago, when I first started using a heart rate monitor. Just like today, my training then consisted mostly of daily MAF test rides. Although I did not notice decoupling during the 45 minute MAF test rides, I also wore my heart rate monitor during longer rides as I added them to my schedule and then I did observe decoupling:

Data from Garmin Training Center. Red lines added by hand.

The above graphs, reflecting data downloaded from my Garmin, are from the first longer ride I included, a 30 mile ride. (A MAF test is normally 10 to 12 miles, 18 miles if you include warm up and cool down.) During this ride, I tried to keep my heart rate between 130 and 140 beats per minute (my heart rate at aerobic threshold, the same heart rate used for a MAF test.) I largely succeeded at doing that, though it did drift up a bit at the end. Because this was a ride not on a track but on a bike path, speed varied as I went up and down hills, crossed roads and stopped for traffic, etc, but seemed to vary around a relatively constant value for the first 1½ to 2 hours, but then dropped off noticeably due to decoupling. The heart rate monitor connected to my Garmin has stopped working again (details to be provided in a future post) and I have been reduced to using an inexpensive, stand-alone Polar monitor which doesn't record data and thus no longer have pretty graphs. However, this inexpensive monitor works fine for my MAF test rides and has proven to be very reliable. I used this basic monitor on a recent social ride with my wife, ridden a few weeks ago at the nadir of my fitness. It was a beautiful day, the George Bush Park/Terry Hershey Park trail is one of our favorites, so although we hadn't been riding much, we decided to go for a 37 mile ride. My wife is almost always a slower rider than I am, so the fact that we were riding together tended to keep my speed down. Even so, my heart rate drifted up over the course of the ride, and during the last few miles, ridden at a leisurely 12 miles per hour, my heart rate got up to 169 beats per minute. For perspective, this heart rate is higher than my lactate threshold heart rate (the junction between zone 4 and zone 5), a rate which, when I am fit, I only reach during during interval training (sprinting). Clearly, my heart rate at the end of that ride had nothing to do with effort but was reflecting something else entirely, something that Joe Friel claims and that my experience suggests has to do with a lack of fitness for long rides. According to Friel, the only way to correct this is long training rides. So, if I want to do fun rides longer than 20 or 30 miles, which I very much do, I will need to do include much longer rides in my training plan.

Besides decoupling, I have found that other anomalies in heart rate behavior seem to be indicative of my fitness. The first is heart rate stability. When I am fit, my heart rate increases and decreases smoothly with effort. When I am not fit, it will jump up and down, making it difficult to ride my MAF tests correctly. The second is the ability of my heart rate to recover during my cool down ride after a MAF test. When I am fit, during the 20 to 25 minute ride home from the Rice Track, I can easily get my heart rate below 110 beats per minutes, sometimes below 100 beats per minute. When I am not fit, it can be a struggle to get it below 120 beats per minute.

What I am not finding indicative of much of anything is my resting heart rate. Based on the advice of Iron Rider, I began recording a "true" resting heart rate about six months ago. By true, I mean I record my heart rate first thing in the morning while lying in bed. That heart rate varies between 55 and 70 beats per minute. I began measuring my "true" resting heart rate because Iron Rider suggested it might reflect my level of fatigue which I could then use to help plan my training. The concept is that my resting heart rate would increase as fatigue increased, and thus on days when my resting heart rate was higher, I should take it easy. It became clear very quickly that my resting heart rate did not behave in this way. However, I thought I detected a reverse pattern, that fatigue caused my resting heart rate to decrease. Because Joe Friel reports that this is one known difference between younger and older riders, such a decrease seemed plausible. However, this association has not held up either. I continue to measure my resting heart rate because I hope that a pattern will eventually emerge, but at present I can not make any use of it.

One final observation I have made is that I have found that I lose fitness very quickly, in a matter of two or three days. Joe Friel has reported that older athletes recover from exercise more slowly, and I believe I suffer from that as well. Joe Friel's advice to older athletes for dealing with slower recovery is more recovery time, but because I lose fitness so quickly, when I increase recovery time, I loose fitness. Thus, as I think about a training plan going forward, I am thinking of a "walking on eggshells" plan; one where I avoid ever getting too fatigued so I never need to allow a long time for recovery. I find that taking a day or two off a week can be beneficial, but any more than that seems to do more harm than good. In that context, I am struggling with the role of "brisk" (fast) training rides in my plan. Everyone seems to think these are helpful; Bicycling Magazine recently described them as the "secret sauce" in preparing for one's first century ride. However, when I have done them, I have not noticed much benefit. I wonder if, for me, they do more harm that good? A final issue that I will leave for a future post is what role periodization, especially on an annual scale, should play in my training. Stay tuned as I continue the quest for a training plan to get the most out of my decrepit old body.

Tour de France: The Blue Jersey

Picture modified from Wikipedia

Like many of you, I enjoy watching bicycle racing, the Tour de France in particular. I also happen to be fascinated by how sports use rules to make their events ("games", "races", etc.) more fun and/or entertaining. Two examples that immediately jump to mind are the off-sides rule in soccer (football to those of you outside the US) and the adjustment to mound height and bat and ball characteristics in baseball. As much as I enjoy watching "The Tour" in its current format, I cannot help but wonder if there are adjustments to the rules that would make it even more entertaining? Of course, tweaking is already being done every year in the form of route selection as well as the occasional rules change. More or fewer mountains or more or fewer time trials affect how the race plays out and who is more likely to win. However, I have two radical ideas for changing The Tour that lie somewhere in the twilight zone between serious and farcical. I call these two ideas The Blue Jersey and the Brevet de France.

The modern Tour de France has five awards for individual riders and one team award. The five individual awards are the Yellow Jersey (General Category abbreviated GC), The Green Jersey (Sprint), the Polka-Dot Jersey (King of the Mountains), the White Jersey (best young rider), and the Most Aggressive Rider (no jersey, but a red number). The Yellow Jersey is given to the rider with the fastest overall elapsed time. The white jersey is the same except that the winner must be 26 years of age or younger. The most aggressive rider is selected subjectively by a panel of experts. The Green and Polka-Dot jerseys are are based not on time, but on points earned by order of finish both at the end of the stage as well as arbitrary lines along the course. Of all of these jerseys, the overall winner of the Yellow Jersey is declared the winner of the Tour de France, and that is what I would like to change.

"Fabian Cancellara pictured at the 2010 Tour de France. He is the rider with the most yellow jerseys not to win the general classification overall." (Quote and Picture from Wikipedia). As far as I know, Fabian Cancellara, due to is particular mix of skills, has not been thought to be a contender to wear the Yellow Jersey at the end of the Tour. Might he have a chance to win the Blue Jersey?

How can I propose to change the Yellow Jersey? The winner of the yellow jersey is the natural and obvious overall winner. Or is he? The first running of the Tour de France on 1903 had rather different rules than those we use today; it was more like a brevet¹ and between 1906 and 1912 the overall tour winner was determined by points, like the modern green and polka-dot jerseys. In that spirit, and to attempt to shake the notion that the current rules are natural and inevitable, I would like to begin by mock-proposing a replacement for the Tour de France that I call the Brevet de France.

Brevet de France

Modern routes for The Tour are discontinuous; one day's race does not necessarily start where the previous day's finished. Contrast that to Race Across America (RAAM) which is a continuous ride from one end of the United States to the other, like a brevet except competitive. In that spirit, a simple version of the Tour de France would be like RAAM, one continuous ride around France with no separate stages, and no breaks for eating or sleeping. As with RAAM, riders would sleep as little as possible. In my opinion, this proposal illuminates the arbitrary aspects of the current yellow jersey competition. If we really want to know who can ride the perimeter of France the fastest, why not make the Tour de France do just that?

Personally, I don't like the above proposal for the same reason I am a bit uncomfortable with RAAM; I don't think determining which rider is best able to deal with sleep deprivation is interesting, humane, or healthy. Plus, I think the flexibility provided by the current discontinuous routing leads to a more interesting race. Finally, I have a slightly more serious proposal I'd like to make that accommodates such discontinuities. Instead of replacing the Tour de France with the Brevet de France, why not supplement it? Imagine an amateur event to be conducted along side the current Tour de France. It would be a brevet that followed the same route as the tour. Each rider (or each team, if it were run as a team event) would have cars to drive them from the end of one stage to the start of the next. There would have to be rules to prevent unsafe driving between stages. One obvious way to accomplish that would be to set a driving time between stages that guarantees a safe driving speed and say that the time between stages cannot be less than that. I would also, in the interest of limiting sleep deprivation, limit cycling to sunrise to sunset; this could be enforced by a GPS carried by the riders who would be picked up and transported to a sleeping facility each evening and returned to where they stopped each morning. Even given these limitations, I suspect that the riders in the Brevet de France would finish the route significantly faster than the racers in the Tour de France. Should this amateur event be an all-out race, or should it be more like Paris-Brest-Paris, where finishers are listed alphabetically? I don't know, but in either case, I think the point would be made that there is something inevitably arbitrary about the definition of the winner of the Tour de France, and thus it is perfectly reasonable to play with the rules in the interest of making it more entertaining.

The Green Jersey. Picture from Wikipedia. 

The Blue Jersey

I hope I have convinced you that the modern Tour de France is not about who can ride the the fastest the longest, but what I am not arguing that it should be about that. There is a lot I enjoy about the Tour the way it is, a collection of 21 separate races conducted over 23 days. I enjoy the contest for the yellow jersey as much as anyone, but almost as much, I enjoy the daily contest for stage winner, the contest for the green jersey winner ("best sprinter") and the most competitive rider. The white jersey awarded to the best young rider is interesting, but clearly is secondary; it speaks more to future years than the current Tour. Personally, I find the polka-dot jersey, the "King of the Mountains", a little forced. The true King of the Mountains is almost always the Yellow Jersey winner, the wearer of the polka-dot jersey is usually decided by who makes it into break aways. The Tour organizers recognize this problem and have worked to make the polka-dot jersey competition more about who is the strongest climber, and to the extent they have succeeded, I think they are increasing the confluence between the yellow and polka-dot jersey winners. In support of this contention, I note that in 2013, the winner of the King of the Mountains competition was the second place finisher overall. Although I enjoy every single day of the tour, I confess that I enjoy flat stages less than the others. The reason is that, except for occasional bad luck that eliminates a contender, such stages have little impact on the overall winner; such stages are essentially padding with little or no impact on the overall race.

In short, the current Tour de France divides into a number of unrelated contests because only the mountain stages and time trials are important for determining the overall winner. As a result, most of the stages have little impact on who wins and become almost like a half-time show in a football game. Sure, some riders are eliminated as potential winners on such days, but this is a negative thing, not a positive. I would find it more fun if not only the strong climbers were in contention for the overall winner, but where someone like Peter Sagan or even Mark Cavendish might win by being good enough in their specialty. The way I propose to do that is to change it from an elapsed time competition to a point-based competition, like the green jersey. There are a lot of options in terms of the details that could be adjusted to make the race more competitive; whether only the top places (e.g. first through tenth) received points, or whether every place counted toward the final tally. For safety reasons, riders finishing in a large group (e.g. the peleton) would probably have to be given the same number of points. However this was done, by adjusting the ratio of flat v.s. mountainous stages and the number of time trials v.s. mass start races, the organizers could put together routes that had as many riders in contention as possible. Even in this highly speculative blog post, I would not propose eliminating the current yellow jersey, the winner of my points competition would receive the blue jersey². To facilitate a transition away from the Yellow Jersey winner being considered the overall winner, I would subtitle the Blue Jersey "the new GC" and retitle the Yellow Jersey "the old GC."

The White Jersey. Picture from Wikipedia.

A potential criticism of the blue jersey is that it is very similar to the current green jersey. In the first place, I consider that a good thing in that the green jersey comes closest of any to being a counter balance to the current yellow jersey. The biggest difference between the green jersey and the blue jersey is that the green jersey includes sprint points at the middle of stages. To my mind, this causes the current green jersey to be a convolution of three different things; a point-based measure of stages won or placed, a measure of who is the fastest sprinter, and a measure of aggressiveness in that going out on breaks is a good way to pick up mid-course sprint points. The proposed Blue Jersey is an attempt to extract the measure of stages won or placed from the current Green Jersey and offer that as an alternative to the current Yellow Jersey as a determination the overall winner of the Tour de France. Determining the fastest sprinter and recognizing aggressiveness are both worthwhile, and if this post is way more popular than I expect, I will share some (fairly obvious) ideas I have along these lines about how those things could be determined.

Blue Jersey Winner, 2013

It doesn't really make sense to declare a Blue Jersey winner for 2013 because the riders were not competing for it (their strategy would likely have been different were they to) and the organizers gave it no consideration during course design. That said, just for fun, I set the following rules and looked at the impact on the order of finish:

1. Points were given for order of finish for the top 10 finishers. 50 points for first place, 40 for second, and so on, 30, 25, 22, 20, 18, 17, 16, down to 15 points for tenth place.
2. I wanted to give everyone finishing with the peleton 10 points, but that was too hard for this mock calculation, so I gave 10 points to everyone finishing within 30 seconds of the stage winner.

Using these rules, the first 10 winners of the 2013 Blue Jersey competition were as follows:

Rider	Blue Jersey Points	Blue Jersey Place	Yellow Jersey Place
FROOME Christopher	346	1	1
SAGAN Peter	330	2	79
QUINTANA ROJAS Nairo Alexander	261	3	2
RODRIGUEZ OLIVER Joaquin	239	4	3
CAVENDISH Mark	235	5	149
KWIATKOWSKI Michal	235	6	11
KITTEL Marcel	230	7	166
CONTADOR Alberto	223	8	4
KREUZIGER Roman	215	9	5
COSTA Rui Alberto	210	10	25

I did not tune my rules to get the results I wanted, I guessed at what seemed like reasonable rules, and the above is what happened. That said, I confess that I am delighted by the results. Firstly, I thought Chris Froome rode a really good Tour last year and deserved to win by any standard. The fact that he won my proposed Blue Jersey is an endorsement of it as a reasonable standard for winning.  Similarly, I am pleased that the top five Yellow Jersey contenders all ended up in the top 10 for the Blue Jersey, again a reality check that the Blue Jersey measures something relevant. Secondly, I am delighted that Peter Sagan came in second in the Blue Jersey competition. Like many people, I am a big fan of Sagan, and as I hoped, my Blue Jersey rewarded his all around cycling skills. Thirdly, I am delighted that three sprinters, Mark Cavendish and Marcel Kittel (in addition to Sagan), were elevated to the top 10. This confirms that the Blue Jersey does something interesting, it gives a whole new class of riders the hope of being a General Category winner. Finally, nobody in the top 10 seemed to me not to belong there. I hereby declare my proposal for the Blue Jersey a howling success and expect the Tour organizers to implement it, if not in 2014, certainly by 2015. In the spirit of the public good, I am not asking for any compensation from the organizers for this valuable suggestion.

Footnotes

1. The word "brevet" comes from the sport of randonneuring. Understanding that sport would be helpful for understanding this post, and the Randonneurs USA website has an excellent summary.

2. I picked blue for the jersey color because blue is a primary color which is not otherwise used to describe a rider in the Tour.

The Modesto Roadmen Website

The blog post that was due two days ago was to be a whimsical one, mock-proposing radical changes to the Tour de France. That post got delayed (hopefully by no more than a week) by my involvement in another project. Regular readers of this blog already know a lot about the Modesto Roadmen, the bicycle club I belonged to way back in the 1960's, when I was in High School. As noted in those posts, I have been back in contact with one of the other four founders of this club. Because I have more or less made it a policy on this blog not to use peoples' real names, I refer to him as "Peter". Peter has a friend who I will refer to as "J". J is a Modesto cyclist who specializes in endurance events. The three of us decided it would be fun to create a website for sharing pictures and other forms of Modesto Roadmen history, and I have spent the last few days setting that up; the current front page of that site is shown in the picture at the top of this post.

Do you wonder who J and Peter really are? The three of us who are putting up the Modesto Roadmen website, after due consideration, decided that we will use real names on that site, so go there to find out! (Clue: The code names used on this blog have the same first letter as the first names of the organizers listed on the above website.)

I hope that the Modesto Roadmen website will grow and develop for a long time. In any case, it is very minimal right now and I expect it to get a lot better over the next few weeks as I continue to upload pictures. If you are curious, the site is here:

http://www.modesto-roadmen.org/

Cycling for Fun

Me and my harmonica doing a Jonny Cash imitation on a fun ride back in '68.

I love getting comments on my blog, but sometimes they confuse me. A few weeks back, in response to a a post, in which I described my struggles with whipping my old body into some kind of useful condition, skiffrun commented:
Your goal has never seemed to be "do some rando rides," but instead has seemed to be "do training things and worry and blog about the training numbers." It seems you are getting all your "pleasure" out of the training tests. To do rando rides, you need to get the "pleasure" out of the actual RIDING and to heck with the numbers. 

The post on which skiffrun commented was the one of my posts that, for whatever reason, has generated more comments than any other. I responded to many of those comments, but not to skiffrun's. The reason I didn't is that, of all the comments, I found his the hardest to understand. I'm sure the barrier to understanding is entirely on my side of the dialogue, I suspect that any real randonneurs who happen to read skiffrun's comment thought to themselves "yup, that's how it is." However, I think I might finally be getting a sense of what skiffrun is saying. If I may attempt a paraphrase in my own words, it would be "We randonneurs really enjoy our brevets, but what you are describing is not what we do. Perhaps you would have more fun if you did it our way?"

Skiffrun is not the only commenter who seems to suggest that I am approaching randonneuring the wrong way. Implicit in some of these comments is the notion that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. For example, in response to a different post, an anonymous poster said "I think you are way overanalyzing things. Almost anybody can complete a 200 or 300k brevet--just keep the pace slow and steady, and eat way more than you think you should." Although true for many people, my problem with this generalization is that no two people are alike, what works for one may not work for another. We are not completely different one from another, that's why it makes sense to give each other advice. That said, we consist of subgroups, and advice relevant to one subgroup might miss the mark for another. For example, older cyclist (like me) have many limitations not shared by other cyclists. To further subgroup, older athletes who remained active in their sport throughout their life have more in common with each other than they do with the subgroup to which I belong, those oldsters who try to (re)join the athletic community at an old age after decades of neglecting their bodies. The peculiar characteristics of this latter subgroup may well put me outside the "almost anybody" who can complete a 300K brevet by riding slow and eating right, and skiffrun gets that. As he says later in his comment "if you end up only doing 40-milers, or 20-milers, because that is what you can do repeatedly and enjoy the ride, that will be a success!" I couldn't agree more, and the topic of this post is what fun rides might be available to me that "I can do repeatedly and enjoy the ride."

Let me start by repeating that I have enjoyed the two 200K brevets I have completed very much. However, what I have learned about myself since I restarted cycling in 2008 is that for me to complete one of these requires long, careful preparation and that riding one takes a lot out of me, such that I have to allow plenty of time (months) to recover. Is this too high a price to pay? I confess that, in my mind, that is still an open question. Arguments in favor of continuing to ride brevets to the extent I can, even as few as one 200K brevet a year, are that I find the long preparation for them fun in and of itself and that I have not found a group of riders I enjoy riding with more than randonneurs. The arguments against continuing is that they might be such a strain for me, given my genes, age, and history, that their harmful effects could outweigh their benefits, even factoring in how much fun they are. Stay tuned as I ponder this dilemma.

Modesto Roadmen, 1966, having about as much fun as we can stand.

If my only fun ride was one 200K brevet a year, that clearly wouldn't be enough. Fortunately, I also enjoy riding by myself (e.g. while preparing for a brevet) and riding with my wife on weekends, but I would still like to ride with groups more often than once a year. So what shorter group rides are available to an old man in Houston, Texas?

In the first place, 200 kilometers is not the shortest distance randonneurs ride. My club, the Houston Randonneurs, and our sister club, the Lone Star Randonneurs, run a number of 100K and 137K rides that start within driving distance of my home. What has kept me from participating in these heretofore is two things. Firstly, because I was focused on longer rides, these shorter rides conflicted with preparation for longer rides. Now that I have convinced myself that rides longer than 200K are beyond my abilities, and that even 200K represents a stretch, perhaps I should turn my attention to these shorter rides. Secondly, these rides are on weekends, and because I am retired and my wife is not, weekends tend to be reserved for activities with her. My longer brevets also took Saturdays away from my wife, but since I never managed to ride more than one brevet per year, this had not become an issue. If I do a larger number of shorter rides, it will. My wife can complete a 100K ride, so maybe we could do these together. A dream of mine is to get a tandem, which might facilitate this. The advantage these shorter rides have compared to the other kinds of rides I am considering is that they allow me to ride with the randonneurs whose company I enjoy.

In other posts to this blog, I have discussed two large group rides (hundreds to thousands of riders) I have enjoyed, the Tour of Houston and the Tour de Pink. I fully intend to repeat these two particular rides in 2014, and have my eyes open for more such rides. Riding with my adult children is always fun, and the recent large group ride I did with them in Virginia, the Back Roads Century, was special indeed. For 2014, we are looking into doing RAGBRAI as a family team, though the obligatory camping might be beyond what my wife and I can still do. Something I have looked at but so far avoided are the rides sponsored by Critical Mass and the like. In addition to their cannonical ride held the last Friday of every month, this same group of people hold several other rides each month, many spontaneous. On the one hand, they seem like relaxed and friendly rides, well within my capabilities, but long enough to be fun. On the other, these seem to be party oriented and most definitely not my demographic. What I have not enjoyed so much are typical "club" rides, either with the Houston Bicycle Club or the Stanislaus County Bicycle Club. The problem with these rides for me is that they are not usually all that long but include a lot of rest stops and are ridden at a pace I find very fast, almost like a race from rest stop to rest stop. I am well aware that these are kind of ride that the majority of road cyclists enjoy most, I just happen not to be one of them.

But life cannot be all fun and games. As I noted in my post on Cycling for Health, because cycling is my sole source of aerobic exercise, The American College of Sports Medicine wants me riding at least five days a week, those rides done at a moderate effort and averaging an hour in length. Between the perils of urban cycling and the constraints of time, there are just not that many fun rides I can do. A couple of years ago, my wife and I gave up our second car and my wife started commuting to work by bicycle. We are trying to spend as much time as we can together, so I have been riding in to work with her and then spending another 45 minutes going around and around and around the third of a mile bike track at Rice University. I do confess this is boring, but what keeps me going is the regularity of this routine. Like brushing my teeth and washing the dishes, this is something I do without thinking too much about it, and so it gets done, and hopefully as a result, I will stay healthier and perhaps even be better able to engage in fun rides.

This is my 77th blog post. My first 69 assumed that I might be able to work up to a relatively normal randonneuring career, one including an annual super brevet series and perhaps a 1200K randonnée. How to reach that goal was one of the organizing themes of this blog. Even though I always allowed for the possibility that this dream might be too ambitious for an old man like me, it was not until Blog Post 70 that I accepted that the dream was over. Perhaps what skiffrun was really telling me was that the problem all along was the whole notion of having a dream. Perhaps, instead of using my rides to reach a goal, I should have just gone out on rides and let what happened, happen. Will I change the title of this blog from "The Zombie Cyclist" to "The Nihilist Cyclist?" Stay tuned.