The Houston Bike Club

The home page of the Houston Bike Club website

I have been on three rides with the Houston Bike Club (HBC), my wife, two. In their ride FAQ, HBC says:

The HBC has a variety of rides. The most common are the countryside rides where we ride on country roads well outside the city. We also have EZ rides which are slow paced social rides in town. There is a group named the Dirty Dozen who ride a century (100 miles) once a month. Orientation rides are for new members and beginners.

The first ride we did with the HBC, which my wife and I did together, was an "Orientation ride." We both found it very easy, too easy to be worth the long drive to get to it. I did the second HBC ride by myself, one of their "countryside rides." My plan was to ride with the slow group, to see if it might be something my wife could enjoy, but in my confusion, I ended up with the fast group, a group too fast for me. Both the good and the bad news was that a couple of the riders from that group stayed with me which got me home but also made me feel bad that I had "spoiled their ride". They were very friendly and gracious and never suggested I had done so, but I knew anyway. That experience was sufficiently discouraging that it was almost four years before we tried again. Recently, however, my wife has been more daring and enthusiastic about bicycling and suggested we give the HBC another try. So, a couple of weeks ago, we showed up in Columbia, Texas for their 37 mile Columbia to Fayetteville ride:

The HBC map handed out at the beginning of the ride.

By now, I have become fairly familiar with the roads this ride traversed. My second HBC ride was from New Ulm to Fayetteville, and covered many of the same roads. A few years back, my wife and I did a ride with our son and daughter-in-law that started in Columbus and went to Freisburg, a very similar route. Most recently, the last 200K brevet I rode included these roads exactly. Thus, I knew about the rolling hills on this course, but somehow I failed to put two and two together and consider what effect this might have on my wife.

We drove the hour from Houston to Columbus and showed up in plenty of time for the 8:30 am start. There were about 15 riders there from the HBC, about the same as the last time I rode with them. Although the average age of the riders might have been a bit younger than my wife and I, it would not be by much; we were definitely in the same demographic as the HBC riders. This time, I was quite careful to make sure we ended up with the slow group. As it turns out, the "slow group" is the wives; the husbands ride fast and long, the wives ride separately, slower and shorter. I can see how this division might arise organically and naturally, and I can see how it might work for this obviously tight-knit group, but it did make me feel a bit out of place in the slow group. That was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I was obviously there to "take care of my wife", but made me wonder how this would work out in the long term. When we discussed joining the club, my wife and I wondered if we might form the nucleus of a new, even slower group. From our charity rides, we know there is a big chunk of cyclists like us, slower than the HBC, but are unaware of any clubs that are "our speed." Could the HBC become that club by including a new subgroup? Having seen how close the group is, and how well they have worked out their logistics to suit themselves, I wonder if that is possible. So, as we headed out of town, I was very curious to see if my wife would be able to keep up.

The slow group consisted of four women from the HBC and my wife and I. Normally I council my wife to start slow; I find that starting too fast can be disproportionately tiring. Given that the goal of this ride was to determine if this was the club for us, in this case, I suggested she push herself to keep with the group. At first, she was able to do that, but with each rolling hill, she found it harder, and by the time we got to Fayetteville, the other riders were almost out of sight. Once in Fayetteville (a beautiful Texas country town, complete with an antique sale on the town green), the group did not seem inclined to hang out for long, so after a bathroom break and a chance to eat the peanut butter sandwiches we had brought with us, it was time to head back. There was no hope of keeping with the group on that return trip, we were on our own from the git-go. As the ride continued, my wife became so exhausted that I began to worry about her. As we nervously traversed the narrow and heavily travelled bridge back into Columbus, I sadly concluded that the results of this "experiment" were clear; this was not the group for us, we had to keep looking to find our club.

When we got back to where we had all parked our cars, I was surprised to see that most of the group were still packing up for the drive home. In some of their literature, there was talk of a lunch at the end of their rides. I suppose it was possible that they all went to lunch as we were dragging ourselves back into town, but that seems unlikely; as slow as we were, I doubt that there was time for a lunch between when the rest of the group got back and when we did. It seems more likely that we were not as far behind as it seemed.

On the drive home, my wife was shocked and horrified by the conclusion to which I had come, vis a vis our place in the HBC. "I had fun!" she said. "I want to do this again!" Is that possible? A flatter route would have been easier, and there are many flatter routes on the HBC calendar. The ride certainly would have been easier on a tandem, should we ever get it together to purchase one. Although I have expressed pessimism about how much my wife and I can improve our cycling speed or endurance, perhaps there is some room for improvement there as well. Perhaps it is possible.

Finally, I would like to compare the different kinds of group riding experiences we have had over the years. The first group ride in which we participated was our vacation in Maine with the bicycle tour organizers, Summer Feet. We picked their easiest ride, and found that we were among the slower riders, but certainly not the slowest, and had no difficulty completing the rides in a timely fashion. When we ride the Tour de Pink or the MS150 training rides, we are again among the slower riders but not the slowest. At the beginning of the ride, it seems that everyone is passing us, but by the end of the ride, we are passing some of those same riders who had passed us earlier. I have ridden twice with my high school bicycling buddy, Paul, in Modesto California. The second time, we rode with some of his friends from the Stanislaus County Bicycle Club. They reminded me a lot of the men of the Houston Bicycle Club. They were older (like me) but rode much faster than I do. The style of riding seemed to be a series of races from rest stop to rest stop. When I ride with the Houston Randonneurs (HR), there are often times when I cannot keep up or when I am towards the back of the group, but the style of riding is very different. The second ride I did with them, we all stayed together for the first 45 miles, and it was a most enjoyable ride with lots of friendly conversation. Towards the middle of that stretch, we happened to bump into a group from the Houston Bike Club. One of their members was quite chatty and rode along with us. At one point, he suggested we all stop together and socialize, but then his face fell. "Oh that's right" he said, "you folks never stop." To me, that is the big difference. Rather than race from rest stop to rest stop, randonneurs just roll out the miles, mile after mile, with rest stops few and far between. I strongly prefer the randonneuring style of riding, which is why I am so sad I have not been able to participate in randonneuring as much as I would like.

And then there is the bikes. On my second ride with the Houston Bike Club, one of the other riders looked at my bike and commented "That's a nice touring bike you have." (In fact, it is not a touring bike at all. It is a low end, somewhat ad-hoc randonneuse.) Although the remark was friendly, I somehow felt bad. On both country rides I have been on with the HBC, most or all of the other riders were on carbon fiber racing bikes with skinny tires and narrow-range gears that probably cost 3-5 times as much as my Surly. A close friend of mine, who also favors this kind of bike and who knows me well enough to be blunt, tells me plaintively "David, you can afford a good bike! Lift mine! Lift yours! Don't you feel the difference?" He cannot conceive that there may be reasons I have the bike that I do; that I might prefer it to one like his. The Houston Randonneurs sport a much more eclectic mix of bikes than the HBC. Again, mine is probably the least expensive out there, but on a Houston Randonneurs ride, I see plenty of frames made of steel or titanium and fewer made of carbon. Gear ranges are wide, fenders are not uncommon, nor are leather saddles, and many bikes sport relatively fat tires. The charity rides we have participated in exhibit an even broader range of bikes. On these rides, the distribution of bikes seems to be bimodal, with one group of riders on the carbon fiber racing bikes, and another group riding anything and everything from mountain bikes to cruisers to classic steel framed bikes from the 1960's, 70's, and 80's.

So what are my wife and I to do? The HBC are "Roadies" as defined by Bike Snob. I am more of a "Retrogrouch", and in this matter (and this matter only), my wife follows my lead. We will always be a little self-conscious about our bikes in this group and they will always be too fast for us. Even if we get a tandem, we could only keep up with the wives, which is fine for my wife, but makes me feel like a bit of an interloper. What about my simpatico buddies in the Houston Randonneurs? Even on a tandem, even attempting only the shortest, 200K/125 mile rides, the HR is almost certainly too much for my wife. (It might be too much for me.) Charity rides are great and I suspect they will always be part of our mix, perhaps an increasing part, but they are somewhat seasonal, quite crowded (thousands of riders compared to the 10 to 15 riders on an HBC or HR ride) and tend to use the same roads over and over. We are still playing it by ear and will just have to figure this out as we go.

The No Bluebonnet Express

My wife on the left and me on the right. This picture was taken by the ride organizers

at the end of the ride.

As the regular reader of this blog knows, I have been wondering if I should replace randonneuring with something else as my Fun Bike Ride^®. I will not get enough exercise if all I do is fun rides, my morning laps at the Rice Bike Track are a boring necessity, but I do want to get in as many fun rides as possible. Mostly, these rides are their own reward, but in addition, they provide the motivation to keep me going on my daily exercise routine. I am very glad that I participated in 200K brevets in 2012 and 2013, I found them exciting, motivating, and fun. I particularly enjoyed getting to know a few of the Texas randonneurs. I haven't officially abandoned randonneuring, and in fact I really thought I might be attempting a 200K brevet with the Houston Randonneurs this April. I was particularly looking forward to trying a different way to prepare for this ride. However, it seems unlikely I will make this attempt, and I am not sure when I might next consider another one. Some of the reasons for that decision are a concern that a 200K ride might be just a bit too much for my aged body, a sense of "been there, done that" combined with a belief that a 200K brevet is probably the maximum I can do, and the responsibility of caring for my aging Dad. All of that said, probably the biggest single thing that is preventing me from attempting a brevet this April is my wife's increasing enthusiasm for cycling. If I attempt a brevet, that is a weekend I don't ride with her. So, probably no brevet (by myself¹) in April, but two exceptionally fun rides with my wife in March; the Blue Bonnet Express, described here, and a ride with the Houston Bicycle Club which I will describe in a future post.

The Bluebonnet Express is one of the oldest bike rides in the Houston area; this year's event was the 26th running. It is organized by Houston's Northwest Cycling Club. The MS150, a charity ride supporting the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, is probably the premier cycling event on the Houston cycling calendar. The Bluebonnet express is one of a series of recommended training rides for the MS150, and so attracted 2,600 riders. The MS150 is held in April, and there are 38 training rides, one or two each weekend, starting the previous October. This cycle of training rides has taken on a life of its own, such that 4 of the "training" rides are held after the MS150! From my perspective, these training rides make excellent fun rides on their own.

The Bluebonnet Express offers routes varying from 25 to 75 miles in length. The map above shows the longer routes. We opted for the 45 mile distance. This ride takes place in the same part of Texas as the Tour de Pink; the roads in red are shared between these two rides.

So what did we think of the Bluebonnet Express? In summary, we loved it! We definitely plan to include MS150 training rides in our future schedule. In case it is not obvious, a bluebonnet is a wildflower, the state flower of Texas. The emergence of bluebonnets each spring is a big event. Many families take their annual family portrait midst the bluebonnets. When the first bluebonnets emerge depends on the weather that year and on microclimate; bluebonnets will emerge at different times in different parts of the state. Thus, when planning an annual bike ride, there is an element of chance; one cannot know of certain that the bluebonnets will be out on the day of the ride. We were hopeful, because a week or so before the ride, bluebonnets started appearing around Houston. Sadly, the ride was located in a cooler microclimate and on the day of the ride, nary a bluebonnet was to be seen. Nonetheless, the weather was just about perfect, the organizers and fellow riders were fun and friendly, and the rest stops sponsored by the Kroger grocery store chain provided welcome bathrooms, drinks, and snacks. As I have mentioned before, my wife and I are somewhat nervous riders, so the security in numbers from all the other riders along with the police support at busy intersections made the ride a lot more fun for us. We also enjoyed being introduced to some beautiful, quiet country roads that were new to us. This ride as about twice the number of participants as the Tour de Pink, the charity ride we have participated in four times before, and the difference was noticeable. There were so many riders that in spots (especially at the start) the roads were more crowded than we might have wished:

The tables offering food and drinks are hidden behind the crowd.

My wife bicycles to work, I ride in with her and do a training ride, and then each weekend we try to do one or two fun rides. In the past, most of these have used three or four standard routes, which I confess was starting to get boring. Each year, we have participated in the Tour de Pink. For my wife to be able to complete the 63 miles or that ride, we have to do some targeted training. For the Bluebonnet express, we did no training at all, deciding to go at the last minute. We were definitely tired by the end, and this was our only ride of the weekend, but our ability to complete it was never in question. The weekend after this ride, we went on a Houston Bicycle Club Ride, a very different (but also good) experience and the subject of a future post. One disadvantage of both of these rides is that it is about an hour by car to get to the start, meaning that it is more of a production to participate and that we have to get out of bed earlier than we might like. Going forward, we will have to decide on a mix of the same old/same old local rides, club rides like the Houston Bike Club ride, and charity rides like the Bluebonnet Express. I am very curious to see what we end up doing.

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1) An interesting question is if my wife and I could complete a 200K brevet on a tandem. (She probably could not complete one on a solo bike.)

To BART and Back

The Pittsburg stop of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. The BART sign (with the "ba" logo) is on the right side of the picture, a train extends from that sign to the left, and the station itself extends from the center of the picture to the left.

Goals are wonderful things, even if they are pointless. They inspire me and give me enthusiasm and energy. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the public transportation system is named BART, an acronym for Bay Area Rapid Transit. My parents' house in Brentwood is at the outer limits of the Bay Area, past the last BART stop. Bicycles are allowed on BART trains, and I had always wondered if it would be practical to bicycle from the last BART station in Pittsburg, California, to my parents' house in Brentwood. Mom is no longer with us and Dad has moved to an assisted living facility, but he still owns the house and that is where I stay when I go to California to help with his care, as I did again last week. I have previously blogged about the Sand Creek Trail and the de Anza trail, and how the closing of a gap in the de Anza trail finally allowed me to bicycle from Brentwood to Pittsburg. The branch of the trail I took did not allow me to make it all the way to the BART station but examination of maps upon my return gave me an idea for a branch that might. Last week, I was able to explore that branch, made it to the Pittsburg BART station, resulting in the 45 mile ride mapped below:

Click on map to see a larger version

So, in theory, I could bring a bicycle on the airplane, reassemble it at the Oakland Airport, take it with me on BART, getting off at the end of the line in Pittsburg, and then bicycle to Dad's house. Demonstrating the feasibility of the last leg of that plan gave me a lot of motivation and a very fun ride but it is not a plan I am likely to execute. And, having had the fun of proving the point, I have to say that the trail through Pittsburg in not very attractive. It is very urban with not much scenery, there is a lot of broken glass on the trail, it has a lot of grade crossings, and the last and probably the least of my objections is that it has a bizarre geography. I guess that part of California is highly gullied and that means that the trail contains a large number of very steep downhills immediately followed by very steep uphills. The total elevation change is not much, maybe 20 or 30 feet, but I cannot overstate the steepness. The change from downhill to uphill at the bottom is so acute that I found it difficult to execute the usual strategy of using the speed gained on the downhill to make it most of the way up the next hill, to do so felt like riding over a rather nasty pothole at the bottom. As a result, I tended to brake on the downhill, leaving me with little momentum and a brief but bitter struggle to get up the other side. Normally, I love hills, but these were no fun at all. Somehow, my photographs do a terrible job of capturing hills, but here is my best effort:

I was feeling strong on this ride, so I kept up a pretty brisk pace. That plus the 45 miles, more than I have been riding recently, left me pretty tired so I took the next day off. Even so, I was looking for a shorter (not to mention a prettier) ride the day after that, so I rode the Marsh Creek and Big Break trails, about 22 miles out and back. As I had remembered, I found it to be a much nicer ride! I did a little exploring and stopped off at Big Break Regional Shoreline, a park I had ridden by many times but never visited, and I was entranced! To quote the park's website, "Big Break Regional Shoreline is a part of the great 1150-square-mile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The water flowing past Big Break through the Sacramento and San Joaquin-the State's two greatest rivers-drains half of California and creates the largest estuarine environment on the Pacific coast." The park gets its name from a break in the levies which occurred in 1928 and which flooded a large asparagus farm, now a permanent bay off the San Joaquin river and site of this park. The nicest thing about the park is that it provides a place to experience the delta, including a pier that can be used both for fishing or for simply soaking in the delta experience:

A particularly nice feature of the park is an interactive map of the delta, made out of concrete and set into the ground. Water can be poured onto the map to show how water flows in the delta. I have added a red arrow to the following picture to indicate the location of the park; San Francisco Bay is off of the lower right corner of this picture:

I am honestly surprised that I ended up writing yet another blog post about trails near my dad's house. Upon reflection, I think the reason I did so is that finding and using these trails was neither easy, obvious, nor quick. Because I learned about these trails over many rides, they featured featured in several blog posts. A summary of what I have learned is that some trails are dramatically nicer than others, these trails can take you to unexpected places, and finding one's way on these trails is not trivial. I am pretty sure that there are people out there who would appreciate the information I have accumulated, but I am also sure that the vast majority of these people will never see this blog. Besides, a blog post is not the best format for sharing this kind of information. My subjective impressions of which trails are nicer or less nice come across fine, but what doesn't fit is a list of confusing intersections, ways around gaps, and a list of trails and where they do (and do not) go. I would have loved to have this information when I started using these trails, and I searched for it diligently but without success. It's not that there is nothing out there, but that nothing out there was quite what I was looking for. I have contributed in a small way to making this situation better by submitting corrections to the bike route information on Google Maps, but I feel like I would like to do more. This is something I plan to think about going forward. If I have any inspirations, I will share them here. Stay tuned.

Bikes I Want

This cartoon, from the bikeretrogrouch blog, illustrates a modern cyclist on the right and a "retrogrouch", a cyclist who prefers older technology, on the left. This conflict between wanting the best that the modern cycling world has to offer on the one hand yet still being in love with the cycling technology of my youth on the other, is one of the themes of this post.

Almost three years ago, I posted a description of every bicycle I have owned. I confess, however, that this is only a small fraction of the bicycles I would like to own, the topic of this post. Here is my wish-list of bikes I would like to acquire:

Trek's $370 entry level mountain bike

A Mountain Bike. So what is the deal with mountain bikes? They had yet to be invented during my first cycling career (1963-1971) so when I rejoined cycling in 2008, I didn't know what to make of them. (Coincidentally, one of the inventors of the mountain bike, Gary Fisher, was a racing companion of mine; little did I know what future lay in store for him.) So one reason I want one is just to try to understand the breed. Another reason is to get away from traffic. Some of my friends from my first cycling career have all but abandoned road biking for mountain biking for just that reason. There is a strong argument that mountain biking is safer than road biking because of the lack of cars. Finally, a "mountain" bike is not just for the mountains (which is a good thing, since there are no mountains anywhere near Houston.) In the first place, they probably should be named "trail" bikes; they are meant for riding on dirt roads and hiking paths, whatever the geography. In the second place, the same features that make mountain bikes good on dirt roads makes them good for deteriorating urban streets; the Houston Bike Club recommends mountain bikes for their urban rides.

Having said all that, it is not clear I would get much use out of a mountain bike. In a recent post, I detailed how I tend to ride the same routes over and over. If I am not interested in getting in my car and driving to more interesting routes on my road bike, what makes me think I would be willing to drive a mountain bike to the trails on which I could use it? Also, it is unclear how much additional functionality a mountain bike would give me. Part of the reason my wife and I chose our Surly Crosscheck's is their versatility; they have wider tires and are generally ruggeder than a typical road bike, making them quite satisfactory for the mean streets of Houston, and even for a good quality dirt road.

Still, maybe if I signed up for mountain biking lessons, that would give me the inspiration I would need to extend my cycling options in fun new directions.

Trek's top of the line Domane Road Bike. This is their "endurance" fast bike, used in races like Paris-Roubaix, where comfort is a factor. This bike sells for $7,600.

A Fast Bike. Isn't my Bianchi Specialissima my fast bike? Not really. It is faster than my Surly, but not as fast as a good, modern road bike. When my Bianchi was manufactured, it was as fast as any bike being ridden in the 1960 Tour de France, but bicycle technology has moved on. That said, I am in a bit of a quandary as to what it is I want to buy. A full-on carbon fiber bike, like a Trek Domane ($7,600) or a Bianchi Infinito ($4,600)? I confess to a prejudice against carbon fiber as a frame or fork material, but perhaps I need to get with the times. Neither Trek nor Bianchi publish bicycle weights so I am going to assume these bikes weigh in at the minimum weight allowed by UCI or USA Cycling, 15 lbs. Obviously, if one considers bicycle + luggage + rider, the bike weight is almost irrelevant, but there is something inspiring about picking up your bike and having it feel light as a feather.

This is Grant Pederson's all steel answer to the bikes like the Trek Domane. When comparably equipped, it sells for about the same amount of money. It weighs a few pounds more. Which of the two bikes is faster is perhaps open to debate, though conventional wisdom would probably bet on the Trek.

If I stay true to my retrogrouch tradition, I might take the advice of Grant Peterson and purchase his 18 lb all-steel Rodeo, Grant's self-titled "answer to speedy carbon road bikes" ($5,400.) Besides being not all that light, Grant has made other design decisions (e.g. fatter tires) that might not be entirely consistent with speed, or at least the perception of speed. Grant is a strong proponent of conservative design and functionality. Normally, I would be full on board with that, but because I am buying this specifically as a fast bike, his philosophy might not, in this case, be as attractive. Surly has an equivalent bike, its Pacer, but it seems that would be even heavier and certainly not any faster. There are other vendors who sell steel-framed road bikes that are so light that they come in below the 15 lb UCI limit. These are based on the latest, extremely light steel tubing, and a custom frame builder, such as Waterford Precision Cycles, can use these to build a truly fast bike with an exceptionally light frame to please even the most grouchy of the retrogrouches. Such bikes do not come cheap, however.

One fast option that used to be available is an aluminum bike. Although it is still possible to purchase fast, light road bikes with aluminum frames, as best I can tell, all now come with a carbon fork, a deal killer unless I overcome my aversion to carbon, at which point, why not go full carbon?

I confess to spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about and researching a "fast bike", but I think the fun may be more in the dreaming than the riding, at least for now. One game I am playing with myself is to say that if I can loose my 40 pounds of extra body weight, then I will reward myself with a new fast, light bike. That might be the best use of such a bike imaginable (inspiration), but will mean that I will not be buying it tomorrow.

Surly's Travelers Check is available only as a frame. I would have West End Cycles, my LBS of choice, build it up as a complete bike. The silver lumps at the top and the bottom of the frame, near the seat tube, are where the bicycle comes apart so that it can be put into a regulation-sized suitcase for air travel.

A Travel Bike. At this point, travel bikes are the most likely next purchases for my wife and I. The motivation to act now is that Surly, after a long lapse, is once again offering the "Travelers Check", a version of our beloved Surly Crosschecks, but with the S&S couplers which allow the bike to be taken apart and put into a regulation-sized suitcase for checking onto an airline flight. Financially, this almost certainly doesn't make sense. In the first place, these new bikes will have substantial overlap in function with our existing bikes. Paying back the full purchase price of these new bikes in bike shipping fees would take many more years than we have left to live. Even if we sold our existing bikes for a good price, the extra cost of the S&S couplers, the special suitcases for packing the bikes, and other necessary paraphernalia would all by itself take many years to recoup in saved shipping fees. The reason we are interested in these bikes has to do with psychological factors. I find the process of shipping a normal bike stressful, and as a result, tend to not travel as much as I would like. In addition, transporting the packed bike to the airport is awkward. I am hoping that if I could pack the bikes up myself in normal sized suitcases, the stress of travel will be less and we will travel and enjoy biking more.

A Tandem. For years, I begged my wife to consider a tandem. For years, she refused to consider it. Lately, however, she is more open to the idea. I originally wanted a tandem just because I thought they were cool, but more recently, it has occurred to both my wife and I that on a tandem, there would be rides we could do together than would not be possible if each of us were on single bikes. The reason is that I am a stronger rider and could "loan" her some of my strength, to go longer distances and to make it up steeper hills. A number of the couples who ride with my bike club, the Houston Randonneurs, ride tandems. On my last brevet, I fell in love with Co-Motion Mocha, available from a local dealer who specializes in tandems, the House of Tandems.

One issue we struggled with in selecting a tandem is how to have it configured. At one extreme, we would purchase it with S&S couplers, an internal hub gear (Rohloff), and belt drive at significantly increased cost or alternatively, a basic tandem for much less money. The advantage of the former is that it makes it possible to take our tandem on trips. The disadvantage is that it makes it much more expensive and possibly more difficult to maintain. Also, when we thought about our one guided bike tour, we realized that a key part of that trip was the ability of the guides to transport bikes on the roof of their van. Would they have been able to transport a tandem?

My wife would have to participate in the purchase of any tandem and she is very busy at work right now, so the purchase of any tandem is probably not imminent.

The picture of this randonneuse is from Chris Richards, linked to from the Boulder Bicycle Shop website

A True Randonneuse. Purchasing a bike specifically designed for randonneuring, a randonneuse, was high on my priority list a couple of years ago. However, with the growing realization of my limitations as a randonneur and with the modifications I have made to my Surly Crosscheck to make it more suitable for randonneuring, my enthusiasm for a dedicated randonneuse is waining. Nonetheless, it is still something I think about.

Picture from http://velospace.org/forums/discussion/2762/peugeot-px-10/

A 1960's Peugeot PX10. Although my Bianchi Specialissima is not my dream fast bike anymore, it still brings back wonderful memories. As I have previously blogged, a Peugeot PX10 was my bike during the peak of by first cycling career, and I miss this bike very much. I am sure my actual bike is long gone, I don't even know if I could identify it if I found it, but a similar bike from about the same era would make me very happy.

Catalogue scan from:
 http://www.creativepro.com/article/scanning-around-with-gene-getting-that-new-bike-down-the-chimney

A 1960's Schwinn Varsity. My first 10-speed was a Schwinn Continental, an upgraded version of the iconic Schwinn Varsity. I did not love that bike the way I loved my PX10, but it was an important part of my history. Besides, that era of Schwinn 10 speeds is of great historic significance and employs some very unique (if questionable) technology. In this case, I am less motivated to reclaim the actual bike I had than to own a piece of this history, and the Varsity is a more canonical representative than the Continental. Similarly, I might want to own a Super Sport from that era, a very different kind of technology employed by Schwinn for this line of bikes. (Modern day Schwinn bicycles have no connection whatsoever with the Schwinns described here. They are not even a single brand, the name is licensed by whoever whats to pay for it.)

A Replacement for my 3 Speed. My commuter bike is an old department store three speed a friend gave me when he moved. It is truly awful. The brakes don't work well. The frame is poorly made and out of alignment. The three speed hub is failing. It makes no sense to repair any of this as there is no part of this bike which works correctly. I would love to have a commuter bike that looked cheap, ugly, and useless so it is less likely to be stolen but which rides well. It would also be nice if it wasn't tremendously valuable, so that if it were stolen, it would not break my heart. There are a couple of ways I could go with this. One direction is to use this as an opportunity to add to my bicycle museum; to get something like an old Raleigh 3 speed or an old Schwinn 3 speed. Another way to go is to kill two birds with one stone, to purchase an inexpensive mountain bike which could also double as a commuter.

Picture from Bianchi's website

A Fixie. A few years ago, fixed gear bicycles (which have but a single speed and do not coast, the pedals turn all the time) were all the rage; "fixies" and hipsters went together like peas and carrots. Although this fashion has wained, fixies remain popular among serious cyclists for their many virtues. In fact, fixies are not a new thing. When I was "cycling in the 60's", fixies were recommended as good training bikes which helped improve one's rhythm; they were especially popular among racing cyclists in England. I briefly owned one in college. For all these reasons, I would love to have a fixie in my garage to ride when the mood struck me. An example of such is the Bianchi Pista, still available, still steel, still reasonably priced at $800. An interesting thought: perhaps an $800 fixie could slate my lust for an $8,000 fast bike, at least temporarily. The place I am most likely to want a fast bike is on the Rice Track, and there ain't nothing faster than a fixie on that venue!

Conclusions

The reason I was able to retire at age 62 is that I am frugal by nature. In fact, I am frugal to a fault. I hate to buy things and as a result, I even put off buying things that I really need or that would make me very happy. Thus, I do not anticipate acquiring the bikes describe above very quickly. That said, both the entry level mountain bike and the fixie described above are relatively inexpensive and quite versatile. Maybe I should get outside my comfort zone and give my LBS some business. In any case, it is fun to dream.

Bayou Extensions

A new stretch of trail along Houston's White Oak Bayou, not yet ready for cyclists.

Things are hopping in the world of Houston Cycling. About a year and a half ago, our¹ Mayor issued a Complete Streets executive order. This means that when the city plans street upgrades and repairs, the needs of pedestrians and cyclists are taken into account, not just motor vehicle users. Houston has just begun a major revision to its bicycle master plan. Houston's main bicycle advocacy organization, Bike Houston, has new leadership and has become much more active. All of this is not just talk, contruction of new cycling infrastructure is everywhere. In this post, I will discuss progress on construction affecting two of my most frequent rides, Braes Bayou and White Oak Bayou.

Braes Bayou

The third bike ride I did after I restarted cycling in 2008 was on the Braes Bayou Multi-Use trail. Until a few months ago, the trail ended at its West end at Gessner Road. The west end of that trail is now being extended. The extension past Gessner Road is a nice underpass, avoiding the necessity to deal with the heavy traffic on Gessner:

Sadly, a short distance later, there is an unfortunate grade crossing at South Braeswood Boulevard. Traffic is heavy and visibility is less than ideal, leading to a difficult crossing. I have to assume that the City of Houston was simply unable to engineer anything better. I predict that many users of this trail will choose to turn around at this point rather than risk the South Braeswood Crossing. The trail is currently closed at this point, here is a photograph showing both the grade crossing with traffic and the cable blocking further progress down the new trail:

Because I was born to be wild, and because I am curious, I fought the law by riding my bike around the barrier to explore what has been accomplished so far on the new trail. (Tracks in the mud next to the barrier suggest I am not the only Houston cyclist with anarchistic tendencies.) So far, the trail has been extended west by about a mile and a half, with apparently more to come. Among the trail features are one of the attractive, steel bridges that are becoming a common feature of Houston multi-use trails, and side paths into adjacent neighborhoods:

The main trail goes forward on the path to the left, crosses over the dark colored bridge, and continues forward in the same direction. The trails branching off to the left and coming back in the opposite direction on the other side of the bayou to the right represent access trails for the adjacent neighborhoods.

White Oak Bayou

I have previously opined that the extension to the Braes Bayou trail, described above, is a bit underwhelming, in that it adds little other than a few extra miles. The same cannot be said for the latest extension to the White Oak Bayou trail. Usually, I am not a big fan of urban rails to trails projects because they involve a lot of grade crossings, resulting in a rather interrupted riding experience. The current extension to the White Oak Bayou trail is an enormous exception to that generalization. In this case, use of an existing rail route eliminates two of the busiest crossings on the way to the White Oak Bayou trail; Shepard Drive and Durham Drive. Because these roads are so heavily traversed, overpasses were built on these roads over the railroad tracks so that passing trains would not disrupt traffic. Now that this railroad line has been abandoned, these same overpasses mean that the bike trail passes uninterrupted, under these busy streets.

I first explored the potential of this route on a ride organized by the Houston Parks Board back in 2013. At that time, the only way to cross White Oaks Bayou was over an abandon railroad bridge, made unsafe by the ravages of time and vandalism:

Being the timid person I am, I ended up walking my bike over this bridge. After determining that this bridge was unsalvageable, the City of Houston demolished it and replaced it with this attractive, modern bridge:

This trail extension is not yet complete, as noted in the photo at the top of this post. Although the trail extends the existing MKT trail by taking it across the White Oak Bayou thus connecting it to a new set of neighborhoods, it does not yet allow me to get to the current White Oak Bayou trail without crossing Shepard and Durham. The dotted line on the map below shows what remains to be completed to realize the potential of this extension:

The current White Oak Bayou trail starts at the upper left corner of the above map, and continues for a gorgeous 7.5 miles past the edge of the map. Currently, I access this trail via the red route along the top of the map, crossing Shepard and Durham best I can. The new trail extension is shown in red along the bottom of the map. The missing link is the dotted red line weaving more or less parallel to the left side of the map.

Fighting the infamously aggressive Houston drivers is something I find somewhat difficult and that my wife finds extremely difficult, and we very much appreciate being able to bicycle on Houston's traffic free multi-use trails. Thus, we eagerly await each trail extension that lets us ride on more trails and fewer streets. Thanks to the City of Houston for all the progress to date!

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1) I actually do not live in the City of Houston. I live in the City of West University Place, a small community completely contained within the City of Houston. However, my opportunities as a cyclist are affected almost entirely by Houston rather than WestU, so on this blog, I write as an Houstonian.

20,000 Miles and Counting

"You should be proud of yourself for sticking to cycling so long" my wife told me the other day. I don't, in fact, feel all that proud. I know of too many people who have done so much more; I feel like my accomplishment is only impressive when compared to my otherwise miserable record of maintaining an exercise program. What I do feel is relief that I have found something I can stick with. Recently, I passed a minor milestone: 20,000 miles of cycling since I restarted cycling six and a half years ago; I know this would not be much of a milestone for many cyclists, but it is for me. I am using this milestone as an excuse for a retrospective evaluation of how my second cycling career is working out.

When I restarted cycling in 2008, I had two reasons for doing so. The first was that I had come to realize that my health was at risk due to my inability to stick to a regular exercise plan, and I was hoping that cycling would be the solution to that problem. The second was that I remembered the joy that cycling had brought me in the past, and I hoped to reclaim that joy. In my last post, I discussed my exercise history before I restarted cycling. I detailed how I embarked on exercise programs involving swimming, weight lifting, and running, and in each case, I abandoned the effort within a year. My dirty little secret is that the same thing happened with cycling. Although I restarted cycling in August of 2008, within eight months, I had virtually stopped and did not really restart until May of 2010. Granted, there were some very powerful forces that caused me to pause my cycling. My wife became ill at the end of 2008 and was in the hospital most of January 2009, so it is perhaps not surprising that I only got in a single bike ride that month. Her treatment continued for another year and a half, a regimen of treatment sufficiently debilitating to keep her from riding. The lack of her companionship, the distraction caused by my worry for her, and the time I spent with her while she was being treated discouraged me from riding as well. In addition, my beloved Bianchi Specialissima turned out to be unreliable. The main problem was the sew-up tires, but in addition, it seems to be something of a bad luck bike. The Surly Cross Check I purchased in 2010 has turned out to be, by comparison, an extremely reliable work horse. Knowing my bike will always be ready is a tremendously powerful motivating force to keep me exercising. Having said all that, when I actually look at my cycling history, it is apparent that my wife's health and my Bianchi's reliability issues only partially explain my lapse in cycling. Sometimes, I just loose motivation.

I have ridden 21,000 miles since I restarted cycling in 2008, but less than 1,200 of those miles were ridden before May of 2010; my cycling re-start in 2008 may have been a false-start. Yes, I got my bike repaired, but it turned out to be a bike I could not rely on long term. Yes, I managed a ride or two every week, but then completely stopped riding for a year. Perhaps I really restarted cycling in 2010, a re-re-start if you will. But even since 2010, my record has been far from perfect; I have gone as long as three weeks without a ride. The difference between cycling and all the other kinds of exercise I have tried is not that I never backslide in cycling, but that when I do, I have always managed to restart. Looking at it that way, 2008 might, in fact, be the correct start date to use, and in that case, it won't be much longer before my second cycling career will be longer than my first.

So how am I doing towards meetings my goals of better health and more joy? Joy is pretty much by definition entirely subjective, which makes it both easier and harder to evaluate. It is easier, because there is no math to do. It is harder, because it is totally unclear what an evaluation consists of. What I can say is that my joy is at constant war with the four horsemen of the spudocalypse: boredom, terror, misery, and despair.

War On Joy

Boredom: The joy I felt when I test-rode an inexpensive bicycle at a bike shop back in 2008 had two sources. The first was the physical pleasure of being on a bike, the sun on my face, the wind in my hair. The second was the fun of exploring a new neighborhood, in the best way that can be done, on a bicycle. In the last six and a half years, I have ridden over 900 rides. 273 of those rides have been around and around and around the ⅓ mile Rice track. The only thing more boring than that are the 4 rides I have done on my trainer. Even so, the wind in my hair, the sense of speed, and the sound of my tires is occasionally enough to bring joy to my heart, even circling the Rice Track. I also have ridden Braes Bayou 244 times, White Oak Bayou 132 times, and through Terry Hershey/George Bush parks over 100 times. The City of Houston has 16,000 miles of roads, not to mention the country roads in the surrounding areas, why do I keep riding the same routes? In a word:

Terror: As an old man, I worry about being attacked by dogs, murdered by brigands, but most of all, crushed 'neath the wheels of the iron behemoths with whom I "share" the road. The vast majority of the 16,000 miles of Houston roads are too busy or otherwise unsafe to use, or if not, there is no safe route to get to them. I ride the same routes over and over because they are relatively safe, relatively pleasant rides close to home.

Misery: Houston's humidity makes hot weather feel hotter and cold weather feel colder. On one of my trips to California, I failed to bring warm enough cycling clothes. An unexpected cold front had come through and when I got up in the morning to ride, it was in the mid-fifties outside, much too cold for the short sleeves and shorts I had with me. Or so I thought. I decided to give it a go, and to my surprise, it was quite comfortable. In retrospect, that is because humidity is low in California, dry air does not pull the heat from your body in the same way the humid air of Houston does. As I write this, it is 37 degrees out, and rather than ride in with my wife, I will wait until later in the day when the temperatures are more reasonable before my ride. While the residents of colder climes laugh at what a wimp I am, not riding when it is a balmy 37, Houston's hot and humid Summers hold a candle to none. And then there is rain. I read in my Randonneurs USA Members Handbook that, as a Randonneur, I should set my alarm for 3 am on the coldest night of the year, turn on my sprinklers, and sit under those sprinklers to practice changing a tire. If that is true, then I am not a Randonneur. Should I be trapped in a downpour, I will usually finish the ride, but I am too much of a wuss to start a ride in the driving rain.

Despair: A running theme on this blog has been how I had dreams of becoming a successful randonneur¹, earning an R12 award, completing a brevet series, and then flying to Paris to ride PBP, and how those dreams were crushed beneath the reality of my physical limitations. When I blogged about my previous exercise attempts, I described how in each case, I improved rapidly. That seems not to be the case with cycling. Within a few months, my typical "long" ride was 30 miles and on my best days, I could average 15 mph. Today, my typical long ride is 30 miles and on a good day I average 15 mph. There is much to be said about that, and I will say it in a future blog post, but the bottom line is that I have not felt like I have improved as quickly or as much as I expected, and that takes the wind out of my sails.

Joy: I don't know if it is apparent, but I did a lot of number crunching in preparation for this post. I was horrified but not really surprised at how often I had ridden the same old routes. What was a surprise is how many rides I had done that I had never done before, the kind of exploration that brings me joy. If you had asked me, I would have said there were 5 or 10 such rides. In fact, there have been 40; the back roads of Virginia, the river delta of California, the island paths of Martha's Vineyard, the Maine Coast. In the next section of this post, I am going to discuss how successful my more than 850 pure training rides have been at keeping me healthy. But besides keeping my healthy, they have kept me in shape so that when the opportunity for an exciting new ride comes along, I am ready.

Health and Fitness

There are more theories of exercise than there are athletes creating them. The good news is that, as best I can tell, there is a wide range of activities and training plans that adequately meet the requirements for healthy living. I have read the recommendations of the US Government, of the American College of Sports Medicine, and on the web pages from a variety of medical organizations, and fortunately, there is a consensus. For health purposes, exercise can be divided into three intensities; Light, Moderate, and Vigorous. Moderate Exercise is the equivalent of a brisk walk. Light exercise is less than that, perhaps a slow stroll. Vigorous Exercise is the equivalent of running. The recommendation is that everyone should get a minimum of 150 minutes a week of Moderate Exercise or 75 minutes a week of Vigorous Exercise or any combination of the two. (It is unknown if light exercise has health benefits.) Ideally, one should get 300 minutes of Moderate Exercise or 150 minutes a week of Vigorous Exercise a week. That exercise should be distributed over the week; cramming your 300 minutes of exercise into the weekend provides fewer health benefits than distributing it over the week (see below).

For purposes of this post, I made some conservative assumptions to simplify analysis of the cycling data I have been collecting since 2008. First, I assume that all the bicycling I do is moderate exercise, even though some of it is clearly vigorous. Second, because I track miles I ride, not time, I assumed an average speed of 13 miles per hour to convert miles to minutes. Over the past year (52 weeks), I have exceeded 300 minutes of exercise for 41 weeks and 150 minutes for 8 weeks; I have met or exceeded the minimum aerobic exercise guidelines 94% of the time. All of this occurred during a period of discouragement with regards to my career as a randonneur and in a year where I made 4 trips to California and spent 6 weeks there helping my ailing father. Since 2008, I have averaged 283 minutes a week of aerobic exercise, an average that includes approximately one year in which I did almost no riding. Since my re-re-start of cycling in 2010, I have averaged 362 minutes a week. Since beginning randonneuring in 2012, I have averaged 441 minutes a week. I think cycling is providing me with enough aerobic exercise for health.

How about the distribution of that exercise? I have already discussed that in terms of the percentage of weeks I met the guidelines, but how about days per week? Am I a weekend warrior, or do I properly distribute my exercise? That depends on when I look:

Before I retired, I was a classic weekend warrior; most weeks I rode on the weekends, but not during the week. Once I retired, I rode almost every day, most commonly 4 or 5 days a week. In retrospect, while I was working, I should have found some way to commute to work by bicycle. A 2004 study found that getting enough exercise, but getting it all on the weekend, provides some benefits to some people, but spreading that same exercise out over the week provides more benefits and provides benefits to all groups studied.

Randonneuring

Developing a training program to allow me to continue as a randonneur is clearly a work in progress, a work that I have discussed ad nauseum on this blog. I just want to discuss one statistic in this post. My Randonneurs USA Members Handbook says that I should be riding at least 5000 miles per year to prepare for randonneuring. As part of my compulsive record keeping, I keep a running average as to how many miles I have ridden during the previous 12 months. At present, that average is at 4636 miles, less than the desired 5000 but perhaps understandable given that I have not been preparing for a brevet during that time. At the peak of my brevet training, I hit 5572 miles from August 2012 through July 2013. At the time I rode my first 200K brevet in May of 2012, I had accumulated a mere 3522 miles during the previous year. Since starting randonneuring in 2012, I have averaged 4967 miles per year, not quite there but pretty darn close.

Conclusions

Preparing this post has been a very motivating experience. I have a dour personality and so, before I prepared this post, my overall impression was of a cycling career full of lapses and setbacks. However, when I crunched the numbers, I feel like I am doing pretty well. Pulling together this post also helped me remember and clarify why I am doing what I am doing; it is easier to drag myself over to the Rice Track for yet another ride when I remember that I am doing that to stay healthy and to be ready for a fun ride when one becomes available. Although I was pleasantly surprised by the number of fun rides I have taken, I feel like that is a number I should try to increase. How I propose to do that will be topics of future posts; stay tuned.

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1) Randonneur, randonneuse, brevet, R12 award, and PBP are all terms having to do with the sport of randonneuring. I have posted extensively on this in the past, and there is an excellent summary of that sport on the RUSA website.

A Rake's Progress

"A Rake's Progress" is the title of a series of 8 paintings (and 8 parallel engravings) by William Hogarth chronicling the fall of a young man. It begins with the first painting, depicting his inheritance of his father's fortune, and ends with the eighth picture, shown above, where he has lost everything and is confined to the Bedlam insane asylum. This series provides the title for this post, which chronicles my fall from fitness until I restarted cycling in 2008.

Perhaps I overestimate the importance of aerobic exercise, activities like running or cycling, for a healthy lifestyle. Other important factors include not smoking, moderating alcohol consumption, stress reduction, healthy eating, weight control, and regular medical care to name the most obvious. My personal healthy living scorecard is mixed; I have never smoked but I am 40 pounds overweight, for example. Even just considering exercise, aerobic exercise is supposed to be only one part of a plan that also includes strength training, flexibility training, and for a man my age, exercises to maintain balance. The press¹ loves to print alarmist headlines (that's what sells ads after all) and there is one headline that has been popping up recently stating that 80% of Americans fail to meet the minimal standards of exercise set by the US Government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It is always a good idea to go past the headline and read the entire article, identify the source for that article, confirm that the source is reputable, and even read the original source to make sure the press quoted it correctly. That is what I did when I encountered the "80% of Americans don't exercise" article, and the source is a study by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). What that study consisted of was to ask people about their activities in pursuit of two parts of the HHS exercise goals, aerobic exercise and strength training. It turns out that, as the headline reported, only 20% of people surveyed reported that they had met the minimum requirements for both, but that was mostly a deficiency in strength training; 29% of those surveyed met the strength guideline, 52% met the aerobic guideline, and 20% met both.

What are these guidelines from the HHS that we, as Americans, are not meeting? In the first place, the guidelines are considered a minimum; people are encouraged to go beyond them. Secondly, the minimum guidelines call for 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise (e.g. brisk walking) and two sessions of strength building exercises per week. I said at the start of this post that I may overestimate the importance of the aerobic part of this, but perhaps not. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that HHS agrees with me that the aerobic component provides more of a health benefit than do the other components, so perhaps my focus on aerobic exercise is not misguided. In this post, I will focus on the decisions and circumstances led me to become one of the 48% of Americans who fail to do enough aerobic exercise; a decades long journey from being an active cyclist to a couch potato. In a future post, I will provide an overview of my return to grace as an active cyclist in 2008.

Thinking back on my golden age of my cycling, when I was in High School and College, my cycling may not have been as perfect a source of healthy exercise as my rosy memories might suggest. Although it is likely that I significantly exceeded the minimum average of 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, a single weekend ride often exceeded 400 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity, the problem was that this exercise was not evenly distributed over the week. That said, I did bicycle to school every day, and between that and the major weekend activities, this was probably enough to keep me healthy. Although I have no records to back me up, I suspect I rode fewer miles in college than I did in high school, though I did go on regular training rides with the Berkeley Wheelmen and I suspect that, even in college, I got enough aerobic exercise for health.

Graduate School was much harder than undergraduate; finding time for regular exercise became more of a challenge, a challenge I did not meet. I have no records of any exercise I did while in grad school, I don't even remember if I walked, biked, or drove to school. I did go for the occasional bike ride, especially when I started dating my future wife, but I doubt it was enough to meet the minimum guidelines for aerobic exercise. Things got a bit better during my four years of postdoctoral training as I biked to work, but then collapsed completely when my wife and I got real jobs, moved to the suburbs, bought a house, and had our first child. Work was too far to bike and there were the logistics of day care, so for over 25 years, I did virtually no aerobic exercise.

In 1993, changing interests caused me to leave academic science to form a one man consultancy focused on bioinformatics, the use of computers to advance medical research. The increased flexibility that came from being my own boss should have allowed me to begin a regular exercise program, but somehow it didn't, a couch potato I remained.

In 1991, my older son joined Boy Scouts. At first, this had little impact on my (lack of) exercise, but as he got older, he became increasingly frustrated with the activities of his troop, finding them an inadequate challenge. When I asked the other, more experienced parents about that, I found that high adventure camps were available for older scouts, but that adult volunteers were necessary to make that happen, so in 1996 (at age 47), I volunteered to help lead a backpacking trip in the famous Philmont High Adventure Camp. I was appropriately apprehensive about a major backpacking trip after 25 years of sloth, so my son and I began a regimen of morning runs which, when supplemented by the weekly exercises organized by the trip leader, got me into good enough shape that I had no difficulty on the the trip.

In 1999 (at age 50), while vacationing in Canada, my older son and I borrowed mountain bikes from the lodge where we were staying and hit the trails. I was utterly embarrassed, I was not at all able to keep up with my 16 year old son, my legs gave out on me in minutes. I think the difference between my success in 1996 and my failure in 1999 was the difference in preparation; I prepared extensively for the 1996 backpacking trip, but then returned to life as a couch potato so was utterly unprepared for a mountain biking adventure.

By 2001, my former academic home had finally discovered the value of bioinformatics, and I returned, first as a consultant, but then as a faculty member. I worked under a fierce taskmaster who made sure that I had no free time; there was little opportunity for exercise. In 2003 (at age 54), my younger son wanted to attend a Boy Scout high adventure camp in California, and again I volunteered. Having been so successful in 1996 and under intense pressure at work, my preparation was much less than in 1996. I was also 30 pounds heavier, and I struggled to complete the trip. That should have been my wakeup call, but rather than rise to the challenge, I fell into despair. In 2004, my work situation changed such that I potentially had more time for exercise. In 2005 (at age 56), I was volunteered for a second high adventure camp, one which promised to be more challenging than the previous two, and I took it very seriously. Because this was a sea-based adventure, my exercise plan involved mostly swimming. I dramatically improved my fitness as evidenced by performance improvement during training, but was still woefully underprepared for the trip despite having made an heroic effort to prepare. Whereas some of my previous failures could be blamed on lack of preparation, this one had to be blamed on age and/or obesity. When I got back, I was determined to not return to my slothful ways, but found that swimming was a difficult form of exercise to maintain. Also, I had found that my major deficiency on the trip had been upper body strength, strength training had become all the rage, so I took up weight lifting. I kept this up for about a year, and my strength improved dramatically over that time, but it was always a chore, never a joy, and so gradually, I would skip a day, skip a week, and then found I wasn't lifting weights anymore. I then picked up a wonderful book entitled Daniels' Running Formula by Jack Daniels and took up running. I enjoyed running a lot more than weight lifting (I think I am an endurance athlete by temperament) and again, improved rapidly, but in this case, experienced over-training for the first time in my life. I had been gradually increasing the lengths of my runs. I managed a six mile run, and felt like I had a marathon in sight! However, the next week, I felt dramatically worse and had to turn back on my attempt to simply repeat those six miles. In retrospect, this was the result of over-training; my body needed time to recover after my push to work up to a six mile run, and I had not given it that time. The discouragement of the setback along with the essential tedium of running resulted in my abandoning yet another training plan.

So why did I not try cycling, the aerobic exercise of choice from my youth? A major barrier to my resumption of cycling was the lack of a working bicycle. After decades of hanging in my garage, none of my bikes were ridable. I had always maintained my own bikes, but was way out of practice, had lost any connection with a source of repair parts, and there was so much to do, that bringing my bikes back to rideability just wasn't getting done. I checked out a local bike shop and they encouraged me to consider purchasing a new bike rather than trying to repair my obsolete old bikes. They had me test ride one of their bottom of the line bikes, a hybrid that sold for under $400. I was entranced! Just exploring the neighborhood around the shop brought back all the transcendent joy of riding a bicycle. In the end, I opted to have my decrepit Bianchi Specialissima repaired rather than purchase a new bike and I was on the road again!

So, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. This post contains a lot of words about me, what's the point? The point is that Joe Friel, my favorite bicycle training author, just released a new book for older cyclists entitled Fast After 50: How to Race Strong for the Rest of Your Life. I haven't decided yet if I will be purchasing it, but if I don't, it will be because it isn't about people like me; Joe's latest book is about 1) older athletes who have 2) remained fit their entire lives and who 3) have the genes to be competitive amateur bicycle racers. Although I qualify for the first, I don't for the second and third. I have been posting to this blog for almost three years now, over 100 posts, and in my second post I said:

Everyone is different, of course, and we are each different people at the different times in our lives. In my research, I read many stories of cyclists who "never train" but ride 1200 km brevets with ease. I think I might have been one of those people, even into my 40s. However, I am not now one of those people, and you might not be either. I hope some of the things I found in my experimentation will encourage you to find something as enjoyable and as effective for you as this return to cycling has been for me.

I see this blog as a place for me to talk about one particular cyclist who happens to be me who is a representative of what is, in my opinion, an under-documented class: people with an average set of genes, not destined to be successful bicycle racers, who have neglected their fitness for much of their lives but who, at an older age, decide to improve their health by taking up cycling. Does this describe you? If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences!

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1) Like most people these days, I get most of my news online. Thus, for press read not just newspapers and magazines but the rich variety of sources on the Internet as well, and for headline, etc. read the equivalent parts of these online resources.