Metric Century Progress Report

The Joy of a Group Ride
(The Great Western Bike Rally, 1968)

My first group ride after moving to California was the 2018 Art of Survival which I rode with my high school riding buddy, Roger. Back in 2016, at the Modesto Roadmen 50th Reunion, Roger urged me to ride Eroica California with him. I couldn't join him in 2017 because I was caring for my sick wife. When, in 2018, I again couldn't go with him, this time because I had pneumonia, Roger suggested the Art of Survival as another ride we could do together, and I managed to make that one. That event offered rides of various lengths, and Roger and I decided to ride the "metric century", a ride 100 kilometers (62 miles) long. The Art of Survival is held near to where Roger lives, a seven hour drive from where I live, so I spent both the night before and the night after this ride with Roger and his wife Janet and we had lots of time to talk about many things, one of which was Roger's plan to ride a metric century a month. I was very excited by Roger's plan, and decided that I, too, should try to do that, a plan I announced on this blog the following August.

Precisely what were Roger and I planning? Subsequent history indicates that Roger had a well thought out plan but I confess that my adoption of Roger's plan was an impulsive response to his enthusiasm and thus not carefully thought out. I think the reason I got excited is that I had really enjoyed the ride we had just done and wanted to keep doing rides like that. Upon reflection, there were two attractions of the Art of Survival ride that made me I want to do something similar on a regular basis: the social aspect and the challenge; I had found the ride hard but doable. Unlike the 200 kilometer rides I was doing five years ago, I hoped that I could do 100 kilometer rides without the months of preparation the 200 kilometer rides required, that they would not leave me so tired that it would be a year before I could do another one, and that I could do them on the hilly roads of California. And I also wanted to ride with Roger and with large groups of other cyclists.

When I got home, I started looking for more group metric centuries and built up a list of almost 100. The sources I used to assemble this list were the California Bike Ride Calendar and California Bike Rides. I took me some time to assemble this list, my babysitting responsibilities increased with the birth of my second grandchild, and as I worked my way through the list, I found that, for a variety of reasons (too expensive, too hard, ...) not all of them were rides I wanted to do. In fact, the first one I decided to try was The Golden Hills metric century in October. I mentioned it to Roger, he was interested, so we rode it together and had a great time. I also found that these group rides are not evenly distributed throughout the year. There were 17 rides in October, 1 in November, 0 in December, 0 in January, 1 in February,  and 2 in March, so all of a sudden, I was staring at April and Eroica California. The good news was that this year I finally made it to Eroica. The bad news is that the ride I chose was not a metric century. Why? Because the shortest ride at Eroica which qualified as a metric century was just too hard for me.

What made this ride "too hard?" As a general point, it is extremely difficult to come up with a route for a ride which is exactly 100 kilometers (62 miles) long, so a typical metric century is at least 100 kilometers long. Thus, at a given event, the shortest ride over 100 kilometers can be significantly longer than that. The shortest ride at Eroica was 33 miles long. The next shortest ride was 74 miles, more than the 62 miles of a metric century. But the problem with this ride was not so much the 12 extra miles as it was the hills. My 33 mile long ride included 1,400 feet of climbing. The metric centuries I have ridden have had about 2,000 feet of climbing. The 74 mile ride had 5,700 feet of climbing.

How much climbing is too much? During the 2019 season, I learned that I can ride 65 miles, I can climb 4,500 feet, but I probably can't do both on the same ride. The two metric centuries I rode were rated as "easy", but I still found them to be about as much as I wanted to do. They were each about 65 miles long and each had about 2,000 feet of climbing. In July of 2019, I rode a one pass version of The Death Ride which was 49 miles long with 4,500 feet of climbing, and I felt like that is was absolutely the hardest ride I can complete. One rule of thumb I have come across is that in terms of difficulty, is that 100 feet of climbing is equivalent to 1 mile of distance. If we add feet of climbing divided by 100 to distance to get a difficulty score, then the two metric centuries I rode each had scores of 85 and The Death Ride had a score of 94. Based on how hard I found the rides, that feels about right to me. The ride I did at Eroica had a difficulty score of 42, easier than I might have ideally chosen, but the next longer ride had a score of 130, more than I think I should attempt.

Another factor that affects ride difficulty is how fast the ride is ridden, not in absolute terms like miles per hour which is affected by things like how much climbing there is in the ride, but in relative terms, how hard I push during the ride. Consider my Go-To Alpine ride, 23 miles long with 1,300 feet of climbing which I have ridden approximately 100 times over the last two years. The fastest I have ever completed it is in 1 hour 44 minutes, the slowest, 2 hours 9 minutes. The fastest ride left me a lot more tired than the slowest. Despite my out of control compulsion for analysis and metrics, this is not an attempt to add one more parameter to my difficulty score but to recognize that such a score has its limits. This is just one example, there are many more factors that affect ride difficulty (e.g. choice of bike) but length and amount of climbing is where I stop.

At the top of this post, I noted that one of my major reasons for wanting to ride a metric century a month was because they provide opportunities to ride with my friend Roger. But even on my first ride with him, the 2018 Art of Survival, I realized he is a much stronger rider than I am. In contrast, he and his brother-in-law Dave, who ride together a lot, are similar in ability. For Eroica 2019, Roger and Dave did the 74 mile ride, while I did the 33 mile ride. For Golden Hills 2019, they did a full century (101 miles) while I did the metric (65 miles). Roger and Dave completed metric centuries each month from April through October of 2019, and they invited me along on all of them. In the end, I did Eroica, Art of Survival, and Golden Hills with them (albeit over easier routes in some cases.) Many of their other rides were too much for me, having up to 7,000 feet of climbing. As we were leaving Golden Hills this year to make our separate ways home, we shouted out "See you at Eroica!" I hope so, and I hope we see each other at Art of Survival and Golden Hills as well. That said, the reality is that they will want to do rides that are beyond my strength. As much as I would like to join their team, I don't qualify. What, then, should I do going forward? I don't need to ride metric centuries for my health, I can satisfy that need with much less riding, so I should do what is fun, and I think the social aspect more than the challenge might be the key to that. Right now, I am looking at the ride schedule of one of the local bike clubs, the Western Wheelers. Maybe riding with them is just what I am looking for.

Training

Wait, what, all of those posts on training for a metric century, that was all for nothing? Not at all! Even if I add no metric centuries to my schedule in 2020 beyond what I rode in 2019, I still need to get in shape for The Art of Survival in May and The Golden Hills in October. I have come up with two different approaches to being in shape for a metric century. The first is used when I have not ridden a metric century the previous month. It is the plan I used to prepare for the 2019 Golden Hills metric century. If I am routinely riding a 34 mile ride each week (which I am currently doing) it takes me 4 weeks to get ready for a metric century. The second training plan is to be used when I want to ride metric centuries two or more months in a row. Again, assuming I stick with my schedule of riding a 34 mile ride each week, then that is all the preparation I need. The only problem was that I had never tested that second plan, I had never ridden a metric century two or more months in a row. When I got home from Golden Hills in October, I executed my "metric century a month" training plans over the next 4 weeks and in November, I rode a solo 100 kilometer ride on local roads, and it went fine. I was tired at the end, but not overly so. A solo ride lacks the social aspect of the Metric Century a Month plan and is not a substitute for that, this was just a test, but a test I passed. Thus, the training plans I have blogged so much about should allow me to ride Group Metric Centuries whenever I want.

Bay Trail

Cover of the box containing the maps of the San Francisco Bay Trail

The San Francisco Bay Trail is a work in progress which has as its goal a Hike and Bike trail running completely around the San Francisco Bay. When completed, it is expected to be about 500 miles long. To date, 350 miles have been built and are available to ride. Who is building it? the Association of Bay Area Governments, known as ABAG, is organizing the effort. ABAG describes itself as "part regional planning agency and part local government service provider." ABAG was established in 1961 and in 1989, California State Senate bill 100 authorized them to begin development of the San Francisco Bay Trail. Although ABAG does the planning, the actual building of the trail is being done by the 47 governments along the route of this trail, all of which have agreed to be part of this project. These communities use the same process and funding sources to build the section of the trail going through their community as they would use for any other pedestrian or bicycle infrastructure.

When I heard about the San Francisco Bay Trail, I googled it and found its website. The first thing I looked for there was maps of the trails. There are maps online, but there are also paper maps for purchase, and I purchased a set of maps from the online store at the Oakland Museum of California. One concern with paper maps is they can quickly go out of date. This set of maps was copyrighted in 2016, so would appear to be at least 3 years old. So far, I have not encountered any discrepancy between the map and what I find out on the road, but I am sure I will as time goes by.

The map comes in the form of a deck of 24 4x7 inch cards, each card showing one section of the trail in high resolution. The cards are laid out around the bay as shown below:

So far, I have ridden two sections of this trail, one shown on Card 4, and one shown on Card 6. This is the section of the trail shown on Card 4:

Note that the start of the trail is purple, indicating a trail not part of the SF Bay Trail, in this case a very high quality bike and hike overpass over Highway 101. 101 is always difficult to cross so this overpass is much appreciated. The overpass leads directly onto the Bay Trail. The start of the ride is only 3 miles from my house, so the 20 miles of SF Bay Trail were the focus of the ride. This section of the trail is all paved and travels through heavily populated suburban parts of the Peninsula. I first rode it on July 4, and as expected, the trail was quite busy with bikers ranging from riders in full spandex on carbon road bikes to families with kids. Mixed with the bikers were joggers and walkers. It is definitely not the best place for an all-out training ride, but for a fun ramble, it works well. It is also not the best place to get away from civilization. The trail is 100% car free, but often runs next to roads so cars and houses and the other trappings of civilization are never out of sight. The trail runs through a number of popular parks which contributes to both the crowding and the charm. July 4 was windy this year, and I especially enjoyed the families flying kites. A final point important for setting expectations is that much of San Francisco Bay is more like a wetlands rather than a deep water port; frequently, the "bay" one is riding next to is mud rather than water, especially at low tide.

The section of the Bay Trail I rode that is covered on Card 6 is about 4 miles long and is 15 miles away from my home, so it is part of a longer ride rather than its focus:

Note that, once again, I started on a trail not part of the Bay Trail, the Stephens Creek Trail, a truly wonderful ride that I have mentioned here before. Despite being located near a very heavily populated part of the Peninsula, the trail itself is a bit separated from civilization, so riding has just a bit of a "getting back to nature" feel, though bridges and powerlines were never out of sight. The biggest difference between this and the section of trail I discussed above is that majority of this stretch of the trail is dirt/gravel rather than paved. Were it not for the map cards encouraging me, I might have wondered if me and my bicycle truly belonged, it looked more like a hiking than a biking path, but encouraged by my card, ride it I did. I rode this stretch of the SF Bay Trail on my Public Bike, an urban commuter, not a mountain or gravel bike, but it did just fine. The trails are quite smooth and reasonably firm. The biggest difference between the gravel and paved sections is that the gravel sections can have large mudpuddles, especially after a rain, so bikes do get dirty and fenders are much appreciated. How well these unpaved sections worked was a revelation for me. From now on, I will have no reluctance about riding the parts of the trail marked dirt/gravel.

I rode Card 4 and Card 6, what about Card 5? Much of the trail on Card 5 is drawn in dotted lines, indicating that it hasn't been constructed yet. There are alternative routes through much of this area, I have ridden on some of them, and it can be done, but it is not the seamless car-free experience that I describe above.

What's next? There is quite a bit of trail I have yet to ride connected to what I have already ridden, and I look forward to riding that, but ultimately, I am going to run into the dreaded dotted lines, gaps in the trail that remain to be filled. The metric that truly matters, in my opinion, is less the 350 of the 500 miles of trail have been built, but more how long the contiguous stretches of trail run, for that determines how long most people will ride before turning around and going home. That said, there are some stretches near where I live that make for a nice, car-free day ride. My older son his wife and I used to enjoy biking together, and now that they have kids, I would really enjoy taking them along. However, my daughter-in-law is not comfortable taking her kids into traffic on a bike. The San Francisco Bay Trail provides the perfect solution! All we need to do is to purchase and install bike seats, and a lovely car free day outdoors is ours.

Sad Surly Story

The Zombie, riding his cronenberged 1967 Hetchins Mountain King in the 2019 Gold Hills Metric Century

"It's springtime for Hetchins and vintage bikes, it's winter for Surly, so sad!" - To the tune of "Springtime for Hitler", apologies to "The Producers"

One thing I did not mention in my post about the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century is that I rode it on my newly resurrected Hetchins. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Way back in 2018, in preparation for my first California metric century,  The Art of Survival, I decided I had neglected routine maintenance on my poor Surly Crosscheck for so long that I needed to do that ride on my Bianchi Volpe. Until then, the Surly had been my go-to bike,  the bike I rode unless there was some reason not to. After that, my Volpe became my go-to bike. Once I took care of the deferred maintenance on the Surly, my Volpe needed maintenance, so I swapped the Volpe for the Surly. This was a few weeks before the 2019 Golden Hills metric century and so the logical thing to have done was to ride Golden Hills on my newly overhauled Surly. But when I rode the Surly, I did not like the way it felt. So a plan was born, I would ride Golden Hills on the Hetchins, even though its gears were not as low as I would like, even though it had attachments for only one water bottle, even though I did not have a rack to carry the warm clothes I would need at the start of the ride.

How did the Hetchins do? It did great! As I have posted before, the lack of low gears on some of my bikes has turned out to be less of an issue than I initially feared, and once again, gears were not an issue on this ride. Some of the other potential issues which I mentioned earlier never materialized; the shift levers never slipped and the "soft" wheels held up fine. As for the lack of water bottle cage and rack, I figured out how to stash both warm clothes and a second water bottle in my jersey pockets. I have come to love the way the Hetchins rides and I continued to enjoy that during Golden Hills. Also, the Hetchins is a remarkable, vintage bike and I got to show it off. All and all, the decision to ride my Hetchins, initially forced on me by circumstance, turned out to be a huge win.

But what was wrong with the Surly? It had been my go-to bike nine years! Well, therein lies a story. It turned out that a lot of what I didn't like about my overhauled Surly was the saddle. I have come to prefer a well broken in Brooks B17 saddle so much so that I almost can't ride anything else. Unfortunately, I only have one of those and at the time my Surly came home from the bike shop, the it was in use on the Hetchins. I had a newer B17, less well broken in, that I put on the Surly, figuring it was close to being broken in and that it was about time to finish the job. So one problem was that the saddle was too hard. I made allowances for the hard saddle, but my intuition told me there was more wrong than that, and it turned out I was right. Another problem was not the saddle itself, but adjustment of the saddle. In my blog post "Saddles and Bike Fit" one adjustment I did not talk about was the tilt of the saddle, the extent the saddle is level, has the nose pointed up, or has the nose pointed down. I always thought that saddles should be level and I don't recall tilting of the saddle ever being an issue before. It was not that the saddle felt wrong on the Surly, it was that I felt like I had way to much weight on my handlebars. That was surprising, because weight on the handlebars is normally caused by low handlebars (relative to the saddle height), and my Surly has the highest handlebars of any of my bikes. When I thought about what else might cause that feeling, it occurred to me that if the nose of the saddle were too low, I might tend to slide forward, putting weight on the handlebars. When I looked back at the Hetchins, I noticed that the saddle was not quite level, the nose pointed up just a bit. Once I adjusted the tilt of the saddle on the Surly with the nose slightly up to match the Hetchins, the Surly became much more comfortable. (A number of cyclists on the Internet note that being more comfortable with the nose a bit up is yet another peculiarity of B17 saddles.) Had I figured this out sooner and/or if I had moved the broken-in B17 from the Hetchins to the Surly, I might have decided to take the Surly to Golden Hills, a decision that, in retrospect, would have been a lost opportunity to enjoy my Hetchins.

My Surly is much more comfortable now than when I brought it home from the shop, but I still prefer my Hetchins - by a lot! Why is that? Again, part of it might be the difference in saddles. The B17 on the Hetchins is well broken in, the one on the Surly still has a ways to go. If so, that should be a self correcting problem, and to that end, I am going out of my way to put miles on the Surly and its still-hard saddle as well as slathering that saddle with Brooks Proofide. However, I think there is more to it than the saddle. Back when I was in High School, the Modesto Roadmen had a belief that different bikes had different feels when ridden, some better, some worse, and that there was no way we could tell by looking at a bike how it would feel. I remember that we found that Raleigh bikes usually rode better than we expected, for example. As a scientist, I have to believe there is no magic to this, and as I have come to learn more about bicycles, I have learned some things that are less apparent but impact ride quality. One set of things, visible but perhaps not obvious, is frame geometry. Another which is entirely invisible to the naked eye but apparently has a big impact on ride quality is the kind of steel tubing used to make the frame; that tubing can be made from different grades of steel and the walls of that tubing can have different thicknesses. I think some of that is going on between the Hetchins and the Surly. Gebhardt at Veloro Cycles has suggested that wheels and tires might be a factor as well. The Hetchins feels quite lively, whereas by comparison, the Surly feels like a brick. This is not new. Although the Surly was my go-to bike for nine years, this was despite it having a bit of an unresponsive feel. Part of the reason this did not bother me more at the time was that the only bike I had to which I could compare it was my Bianchi Specialissima, and the fit of the Surly was so much better as to more than compensate for any difference in frame feel.

Seat firmness, width, and handlebar height

The not-yet-broken-in and thus hard B17 saddle may not be the only problem with my Surly, but it is definitely a problem. I have previously discussed how I position my saddle when adjusting my bikes. Another set of issues that arose while doing those experiments concerned seat width and firmness. Of course, choice of a saddle is a very personal decision, what works for one cyclist may not work for another. What I am going to talk about here is one cyclist (me) and the comfort of the same saddle on different bikes.

I am going to talk about four saddles and four bikes. The saddles are a well broken in leather Brooks B17 (old B17), a second B17 still in the process of being broken in (new B17), a synthetic Brooks C19, and the same saddle in a narrower width, a C17. The bikes are my 2010 Surly Cross Check (Surly), my 2007 Bianchi Volpe (Volpe), my heavily modified 1967 Hetchins Mountain King (Hetchins), and my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima (Specialissima). There are some small differences in the geometry of these bikes which might be relevant, but I have no hypotheses about those so will not be discussing them. What I will be discussing is the differences in the height of the handlebars relative to the height of the saddle on these four bikes. My working hypotheses are:

1. A softer, wider saddle can be more comfortable than a harder, narrower saddle.
2. A harder saddle can be comfortable if it is wider.
3. The lower the handlebars, the less weight will be on the saddle and the harder and narrower a saddle that can be comfortable.

None of my saddles are recommended for racing by their manufacturer, Brooks. The C19 is recommended for "Commuting .. in an upright riding position" (which is how I use it*.) The C17 is recommended for "City [and] travel ... hard riding in an angled riding position." The B17 is recommended for "Touring, Trekking and MTB (mountain biking)". The C19 is the widest saddle at 184 millimeters. Next are the two B17s at 175 millimeters. The narrowest is the C17 at 164 millimeters. Brooks advertises that the Cambium line to which the C19 and C17 belong do not require breaking in. I would rephrase that as cannot be broken in; both are much harder than a broken in B17. Using my fingers to judge, the newer B17 is the hardest of my saddles, the C17 and C19 are slightly softer, and the older B17 is clearly the softest.

My Specialissima has the lowest handlebars of the four bikes; they are 1⅜ inches lower than the saddle (low). Next is my Volpe with handlebars ¾ inches below the saddle (medium low). My Hetchins has handlebars 1¼ inches above the saddle (medium high), and my Surly has handlebars 2¼ inches above the saddle (high). I broke in my first B17 on my Specialissima with its low handlebars back in 2008, riding rides of up to 2 hours before the saddle was broken in with no bad consequences. In 2019, I rode the 2 hours of Eroica California on my Specialissima and the new B17 with no problem. When I recently put that same saddle on my Surly with its high handlebars and rode 34 miles on it, it felt very uncomfortable and I ended up with saddle sores. On the other hand, the old B17 feels good on all four bikes at any distance I have ridden, including a 10 hour ride on my Surly with its high handlebars. This suggests that low handlebars can make up for a hard saddle.

When I was first setting up my Hetchins (medium high handlebars) after its rebuild, I found that I could not correctly position a B17 saddle on it with the seatpost it had. I tested my C19 which I borrowed from my commuter and found that it could be positioned correctly, and that it felt comfortable during a 1 hour ride. Based on Brooks recommendations, I purchased a C17 for use on the Hetchins (returning the C19 to my commuter) but found that in a 1 hour ride is was less comfortable than the C19, and at the end of a 2 hour ride found it quite uncomfortable. This suggests that the reason the C17 is uncomfortable is a combination of being hard and being narrow. I borrowed a different seatpost so I could put my old B17 on the Hetchins and rode it that way for rides of up to 5 hours in perfect comfort. Noting that my Volpe had lower handlebars (medium low) than the Hetchins, I tried the C17 on it. It felt better in a 1 hour ride on the Volpe than the Hetchins, but not good enough that I would want to try it for longer rides. I then tried the C17 on the Specialissima (low handlebars), and found that it was comfortable for a 1 hour ride, confirming the hypothesis that a harder saddle can be comfortable when paired with lower handlebars.

How long does it take to break in a B17? The consensus of the community seems to be about 500 miles, but that is not my experience with the new B17. I have over 600 miles on it and it still feels much harder than my old B17 (which has well over 30,000 miles on it.) Is it possible that this is saddle to saddle variation rather than a lack of breaking in, that the new B17 will never be as comfortable as the old B17? Brooks leather saddles are known for such variability. Another possibility is that I waited too long to break in the new B17 - I purchased that saddle in 2012 and didn't complete my 500 mile break-in period until 2019. Only time will tell what the future holds for my new B17.

In summary, my experience, though certainly not a scientific study, did I support my hypotheses: a relatively hard C19 saddle is comfortable where an equally hard but narrower C17 is not. A not yet broken in B17 can be comfortable paired with low handlebars but not when paired with high handlebars. And a relatively wide, very soft, well broken in B17 will be comfortable on a wide variety of bikes. Using these parameters will help me pair the right saddle with the right bike depending on how I decide use them, but only time will tell how this will all play out.

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* I purchased the C19 for a fifth bike, my Public commuting bike which has an upright geometry not easily comparable with the four road bikes considered here. This bike ought to put more of my weight on the saddle than any of my other bikes. That said, this saddle and bike combination are comfortable for up to 3 hours further suggesting that the C19 is a comfortable saddle, despite being hard.

Training for the Golden Hills

Left to right, Dave, Roger, and The Zombie, at the lunch stop of the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century.

Last year, I posted a detailed description of the Golden Hills Metric Century* with lots of pictures. I heartily recommended the ride back then, and this year I enthusiastically repeat that recommendation. If you want a description of The Golden Hills Metric Century, look at that older post. In this post, I will be talking about the new training plan I tried for preparing for this ride and how this year's ride went for me.

My goal for the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century was to have a comfortable ride from beginning to end. I came up with that goal after having a miserable finish in the 2019 Art of Survival Metric Century, and then looking back, realizing that I had ended up more or less miserable by the end of the all three metric centuries (100Ks) I have ridden since moving to California in 2017. The only thing I could think to try was to vary my training, to try to come up with a training plan for a 100K that worked better than what I had done before.

The standard plan given in many cycling books to prepare for a long ride (typically a century) is to increase the length of the longest ride each week by 10% until you reach a distance equal to 67% to 75% the distance of the challenge ride (e.g. 67 to 75 miles for a century) two weeks before the challenge. That is what I did the two times I prepared for 200 kilometer (124 mile) rides in 2012 and 2013, and that is what I did to prepare for my first 100K after moving to California, the 2018 Art of Survival Metric Century. So why mess with this widely accepted strategy? A number of reasons:

1. As noted above, I found the 2018 Art of Survival Metric Century hard despite following the standard plan.
2. I frequently suffer from overtraining, a build-up of fatigue which causes my performance to get worse with training rather than better, especially since moving to California. To prevent that, I am looking for something easier than the standard plan.
3. The standard plan is, strictly speaking, designed for one challenge ride a year. Might I be able to repeat it twice in the same year, say six months apart? Maybe, but it certainly isn't designed for riding a 100K a month, what I am trying to do.
4. Way back in 2012, when I first started reading about preparing for 200 kilometer and longer rides as part of the sport of randonneuring, I came across riders who had very minimal training protocols, often with the long ride of each week being, not 10% longer than the previous ride, but 100% longer (twice as long.) That is, these riders would have as their longest training ride a 100 kilometer ride a week or two before their first 200 kilometer brevet (challenge ride.) It seems that real world cyclists don't always follow the standard plan.

If the standard plan anticipates one challenge ride (e.g. a 100K) a year, what does the exercise community recommend for someone who wants to do a 100K a month? What first endeared me to the book "Distance Cycling" by Hughes and Kehlenbach^ was that it had an answer to that very question. Specifically, it had a plan for riding a 200 kilometer ride every month. This is not a plan for the meager 100K I was attempting, but it seemed a simple matter to scale their plan down for 100K, and that is what I did. (I have posted a long, detailed description of this scaled down plan.) However, a key component of the Hughes and Kehlenbach plan (and of my version) is that I have to actually ride that 100K each month; it is not only the goal for the month, but also an essential part of the training program for the next month. So what was I to do if for some reason I couldn't ride a 100K one month? Other than the 100K itself, the longest ride in this plan is 55 kilometers,  more than half of a metric century. I remembered those randonneurs who were increasing their weekly mileage by factors of two, and thought, "That might be OK. Don't worry about a missed 100K, you have enough preparation anyway." So that's what I did for my next two 100K's, the 2018 Golden Hills 100K and the 2019 Art of Survival 100K. It sort of worked, I finished both these rides, but they were painful by the end, especially the 2019 Art of Survival. However, given how much trouble I was having with overtraining, I was nervous about the 10% a week plan which, if followed strictly, would have required 6 to 7 weeks of increasingly hard rides to get ready for a 100K. And then Coach John Hughes (of Hughes and Kehlenbach) made the suggestion that older riders like me might be better off skipping every other long ride in the standard plan. That is, rather than doing a ride 10% longer every week, do a ride 20% longer every other week, so that is what I tried. Here is the training plan I used for the 2019 Golden Hills 100K:

The rides in blue are shorter rides ridden at a speed slightly harder than I expect to ride in the 100K. The rides in green are ridden at an easy pace. The rides in yellow are the rides that get increasingly longer. The highlighted yellow ride in the lower right corner of the figure is the Golden Hills Metric Century for which I was training. I have idealized this diagram a bit, e.g. by moving rides by a day or two to make them line up for clearer presentation. I present the length of rides in miles rather than the more modern minutes because I think that better shows my intentions.

Two questions raised by my plan: What kind of riding was I doing to be ready to start this program? Why are the increases between the longest rides more than 20%? My normal riding schedule is four rides a week with the longest ride being 23 miles, but as I have posted here before, life happens, and that makes my riding more erratic than I might like. The week before starting this program, I did no riding at all. I had a houseguest who did not ride, so we hiked instead. The two weeks before that I did no ride longer than 11 miles. The reasons were that my younger son was getting married which was most definitely one of the high points of my life but did disrupt my cycling, and as luck would have it, I was also fighting off a cold, so I decided discretion was the better part of valour and rode less. However, seven weeks before starting this schedule, I rode The Death Ride, one of the hardest rides of my life, and surely some of the fitness from that carried forward. All of that said, this is not my first rodeo, I have been through such disruptions many times before, and have a pretty good idea how quickly my body loses fitness and how quickly I can get back to my usual schedule. I also know that going from my usual 23 mile ride to a similar 34 mile ride represents an easy transition for me, despite being an almost 50% increase in miles. (I think the 20% increase limitation is less relevant at these low mileages.) The last two increases are about 25% when the plan calls for 20% increases. My intuition told me that this was close enough, and the results indicate that my intuition was right.

So how did it go? I have never had a training plan work better, so that went very well indeed. As to how the ride went, that is a bit more complicated. Stress was a big factor for this ride. After having done so badly in the Art of Survival last May, it was very important to me that I redeem myself, so the seven weeks of training for this ride were as stressful as I have ever found a training program. For some reason I found the logistics of organizing the trip (arranging a hotel, etc.) stressful and as a result, I had trouble sleeping the two nights before the ride, so went into the ride with sleep deprivation. As an experiment, I tried carrying my bike in the trunk with the wheels off rather than on on the bike rack and fussing with the bike the morning of the ride was another stressor. I got delayed a bit at the start and everyone was much faster than I, so I was alone from the beginning and I was worried about staying on route. Maybe because of all this stress, I started feeling tired early on the ride, which made me wonder if I would fail in my goal of having a comfortable ride, or perhaps even not be able to finish at all. And finally there was Roger and Dave.

Roger and Dave? Roger is my good friend from high school with whom I stay when I ride Art of Survival, and with whom I have ridden my three previous metric centuries. Dave is his brother in law and cycling buddy. I was at Eroica California 2019 with Roger and Dave, but did not ride with them because we rode different routes, so I have never ridden with Dave. But Roger and Dave ride together a lot, and Roger tells me they are pretty evenly matched, so I kind of knew what to expect from Dave. I totally love riding with Roger, it is one of the biggest attractions of my 100K rides. However, there is a problem: Roger is a much faster rider than I am. We had discussed our 100K plans for the year, and Golden Hills was not on Roger's list, so I thought I would be doing it alone. I knew I would really miss him, but not having him there would give me the opportunity to ride at my own pace. Besides training, another important factor in finishing a ride comfortably is how you ride it, pacing being an important part of that. And then, at the last minute, Roger and Dave decided to come. I was overjoyed! I was so looking forward to seeing them. On the other hand, I was also a bit worried. Would trying to keep up with them throw off my pacing? The solution to that problem was that Roger and Dave's ambitions had grown; they were riding not the 65 mile 100K, but the full 100 mile century. Interestingly, my 100K and their century traversed similar routes. Relative to my 100K their century had a 15 mile extension about 20 miles into my ride and a 20 mile extension at about 55 miles into my ride, so a plan was hatched. Because I do better when I start slow and increase my effort as I go along, I would not try to keep up with them at the beginning of the ride. By the time we got to the lunch stop (40 miles into my ride), they would have ridden 15 miles more than me, so their longer route should more or less cancel out my slower pace and we could regroup. At that point I would be fully warmed up and I would try to stay on their wheels until our routes diverged again near the end of my ride. They started a bit late, and we agreed I would go on ahead because they were going to pass me anyway. I have already described how grumpy I was at the beginning of the ride, but it was even worse than I said. The roads were in poor repair, the traffic heavy and on and on. I knew this was all my mood, and fantasized about posting a second review of Golden Hills, a review of Golden Hills while in a Bad Mood to balance out my review from last year, Golden Hills while in a Good Mood. And then Roger and Dave caught up to me. We rode together for a few minutes before they rode off into the distance, and it was as if the clouds had parted, letting in the sun. All of a sudden, the ride was good. My mood dropped a bit when they left, but not to its previous low. I started enjoying the ride more and found a bit more strength and started picking up my pace. We regrouped at the lunch stop, and then we started off together. It took me to the limit of my ability to stay on their wheels, but I found strength I didn't know I had and experienced the joy of catching up to and even passing other riders rather than having everyone pass me. There were many moments when I felt that there was no way I could keep up with them until the divergence of our two routes, but I did, and took great satisfaction in that accomplishment.

But how did I do objectively? Did I accomplish my goal of having a comfortable ride from beginning to end? I have already answered the second question, there were moments of unpleasantness at the beginning of the ride, so no, I did not have a comfortable ride from beginning to end. But maybe that was the wrong way to express my real goal. Maybe I should have described my goal as to "not fall apart at the end of the ride", and that goal I accomplished. Objectively, my performance on the ride was almost exactly the same as last year, with an average speed of 13.3 miles per hour, quite good for me. (As an objective measure of how much faster Roger is than me, he rode more miles than I did and averaged 15.3 miles per hour.) But last year I only trained one week for the ride, as opposed to three hard weeks this year, doesn't that make last year's training plan better? When I was imagining this ride, thinking Roger would not be there pushing my pace, I was expecting that it would be slower but more comfortable this year. The fact that I rode this year at the same average speed but much more comfortably than last year is a big improvement in my opinion.

So what did I learn? I certainly learned that my new training protocol works well for me (thank you, Coach John Hughes) but I also relearned of some things of which I needed reminding. I was reminded of the power of mood and the impact it can have on the quality of the ride. The beginning of my ride was miserable only because I had gotten myself into a bad mood. I was reminded that although I am an introvert, I do benefit from social interactions. The improvement in my mood when Roger and Dave passed me was startling in its intensity. When I restarted cycling back in 2008, I did a lot of riding with my wife, who sadly is no longer with me. Since moving to California, I have done most of my cycling alone. I am now wondering if I would be happier if I joined a club so I can ride with others more often, and I am actively looking into that.

In summary, I am very pleased with my new training protocol. It got me better prepared for a 100K than ever before while not driving me into overtraining. That said, I never actually evaluated the "100K a month" plan I developed so meticulously (I will discuss why in a future post) so I would still like to give that approach a try. Stay tuned.

---

* The official title of the ride is the Golden Hills Century. This event features a Century (101 mile ride), Metric Century (65 mile ride), and other ride lengths as well. Strictly speaking, a century is 100 miles and a metric century is 100 kilometers or 62 miles, but in practice it is hard to design a route that hit these mileages exactly, so a century is greater than and approximately equal to 100 miles and a metric century is greater than and approximately equal to 62 miles.

^ I have posted several times about this book, so I wanted to link to one of those posts here. Normally that would have been the first post in which I reviewed this book, but back then, I underappreciated it. Over time, this book has really grown on me such that it currently is almost the only training book I use.

Do As I Do, Not As I Say

Author "Coach John Hughes"

John Hughes is my current favorite author of training books for cyclists. Thus, it caught my attention when I learned he had published a new article on Road Bike Rider entitled "I’m 70! Yikes!!! Lessons from my Journey Through Life". Because I like Hughes and because I too had just reached 70, I looked forward to his article with enthusiasm. As I read it, I became even more enthusiastic because I found that what he said rang very true to me. Here are two especially relevant excerpts:

"Ride, don’t train. I don’t own a heart rate monitor, power meter or sophisticated bike computer. My friend John E. and I ride year-round in Colorado and we have two rules: no passing anyone and always stop for a meal. This means we’re always riding at a conversational pace. Of course, if it’s frigid we may just ride to the café, have breakfast and ride back.

Ride less, recover more. In my 30s and 40s I could put in big miles with only a couple of recovery days a week. Now I rarely ride more than 100 miles in a week with only one or two climbing rides."

Like most authors, Hughes promotes his work, so his (free) article contained a link to one of his latest (not free) eBooks: Anti-Aging: 12 Ways You Can Slow the Aging Process

Based on my enthusiasm for the article, I purchased the book. But when I read it, I was disappointed. Why is that? What I liked about the Hughes article was that the overall tone and impression it gave was realistic - it spoke to the limitations I am living with these days. What disappointed me about his book was the overall tone and impression it gave was the same panglossian "rah rah" pep talk that every training book I have ever read has, that you can do anything you put your mind to. Mind you, if you read the book carefully, that is not strictly what it says, but that is certainly the impression I got from reading it, and I bet I am far from alone in getting that false impression. So what is it that I wanted the book to say? If I were to write a training book (a task for which I am completely unqualified) it would include the following:

1. You may not know what you are capable of as a cyclist. If you are a beginner, you almost certainly don't know. You may be capable of more than you think. However - and this is really important - you may be capable of less!
2. The most important thing you have to master as an athlete-in-training is how to listen to your body. Your body will tell you when you reach your limits, but only if you listen.
3. None of the training plans in this book are meant for you. We put them in here firstly as illustrations and examples of what training plans look like and how and why they are constructed, and secondly because we have found these particular plans work adequately for a reasonably large percentage of cyclists. However: If you are better than the average cyclist, these plans will not take you to your full potential - you can handle a more challenging plan that will take you to a higher level of performance. Much more importantly, if you happen to have less stamina or training capacity than the cyclists for whom they are intended, these plans will be too hard for you, and if you try to follow them, you will end up getting worse, not better because...
4. ...it is much, much better to train too little than too much.
5. So, every training plan in this book starts with an introduction describing the minimum cycling experience that the typical user of that plan would have and then, emphasize the signals that your body might give you at various points in the plan that the plan is too hard for you, that you should try a different plan and perhaps even chose a different goal.

If I am right, why are virtually all training books written in the same way, a way which I find objectionable? I think there are two reasons:

1. Nobody likes a downer. You sell a lot more training books by emphasizing all the amazing things you can do by following the plans in the book rather than by warning the reader that depending on your specific situation, none of that might be possible.
2. Arguably, one of the most important functions of a coach in encouragement. From that perspective, it makes no sense to write a training book any other way than the way they are written now. Sure, there will be some people for whom the book simply doesn't work, but a realistic book that took that into account would by necessity lack the rah-rah aspect and thus would be useful for nobody. Or nobody but me.

Two final reasons I found the book disappointing:

1. The book I was hoping for was "How to train on a bicycle when you are 70." What this book is is "How to train when you are 20-50 so you can live to be 90: a bicycle is neither sufficient nor necessary and you may even be better off without one." More specifically, a lot of this book was a representation of the American College of Sports Medicine's recommendations.
2. A large fraction of the book is taken up with "stories" from individual cyclists, what we in the biomedical research community disparagingly refer to as anecdotes. I haven't measured this, but by eye, my guess is that these anecdotes, which I find utterly useless, take up over half the book.

So did I find the book worthless, am I sorry I spent $15 on it? Quite to the contrary, I definitely found several pearls of wisdom in this book, more than enough to justify what I paid. What I found useful in this book was a mix of two kinds of ideas:

• Ideas I already knew or believed, but for which it was nice to get confirmation.
• Ideas that were new to me. 

Unsurprisingly, the line between these two is not always clear. In my division below, sometimes it was hard to know into which category to put an idea. In general, even if I knew most of an idea, if there was some part that was truly a revelation to me, I put it under new ideas.

Ideas I Already Knew, but for which I Appreciated Confirmation:

• Overreaching and overtraining are the result of an accumulation of ALL FORMS of stress, i.e., multiple hard workouts *PLUS* non-training stresses: "How much stress you can handle depends on the presence of other stressors in your life. Some stressors can be reduced, e.g., by getting enough sleep or a good diet. Some stressors can be managed, e.g., the stress of constantly having too much to do. Some stressors can’t be managed, but you can deal with the consequences by reducing training stress."
• Every rider should take at least one day a week off the bike.
• You want to be fully recovered before the next hard day.
• During a hard workout, you should always stop while feeling as if you could have done more that you could have ridden another 10 miles or you could have done one more interval.
• It is much easier to avoid overtraining than to recover. When in doubt about how much or how hard to exercise, listen to your body and do less.
• Of the different types of exercise, cardiorespiratory exercise is the most important. Always include cardio in your weekly exercise. [This is in the context of the 5 kinds of exercise recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine for a healthy old age, Cardiorespiratory Exercise, Resistance (Strength) Exercise, Flexibility Exercise, Balance Exercise, and Weight-bearing Exercise.]

Ideas Partly or Entirely New to Me:

• For Older Riders working up to a longer ride (e.g. a century), it might make sense to have every other week be an easy week.
• The weekly long ride should not be more than half the total weekly riding. 
• Compared to riders in their 20s and 30s who can handle three or four hard training days a week, riders over 60 usually can only handle one or two hard training days a week.
• The key indicator [of overtraining] is declining performance. ...If you’re not riding as fast or climbing as well for several days, for example, watch out! The other key indicator is your mood. We all have a day here and there when we blow off a workout. But if you think, “I really don’t want to train!” for several days, watch out! ... You may have heard that these are indicators of overtraining: a change in morning heart rate, or a change in body weight, or a change in how fast your heart rate drops after a hard effort. However, research shows that there is little correlation between any of these and overtraining."
• [Training for a long ride, e.g. a metric century] "If you were in your 50s, had been riding for about 10 years and your annual volume was over 5,000 miles (8,000 km), you probably could ramp up faster at 15% per week. If you were in your 70s, had been riding fewer years and/or your annual volume was less than 3,000 miles (5,000 km), you should ramp more slowly -- at about 5% per week."
• I had rejected periodization as a training strategy I wanted to use. Hughes presented periodization in a new way that inspired me to give it another look.
• Some benefits of cardiorespiratory exercise only occur in older subjects if they do vigorous rather than moderate cardiorespiratory exercise. This is not true for younger subjects. This was a totally unexpected assertion, one which I want to investigate more critically, and if true, will definitely change how I ride my bike!
• "Cycling is easy on your joints because it is not weight bearing and, for that reason, you need to supplement it with weight-bearing exercise ... Recent studies of post-menopausal women indicate that walking does not prevent bone loss because it doesn’t overload the body more than the skeleton is already accustomed to carrying." [I had known that I ought to be supplementing my cycling with weight training and probably stretching, but weight bearing was a new one for me.]

So does any of this change how I am riding? Yes it does. I am currently training for the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century, and for a variety of reasons, felt that I should try a different training schedule than what I had been using recently and I have incorporated a number of ideas from this book into this new schedule. I plan to blog about this in detail in a future post. Stay tuned.

Saddles and Bike Fit

Comparison of the rail clamping regions of three saddles:  the Specialized Avatar, the Brooks Team Pro, and the Selle Italia Turbo. The Brooks Team Pro has the same rail configuration as the Brooks B17, and the other two saddles are meant to be representative examples of typical, modern saddles. The measurements are in centimeters, not mm as shown in the picture. The picture is from Tallrider on Bike Forums (@drtallrider on Instagram).

I have been testing my resurrected Hetchins to see how rideable it is. When I started this project, my big concern was if the frame was simply too large for me. Had that been the case, it would have been a deal killer. Good news, I realized within minutes of picking up the bike that the frame, though large, is quite rideable. Of course, issues sometimes appear on longer rides that would not have been noticed on the 3 mile ride home from the bike shop so I decided to ride it 100 miles or so before making any big decisions. One decision that could not wait was what to do about the saddle. The saddle from the Centurion donor bike, despite being a Brooks, was a cheap model which I found uncomfortable. I borrowed a Brooks B17 from my Bianchi Specialissima, put it on, and went for a 5 mile ride, only to find that the B17 was positioned too far forward. I had run into a similar issue just over a year ago when I transferred the B17 from my Surly Cross Check to my Bianchi Volpe in preparation for my first metric century, replacing the (rather uncomfortable) modern saddle that came on the Volpe. When I did so, I found that the B17 felt too far forward. This surprised me at the time, and to understand why this was, I got on line only to find this was a known issue with the B17. As can be seen in the illustration at the top of the page, the shape of the rails underneath the Brooks B17 has two potential problems:

1. The part of the rails where the seatpost attaches is very short front to back, providing virtually no front to back adjustment.
2. The clamping area is relatively far back on the saddle, resulting in a more forward than normal saddle position.

This problem is sufficiently well known that special "long setback" seatposts are manufactured specifically for the ever popular Brooks B17 saddle.

Why would Brooks design their saddle this way? One thing to bear in mind is that the design of the B17 remains unchanged since the 1890s when it was first introduced, so perhaps this problem results from bicycle geometry evolution. I would have to say, though, that my experience so far does not support that. I have put B17s on four bicycles, two modern and two vintage, and it worked out of the box on two, one vintage and one modern but was too far forward on the other two, again, one modern, one vintage. My 1960 Bianchi Specialissima originally came with a Brooks B17, so perhaps it is no surprise that a (new, replacement) B17 worked on it. After my first 200 kilometer brevet ride, which I rode on my 2010 Surly Cross Check, I developed saddle sores, so before the second one, I replaced the Surly-provided saddle with a Brooks B17, and it fit fine too. When I transferred that saddle onto my 2006 Bianchi Volpe, however, it felt too far forward, the same experience I just had with my 1967 Hetchins.

What accounts this this bike to bike variation? Two factors that spring to mind are differences in the seat tube angle of the frame and differences in the setback on seatpost that came with the bike. Normally seat tube angle is a piece of information provided by the manufacturer, but because all my bikes are older, that was not an option for me. I could measure this angle, but getting measurements that are sufficiently accurate for potentially small differences seems problematic. Measuring the setback on various seatposts seems easier, and I may do that at some point, but have not yet done so. So, as of today, I don't know exactly why this saddle fit fine on two of my bikes but is too far forward on the other two.

What does it mean to say  that the seat is too far forward? How is that determined? To begin with, I have to confess to being quite ignorant about bike fit, I have always adjusted my bikes by how they feel. When I had the problem with the seat feeling too far forward on my Volpe, I assumed the problem was the distance between the seat and the handlebars, e.g. that I might have been able to correct it by purchasing a longer handlebar stem that would move the handlebars forward, away from the seat. It turns out this is incorrect. (I have noticed on bike forums that I am not the only one with this misconception.) The issue is the positioning of one's body relative to the crank and pedals. Thus, the correction I made on the Volpe, changing the seatpost, was the right one, moving the handlebars would not have solved the problem. I believed the seat was too far forward not due to any measurements, but only because it felt too far forward. I did worry if this judgement was subjective; I have had the experience of a bike feeling like it fit perfectly one day and badly the next despite not changing anything in between. So, my first response when the B17 felt too far forward on the Volpe was to try to get used to it. Only when that didn't work did I change the seatpost.

What could I have measured? What is the proper position of the saddle relative to the crank and pedals? Conventional wisdom, summarized by the acronym "KOPS", is Knees Over Pedal Spindle. According to this rule, with the cranks parallel to the ground, a plumb bob extending from the knee should pass through the spindle of the pedal. However, not everyone agrees this is optimal. Besides theoretical objections, there is the observation that triathletes often ride bikes with the saddle very much farther forward than that. Who is right? To my knowledge, there is little definitive scientific evidence on this subject, so perhaps my approach of putting the saddle where it feels best is not such a bad idea, especially given my interest is not on maximum speed and efficiency, but rather on a fun, comfortable ride.

Someone whose advice I have come to trust is the late, great Sheldon Brown. Although he died in 2008, much of what he said retains its value and as a result his website is being maintained and updated by his disciples. Of all the things I read in preparation for writing this post, his article, Revisionist Theory of Bicycle Sizing. was the one I found most helpful. This is what he says:

"On a bicycle, much of the rider's weight should be carried by the pedals, but if your saddle is too far forward, your legs alone can't support your upper body, so you'll wind up leaning on the handlebars too hard. ... Different cycling styles involve different amounts of pedal force. Racers obviously apply more force to the pedals, more of the time. The usually recommended position for a racer is the "KOPS" position, which usually works out well with seat tube angles in the 73°-75° range. For recreational riders, who don't tend to pedal as hard or as much of the time, a more relaxed position, with the saddle farther back is likely to be more comfortable. As the saddle goes back, the handlebars will generally move back and up to avoid an excessively sharp bend in the torso."

So after all that, here is the Zombie's Guide to Subjective Bike Fitting:

1) Adjust the saddle height so that your leg is almost straight at the most extended part of the pedal rotation.

2) Adjust the forward-back position of the saddle so that it is comfortable. This might require changing the seatpost.

3) Adjust the forward-back position and height of the handlebars until they are comfortable. This will require changing the stem.

So what should I do about my Hetchins? One approach is to purchase a long setback seatpost. Another is to purchase a more modern saddle. I definitely wanted to try these solutions before purchasing components that might or might not work, and to that end, I moved my Brooks Cambium C19 from my Public Bike to my Hetchins, and that solved the "seat too far forward" problem. (It also felt reasonably comfortable.) The Brooks Cambium comes in various widths, C19 being the widest, which I have on my Public Bike because conventional wisdom states that the more upright the seating, the wider the saddle should be, and my Public Bike has a fully upright seating position. I assumed that the C17 size would be about the same width as my preferred Brooks B17 and thus more appropriate for the Hetchins, as it is a road bike with a more aggressive seating position, so purchased that. When I tried it, the front-back position was fine but the saddle felt very hard. I tested it for rides of increasing length, and at the end of a 23 mile ride, concluded the C17 is just not comfortable for me on that bike set up as it is. So, I solved one problem but created another, a story which is beginning to come up frequently on my Hetchins restoration project. I plan to blog about the comfort of different saddles in a future post, but in order to make the Hetchins comfortable to ride, I was back to trying a B17 saddle with a long setback seatpost, which I borrowed from my Bianchi Volpe. This worked great! With this seat and seatpost, the Hetchins is comfortable for at least 39 miles, the longest ride I have tried on it so far. With no sign of discomfort at that distance, I am guessing it is as comfortable as any bike I own. Problem solved! Or at least that problem.

What other issues remain with my Hetchins? To begin with, calling this bike a Hetchins might be a desecration of the Hetchins name. Rather than building up this frame with a set of components carefully selected to create an optimum bike and to match the characteristics and features of the frame, I built it up from components that came from (and thus were selected for) a completely different bike, a 1970s Japanese Centurion. I did it this way so I could test the frame size at reduced expense, but the downside is that some Centurion parts might be less than optimal in their new home. This kind of mismatch is responsible for many of the issues that affect the rideability of my Hetchins (Hetchurion?) For example:
1) The downtube shift levers slip. The shifter levers from the Centurion are held on by a clamp, and on the Centurion frame, there is a small braze-on on the downtube to keep this clamp from slipping. The Hetchins frame lacks this braze-on, thus the slipping. Instead, the Hetchins frame has braze-ons for shift levers mounted in the ends of the handlebars.
2) The gears are not as low as my old body needs in the hills of California.
3) Shifting into the largest cog (lowest gear) on the freewheel is not as smooth as I would like. When I find myself on a hill, I can have difficulty getting into that gear. I am getting a bit better at this with practice, but if I could make it work more smoothly, I would.
4) Gebhard, after he completed the build of this bike with parts from the Centurion, warned me that the rims and spokes from the Centurion were made of soft metal, and might not be very durable. In fact, after 120 miles of riding, the spokes are still making creaking noises. In my experience such creaking noises are common on a newly built or aligned wheels, but that goes away fairly quickly, way before 120 miles. Thus, especially in the context of Gebhard's warnings, I find these noises disquieting. It is possible that these "soft" wheels would work for me, as I am a very low power rider. However, my son has expressed interest in using this bike, and he is a much more powerful rider than I, so it might be wise to proactively rebuild these wheels with sturdier spokes and rims.

In addition to the above, my Volpe wants its seat and seatpost back, so I should purchase a new Brooks B17 saddle and setback seatpost. On the other hand, although I had previously posted that the brakes on the Hetchins grabbed, this problem has gone away with time presumably as a result of the brake pads wearing in, thus, this is no longer a problem.

When the downtube shift levers first slipped, I took the Hetchins back to Gebhard, and he repositioned and tightened them. He also readjusted the rear derailleur, but it still doesn't work the way I'd like. We talked about the above issues, and discussed some possible directions we could take. The good news is that I learned he has access to a large selection of vintage-compatible parts, making this project much easier. The bad news is, as I have thought about this project, I have ended up back where I started when I first brought the rebuilt Hetchins home. I'm still not sure what I want to use this bike for, so I am not sure what I should do to it. What Gebhard and I discussed was replacing both the front and rear gears (new freewheel and crankset) to provide a low gear of 25 inches, as low as any bike I own, as well as putting on bar end shifters, the seatpost, and saddle. The derailleur would have to be changed as well as the derailleur from the Centurion will not handle this gear range, but I have a derailleur which might do. As I have thought about it, this set of upgrades does make sense, in that it makes the bike generally rideable, but I still want to think about it a bit more. For example, if I wanted to save some money, I could leave the crankset as-is and just replace the rear gears, giving me a low gear of 33 inches, low enough for most rides that I do, and depending on how I use this bike, that could make sense.

The Death Ride...

My son Michael on the left, and me at the top of Ebbetts Pass.

...or From Seventeen to Seventy, How I Just Can't Stay Away from Ebbetts Pass.

Full disclosure, I did not complete The Death Ride this year (or any other year for that matter). What I did do is to participate in The Death Ride by taking the opportunity to climb Ebbetts Pass, one of the five mountain passes that constitute this epic event. Yes, I was legally registered and did pay my $140, but I think the phrase "complete The Death Ride" should be reserved for those hardy souls who manage to ride all five mountain passes, all 129 miles, and all 15,000 feet of climbing of this challenging ride, a group of which I am not and never will be a member.

The Official Map of the Death Ride

Exactly what is The Death Ride? Also known as "The Tour of the California Alps", it is a group ride which has been held every year since 1981. This ride starts just outside of Markleeville, California, a town nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains at an elevation of 5,531 feet between three mountain passes, Carson Pass (8,580 feet), Monitor Pass (8,340 feet), and Ebbetts Pass (8,730 feet). The route varies a little from year to year, but this year's route was fairly typical. From the start at Turtle Rock Community Park, it goes over the western slope of Monitor Pass (pass #1), down the eastern slope, back up the eastern slope of Monitor (pass #2), back down the western slope, up the eastern slope of Ebbetts Pass (pass #3), down the western slope, back up the western slope of Ebbetts (pass #4), back to the start, then up the eastern slope of Carson pass (pass #5) and then back to the start to complete the ride. Registered riders who are not up to the full ride are given the option of doing lesser rides of four, three, two, or as in my case, one pass. The official one pass ride would have been to the top of Monitor pass and back to the start, but for a couple of reasons (listed below) I decided to ride Ebbetts Pass instead. I'm pretty sure nobody cared, the organizers are very strict about some of their rules, but this appears not to be one of them.

The crowd signing in the day before the ride. 3,500 signed up for the event. It was with some apprehension that I noticed I was the fattest guy in the room.

Why did I, a man just 14 days short of his 70th birthday, chose to attend this particular event? The main reason is that my older son Michael has been excited about this ride ever since he learned of its existence, and has wanted to attend it with me. A second reason is that there is a cycling tradition of "riding your birthday", which this year would have meant riding 70 miles on the day of my upcoming 70th birthday. I certainly could have done that, 70 miles is not that much longer than the 62 mile metric centuries which I have been riding recently, but it seemed like it would be more fun to deviate a bit from the strict interpretation of "riding my birthday", and instead acknowledge this big birthday with a much more fun (and challenging) ride, even if it was not 70 miles and not on the exact anniversary of my birth, so Death Ride it was. Finally, this ride allowed me to wallow in a bit of nostalgia. One of my earliest big rides, my first Mountain Loop back in 1966, I rode when I was seventeen years old. It went (among other places) over Monitor and Ebbetts passes, so The Death Ride gave me a chance to revisit the scene of that event at the age of seventy. One reason for riding Ebbetts Pass rather than Monitor Pass is that Ebbetts is the prettiest of the three passes in The Death Ride, but another is that I have a photograph from 1966 of my bike leaning against the sign atop Ebbetts Pass and riding it this year gave me an opportunity to recreate that photo:

On the left, the bike in front is my Peugeot PX10, at the top of Ebbetts Pass in August of 1966. On the right, the bike in front of the sign is my Bianchi Volpe in July of 2019. One obvious difference is that, in 1966, my bike was loaded down with camping gear, compared to my stripped down bike in 2019. If you look very closely, another difference is the gears. The low gear on the PX10 (if memory serves) was 47x28 for a 45" gear, compared to my Volpe with a 28x32 for a much lower 24" gear. So why was this year so much harder than 1966?

So if I didn't complete the 129 mile Death Ride, how much riding did I do? I rode 49 miles, completed 4,500 feet of climbing, and spent 5 hours doing so. Although this is a subjective estimate, I feel quite strongly that this was the second hardest ride of my life; I was so exhausted at the top, I started crying, something that has never happened to me before. In a beautiful coincidence, my guess as to the hardest ride of my life was on the same 1966 ride that went over Ebbetts Pass, but back then it wasn't the Ebbetts Pass part of the ride that was hard, it was an earlier climb up Old Priest Grade. Ebbetts Pass is both longer (6 miles vs 2 miles) and gains more elevation (2,088 feet vs 1,313 feet) but is much less steep (6% average vs 14% average) than Old Priest Grade, a climb which occurred on the first day of our five day Mountain Loop. Most of the group chose an easier, parallel route up New Priest Grade (6% average steepness) but my buddy Paul and I dared each other to ride the much steeper Old route, which left us totally exhausted. Back then, at a ripe old age of 17, I was completely recovered by the next morning after spending the night sleeping on the ground (no mattress).

The Zombie, riding up towards the pass wearing his Raulston Strokers jersey

This is the second challenge ride in a row that I found difficult to complete. What does this say about my training? Subjectively, I feel like the two experiences were very different. In the run up to my previous challenge ride, The Art of Survival, I was tired almost all of the time; I felt like I was struggling with overtraining. I certainly had tired days in the run up to The Death Ride, but they weren't unrelenting like my earlier experience, and in general, I felt I was managing my fatigue pretty well. In fact, the two training rides up Kings Mountain I did to specifically prepare for the Death Ride were the fastest of the four times I have ridden that climb. My experience preparing for and riding The Art of Survival made me feel like I had lost fitness since moving to California in 2017. My experience preparing for and riding The Death Ride, as tired as I was at the top of Ebbetts Pass, made me feel like I was as fit as I have been since that move. That said, compared to everyone else, I was pretty slow. According to Strava, my speed was in the bottom 7% of people of have climbed Ebbetts Pass. (Similarly, my best time up Kings Mountain is in the bottom 5%.) What all this says to me is that I have now reached my peak, this is good as it is going to get, with one possible exception. I am certain that if I were able to lose 40 pounds, an amount I could lose without jeopardizing my muscle mass or fitness, my time up these climbs would improve immensely. (My doctor is strongly encouraging me to do just that.)

The crowd at the top of the pass. The crowds were so great there had to be "traffic control" at the top to prevent those of us taking a break there from blocking the riders going over the top from both directions. The organizers provided chairs for the riders along with food, drink, bathrooms, and a bike repair facility. The Ebbetts Pass sign can barely be seen in the center of the picture.

How was the ride for my son? He is a much better cyclist than I, and it is a measure of his love for me that he stayed with me all the way to the top of Ebbetts Pass. Once we got there, he found me a seat in the shade, made sure I had food to eat and water to drink, and then headed down the front of Ebbetts so he could climb back up to collect his second pass. This gave me an hour and a half to recover before we headed back to the start together, where I hopped in my car to drive back to where we were staying, and he headed off to conquer Carson Pass for a grand total of three passes, 80 miles, and 9,500 feet of climbing.

A recurring theme of this blog is the important role friends play in my cycling experiences. This ride was no exception. One of my son's best friends from High School (who is also named Michael) owns a home a few miles from the start of The Death Ride, and we stayed with him. He is also a very good cyclist. He completed The Death Ride, all five passes, all 129 miles, all 15,000 feet of climbing. He started about a half an hour before we did, but because we skipped Monitor Pass, I was resting at the top when he rode over Ebbetts pass. He stopped by to see how I was doing and then headed off after my son. He and my son got back up to the top from the other side at the same time, so I got to see him again. The picture above is of Michael the first time up the pass.

Dinner at Michael's. From left to right, my granddaughter Julia, my daughter-in-law Robynn, my grandson Elliott, me, and our host Michael. My son Michael was taking the picture.

The ride was on Saturday, and Michael suggested we come up on Thursday to spend a little more time at altitude to acclimate, which we did, and then stayed through Saturday night. I left the next morning, my son, his wife, and his two children who had come along, stayed the rest of Sunday to enjoy the mountains and came home Sunday night. The time we spent with Michael would have been well worth the trip even in the absence of the ride.

Would I recommend this ride? Am I planning to go again next year? I would highly recommend this ride to anyone fit enough to do however many passes they chose to do. Back when I was describing the Eroica California ride, I commented "this is an expensive event". Actually, when I looked back, that was not true. All of the group rides I have attended have roughly the same entry fee, somewhere between $100 and $150, and The Death Ride is no exception. The organization was impeccable (especially impressive given that 3,500 riders participated), the food at the rest stops was plentiful and exactly what my body wanted, but what made this ride special was the closed roads over Ebbetts and Monitor passes. The absence of cars made the ride much more comfortable and fun. Whether I do it again has nothing to do with the ride, which could not be more attractive, but with my aging body. I barely made it up one pass this year. What will next year bring? Will I lose weight and get more fit, or will the passing of another year reduce my fitness just enough to make even one pass too much? I have no idea, I'll just have to wait and see.