50,000 Miles ... and now what?

This is my third round number of my miles posts. I posted The first one after I had completed 20,000 miles of riding. I started out that one with a quote from my wife: "You should be proud of yourself for sticking to cycling so long." That continues to be the most important thing about my cycling, that I have now stuck with it for more than 15 years. I believe that the impact of that consistent exercise has been enormously beneficial for my health. My second post came after 40,000 miles of riding. In that post, I predicted I would reach 50,000 miles in September of 2023. That was a bit optimistic, but I am extremely satisfied to have reached that milestone even if a bit late. 

Here is another optimistic prediction from that 40,000 mile post: "It is not impossible that, even riding against [the] headwind [of my old age], I might still be able to get a bit more fit than I am today." I no longer believe that is possible. Rather, I believe that I am engaged in a rearguard action to delay my decline and continue cycling in at least some form for as long as I can. 

Each of my three round number of mile posts have opened with a similar graph - my accumulated miles since I restarted cycling in August of 2008 through the present. For this one I added a trend line (in red) to help reveal times during those 15+ years when I have ridden more or less than average. Looking at my progress compared to that trend line, it is apparent that I am slowing down. Given that, how much longer can I keep this up? There is no way to know, of course, life just happens, but one can ask about the odds. A good starting point is to ask how much longer I might expect to live. Social Security provides a very basic prediction based only on my sex and current age and predicts I will live 12 more years, to age 86. To provide a more personalized and possibly more accurate prediction, I searched the Internet and found a government funded, peer reviewed (which is to say believable) research project at Boston University named Living To 100 that asked me a large number of questions about my weight, drinking, smoking, exercise, etc. Based on all this data about me, their algorithm also predicted I will live 12 more years, to an age of 86. But that is just an upper limit. It would be lovely if I could finish a bike ride, sit down by the side of the road, and peacefully pass into the hereafter, but the fates are seldom that kind. It is likely that I will be unable to continue cycling some time before the end of my life. 

To help me think about what the future might hold I have collected stats on all my previous 10,000 mile landmarks, whether I blogged about them or not, and then made some reasonable assumptions and projected forward to the next three 10,000 mile landmarks:

The key column in this table is the last, labelled Years. The more years it takes to complete 10,000 miles, the less riding I did on a per year basis. As can be seen on both the graph at the top of this post as well as in the table above, my first 10,000 miles were an outlier. One reason for that is, as I noted in my 20,000 mile post, the start of my second cycling career on 8/1/2008 was something of a false start. After cycling for about six months I stopped cycling for well over a year before restarting again on 5/3/2010. This long gap with almost no rides and thus almost no miles dramatically distorts the statistics. I tried a number of different ways of correcting for that and all of them make that first year less of an outlier, but in all cases the First 10,000 miles was slower than the Second 10,000 miles. From this I conclude that my cycling was improving during those first 10,000 miles. This is the second reason that the First 10,000 miles is an outlier: after that landmark, everything is downhill.

For each 10,000 miles (except for the first) the number of years required to complete those 10,000 miles is greater than the 10,000 miles before by about 6 months. To project what I might be able to do in the future, I assumed that trend would continue. Will I be able to reach a 6th 10,000 miles? There certainly aren't any guarantees, but barring any problems (a bit of an assumption at my age) it is certainly possible. How about a 7th? Should I be able to do that, I would count myself lucky indeed! I would say a 7th 10,000 miles is unlikely but not impossible. To complete an 8th 10,000 miles would require me to ride two years past the date projected for my death. Of course, the date of my death is impossible to predict precisely, and so nothing is impossible, but I am definitely not counting on reaching that milestone.

There are other reasons I believe my fitness is decreasing:

• From 2012 through 2015 my goal was 200 kilometer long rides. By 2018, I had lowered my goal to half that, 100 kilometer long rides. Of course, it is more complicated by that. By 2018 I had moved to hilly California from flat Texas and my goal was one 100 kilometer ride a month rather than one 200 kilometer long ride a year, but all things considered, I believe this was a step down in ambition.
• In 2021, I failed at even this less ambitious goal. I attempted to train for the Art of Survival Metric Century (100 kilometers) and fatigue prevented me from doing so. (I have blogged about that failure ad nauseum and may do so again.)
• In 2023 my back got worse. Although this does not affect my cycling directly, going for a ride is one of the most comfortable things I can do with regards to my back, but my back pain does create fatigue and thus inhibits my cycling indirectly.
• Recently, I realized my dream of riding a Metric Century a Month was never going to happen. Although this is not an event but rather the acknowledgement of a reality, I think I wouldn't have been driven to this acknowledgement except that I am no longer feeling as strong as I did when I first had that dream.

Cycling for Health

The primary reason I restarted cycling back in 2008 was because I realized my lack of aerobic exercise was threatening my health. The Medical community recommends I accumulate a minimum of 150 minutes a week of Moderate Intensity or 75 minutes of Vigorous Intensity aerobic exercise a week. Ideally they would have me accumulate twice that, 300 minutes Moderate or 150 minutes Vigorous Intensity a week. They also recommend that exercise be spread out over the week. For example, they suggest a 60 minute Moderate exercise session five days a week, with a recommended minimum of 3 days a week. For the purposes of this post, I am calling all my cycling Moderate Intensity even though I know that is not completely true. I am hoping it is a close enough approximation but will call out one case where I think that assumption might be problematic.

For the purposes of evaluating how my health-targeted cycling is going, I am going to look at two statistics: for what percentage of the weeks did I accumulate 150 or 300 minutes of cycling, and for what percentage of the weeks did I ride for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 days? During my most recent landmark, 40,000 to 50,000 miles, I rode 150 or more miles during 78% of the weeks and 300 or more miles during 51% of the weeks. I did five or more rides during 39% of the weeks and three or more rides 77% of the weeks. So, not nothing but far from perfect.

Historically, I have not worried about riding for health per se, I figured my recreational riding should provide the health benefits I was seeking but is that true? My gut says yes but my annoying brain remains skeptical. I have blogged about the medical community's aerobic exercise recommendations a fair bit and plan to blog about it more in the future but very briefly, I take comfort from the following quotation from "Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition" by The Department of Health and Human Services USA, 2018: "Some physical activity is better than none. Adults who sit less and do any amount of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity gain some health benefits." Similarly, I am inspired by the following quotation from the same source: "Additional health benefits are gained by engaging in physical activity beyond the equivalent of 300 minutes (5 hours) of moderate-intensity physical activity a week." So mostly I am going to go with my gut on this one. What I am doing is way better than nothing but I should continue to strive to bicycle as much as I can.

What does it mean, "mostly go with my gut"? Well, my brain has an important role to play here, and that is keeping me honest. One example of where this is an issue is the Recovery Rides on my trainer. One thing I hope to blog about in the future is the difficulty in distinguishing between Light, Moderate, and Vigorous aerobic exercise, but for the purposes of this post I am going to claim that those Recovery Rides are at an Intensity below Moderate so that I should not count them towards my health benefits. Unfortunately, the statistics I quote above do include them. At the time I was recording them, I believed they did count as Moderate exercise and now it would be too much work to go back and remove them. Does that mean I am doing even worse than I thought? Maybe not. Although I counted my Recovery Rides when I shouldn't have, I also ignored that part of my riding that is clearly qualifies as Vigorous or even HIIT. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. Here is what The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says about HIIT: "Recent research has examined high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which may provide similar reductions in cardiovascular disease risk factors as those observed with continuous moderate- intensity physical activity." HSS goes on to say that research remains to be done on exactly how much HIIT should count. The research I am reading says that, whereas minutes of Vigorous exercise counts double, minutes of HIIT may count as much as 45 times as much as Moderate exercise. So, for the purposes of this post I am going to hope that erroneously counting my Recovery rides is offset by failing to fully credit the parts of my rides that are Vigorous or HIIT. Of course, this assumes that I don't over-use my trainer (see below.)

Finally, how does my success during my last 10,000 miles compare to my previous 10,000 mile landmarks? During none of the five 10,000 mile landmarks was I perfect; I did not cycle 300 miles or more and 5 days or more for 100% of their weeks. The graph below illustrates how much I did ride for the last four landmarks:

I didn't include my first 10,000 miles on this graph because, as noted above, it was an outlier and including it made the graph harder to understand. The red line on the graph is average minutes per week, equivalent to the how many years it takes me to finish 10,000 miles already noted above as a declining indicator, and it is indeed declining. This is related but not identical to the percent of weeks in which I rode greater than 300 miles. The key difference is that, for the latter metric, it doesn't matter by how much I exceed 300 minutes whereas for the average, it very much does. My longest week, the week of my first 200 kilometer long ride, I accumulated 909 minutes while riding 197 miles. This week dramatically affects the average but counts no more than a week with 301 minutes towards the percent of weeks >300 minutes.

Looking at this graph, it is the case that my second 10,000 miles had the best score in all categories, but for the third, fourth, and fifth, each landmark may be better in one but worse in another. Especially relevant to this post, my most recent 10,000 miles had the worst score for percent weeks with greater than 300 minutes, but a pretty decent score for number of weeks with five or more rides; my consistency is good but my rides are too short. I feel like the overall message is that my performance on these metrics is declining overall but with some ups and downs along the way.

Cycling for Fun

I reached the 40,000 mile landmark during September of 2020, just about the time I moved from a relatively flat part of San Carlos to the well named Emerald Hills where I now live. This was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and as a result all 2020 cycling events were cancelled. However, that didn't mean I had no fun. Rather, it meant the fun I had was that of exploring a new neighborhood and figuring out how to deal with its challenges, especially the hills. After the move, I could continue to ride my two favorite GoTo rides, my Alpine and Alpine-Cañada rides, almost unchanged. As for new rides, my son shared one of his favorite rides with me, the Huddart Park ride. It is a delightful ride in many ways, low traffic, amazing scenery, and at first I did one of these rides a week, but it is also a very challenging ride and I found I was building up fatigue and, as a result, started looking for alternatives. I tried coasting downhill from my new home to my old haunts in the flats of the East Bay to do some of my favorite rides there but always ran into the same problem. The hills back to my house from the east are all very steep and this converted what was supposed to be an easy ride into a hard one. (The reason the Alpine and Alpine-Cañada rides work is because they bring me home from the west where the hills are less steep.) Similarly, when I tried to explore my new neighborhood (one of my favorite things to do on a bike) the very steep hills made that extremely challenging to impossible, even for my Bianchi Volpe, my bike with the lowest gears. In fact, the new neighborhood had reduced my formerly respectable stable of bikes to a single usable bike, the Volpe being the only one with gears even close to low enough for the neighborhood. I knew I needed to find an easier ride. My first attempt was the Lake Loop. I rode that ride so many times I became a Legend on Strava. The ride itself was fine, but getting home from it was still too hard. Several years ago I had purchased a trainer but found it so boring I didn't end up using it very much. I set my trainer up in my bedroom with my Surly Cross Check dedicated to it, making it super convenient to use, I just hop on and go. It is still boring, but it allows for a very easy ride to help balance all the hills and so I find myself using it a couple of times a week. 

In early 2021, my son decided that I needed an eBike. Because of the pandemic, bikes were hard to come by, but he found an exceptionally good bike that I could get right away, an Orbea Gain. It arrived March 24, 2021 and by March 28th I had it set up and completed my first ride, that exploration of the neighborhood which that eBike finally made possible. The other thing it made possible was keeping up with riders who are much faster than I am, my son and my friends Roger and Dave for example. One of the most fun set of rides I did on that bike was one we called the Hot Chocolate Ride. The pandemic was still in full force so eating indoors at a restaurant was out and restaurants had not yet had time to build out the outdoor seating which they all have now. However, there was one restaurant that had always used outdoor seating and so Sundays, we would ride over the (steep!) hills to that restaurant, Michael on his normal bike, his wife Robynn on a cargo eBike with Julia and Elliott aboard, and me on the Orbea. When we started these rides, I was on my Volpe but Michael and Robynn had to slow down so I could keep up. Once I had my Orbea, they could ride as fast as they liked and I could keep up with them.

By 2021,  Art of Survival had come back after the pandemic, but when I attempted to train for it, fatigue prevented me from doing so, something about which I have blogged ad nauseum and which I may blog about even more in the future. I concluded at the time that this failure was due to overtraining and reacted accordingly. As time goes by, I become more and more skeptical of that conclusion and worry that my response to that hypothetical overtraining may be doing more harm than good, an issue to which I will return later in this post. One consequence of that was between the middle of 2020 when I moved to the start of 2022, with the exception of the Hot Chocolate rides, the only ride I did with anyone else, that I did not do all alone, was one ride with my friends Paul and Fringy.

2022 was a very good year. I began by riding with Paul and Fringy in February, April and July. In March, I completed a ride on my Hetchins with the local Classical and Vintage bike group. At the end of April/beginning of May I attended Eroica California. I successfully prepared to ride the Art of Survival at the end of May, but then couldn't attend due to bad weather.  Instead, I was able to attend Ride the Rogue in September of that year. This was also the year I got my TranyaGo sports watch and restarted tracking my heart rate.

2023 started out as another bad year due to a combination of my back getting worse and coincidentally, some severe dental problems. These exhausted me and my riding suffered. This reached a nadir in May, making attending Art of Survival impossible. Starting in July, my riding got better so I might have hoped to attend Ride the Rogue, but I had a scheduling conflict. By October, my riding again got worse due to a random combination of interruptions, weather, and illnesses. January 2024 was a continuation of that poor performance, but by February I started to improve again. If this continues, I am hoping to attend Art of Survival this year.

Final Thoughts

My gut is telling me that the big picture presented by the time course of my 50,000 miles of cycling is that I am getting older and that my ability to ride is fading as a result. My brain is not entirely convinced. One argument that my brain makes is to point out a possible wrong turn in my training that I may have made back in 2011. One explanation of my poor performance that year was overtraining and I really leaned into that one possibility. Two things I did which my brain is questioning are 1) I started overusing my Trainer, and especially riding too often at too low an Intensity. These are not training rides. One or two of these a week after a strenuous ride might help me harvest the benefits of that strenuous ride, but in excess of that, represent junk riding of no significant benefit, and yet I am counting them in my training statistics, giving myself a false sense of progress. 2) I started riding my long rides more slowly. There were logical reasons for doing that, the 80:20 rule (aka Polarized Training aka Zone 2 training) recommended by many coaches, for example. What my brain argues is that maybe I overemphasized the 80 and underemphasized the 20, that when I made my long rides easier I was not careful to make sure I included enough fast rides and to make sure that they were fast enough. Similarly, when I made my long rides slower, maybe I should have made them longer at the same time. Now my brain will concede that this is just a possibility, that I definitely need to listen to my body, and when my body says it is tired, I should act accordingly. In retrospect, however, even my gut will concede that I really overdid the easy trainer rides. In summary, maybe I should make sure that when I am riding less it is because I am tired not because I am lazy. Who knows, Paris-Brest-Paris* for my 90th birthday? (Just kidding.)

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* Paris-Brest-Paris is perhaps the most prestigious group ride there is. It is about 750 miles long and must be completed in 90 hours to qualify for an award. Sleeping is allowed but it does count against your time so sleep deprivation is common. It is tough, even for a very fit rider in their prime.

Testing My Calculation of Load

Most coaches recommend keeping a training log, a list of rides completed along with their length. Most coaches also recommend measuring the length of those rides in minutes rather than miles. One reason for preferring minutes is illustrated by a consideration of two rides of equal mileage, one hilly, one flat. Imagine riding these two rides, riding each with the same intensity. To do that, you will need to slow down going up the hills of the hilly ride (and no, the downhills will not make up for the uphills.) That means the hilly ride will take longer and, as a result of being longer in minutes, leave you more tired (and more fit). However, if you track miles in your training log, they will look the same. Tracking minutes makes up for that and therefore is a better metric. However, let’s change the scenario a bit. After the above rides you decide to see how fast you can complete the hilly ride. Because you moderated your effort the first time, imagine it took an hour to complete the ride. When you repeat it going all out, imagine that it only took you fifty minutes. Obviously the faster ride will leave you more tired (and more fit) than the slower ride, but by tracking minutes, you get less credit for it in your training log. Aren’t coaches aware of this problem? What do they suggest we do about it? Coaches are fully aware of this fact (they would not call it a problem) and what they would say about it is that every ride should be ridden at a planned level of effort based on a well thought out training plan so there would never be a reason to compare the faster and slower rides. Exercise scientists have different goals and would take a different approach, they would say that level of effort does need to be taken into account and have developed quantitative measures for doing so. For better or for worse, I decided to start tracking a quantitative measure of the effort of my rides in my training log. To explain what I mean by that, let me start with some definitions.

Fitness is the goal of my training. It is the process of getting faster and stronger and developing more endurance. Fitness is a very complicated topic which I will describe only briefly towards the end of this post. Training also has a dark side and that is Fatigue. When I ride I develop Fatigue such that if I attempt to ride again too soon, my performance would be worse than before I trained. However, if I rest, Fatigue declines and Fitness increases and if I ride again after the proper amount of rest, my performance will be improved. Excessive training can even lead to Overtraining, Fatigue that won’t go away. Thus, it is important to do the right amount of training and not too much. How is training measured? The term I use as a measure of how much training has been done is Load.

Load = Volume x Intensity

Volume is how long a ride lasts in minutes. Intensity is much more complicated, but roughly corresponds to how hard a ride is, hard because it is ridden fast or because the route over which it is ridden is hilly, for example. Perhaps the most common way Coaches talk about Intensity is in terms of Training Zones. Different coaches use different Training Zone systems. The coach I follow, Coach John Hughes, uses a 7 zone system, where Zone 1 is the easiest, the lowest level of Intensity and Zone 7 is the hardest. The boundaries of Training Zones can be defined by a variety of indicators including Heart Rate, Perceived Exertion, Power, Blood Lactate, and Rate of Breathing. In this post I will only be discussing Heart Rate. Dividing Intensity into Zones is merely a convenience, Intensity is continuous. For example, the Intensity of the very top of Zone 2 is virtually identical to the Intensity of the very bottom of Zone 3. Training zones are a great way for coaches to communicate training plans to their athletes, but are not quantitative, they do not allow one to calculate a quantitative measure of Load. In the scientific literature, the term used as a measure of training is TRIMP (which stands for TRaining IMPulse). Confusingly, there are several different versions of TRIMP, each corresponding to a different way of calculating that number (which is part of the reason I prefer to use the term Load.) Which version should I use? In the end, I decided I didn’t like any of them and developed my own. My discussion of the various versions of TRIMP and the development of my own version is described in my blog post of August 2021 entitled “TRIMP, Intensity, and Fatigue”. How I decided to use the Average Heart Rate for a ride provided by my TranyaGo sports watch to calculate the Load (my version of a TRIMP score) for that ride is described in my blog post of April 2023 entitled “Improved Training Load Estimate”. Between October 3, 2022 and March 3, 2024 I calculated and recorded that Load in my training log. Three to four months ago, I decided to review that data and blog about how that worked out. After two months of writing and deleting drafts of that post, I gave up and wrote a blog post on how the attempt to do so had given me “Blogger’s Block”. Where did I go wrong?

I’m not sure I did go wrong. I often say on this blog that in order to think, I write, and I believe there was a lot of thinking to be done on this topic and thus the writing took a long time. What made it feel frustrating is that the process of this kind of writing is not linear. I write down an idea, think about it, decide it is wrong, and then delete it and start over. It feels like I am making no progress, that I am stuck, that each step forward is followed by a step backwards, but that feeling is missing the fact that the thinking is the goal, not the writing, and thinking often involves exploring lots of blind alleys before finding the true path. (Well, maybe not the true path, but a better path.) But what made the thinking so hard?

Consider this whole project an experiment the purpose of which is to test the following hypothesis: Does the Load score I generated by using the Average Heart Rate for a ride provided by my TranyaGo Sports Watch provide a better measure of the Fatigue generated by my training than minutes of riding?

Something else I often say on this blog is that I shouldn’t let Best be the enemy of Good. The fact of the matter is that I do not have enough data of high enough quality to determine with a high degree of confidence if that hypothesis is true or false. However, as as result of looking at the Load data in my training log and of all the thinking I did while preparing this post, I am of the opinion that the original way I calculated Load was probably not more useful than minutes of Riding, but with minor modifications I could come up with a score that does have a reasonable likelihood of being better.

How could Load not be better than minutes? As I noted at the beginning of this post, it seems like this should be a no-brainer. Tracking Load by tracking minutes completely ignores the difference between a hard ride and an easy one. If one could reliably determine how hard a ride is, its Intensity, that would be true. Unfortunately, there is no consensus as to how to determine Intensity, or even what Intensity means, or if Intensity is even one thing. For the sake of the Good and the purposes of this post, let’s ignore Best and assume Intensity is one thing. If one ignores Intensity, the Load of a fast ride will be underestimated. If, however, the Intensity of that fast ride is overestimated, so will the Load of that fast ride. Because there is no limit as to how badly one can overestimate that Intensity, Load can end up being a worse measure of Fatigue than minutes. Thus, the first question I asked when I started working on this post is, does the estimate of Intensity I am using seem reasonable? To answer that question, I decided to simplify things by only comparing rides on the same route, on the same bicycle, etc. These are the rides I have named the Cañada rides, a 17 mile ride with 1,100 feet of climbing. The lowest heart rate I have recorded on those rides is 113 beats per minute (BPM). The highest is 145 BPM. Using the equation from my Improved Training Load post, I calculated that the 145 BPM ride had an Intensity 6.8 times that of the 113 BPM ride. The effect of that on Fatigue (Load)  is less than that because the faster ride is completed in fewer minutes so the Load of the faster ride is 5.7 times that of the slower ride. This is completely unreasonable. Yes, I am more tired after the fast ride than the slow one, but it is not five to six times more tired!  I might believe that the Fatigue of the fast ride is twice as much as the slow, though one and a half times seems even more likely. This is where I got stuck. I have spent the last three months trying to figure out where I went wrong. The good news is that in the process of trying to explain these discrepancies, I clarified my thinking on a whole range of issues. Here are some of them:

1. Heart Rate depends on many things in addition to Intensity. A few examples include worry, caffeine, and Fatigue. Thus, Heart Rate can give misleading Intensity measures. In my experience, Average Heart Rate is fairly reliable, my Average Heart Rate recorded for most rides seems to be a pretty good indicator of Intensity, but when I selected the rides with the highest and lowest Average Heart Rates, I was selecting the outliers, those rides where Heart Rate was most likely not to be a good indicator. To get around this problem, I selected my ten slowest rides and my ten fastest rides and compared the Intensity calculated from the Average Heart Rates recorded for those two groups of rides. There was only a 2.2-fold difference, much more reasonable. (The average heart rates were 137 and 120 BPM.) Is this the solution to my problem? Maybe, in part at least. This idea occurred to me very recently. Had I thought of it early on, I might have avoided the whole “blogger’s block” thing, and that would have been unfortunate. As I struggled to explain why my Intensity estimates were so far off, I reconsidered every aspect of how I calculated my Intensity and many good insights resulted.
   
   
2. I stand by my post on Trimp, Intensity, and Fatigue. If I were to write it today, I would change some of the numbers a bit but the overall conclusions of that post, that the commonly used TRIMP calculations are not consistent with coaches’ recommendations or athletes experiences, would not change. What I am reconsidering is how the conclusions from that post ought to affect my day to day cycling. That is a work in progress and may be a topic for a future post, but I have nothing more to say about that in this post.
   
   
3. In my post on Improved Training Load Estimate, I proposed to calculate Intensity from Average Heart Rate by using this equation:
   
   Intensity = 0.00065 x e^{(0.06 x heart-rate)}
   
   As noted in Point 1 above, I don’t think this was a ridiculous choice, but I am not sure if it is better or worse than just using minutes as a measure of Load and I also think I can do better. Again, that is a work in progress and is likely to be the topic of a future post, but I have nothing more to say about that in this post.
   
   
4. In that same post, I noted that Average Heart Rate for a ride is not a good way to estimate the Load of an Interval Session. More recently, I have noticed that some of my rides look a bit like Interval Sessions in that they contain short stretches of very high Intensity embedded in a long ride of more moderate Intensity. This might be important because such rides might be generating more Fatigue than would be predicted from the Average Heart Rate of that ride. I did several such rides after my move from a flatter neighborhood to a hillier one in 2020 and this might be what prevented me from riding the 2021 Art of Survival. This is not even a work in progress, but rather the seed of an idea that might or might not develop into something.
   
   
5. Different rides have different effects on my fitness even if they have the same Load. One might primarily improve endurance while another might primarily improve speed. Thus, I should not substitute one ride for another just based on Load. For that reason, I have started adding a sentence to my Training Log explaining, for each ride, the purpose of that ride, why I chose to ride it instead of a different ride.

Where does this leave me? As of March 4, I have changed my training log to emphasize minutes over Load. I am still tracking Load but I am experimenting with different ways of calculating that Load. Once this settles down, I’ll post about it. 

 

RIP Coach Hughes

 

A few days ago, I stumbled across the obituary of Coach John Hughes. As readers of this blog know, Coach Hughes was, of all the fine coaches out there, the coach I chose to follow. I never met him or even communicated with him, I just read his books and articles. 

I discovered Hughes on the Google group randon, a group devoted to randonneuring (long distance challenge bicycle rides.) I liked what he said there and so purchased the book he co-wrote with Dan Kehlenbach, "Distance Cycling." My first reaction to "Distance Cycling" was lukewarm at best - I gave it three out of five stars on Goodreads. Over time, however, it grew on me until it became the only training book I used. From the references in 'Distance Cycling" I discovered Hughes' publications on Road Bike Rider website and eventually those publications replaced "Distance Cycling" as my primary reference for bicycle training.

What was it about Coach Hughes which made me select him from amongst the truly amazing collection of coach-authors I might have followed, Coach Joe Friel as one major example? He certainly was not the most polished, the most authoritative, nor the most cutting edge. Most of his advice he took from other coaches, Joe Friel for one, a fact I know because he meticulously referenced the ideas he used. I am a scientist, and Joe Friel (for example) tries to make his training advice as scientific as possible, something Coach Hughes did not do. One of the first thing that attracted me to Coach Hughes was the breadth of his advice. At the time I discovered him, he was one of the few coaches to provide advice for randonneuring, a sport I had just taken up. Actually, the very first thing that caught my eye, back when I discovered Hughes on randon, the thing that persuaded me to purchase "Distance Cycling", was his advice for older cyclists, a group that very much included me. There are plenty of books with titles like  "Cycling Past Fifty". but none of them seemed to describe cyclists like me, only Coach Hughes managed to do that. This brings me to the second and perhaps more important reason I followed John Hughes. For Coach Hughes, cycling was personal and totally real. He and I were very close in age (he was about three months older than I and yes I get the implications of that for my mortality) and my favorite of his articles were those about himself, the practical impacts of aging, mistakes he had made, and the consequences of those mistakes. What I loved about those articles was how honest, real, and slightly sad they were. The final thing that drew me to Hughes was his flexibility and humility. One of his favorite expressions was "Remember, everyone is an experiment of one." By that he meant that every cyclist needs to decide for themselves which pieces of training advice work for them and which just don't.

So, is it time for me to find a new coach? I don't see why. I think there is enough wisdom in Hughes collected works to last me for however long I have left. That said, I will miss you John Hughes, it will be lonelier out there on the road knowing you no longer are with us. 

Blogger's Block

The Zombie, failing for the third time to complete a blog post.

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I tend to write my blog posts ahead of when I need them. At present, I have twelve draft posts at various stages of completion. As a new month comes around, I pick a draft that seems the most ready and complete it for that month. In between, I work on various of these drafts as ideas come to me. Sometimes one of these drafts reaches final form before the beginning of a month such that all I have to do is post it. Almost as easy, sometimes when I turn my attention to an unfinished draft, it comes together pretty much the way I expected it to when I started it. However, as I have mentioned on this blog before, one of the ways I think is to write, and that means that sometimes I pick a draft to finish for the month and as I try to complete it, it goes sideways. That is exactly as it should be, that is what it means to think by writing. From a practical point of view, sometimes that is fine but sometimes it is a challenge. Sometimes I simply follow the post where it wants to go and that is what gets posted. Sometimes, however, I cannot do that, either because completing that post would take more time than I have or because what I learn as I write is that the idea that inspired that draft was flawed and I end up discarding it. In that case, I move on to one of my other drafts. In the case of this month's post, I repeated that process three times. At that point, almost half way through the month in which the post was to appear, I decided my inability to complete any of my draft posts had to itself become the post; I have to blog about the fact that I have Blogger's Block.

Why do I have Blogger's Block? A while back, I posted that when I have trouble blogging, that often reflects a problem with my cycling and that certainly could be true this time, both in the long term and in the short term. Long term, I have found it harder to maintain a consistent and sufficient riding schedule ever since my move to Emerald Hills in 2020. I think the hills around my new home, the COVID pandemic, and my advancing age all factor into this. In the short term, I am just now coming out of a month long slump caused by a combination of a nasty norovirus infection, bad weather, and discouragement. However, in addition to whatever impact my cycling problems had on my ability to complete a blog post, I think there was a conceptual issue which also got in the way. That conceptual issue is that I don't understand how to quantitate the impact of Intensity on both my Fatigue and on my Fitness. (Intensity is how "hard" I ride, e.g. how fast.) I know Intensity matters, I just don't know how much. I think that every time I tried to finish a post, I ran into this issue and got stuck. 

What are the twelve draft blog posts I have queued up and why can't I complete any of them? Here are their tentative titles:

1. Perverse Incentives
2. Perspective
3. Heart Rate: A Sanity Check
4. Using the Banister Model Before and During Training
5. Displaying Fatigue, Fitness, Form, and Load
6. I Am Old
7. The Metric Revisited
8. Current Status of My Bikes
9. Not Door to Door
10. 50,000 Miles ... and Now What?
11. Hughes ToDos
12. Ideas

Drafts 1 through 5 are all somehow tied up with the issue of Intensity. I suspect some of these will be dropped or merged as I work through my thoughts on this issue. (If I fail to work through my thoughts, then they all five will be dropped.) Drafts 6 and 7 are at early stages of development and I am not yet convinced there is enough there to generate a blog post. Drafts 8 through 10 are waiting on events. When these events happen, I will be able to complete these posts. Drafts 11 and 12 are not really drafts at all, but collections of ideas. In summary, I think that before the end of March, I am going to have to come to terms with my confusion about Intensity if I want to have something to post.

In my despair at my Blogger's Block, I asked myself is if it is time to stop posting, to close down or at least freeze this blog? I hope not! Draft number 10, "50,000 Miles ... and Now What?" is one post I am very excited about, I just have to reach 50,000 miles of riding to be able to post it. There is another post I am excited about that isn't on the list. 2024 is the year of my 75th birthday. To me, this is a big deal, three quarters of a century old! Never in my life have I done a birthday ride, a ride where the length of the ride in miles is equal to my age. Knowing myself, a 75 mile ride would be a big challenge, but possible if I don't have any bad luck (e.g. illness), if I keep it as easy as possible (e.g. flat), and if I prepare diligently. The reason it is not on my list is that I am superstitious enough that I fear jinxing the ride if I were to be so presumptuous as to create a draft post about it before it is completed. Besides completing the ride, to make it to that post I would have to come up with four or five more posts before then. Can I do that? Here's hoping!

Training Advice for the Berkeley Wheelmen of 1970

 

I happen to be revisiting the Berkeley Wheelmen Newsletters I blogged about a few years ago and stumbled across the following article on training. This article was published in the June 1970 issue, Volume 5 Number 6. I was struck with how modern it seemed, as well as how simple, and wanted to share it with my readers. Obviously, this training plan, written for college age competitive cyclists, is of questionable relevance to me, a non-competitive old man.

The figure above was at the top of the first page of that newsletter and was drawn by my friend and roommate, Paul Rail, a very gifted artist.

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 LONG TERM ATHLETIC TRAINING

By Eric Johnson

A lot of atheletes believe that the harder one trains the better condition or performance he will attain. This is true for a short time only; the duration of this effect being dependent on the physical type, age, years of training and the native ability of the athelete. Most are willing to acknowledge that the rider can drain himself, but few seem to avoid it. I think that through proper training, nutrition, and a keen awareness of the body's response, overtraining can be avoided and superior performances can be achieved. Here are some basic guidelines for a long term training program.

To best avoid overtraining an athelete should devise a conditioning program that incorporates a maximum of variety. During most of the year he should train at a level which stimulates, not forces, development of his body. This type of training is called base training. It should include one day a week of training at a racing pace but concentrate on long rides at moderate pace. This combination should eliminate the tendency to slow down in the off season. Base training builds energy reserves from which a rider can draw during the racing season.

Base training effects are long lasting, slow to achieve and. difficult to maximize. When correctly carried out base training produces abundant health and energy without sore muscles, fatigue and other bummers. Building a base is a natural consequence of riding over a period of years, however the idea is to maximize the increase of basic speed. This is not done by training hard all year, but by training consistently at the fastest level your body can sustain without fatigue, sore muscles and illness. Almost as important is the regularity of training, daily at best. Heart and lungs, the controlling factors of base training, respond best to controlled daily exercise.

The natural compliment to base training is "sharpening" training. Sharpening is what really counts for the races. It involves hard, fast, long regular workouts. These workouts should be varied including hills, flats, rollers, anything you can think of to extend your muscles, heart and lungs. This training must also be done carefully; fully aware of how the body is responding. A good diet is extremely important and must be strictly adhered to. Weight loss should be avoided as it tends to weaken the body. This sharpening can only be done effectively for a few months once or twice a year. If kept up too long sharpening will result in slower performances due to overextending or using up the energy reserves you built up by base training. If you realize when your maximum sharpening has been achieved and at that point ease up on your training you will not dull before the end of the season.

In conclusion, always remember that the sophistication of training methods has produced four minute miles and Tour de France champions. It is more important to design your training program in terms of years rather than specific races or seasons. This involves year round training most of which is base training promoting the maximum develipment of the whole body. Only a few months a year can be devoted to the sharpening of muscles because this requires more than the body can endure over extended periods. Formally designing a year round training program may be a valuable asset for the Berkeley Wheelmen. If by consensus a flexible program is developed, new riders can be properly trained and seasoned racers can achieve their best performances.

Coach Hughes and Zone 3

 

The figure above shows the Training Zones used by Coach John Hughes, the coach I more or less follow. What are Training Zones? It is obvious that it matters for a cyclist’s training how hard they exert themselves on a training ride. The same ride is harder if a cyclist completes it in 60 minutes by riding it as fast as they can as compared to if they take it easy and finish it in 80 minutes. This characteristic of a workout is named Intensity. The three most common ways Intensity is measured are:

1. Subjectively, how hard a ride feels, a metric named Relative Perceived Exertion, labeled RPE on the above figure.
2. How many watts of power as measured by a power meter in the bicycle's drive train, a metric labeled Power on the above diagram.
3. How fast the athlete's heart is beating, labeled Heart Rate on the above figure.

As is shown in this figure, Coach Hughes believes that these measures are more or less interchangeable.

Although Intensity is a continuous value, for reasons of convenience Intensity is usually divided into discrete Training Zones. Different coaches divide Intensity into different numbers of zones and place the boundaries between zones at different points on the Intensity scale. Also, these boundaries have to be customized to the individual cyclist. Coach Hughes does so by defining the boundaries in terms of measured values for each cyclist, % LT and % FTP for heart rate and power, respectively. (RPE, being subjective, is automatically customized.) I won’t talk about power in this post, you can google the words “FTP power cycling” and find more than you would ever want to know about this topic. I track my intensity by RPE and Heart Rate, so that is what I will discuss. % LT (under Heart Rate in the figure) is short for Percent Lactate Threshold. Coach Hughes defines 100% LT as the heart rate measured during a one hour time trial. The boundary between Zone 4 and Zone 5 is defined to be 100% LT, and then Coach Hughes defines all other boundaries as fixed percentages of that value.

Besides following Coach Hughes, I’ve been trying to follow the principles of Polarized Training. Although Polarized Training has been interpreted differently by different people at different times, my current understanding of it is based on recent podcasts featuring the exercise scientist Dr. Stephen Seiler, the person who invented the term. Dr. Seiler says that Polarized Training means that 80% of training rides should be done below the aerobic threshold and that only 20% should be above it. When I started writing this blog, I believed that the aerobic threshold was the boundary of Training Zones 2 and 3 on Coach Hughes training zones so that if four of my rides each week were in Zone 1 or Zone 2 and if the fifth were ridden in a higher zone I would be following the principles of Polarized Training. Coach Hughes would appear to be a supporter of Polarized Training (see for example his article on Road Bike Rider entitled “Anti-Aging: The 80/20 Principle.”.) What inspired me to write this post is that, given Hughes’ support of Polarized Training and my belief that the aerobic threshold lay at the boundary between Zone 2 and Zone 3, I could not understand why Coach Hughes sometimes recommended riding above that boundary, in Zone 3, during the 80% of rides that ought to be ridden below the aerobic threshold. There are two possible explanations: either Coach Hughes’ zones are not designed such that an athlete’s aerobic threshold is at the boundary between Zone 2 and Zone 3 or Coach Hughes’ training plans do not always follow the principles of Polarized Training. 

How do Coach Hughes Training Zones map onto the aerobic threshold of Polarized Training? To answer this question I once again turned to Dr. Seiler. Dr. Seiler uses a three zone system where the zones are named Low Intensity, Threshold Intensity, and High Intensity. These zones are defined by blood lactate concentration. Low Intensity is where Dr. Seiler says 80% of training rides should be ridden. The two boundaries between Seiler’s three zones are the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. Seiler would say that neither Power nor Heart Rate can be used to locate these boundaries, he would argue that only blood lactate levels can do that, though Power and Heart Rate can be used as proxies after an athlete has calibrated them against lactate. Because both the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds increase with training, this calibration needs to be repeated periodically. 

Unfortunately, most athletes, including me, don’t have access to the facilities needed for blood lactate measurements so we have to estimate these values some other way. Having said that aerobic threshold can only be determined by blood lactate, when interviewed in one podcast, Dr. Seiler did allow that for “many” athletes, their aerobic threshold would be somewhere near 80% of their maximum heart rate, which for me, translates into 144 beats per minute. Other coaches make different estimates. Coach Hughes does not explicitly offer an estimate of his own.

Besides just guessing at the translation between aerobic threshold and heart rate, there are other ways of estimating the aerobic threshold. One is to measure the ratio of oxygen inhaled and CO2 exhaled, a test as difficult as the blood lactate test. An easy test is the talk test - the aerobic threshold is the boundary between where an athlete can talk normally and where talking becomes erratic due to the need to breathe more deeply and often. Using the talk test, I estimate my aerobic threshold to be no more than 130 heartbeats per minute, quite a bit lower than the 144 bpm estimated from my maximum heart rate. Could it be that I am not one of the “many” athletes to which Seiler refers? It certainly could! Dr. Seiler mostly works with college age, elite athletes. I am much less talented, much less fit, and much older than those athletes. It is interesting in that context that the Polar Watch Company, maker of one of the most popular and respected sports watches, says specifically that the more fit you are, the higher the percentage of maximum heart rate your aerobic threshold will map to. For me, the range they gave ran from 108 bpm to 153 bpm assuming low fitness to high fitness, respectively. In that context, it seems quite plausible that if Seiler quotes a typical aerobic threshold of 144 bpm, mine would be below 130. This underlines Seiler’s original point that an athlete’s aerobic threshold should not be determined from their heart rate.

So at long last we have the foundation to ask the question “Why does Coach Hughes recommend Zone 3 training as part of the low Intensity training that the Polarized theory says should constitute 80% of workouts?” If my aerobic threshold were 144 bpm, what Dr. Seiler says is the case for “many” athletes, that would lie in Coach Hughes Zone 3. Thus, it would make sense for Coach Hughes to recommend Zone 3 training as part of the Low Intensity workouts that are critical for Polarized Training. If it is the 130 bpm I estimate from the talk test, then those Low Intensity workouts should be limited to Zones 1 and 2. Interestingly, Coach Hughes explicitly endorses the talk test as the boundary between Zones 2 and 3 when using RPE to determine training zones. There are two implications of that. First, it contradicts Coach Hughes’ implicit suggestion that the zones he defines using RPE, Heart Rate, and Power align - they do not necessarily do so. The second implication follows from the fact that for an athlete who uses the talk test to define their training zones, it must follow that by recommending Zone 3 as part of Low Intensity riding, he necessarily violates the principles of Polarized Training. 

Where does all of this leave me? There are many things I like about the advice of Coach Hughes but his inconsistency is not one of them. In my last post, I discussed a weekly training plan from Coach Hughes. This plan includes four rides in Zone 1 or Zone 2 and one ride in Zone 3. This schedule is entirely consistent with Dr. Seiler’s Polarized Training ideas. In the post before that, I described Coach Hughes-derived annual training plan. That schedule includes five or six rides a week. Two of those rides are in Zone 1, which is fine from Dr. Seiler’s perspective, but one is a mixture of Zone 2 and Zone 3, and the last two to three are all in Zone 3 or higher, too Intense a schedule according to Dr. Seiler. Should I follow the advice of Coach Hughes, Dr. Seiler, or try to figure things out on my own? In fact, I am figuring things out on my own, using the advice of both Coach Hughes and Dr. Seiler, and writing this post has significantly helped me do that. 

Finishing My 2023 Cycling Season

Last post I blogged about an annual training schedule I derived from the writings of the coach I follow, Coach John Hughes. Never in my life, not during my first cycling career (1963-1978), nor during my second cycling career (2008-Present), have I ever followed an annual schedule. Either I have ridden however suited me at the moment or more recently, I have had a pretty regular weekly schedule and from that, used a short training plan, 5 to 10 weeks long, to prepare for an event. However, I have at long last started to think about an annual schedule and even prepared a plan for one that, in theory, I could use during my 2024 cycling season. I did that because almost all coaches suggest following an annual schedule and I thought I might be missing something by not doing so. However, I am not ready to start following such a schedule, at least without a lot more thought. Thus, I anticipate at least one more blog post on that topic. As for this post, it covers a more immediate question: what kind of weekly schedule should I be riding right now?

My starting model for such a schedule also comes from Coach Hughes, a schedule I blogged about back in 2022 and which is diagramed at the top of this post. This schedule is actually three related weekly schedules of varying difficulty. The idea is an athlete picks a level of difficulty and then rides that same schedule each week until there is a reason to change. Each of these weekly schedules was made up of rides which varied both in Volume (how many minutes the ride lasts) and in Intensity (how hard to “push”, e.g. how fast to ride). In that earlier post I added a fourth “level” of Intensity I called Mixed Intensity to communicate that many of my rides were not ridden at the uniform intensities that Hughes called for, but at a mixture of Intensities. I also added a description of what I was riding at the time, labeled “My 2022”. How does what I am doing now, labeled “My 2023”, compare to what I was doing in 2022 and why did I make the changes I made?

One big change I made, important for comparing 2022 to 2023, is that I replaced two Mixed Intensity rides of 2022 with Zone 2 rides and the third Mixed Intensity ride with a Zone 3 ride. I am going to talk about why I made those changes later in the post, but for now I just want to talk about the consequences of doing so.

Back in 2022 when I first wrote about this schedule of Hughes, my cycling was going pretty well. In contrast, 2023 has been a rough year for my cycling due to problems with my back, problems that have gotten better but which are not gone. As I was planning the “My 2023” schedule, one of my main concerns was to make sure it had an appropriate level of difficulty, to not make it so hard that it drove me into overtraining. With that in mind, it may seem surprising that my minutes per week of riding is significantly higher in 2023 than in 2022. This may be the result of a mistake in planning on my part; it is far from sure that I have found the right amount of riding for my current situation. However, in addition to that possibility, there is another explanation for that increase. Look at the Saturday ride. It was 160 minutes in 2022 and is 195 minutes in 2023. Those two rides cover the exact same 33 mile long route (Alpine-Cañada) so the reason for the difference in Volume (minutes) is that in 2023, I am riding the same route more slowly (in Zone 2 rather than at Mixed Intensity). Thus, when comparing minutes, it seems like I have increased the difficulty of my riding when common sense says that I have done the opposite, that I have decreased it. It is to deal with these kinds of anomalies that I started tracking my weekly Load in addition to my weekly Volume (minutes). Load takes into account how long the ride lasts in minutes but also takes into account Intensity, how fast or hard I rode during those minutes. My estimated Load for the 2022 schedule is about 720 and for 2023 about 520, the 2023 schedule is, by this measure, easier. There are many reasons (which I will not cover in this post) to be skeptical about these Load estimates and in any case I am not the person in 2023 that I was in 2022 so even if my 2023 Load is lower than 2022, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have found the right amount of cycling, an amount that will avoid overtraining, I have to listen to my body to determine that. But as I have posted before, my body cannot propose a training schedule, it can only tell me if the schedule I am riding is too hard. That raises the question of how I arrived at this schedule, and in particular, why I decided to substitute Zone 2 for Mixed Intensity.

I started riding Zone 2 rides because I finally figured out how to do so and because so many coaches promised I could build more endurance with less fatigue by restricting 80% of my riding to Zones 1 and 2. The way I was able to complete the rides available to me in my current, very hilly neighborhood is by acquiring a new heart rate monitor, my TranyaGo sports watch, and by thinking through why my rides always seemed to contain some Zone 3 riding. Once I understood that, I was able to modify how I approached these problematic parts of my rides to bring them down into Zone 2. This gave me the two Zone 2 rides on Coach Hughes schedule, including the weekly long ride. But how long should that long ride be? Without going into a lot of detail, I have concluded that I can be ready for a Metric Century (a 100 kilometer, 62 mile long ride) if my longest training ride is 45 miles long and if the next longest ride, ridden two weeks earlier, is 33 miles long. My Alpine-Cañada ride is 33 miles long. It  is a ride that I have been able to complete fairly easily, so I thought if I could handle a weekly schedule with that as my long ride I could be ready for a Metric Century with only two week’s notice. For my second longest ride of the week I picked another Zone 2 ride that I have found I can do pretty easily, my 17 mile long Cañada ride. The Hughes schedule also includes two Zone 1 rides which I can easily do on my trainer. This left me only the Zone 3 ride to figure out. I plan to write a whole blog post about Coach Hughes’ unusual enthusiasm for training in Zone 3 and the various ways he suggests doing that but for now, I am completing this fifth ride by simply not holding back as I do for my Zone 2 rides. I believe this serves the purpose and my TranyaGo agrees.

So how is this working out? I can't say for sure. Although I started this schedule eight weeks ago, I have only managed to complete it three of those weeks and therein lies a story. One week contained a conflict which prevented me from completing the schedule, three weeks I had outside stresses that left me too tired to complete the schedule, and finally, and there were three weeks during which my son asked me to ride with him. (The numbers don't add up because I rode with my son on some of the same weeks I was also stressed.) The rides my son wanted to do were not even close to anything on my schedule but, to me, the opportunity to spend time with my son trumped the importance of riding my new schedule. What I can say is the weeks I rode my schedule seemed hard to the point where I wondered if they were too hard. My plan was to keep riding that schedule to see if it got easier as I got into shape or if it continued to get harder due to fatigue buildup but these interruptions kept me from doing that. The way I am thinking about that schedule now is that it is aspirational, it is what I attempt to do knowing that life will sometimes get in the way. Even when I do not complete the schedule, it gives me a framework for what rides to do on the days I am able to do them.

There is so much I didn’t have room for in this post: Coach Hughes’ views on Zone 3, why the way I calculate the Load of a ride might be suspect, and dealing with the effect of the disruptions of life on my cycling, just for example. I hope to address at least some of these in future posts, stay tuned.