Faster, Higher, Stronger

From "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?" by Roz Chast, page 103.
The question the author wishes to ask at the end is "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?"

Once again, I have been in California helping my Dad. On the one hand, this interrupted my cycling. On the other, it gave me an opportunity for more reading, including a lot that ended up being related to cycling. The first book I want to mention relates to the most important factor affecting my cycling in 2014, caring for my 93 year old father. If any of you are caring for aging parent(s), "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?" is a must read! This biographical work of non-fiction uses the format of a graphic novel (see the cartoon at the top of the page for an example) and is both hysterically funny and deadly serious.

A second book I read was "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer. When I started this book, I assumed it had nothing to do with cycling. However, when the author started using cycling examples in the book and referring to his past as a cyclist, I realized he was the "Race Across America" Shermer, for whom the ailment "Shermer's neck" is named. Shermer's neck affects long distance cyclists, including randonneurs participating in the longer events such as Paris-Brest-Paris, and causes the muscles in the back of the neck fail, allowing the cyclist's head to flop forward so they can no longer see the road ahead of them, requiring them to abandon the event. Although "Why People Believe Weird Things" is a good book and the identity of the author is a lovely small world story, it is not about cycling.

The third book I wanted to mention, "Outliers", is also not about cycling in particular, or even athletics, but it does include some topics relevant to cyclists. This book is most famous for having popularized the "10,000 hour rule" which says that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get good at any skill, that people who excel at that skill are the ones who have the opportunity, inclination, and discipline to put in that many hours. I did not consider this the most interesting part of this book, a good thing because this rule has recently met with increasing skepticism. What I did consider central to "Outliers" is its thesis that people who are exceptionally successful, in addition to being genetically gifted and extremely hard working, are almost always present "at the right place, at the right time." One of the examples the author gives is that of amateur hockey in Canada, apparently set up as a pure meritocracy. Boys start playing at age 4 or 5, and the best players from around the country at every level are identified and funneled into elite teams where they have many more opportunities to play and receive extra coaching. The surprising finding is that at the top of this meritocracy, the very best amateur players in Canada are much more likely to have birthdays in January than in December. The explanation the author gives for this astonishing observation is that at the beginning of this process, at age 4 or 5, one year more or less in age has a huge impact on maturity and thus athletic ability. As a result, at the younger ages, players more likely to be selected for the elite teams are the ones who are born in January, almost a year older than their teammates born in December. Although the age advantage declines as the team gets older, the initial advantage of that early additional play time and coaching stays with these players who end up at the top of the pyramid.

And finally to the main book I wanted to blog about: "Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them" by Mark McClusky. Faster, Higher, Stronger builds on Outliers and quotes from it extensively; I found it particularly useful to have read Outliers first followed by Faster, Higher, Stronger. (Interestingly, Faster, Higher, Stronger is one of the voices questioning the 10,000 hour rule popularized in Outliers.) Though not just about cycling, Faster, Higher, Stronger is about athletics and has a substantial section on cycling. For example, major section of the book is devoted to explaining how the British cycling community went from being a non-contender in international cycling (no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France for example) to becoming a major power that helped not one but two of their riders, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, into the yellow jersey. Mr. McClusky is a writer for Wired Magazine, and as such this book shares Wired's "gee-wiz" prose style and emphasis on extravagant ideas over solid conclusions. That said, many of the extravagant ideas in this book do, in fact, have some evidential support, and as I result, I felt that it was well worth reading.

I find it particularly exciting when I read about an issue that is already on my mind; something I don't understand, or a tentative conclusion I have reached. One such conclusion is the effect of rate of maturation on performance among young athletes.

Me and some of my competitors at the end of a bike race in 1967. I am the rider to the far left.

Some kids mature earlier than others. Look at the picture above. The kid in the red jersey is the winner of the race shown, and in fact of many of the races in which I competed in the 1960s. (I raced in the under-18, Junior category.) I didn't notice it at the time, but in retrospect, it is obvious that he is larger and generally older looking than the other riders; he is an early maturer. He was also an extremely nice guy and was a hard worker, if memory serves, so he earned his victories, but being an early maturer certainly gave him an advantage. This phenomenon is discussed in Faster, Higher, Stronger which then further notes that being an early maturer gives one no advantage as an adult. Thus, many of the best cyclists in the Junior category did not go on to be similarly successful as Senior (18 to 40 year old) racers.

Faster, Higher, Stronger discusses many topics. One, for example, is the impact of equipment on sports results. This is a topic of great interest to us cyclists who lust after the latest bicycles and components. What I had not appreciated is that changes in the rules governing the equipment allowed in a sport can change who the best athletes are; using one set of equipment will favor some athletes, and using a different set will favor others. Among all the topics discussed in Faster, Higher, Stronger, the one I found the most interesting is how dramatically one's ability in different sports is predetermined at birth by genetics. This is a very complicated topic and the previous sentence is an oversimplification, so let me take a few lines to clarify. (The impatient reader can safely skip to the next paragraph.) First, there is the difference between phenotype (what you are) and genotype (what your genes set you up to be.) The genetics of hair color a is relatively simple example. If you dig deep, there is plenty of complexity in this topic, but at a basic level, it involves only a handful of genes. As many of us learned in high school, if both your parents are blonde, you will be blonde, and if both your parents have black hair, you might have blonde or black hair. In addition, if you know your parents genotype, and if they have a large number of children, you can make a pretty good guess as to number of children who will have blonde or black hair. As it happens, I am pretty sure that my wife has one gene for black hair and one gene for blonde hair, so her hair should be black, but it's not. It's grey. Some of you may be rolling your eyes, thinking "Yes, but it USED to be black" which it did. Nonetheless, my point is that phenotype (what color your hair is) is a combination of genotype (having one gene for black hair and one gene for blonde hair) and your history (living 66 years.) Perhaps height will be a more persuasive example. In contrast to hair color, the genetics of height is extremely complex. As Faster, Higher, Stronger discusses, there are over 1,000 genes that influence how tall a person will become. Even though we now have the ability to sequence a person's DNA and determine exactly which genes a person has, we are not even close to being able to look at that sequence and determining how tall a person is destined to be. What we can do, by studying families, and especially by studying identical twins, is determine that about half of how tall a person is is determined by those 1,000 or more genes, and the other half is determined by environment, nutrition being a big factor. That said, once a person has finished their growth (usually in their late teens or early 20s), their height is fixed; there is nothing that can be done to change it.

One of the most important phenotypes for a distance cyclist is VO₂ max. This is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can process. This can be thought of as the size of your "engine". According to Faster, Higher, Stronger, VO₂ max is like height in that it is about 50% determined by genes and 50% by environment. As far as I know, the environmental factors that determine VO₂ max are not known, but basically, whatever VO₂ max phenotype you have as a result of your genes and your history, you are stuck with.

VO₂ max actually can be divided up into two parts. Baseline VO₂ max is the VO₂ max you have without training. As most of you probably know, VO₂ max can be improved significantly by training. However, some people can improve their VO₂ max a lot by training (a 30% increase) and others only a little (5%). This is another fixed phenotype; whatever your ability to improve your VO₂ max you have, you cannot change, you are stuck with it.

It is not the case that if you knew the VO₂ max of every rider in the Tour de France, the rider with the highest VO₂ max would be the winner; other factors matter as well. In fact, above a certain level, increases in VO₂ max seem not to help that much. What does seem to be the case is that there is a minimum VO₂ max that you must have to be a successful bicycle racer, to have a chance at winning the Tour de France. To achieve that, you must train intensively to maximize your VO₂ max, but you also have to both start with an unusually high baseline VO₂ max and have a VO₂ max which improves with training much more than average. If you do not have these phenotypes, it doesn't matter how hard or long you train or what training protocol you follow, you are never going to win the Tour de France.

Although we are no where near being able to look at a person's DNA sequence and predicting what their athletic capabilities are, the day may be very near (according to Faster, Higher, Stronger) when, by doing a series of tests on specific phenotypes, things like body measurement (of which tallness is just one), VO₂ max, and muscle strength, we will be able to accurately predict what that persons athletic potential is, what their best sport would be and how good they can expect to get in that sport if they are disciplined, train hard, and train smart.

I have already mentioned that how much you benefit from training is a fixed phenotype. Another phenotype (which is most likely fixed) is the training you should use to maximally improve your fitness. A training plan which is training smart for me may be training stupid for you. Thus, the same training tests that might be able to tell us our athletic potential would, at the same time, tell us what our best training strategy would be. Relevant to this point, Joe Friel's latest blog post suggests that cross country skiers fall into two groups; those who improve most when they do many hours of training at a relatively low level of effort and those who improve most when they do fewer hours of training at a very high level of effort. I read the study on which the blog post is based, and I have significant reservations about its methodology, but it is clear that the idea of "personalized training" is of great interest in the exercise community. That said, the day of precise, personalized training may be near, but I do not believe it is here yet.

Besides ushering in personalized training, the imminent understanding of the relationships between measurable, simple phenotypes (e.g. VO₂ max) and athletic performance will make amateur athletic competitions much more predictable. At the Olympic or professional level, this will not be true; these competitors will all share the same optimal set of phenotypes and who wins will still hinge on effort, luck, and unknown factors, and suspense will be maintained. For the average, amateur bicycle racer, on the other hand, if they undergo a complete set of tests, they will have a pretty good idea about where in the pack they will be finishing. Won't this spoil the sport? It might! To restore the fun, Faster, Higher, Stronger suggests that athletes shouldn't compete against all comers, but rather against a group of competitors with similar abilities to themselves. Amateur bicycle racing in the US already has four or five categories based on performance to accomplish just this. Would it make more sense to base these categories on tested potential rather than performance? Faster, Higher, Stronger points out that, in one case, we already do that. The specific phenotype used to group virtually all athletic competitions happens to be one of the few where the genetic basis for that phenotype is known. Athletes with the genotype of two X chromosomes have the phenotype of "female", and compete in one set of competitions, and those with a genotype of one X and one Y chromosome have the phenotype of "male" and compete in another. The apparently radical proposal of grouping amateur athletes with similar potential is merely an extension of the centuries old, almost universal practice of having males compete against males and females compete against females. In fact, given a more extensive set of phenotypic classifiers, division into male and female competitions may become a thing of the past; one will compete against athletes of similar potential, be they male or female.

What does any of this have to do with me? As a spectator, a lot; I find all this new science about athletics fascinating and can't wait to see its impact on future editions of the Tour de France. As a participant, however, not so much. As I have oft said, my days of bicycle racing are long past. On top of that, Faster, Higher, Stronger makes another point. One of the optimizations the british cycling teams has started to use to improve their results is to spray their tires with alcohol at the beginning of a race to make them slightly tackier, to provide better traction. About this, the author says "the tiny percentage of improvement I might see in my weekend bike-riding speed by spraying the tires with alcohol pales in comparison to what I could see if I just, you know, trained harder and got myself in better shape." If I want to improve my bicycling, I don't need any advances in the science of training to take me most of the way there, I just need to lose the excess 40 pounds around my middle. Even that's not it, though. Even with the 40 pound handicap I give myself, I have demonstrated I can still complete a 200K brevet. The fact that I did not do so in 2014 has little to do with training or fitness and almost everything to do with having a life which includes 93 year old father who I love very much. As much as I might be looking forward to a particular bike ride, I will sadly pass it by when Dad needs help. But enough of that, can't we talk about something more pleasant?

Mapping My Way

Due to the need for specialized medical treatment, my older son, Michael, and his wife have been living with my wife and I for the past several weeks. Michael happens to be an exceptional computer programmer and more generally, has knack for getting computers to do what he wants them to. He has recently become interested in a company called Mapbox, which provides a more sophisticated alternative to Google Maps for individuals and companies who want to develop custom mapping products. Both to show me the potential of this company as well as to become familiar with their latest programming interface, he undertook the task of taking all the accumulated GPS data from my Garmin 500 cycle computer and displaying it on a map. This is what he came up with:



The above graphic is dynamic; all the controls on this map work. Most importantly, you can zoom in and zoom out using the + and - buttons and can move around on the map with your mouse. Feel free to play around with it, at any time you can go back to the starting version of the picture by reloading this page in your browser. However, for purposes of this blog post, I have created static versions below so that what I am talking about corresponds to what you are looking at.

I have posted maps of my rides before by using the Garmin supplied software, "Garmin Training Center", to "view" a ride in Google Earth. Garmin Training Center has its own built-in map, but it is rather crude. Here is what the Tour de Pink looks like on the built-in Garmin map:

If you view that same ride in Google Earth, you have a lot more options in terms of what you see and what you don't see. I pick a set of options to look as much like what Michael did with Mapbox as possible, and that looks like the following:

So what can Mapbox provide that Google Earth cannot?

1. Mapbox allows me to display ALL of my rides on one map. All three maps show the same Tour de Pink route with its characteristic arrowhead shape, but the Mapbox version also shows the overlap between that ride and my 2013 brevet, and where they all are relative to my regular training rides. This was our original motivation for undertaking this project.
2. Mapbox provides a much greater range of options than Google Earth, both in terms of the map background and in terms of how the ride data is displayed on that background. Michael tried several backgrounds before selecting the one he used, a nighttime-looking satellite image. What he and I like about this background is that it is subtle enough to allow one to clearly see my rides while still allowing one to see the geographical context of where those rides took place. 
3. Also possible because of the flexibility of Mapbox,  Michael was able to include an effect wherein as the same route is ridden again and again, the map displays the route with brighter and brighter lines.

This map is centered just west of the City of Houston, Texas, where I live. The "loop on a stick" image to the left of the picture represent my most recent 200K brevet (the "stick") and the Tour de Pink (the "loop".) They have similarly bright lines because each has been ridden twice, the brevet all in one day, as it is an out and back ride, and the Tour de Pink in two successive years (2013 and 2014.)  If you look closely, you will notice that the stretch where the Tour de Pink and brevet overlap is brighter than the rest of either of these rides. Much more obvious is how bright some of the rides to the right are. The two separated sets of rides represent Terry Hershey/George Bush parks in the middle and the White Oak and Braes Bayou trails to the right. If you zoom in on the active map at the top of the post, you can identify the Rice Track as an extremely bright oval. In addition to these very bright sections, there are many fainter sections representing rides done one or two times. If you zoom all the way in on the bright sections, you can see that they are made up of many close together lines representing individual rides along the same route.

To make the point about "all the rides on the same map" most dramatically, I zoomed out on the map until it included all of the United States:

I have been riding mostly in Texas, but when I would visit family in Washington DC or California, I would oftentimes be able to squeeze in a bike ride. I circled the rides in these three areas so you can see them more easily. If I then zoom in on the rides around my Dad's house in California, you can see my rides there:

Everything up until this point, Michael did without programming (except for some optional data cleanup.) You do not need to be a programmer to do any of this, any computer savvy person could create their own customized display and directions for doing so are given at the end of the post. But Michael wanted to do more. Rather than just layering all the rides together, he wanted to be able to look at single rides, subsets of rides, and what the pattern of my rides looked like over time. This required some programming. The result was the following three part graphic:



The top part of the graphic is a map with all my rides layered on it, similar to the first graphic at the beginning of this post. Just below that is another representation of my rides, as a bar chart with the horizontal (X) axis representing the date the ride was done and the vertical (Y) axis representing the length of that ride. These two parts are connected. If you hold your mouse over a ride on the map, all the days that route was ridden are highlighted in pink on the middle bar chart, and vice versa. At the bottom of the bar chart are two sliders. Only the rides ridden on the dates between the two sliders are shown on the map. This allows one to control which rides are shown.

The third and final part of the graphics are a series of controls on the bottom. By clicking on the words "Houston" or "West University" or "Antioch" (a.k.a. California) or "Washington DC" zooms in on that part of the map. (Because the graphic is limited to a small size in this blog post, it sometimes is necessary to zoom out with the "-" control on the map to see the rides.) Clicking on the words "Last 30 Days", "Last 90 Days", "2013", "2014", and "All Time" display the rides done during those times. (The last one, as you might guess, shows all the rides.) This has the same effect as the sliders below the bar graph. The last two controls, "Build the Map" and "Sliding 30 Day Window"are rather clever animations. The first adds rides to the map, one at a time, in the order they were ridden. The newest addition is highlighted in pink. The second shows all the rides ridden during a 30 day window, and the window slides forward in time. Honestly, playing with this graphic is the best way to understand it.

The above tiny window really does my son's program a disservice. If you have a large screen (and a fairly fast computer), you should really take a moment and play with it all on its own, in all its glory.

---

How to Put Garmin Data onto a Mapbox Map

- by Michael Steffen

This blog post from Mapbox explains the basics of importing GPX data into Mapbox Studio and styling it.

This project required a few additional steps:

1. Garmin Training Center exports data as a TCX file, a format that Mapbox Studio doesn't support.  So I converted the Garmin TCX file into the more standard GPX format with the excellent free tool GPSBabel.
2. I wrote a little python script to clean the GPX data by (i) eliminating user-uploaded routes that aren't rides actually ridden -- Garmin mixes these in with the rides data; and (ii) removing segments that were clearly where the GPS had been left on after a ride for the car ride home (identified, in this case, as segments at the end of a ride where the average speed was >30 mph). The script is available here.  It uses Tomo Krajina's very nice gpxpy library. If we had wanted a completely programming-free version, this step could have been skipped.
3. I customized the Mapbox styles in Mapbox Studio, using the Mapbox satellite layer, the Mapbox streets layer, and the rides data. The styles I used are available here. The key to the rides style is that each ride is actually three lines -- a base line in semi-transparent blue, a "heat" overlay in a more transparent white, and then a wide, blurred "glow" overlay, in a yet more transparent white.  As the rides layer on top of each other, they build up the glow effect.

The inspiration for the final interactive graphic came from the "Urban Layers" website; I borrowed both concepts and some code. All the code used by the final graphic is available on Github.

Update

Blogging

My older son, at age four, readying a new blog post. (Or maybe he is just playing on the computer, an original 128K Mac running OS 1.)

It has been more than two weeks since my last post, and there are a couple of reasons for that:

1. Life continues to be complicated. As I mentioned in my last post, my Dad is doing better at the moment, but my older son continues to struggle with his health. Also, it has been exceedingly cold out, at least by the standard of spoiled Houstonians. All of this I find demotivating.
2. Last week, I planned a really cool post based on a project of my convalescing son that shows off my ride data in fun, new ways. However, my son continues to find ways to make it even cooler, so asked me to delay showing off his creation.

Thus, I decided to use this week to provide some miscellaneous updates.

Riding

My friend "Peter" and I, on a recreational ride back in 1966. The photo was taken by a third friend, "James", who was riding as he took it, which probably contributed to the blurriness of the picture.

Despite distractions leading to motivation problems, I have not given up on a brevet on December 13, but my fitness is not where I had hoped it would be. It has been a while since I posted any MAF test results, so I will make up for lost time. The picture below summarizes my MAF test results from the last 11 months.

I have previously discussed MAF tests ad nauseum, so all I will say here is that I am assuming they are a measure of fitness, that higher is better. At the beginning of 2014, I had gone a long time without riding, so I did several weeks where a daily MAF test was my training ride (MAF Test Only). For the first six weeks or so, I improved dramatically on that regimen, but eventually my results plateaued. In response to that plateau, I significantly increased the intensity of my schedule by replacing two MAF test rides with one long ride and one fast ride each week (Long + Brisk). That had the desired effect of effecting improvement beyond the previous plateau but the undesired effect of being exhausting; I could not maintain that schedule. When I backed off, my performance fell, and before I could experiment with a more moderate schedule, I had to take a break in training to visit my Dad in California (Overtrain, Calif). When I returned, I trained with my wife for the 60 mile Tour de Pink, and as a result , I reached the highest level of fitness of the year, a level of fitness I had only previously seen just before riding a brevet. This was very encouraging! Before I could take advantage of that, however, my son became ill and my Dad started falling, causing me to visit California again, but this time for three weeks and with little time to bicycle. Since my return, I have attempted to regain the fitness I had before I left (Claw Back Fitness) with some success but also some setbacks. I have just over three weeks to get ready if I am to ride a brevet this year, we shall see how that goes.

Exploring

Me during my snarky college years. My friend "ER" and I were out on a ride in 1968 or so and decided to take some posed pictures to prove how clever we were.

A while back, I posted about the growing extension to one of my favorite hike and bike trails, the Braes Bayou Trail. That extension keeps growing to the point where I am beginning to be able to guess where it might be going. The extension actually departs from Braes Bayou, which it could have continued to follow, to branch off and follow Keegan's Bayou instead. Looking at the satellite photos on Google Maps, there are existing dirt paths along parts of Keegan's Bayou, and if I imagined the longest possible extension that could be plausibly built, it is the segment in red on the map below.

For perspective, the part of the Braes Bayou trail I most frequently ride is shown in green. Sometimes I mention I ride this same trail to the east, despite some unfinished, rather dangerous dirt sections (that seem like they would be easy to fix.) That segment is shown in blue. As you can see, as appreciated as every bit of new trail is, this extension is not a game changer by any means. It is not that long, nor does it facilitate the crossing any busy highways or other significant barriers. I suspect its only effect will be to make my standard Braes Bayou ride a couple of miles longer, not a bad thing at that.

Home Again

Continuing construction on the extension of the White Oak Bayou trail connecting it to the MKT trail.

I have been back home in Houston for two weeks, after three weeks in California taking care of Dad. He is doing much better now, so I was able to cancel my return trip to California scheduled for last Saturday. In theory, I could have attempted a 200K brevet on that Saturday, given that I was not out of town after all, but I didn't. The reason I didn't is because I am far from recovered from that trip. Interestingly, I firmly believe that the biggest impact to my form¹ was not the interruption in training (though I was unable to do any cycling at all for the last 12 days of that trip) but from the stress of the trip, stress that has pretty much the same impact on me as overtraining. As regular readers know, I have been trying to do a version of Iron Rider's recovery based training. Unlike Iron Rider, I cannot use my resting heart rate as a guide to my state of recovery, so I have been detecting incomplete recovery by the subjective feeling in my legs, sleep disturbances, grumpiness, and susceptibility to minor illnesses. As always, I watch my MAF test scores as well. For the past two weeks, all of these indicators have been sending me exactly the same message; take it easy. So that is what I have been doing. It is not so much that I have not trained enough for a 200K brevet on Saturday, it is that a 200K brevet would not be taking it easy.

I am developing a long term fascination with the hows and whys of fatigue. When I first returned from California, subjectively, I felt pretty good. The day after my evening arrival, I went for a short, easy ride with my wife. The second day, I rode a MAF test. My score on that test (14.9 mph) was much below what I had been doing before the trip (16 mph) but I felt fine, "in need of speed" if anything. As a result, I rode intervals with my son and daughter-in-law on the third day. I then took a rest day, but after that I felt extremely tired, especially in my legs, a tiredness I have not been able to shake. If my exhaustion is due to my trip to California, why did it take a few days to manifest, at least subjectively? Perhaps relevant, my first MAF test was my worst. Although I continue to feel tired, my MAF test results have improved, almost back to where they were before my trip (15.5 mph). Maybe I was tired from the beginning, but the same stress-response that caused that tiredness was masking the symptoms; as the stress subsided, I both started to recover but also felt the effects. As of yet, I have no answer to these questions, but I am bowing to my feelings and taking things easy. As I have been cycling easily around my usual haunts, I have noticed some changes to the Houston cycling infrastructure, including progress on the extension of the White Oak Bayou trail, shown in the picture at the top of this post.

Rice Track

My daughter-in-law completed her first-ever triathlon while I was in California. Before I left, I rode with her on some of her training rides, including some intervals on the Rice Track. Just before I left, workmen moved the barriers around the track as we were riding, forcing us off the track. When I returned, I noticed the barriers were down. I asked one of the regulars if they knew why, and he told me that the workers had moved us off the track so that they could park equipment there, and when they did, they damaged the track. When I looked, sure enough there was a minor, dinner-plate sized indentation in the track, carefully marked (and obscured) by a traffic cone. The track was shut down as part of a dispute between Rice University and the construction company as to who was going to pay to repair the "damage." It was slightly scary using the track without the safety barriers, occasional Rice commuters would drive across the track on the way to their parking spot, but it was usable. That didn't last for long, however. First, Rice University upped the ante by placing barriers across the track to close it for good:

Then, the construction company repaired the dinner-plate-sized damage by replacing almost a quarter of the track:

However, all is well again, the Rice Track has now been returned to full functionality.

Braes Bayou

While waiting for Rice Track to be repaired, I took to riding Braes Bayou. I was most excited to see that the Do Not Enter sign had been removed from the new trail extension so I rode the extension to see what I could see. Unfortunately, at this point, the extension does not go far. Within 50 yards or so, I ran into a work crew completing the next stretch of trail. I will be curious to see how far this extension goes, once finished. This is what it looks like now:

The workmen are closing a short gap in the trail extension. I wonder what is on the other side?

Even more unfortunate than the short extension, at least for me personally, is that when I stopped to photograph the current status of the trail, I dropped my wallet. When I got home and found I was missing it, I was in total panic! I mentally went through the months required to cancel and replace all my credit cards, replace my drivers license, replace all my medical insurance cards, etc. Worse, at that point, I still thought I was going back to California; how would I board a plane without my drivers license? I rushed back to where I thought I had lost it and ask the work crew, who had not seen it. Fortunately, a wonderful (but anonymous) fellow cyclist found it, read my address off my license, and bicycled out of their way to my home to return it. And people say that the bicycle culture is dead!

In retrospect, I wonder if the trail was actually open for business, or if someone just turned the sign around? Look at these two pictures and decide what you think:

There used to be a sign here saying "SIDEWALK CLOSED". It is now gone.

Or is it gone? This is the same location from the other side. Do you think some enthusiastic user just turned the sign around?

I very much appreciate all the cycling infrastructure development going on in Houston, but I wish I better understood why certain projects are selected, and others ignored. Although I hope that the Buffalo Bayou extension shown above results in significant new riding opportunities, knowing what I do about the local geography, I worry that it won't. Towards the other end of Braes Bayou, there is an opportunity to significantly improve the riding experience, and for many riders, offer a much longer ride, at what I would have thought would be very low cost. (I have noted this opportunity before.) There are two dirt gaps in this trail as it passes by Texas Medical Center and Herman Park. One is a very short and very steep hill that might be difficult to fix economically. The other is longer and, to me, more problematic. This second stretch seems trivial to fix. While the Rice Track was being fixed, I decided to explore it, to monitor its status. When this stretch of trail was first opened, the dirt stretch was quite manageable. However, with use, it has become deeply rutted, make it difficult for me and impossible for my wife to navigate. In my most recent traversal, I noticed that someone had dumped gravel in the ruts, which helped a little. However, as the dirt transitions to a paved stretch, there is a major curb. I was approaching this curb riding into the rising sun, and noticed it only at the last second. Had I not noticed it, I could have had quite a spill. Why not just pave this stretch, I wonder? This is what the curb looks like:

---

1) Form results from the opposite effects of fitness (how well trained I am) and fatigue (how tired I am.) Form is defined as my actual ability to ride, all things considered, at that point in time.

The de Anza Reconnect

It was three weeks ago I last posted to this blog. (It seems like forever.) In that post I said:
"[M]y plans for a 200K brevet in November are on hold, perhaps to be abandoned. I will ride as much as I can in California, but between the needs of my father and the absence of my familiar cycling environment, training for a brevet may be more than I can do. But who knows, I will ride as much as I can, substituting intensity for distance, and depending on how quickly my sister and I can get Dad settled, I will see how long it takes me to get back home and what my fitness looks like when do."

Well, getting Dad settled turned out to be much more of an adventure than expected, so much so that I extended my original stay by a week and will be going to California again at the end of next week. Even if I were fit enough for the November brevet, I will miss it anyway as a result of this trip.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Although I did not get much riding in (three rides in three weeks), I did manage to explore some new routes, and to my delight, found that a major gap in the local trail system had been filled! The map below shows large parts of two major trails in the Brentwood/Antioch/Pittsburg region of California: The Marsh Creek Trail (which I have blogged about before) and the de Anza Trail.

Click on map to see a larger version.

Notice the trail labels with a yellow background showing the de Anza, Marsh Creek and Big Bre[ak] trails. From Dad's house, I can catch the Marsh Creek Trail and ride it until it joins the de Anza trail, but where the blue circle is, near the center of the picture, there used to be a gap in the de Anza Trail which prevented me from getting very far. This visit, when I rode that section of trail, I found that the gap had been closed. Here is the new section of trail, going under Highway 4, that has just been completed:

The de Anza trail follows the Contra Costa Canal, so I expected it to be flat. To my delight, this was not the case, as shown by this warning sign:

The climb up to this sign was quite significant for an old man from flat, flat Houston. I always find it difficult to capture hills in my photographs, which is why I included the sign, but I think you can see the trail winding downhill in the picture. But how can this be? The law of gravity would seem to dictate that canals must be close to flat. There are two explanations. The first, which explains the hill shown above, is that the trail briefly departs from the canal and goes over the hill where the canal cuts through it. The other explanation, shown in the next picture, is pumping stations:

Notice how the trail rises to the right of the cement building. On the other side of the building, the canal is significantly higher than it is on the side you can see. (The canal is flowing front to back.) The cement building contains a pumping station that allows the canal to flow upstream, thus providing us cyclists with some modest but nonetheless enjoyable climbing.

I never know how much time I will have to bike when I visit Dad in California. Often, I am going because of some kind of problem that requires my help, and that help may not leave any time for riding. This will be the case when I go back next week. However, if I do have time to ride, there are a lot more trails for me to explore. In terms of brevet riding, the last brevet of the Houston Randonneur's calendar is a 200K on December 12. Will this finally be my 2014 brevet?

Hanging It Up

This picture illustrates a number of points in this post: 1) The hanging bike illustrates the title of this post; once again, the vagaries of life have interrupted my randonneuring plans. 2) My dad's work clothes to the upper right of his walker. We were sad when Dad was driven to use a walker, making the use of his work clothes a thing of the past. Now, we just hope he can return to the walker. 3) The bike itself. My carefully crafted plans to prepare for a 200K brevet in November may be at risk, but even while taking care of Dad, I have a bike to ride.

"Man proposes, God disposes."¹ For my first two brevets, in 2012 and 2013, I used long, rigid training plans to prepare. As regular readers of this blog know, I selected a much more relaxed training plan to prepare for a 200K brevet this November. It is so flexible, it should be resistant to most of life's surprises. Surprise! A few weeks ago I received a text from my sister: "Dad has fallen." A few days after that, "Dad has fallen again, and is in the hospital getting x-rays." I am delighted that the x-rays revealed no broken bones, but what about the next fall? My father-in-law died from such a fall. So, I post this from Dad's home in California where I am staying to both share in Dad's care as well as to help him plot the next stage of his life.

I prepared this post before leaving Houston; Dad's technology resources do not lend themselves to preparing a blog post, nor do I have access to my library of pictures and cycling data here. That being so, this may be the last post for a while, which is its main message. That, and that my plans for a 200K brevet in November are on hold, perhaps to be abandoned. I will ride as much as I can in California, but between the needs of my father and the absence of my familiar cycling environment, training for a brevet may be more than I can do. But who knows, I will ride as much as I can, substituting intensity for distance, and depending on how quickly my sister and I can get Dad settled, I will see how long it takes me to get back home and what my fitness looks like when do. Stay tuned.

---

1) A translation from "The Imitation of Christ" by the German-born Thomas à Kempis (c.1380-1471). I claim this proverb is religion neutral. Either take it at face value or use God as a stand-in for fate, luck, nature, the perversity principle or Murphy's Law, as you prefer.

Fitness Smorgasbord

I was the team photographer for the Berkeley Wheelmen while I was in college in the late 60's/early 70's. This is a picture I took of the sprint at the end of a road race. I have included it here to illustrate the concept of training rides ridden at a brisk pace (e.g. intervals.)

Even though I am not an expert on cycling or training, I do value my own experience. That said, there is an extra confidence that comes when I meet a fellow traveler who has come to the same conclusion I have. This happened to me while reading a recent column by Lovely Bicycle. I had been speculating about the efficacy of using brisk training (intervals) to prepare for long rides and she speculates about the same thing. Additionally, Bicycling magazine has weighed in on the topic. As a follower of Bicycling on Google+ (yes, somebody actually uses Google+) I am offered articles on new training plans at least once a week. Examples include "Interval Training for Weight Loss - Burn More Fat", "Ride Faster in Three Days Per Week", and now, in "Quick Cycling Workouts for Power and Endurance." The last article presents a schedule of intervals that Bicycling Magazine claims will improve endurance. Honestly, I cannot tell if they are saying these specific interval schedules are good for endurance or if intervals in general are good for endurance. I hope it is the latter, because the intervals I have been doing don't look anything at all like these.

Another lesson I think I have learned is that it is much better to slightly under-train than to slightly over-train, that when in doubt, I should train less. Recently, Bicycling published an article about Meredith Miller, a professional cyclocross racer, who claims "she doesn't train." An actual reading of the article suggests something closer to what I have been finding; a valuing of resting over training. Once again, it is a comfort when I have made a discovery on my own and I am wondering if it is true or an illusion, to read about someone else making the same discovery.

When I restarted cycling, one of my first influences was Philip Maffetone. He advocates the virtue of training at a low heart rate, roughly Zone 2 on the Zone 1 through Zone 5 system I use. Zone 2 is a relatively easy ride; the test for the proper level of effort is that one should be able to talk in complete sentences while riding in Zone 2, but not sing. Since first encountering Dr. Maffetone's ideas, I have remained both interested and skeptical. Thus, it was of great interest to me when, once again, Bicycling Magazine published an article about the great success Tour de France veteran Fred Rodrriguez had with a training plan consisting entirely of training in Zone 2.

One of the most seductive fallacies in statistics comes from failing to correct for multiple sampling. In a statistical analysis, the result can often be expressed as a P value, corresponding to the chance that the result observed could have occurred by chance. The most common cutoff for statistical significance is P=0.05, meaning that there is only 1 chance in 20 that the result being tested is due to chance. However, if you do 20 different experiments, you are likely to see such a correlation even if all of them are random. Bicycling magazine publishes so many different training plans and articles about training, I have to wonder if I could find one to support almost any training idea I ever had; is this support even meaningful? One the other hand, the article by Lovely Bicycle may well be the only training article she ever published. That one I can take to the bank!

News Flash

On of my most common rides starts at my front door, goes about a mile on city streets to the middle of the Braes Bayou multi-use trail, and then heads west on that trail to its termination at Gessner Road. This is a 17 mile ride, round trip. About four or five months ago, I noticed construction at the end of the trail that promised to lengthen this ride, a welcome change. Unfortunately, after the initial construction, everything seemed to stop. Thus, I was enormously excited today when I got to the end of the trail to see that the previously dirt extensions were now paved:

This trail extension is not yet open, but it seems we are getting closer. I can't wait!