Rerouting the Peninsula Bikeway

The Peninsula Bikeway with my modifications shown in blue.

[This is the second post in a series. See the first post for background on this one.]

My interest in rides through the flatter neighborhoods on the east* side of the peninsula and thus of this series of blog posts were inspired by a demonstration ride of the preliminary Peninsula Bikeway I attended last September. In this post, I describe how I developed alternatives to the route taken by that preliminary bikeway to make it more to my liking. Do these changes simply reflect the idiosyncratic tastes of a timid old man with too much time on his hands, or do they say something of general interest about the future of the Peninsula Bikeway? What is the purpose of that bikeway anyway? I spent a fair amount of time searching their website for answers that question, and there is a lot to unpack, perhaps even enough for a future post, but for the purposes of this post, I just want to abstract one bit:

"A high-quality bike facility ... [to make] ... possible travel for:

• work,
• school,
• shopping,
• errands,
• fun."

I would have added health to that list, but fun will do for the purposes of this post. I am retired, so work is not an issue (nor is school), but it is for my kids, one of whom commutes by bike from Redwood City to Facebook in Menlo Park. Neither the original version of the bikeway nor my modifications will take him all the way there, but in a future post, I will describe how an easy extension will. As for shopping and errands, I shamefully admit I am still doing that by automobile. The why of that would be a whole blog post of its own, and it is something I am trying to fix. But when I think about shopping by bike, once again, the Bikeway will not take me all the way to where I shop, but it does give me ideas for getting there and I hope my suggested modifications adds more ideas to the mix. So we are left with fun. I find my version of the Bikeway more fun than the original, and hope you will agree.

How relevant is the Peninsula Bikeway, does it use the streets cyclists actually prefer? One way to answer that question is to look at the Strava Global Heatmap. To be fair, the Strava dataset is strongly biased towards recreational cyclists, whereas the target demographic for the Peninsula Bikeway is more the transportation cyclist (e.g. bicycle commuter) but with that reservation in mind, what does the Heatmap show? It varies. The roads of the Peninsula Bikeway are never the most popular north-south route in a given area, but over some stretches the the roads of the Peninsula Bikeway are fairly popular, while in others they are barely used at all. In some cases, I agree with Strava Heatmap, in others, I most definitely do not. Another way to look at the question is to ask the cyclists who commute from San Francisco to Google in Mountain View, who have formed a club, SF2G. They go beyond the scope of the Peninsula Bikeway by starting much farther north, but do ride its entire length. What route do they recommend? They recommend seven, three of which are in scope for the Peninsula Bikeway, and none of these overlap with it at all. Next, the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition (SVBC) recommends a north-south route that runs through Redwood City, Atherton, and Menlo Park. Again, there is no overlap except at the very end where this route terminates onto the Peninsula Bikeway as it enters Palo Alto. Finally, there were the comments from experienced local cyclists on the demonstration ride which I will refer to below. (Briefly, they agreed with some parts of the bikeway and disagreed with others.) One last point: The SVBC route is different from all the SF2G routes, and all of these show up on Strava Global Heat Map but none dominates it. In summary, there are lots of ways to bike north-south on the peninsula and little consensus as to which is best. I have ridden many parts of the SF2G and SVBC routes, and I personally prefer the customized route described here.

One issue I struggled with while writing this post is that the bikeway I am improving is the "interim bikeway." The final bikeway will apparently not consist of quiet neighborhood streets as the interim bikeway does, but rather travel along less attractive routes, such as El Camino Real, Middlefield Road, or the Caltrain right of way. The Peninsula Bikeway website promises that "the design concept will consider how to improve intersections, driveway crossings, and other features" in order to produce a design that is "safe, comfortable and efficient." Depending on how successfully these goals are met, it is possible that I would prefer this new route to the current interim route, but it is also possible I might continue to prefer the interim route. In any case, it is estimated that it will be ten years before the permanent route is ready, so I think my remapping is not in vain.

The Peninsula Bikeway goes completely across the cities of Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Mountain View in a North-South direction, starting at the northern edge of Redwood City and ending at the southern edge of Mountain View. I will discuss this route city by city.

Redwood City

The Peninsula Bikeway starts in Redwood City where I would have it start and finishes in Redwood City where I would have it finish, but I prefer other streets for almost everything in between. The Peninsula Bikeway jogs back and forth as it goes through Redwood City, ending up on Cleveland Street just before it gets to Jefferson Avenue. Jefferson Avenue is sufficiently busy that I prefer not to cross it without a light, and there is no light at Cleveland Street. The experienced cyclists on the Peninsula demonstration ride threw up their hands in exasperation and asked the ride organizers, "Why not Hudson Street?", so I tried Hudson Street and found it to be much better than the Bikeway route; it even has a bike lane along part of it (which the Peninsula Bikeway route does not), and there is a light at Jefferson and Hudson. My preference becomes even stronger when we reach Highway 84/Woodside Road, which I definitely would not cross without a light. The Bikeway crosses at Hess Road and then jogs east, riding on the very busy Highway 84 for one block before continuing south on Cypress Street. This is barely acceptable heading towards Mountain View, as there is a light at Hess, but unacceptable heading towards Redwood City, as there is no light at Cypress. In contrast, there is a light at Hudson, so again I agree with the experienced cyclists. Shortly thereafter, my route merges back with that of the Bikeway just before it exits Redwood City and enters Atherton.

Atherton

The Peninsula Bikeway does go through Atherton on a previously developed network of bike routes. These bike routes do not feature dedicated bike lanes, merely signs and sharrows. Because none of the streets used continue uninterrupted through Atherton, there is a lot of weaving east to west when one north-south street ends to get to the next. That said, I made no changes in the part of the Peninsula Bikeway that goes through Atherton. It is not so much that I carefully tried other alternatives and decided that the bikeway was the best, it was mostly because, unlike in the case of Redwood City, the experienced cyclists suggested no alternatives, and because I found the route used by the bikeway to be just fine. One alternative I did try is Middlefield Road, mostly because it had been suggested as a possible route for the final bikeway. I found it unpleasantly busy even on the stretch through Atherton that has a bike lane, and I doubt I would ever chose to take Middlefield instead of the bikeway. Another alternative I tried, one perhaps out of scope for the bikeway, is Alameda de las Pulgas. I ride this road regularly when I am out for a workout on my road bike, and when I tested it on my Public city bike, I found that it was not at all too hilly for this bike, though it was a bit hillier than the bikeway. Nine times out of ten, I will chose the bikeway when I am out for an easy ride, but occasionally I will take Alameda for variety.

Menlo Park

The somewhat busy but generally bike friendly street of Valparaiso defines the border between Atherton and Menlo Park, and the bikeway rides that border. The left turn onto Valparaiso can be a little tense, but I have found no better alternative. Once on Valparaiso, the bike lane is excellent, making for a safe and comfortable ride. For no reason I can imagine, the Bikeway does a weird jog just before crossing El Camino, a jog I ignore. Continuing straight seems perfectly comfortable to me, so that is what I do. Other than that, I follow the Bikeway exactly through Menlo Park.

Palo Alto

There is no part of the Palo Alto stretch of the Peninsula Bikeway that I would not be happy to ride, though as I discuss below, I deviate from the posted route to enter Mountain View at a different point than the Bikeway does. The first part of the Peninsula Bikeway goes along the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard, which goes down Briant Avenue. With the irrelevant exception of a half a block of bike lane at the beginning of downtown, riding Briant Avenue mostly means riding with traffic protected only by signage. Downtown Palo Alto has more the feel of a small town than a city, but there is more that enough traffic even so. At first, I found this street intimidating, but it works better than I had expected. I think part of that is that drivers have become accustomed to heavy bicycle traffic on this road, and simply have learned to deal with it, but another thing that has been done is to prevent cars from using it as a through street by providing barriers to cars which bicycles can pass through, reducing automobile traffic. There are about half a dozen of these over this part of the Bikeway. Bottom line, I really enjoy cycling on Briant Avenue. The Peninsula Bikeway leaves Briant Street and the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard and takes a right turn on West Meadow Drive and then a left turn on Wilkie Street. The goal of this jog is to get onto California Street once you enter Mountain View, which I find unrideable, as is discussed below. So, rather than take that right turn onto Meadow, I continue on the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard by continuing straight on Briant Street. Between Meadow and the border with Mountain View, this bike boulevard wanders over a number of residential streets, making it less than trivial to follow. It is fairly well marked, but even so, I often end up missing a turn and having to retrace my path. Shortly after crossing into Mountain View, this becomes the Mayfield-Whisman Bike Boulevard.

Mountain View

I don't like the route the Peninsula Bikeway picked through Mountain View, and a lot of my efforts have been devoted to finding a route through Mountain View that I do like. Most of the Peninsula Bikeway through Mountain View goes along California Street. The one time I tried to follow the Peninsula Bikeway route, I found California so uncomfortable that I turned east onto Shoreline Drive and came home on the Mayfield-Whisman Bike Boulevard (described below.) This is in spite of the fact that California Street has a bike lane. The problem is that it is very busy and is lined with shopping centers so there is a lot of traffic crossing the bike lane, making it feel very unsafe, to the extent that I vowed never to ride it again. I had to find an alternative.

One of the discussions I had with the city staffers during the Peninsula Bikeway demonstration ride was about the differences between the cities involved in developing the bikeway. One example of such was that Mountain View favored Middlefield road as the main north-south bike corridor, whereas Palo Alto favored Briant Street, so I thought it made sense to try Middlefield as an alternative. When I rode it, I did not like it either. It had many of the same problems as California Street, so much so that I was unwilling to follow it to the end. I turned west onto the Stephens Creek Hike and Bike trail and again took the Mayfield Whisman Bike Boulevard home.

If I keep taking the Mayfield Whisman Bike Boulevard home, why not make that my route? In fact, I have. This Bike Boulevard is like the Peninsula Bikeway routes through Atherton and Palo Alto, there are no bike lanes, but traffic is light so I find the route very comfortable. The only problem with Mayfield-Whisman Bike Boulevard as an alternative to the Peninsula Bikeway is that has its southern terminus at the Stephens Creek hike and bike trail some distance from the southern border of Mountain View, the end point of the Peninsula Bikeway, and I felt I had to respond to the challenge of making all the way to that border. To that end, I took the Stephens Creek trail to its western end. At that point, there is only a couple of blocks on comfortable neighborhood streets to the southern border of Mountain View, which I rode. Mission Accomplished.

Summary

My modified version of the Peninsula Bikeway has become a go-to ride for me. If I ride the whole thing out and back, it is over 30 miles, a worthwhile addition to my training schedule, and it is a very pleasant ride. It also provides for a variety of attractive variations, a topic to which I expect to return in future posts.

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* The San Francisco Bay Peninsula is at about a 30 degree angle northwest to southeast, but for simplicity's sake, I will refer to the ocean side of the Peninsula as the west side, the bay side as the east side, heading toward San Francisco as going north, and heading towards San Jose as going south.

Exploring the Plains of the Peninsula: Preliminaries

A Portion of the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. San Francisco and the entry to the bay is off the top of the picture. The blue to the left is the Pacific Ocean, that to the right is San Francisco Bay. Terrain View was turned on in Google Maps to show the hilly vs the flat parts of the Peninsula. I start many of my rides at the blue dot near the center of the picture and ride south. If I go through Portola Valley (bottom center of the picture), Woodside, and Emerald Hills, as I do for my "GoTo" ride, I have a strenuous, hilly ride. This post is about some easier, flatter rides I have been doing that go through Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Mountain View (in the lower right corner of the picture.)

 

Background

A while back, I posted that I had "...started exploring routes through the beautiful neighborhoods on the eastern flats of the Peninsula." This post goes into that exploration in more detail. The inspiration for this exploration was the demonstration ride of the interim Peninsula Bikeway I went on last September. What I learned from that ride was that there were delightful neighborhood streets through the flat parts on the bay side of the Peninsula that are worth riding. That demonstration was actually organized was as two rides, one coming from the southern end of the route, the other (which I rode) from the northern end, with both groups meeting in the middle, in Menlo Park. So one inspiration for exploring this region a bit more was to try out the southern end of the route, which I had not ridden in the demo. Another was to see if I could find better roads than those identified by the city governments when putting together this interim route. I suspected this was an option because some of the experienced riders on the demonstration ride asked pointed questions about route choices, suggesting alternatives they liked better. A third was to explore some destinations beyond those reached by the Peninsula Bikeway. This was originally planned as a series of three posts, which, despite my general policy of posting monthly, I planned to post over three successive weeks. Posts one and two, this one presenting background material and the next one on how I would remap the interim Peninsula Bikeway, are on track, but as I have been developing post three, about extensions to the Bikeway, it is not clear that it is a stand-alone post. Perhaps its contents can best be presented as parts of other posts over the next several months, or perhaps it will appear as originally planned two weeks from now. Stay tuned to find out.

Coordinates

If you look at the picture above, you will note that the part of the San Francisco Bay peninsula where I live angles from northwest (San Mateo) to southeast (Mountain View) with the San Francisco Bay on the right and the Pacific Ocean on the left. Most of the roads on the Peninsula run either parallel or perpendicular to the peninsula. For convenience, I will ignore the angle and refer to heading towards San Mateo as going "north", towards Mountain View as going "south", as heading towards the Bay as going "east" and as heading towards the Ocean as heading "west".

Criteria for a Better Route

What makes for a better route? It depends on the rider and the reason for the ride. A brave young commuter might look for a fast, direct route to work. As a nervous old man riding for fun and exercise, I look for pretty scenery, low traffic, dedicated bike lanes, and anything else that leads to a fun, safe experience. What this post will be about is finding the safest and most pleasant roads that allow me to ride this part of the Peninsula.

So is the idea to string together as many dedicated bike lanes as possible? Actually, no. As it happens, dedicated bike lanes tend to be on busier streets, and that busyness can outweigh the advantage of the bike lane. Also, bike lanes come in many different qualities. I could (and might) do an entire post on what makes bike lanes more or less useful, but very briefly, they can be divided into properties of the lanes themselves, their width, surface quality, and how they handle intersections, and properties of the road of which they are a part. The aforementioned busyness is one such property, but so are speed limits, the number of intersections, and amount of traffic which crosses the bike lane. Bike lanes on roads like the section of Middlefield Road which goes through Mountain View contain many strip malls, with lots of traffic into and out of the mall crossing the bike lane and making it unsafe. Junipero Serra Boulevard is at least as busy and much faster than Middlefield Road (the speed limit is 45 mph) but is almost controlled access. Although it goes by strip malls, there is no access to these malls from Junipero Serra, access to the malls is from a parallel street, so there is much less traffic crossing the bike lane. As a result, I vastly prefer riding the bike lane on Junipero Serra to that on Middlefield, and in fact prefer lightly travelled residential streets with no bike infrastructure at all to the bike lanes of Middlefield.

In the end, although I can explain my preferences for one route over another after the fact, my ability to predict the best route is weak at best. I find that I simply have to try promising-looking routes to discover the ones I prefer.

Bikes

One more important factor in this exploration is my choice of bikes. Mostly, I ride road bikes, my classic 1960 Bianchi Specialissima, my Surly Cross Check, and the road bike I use most often these days, my Bianchi Volpe. The Volpe has the lowest gears of all my bikes due to its 28/38/48 tooth triple chainwheels in front and its 11-32 cogs in the back. When I am tackling some of the steeper climbs in the region, Kings Mountain for example, I really appreciate its bottom 24 inch gear, but when I am riding my GoTo ride, I leave the chain in the middle 38 tooth chainwheel which provides an adequate range of gears for this ride, 32 to 93 inches. When my wife died, I originally tried to find a good home for her commuter bike, a step-through frame Public bike with a 7 speed internal gear hub. I failed to do so before the move to California, so brought it with me, and found that if I raised the seat and scooted it all the way back and raised the handlebars, it actually fit me pretty well. I replaced the seat with which it came with a Brooks Cambium C19, and the result was a bike I am enjoying very much, and it has become my choice for my exploration of the Plains of the Peninsula. The synthetic Cambium is harder than my favorite saddle, the leather Brooks B17 I have on my road bikes, but I have gotten used to it and overall, find this bike extremely comfortable for rides up to 35 miles. (I have yet to try it on longer rides, but my experience so far suggests 35 miles may be no where near its limit.) Even on these flat rides, there are hills. In particular, my home is on a hill so there is an inevitable steep climb for the last few blocks of any ride I do. A concern I had about the Public bike is that, because it had an internal gear hub, it might not have an adequate range of gears. However, when I sat down and figured out what its gears actually were, the low gear on the Public bike is 33 inches, virtually identical to the 32 inches low gear on my Volpe when I am using only the middle chainring. That is not the whole story, the fact that the Public bike has me sitting upright compared to the Volpe's traditional road bike posture means that I have less power climbing on the Public bike even at the same gear ratio, but even so, the Public bike has gears more than adequate for any of the flat rides I want to do. Due to the higher wind resistance of that upright posture, it is a slower bike, about 2 mph slower than my road bikes, but who cares when I am out for fun and exercise?

So what is the attraction of the Public bike? First, the upright posture makes it easier for me to look around and appreciate the neighborhoods through which I am riding. Second, there is no changing into bike clothes, which makes rides less of a production. Also, I find it a bit easier to stay warm in normal clothes. Third, because of the Brooks Cambium seat, fenders, and internal gear hub, rain is just not a problem on this bike. Between the lower traffic roads I have selected, the lack of hills, and the fact that the Public bike is more comfortable, an easy ride on this comfortable bike is great when my motivation is a bit low.

Resources

Why am I doing this exploration on my own? Aren't there guides to tell me what the best routes are? Actually, there are lots of great resources out there, and I use all that I can find, but at the end of the day, I find my preference in roads is different than anyone else's, so that there is no substitute for exploring possible routes on my own. Still, I always start with these resources.

• Google Maps is almost always the resource I go to first. Besides its basic mapping function which is essential planning a ride, if I turn on the Bicycling option, I get excellent (if not perfect) information as to where the bike lanes are, and Google's recommendations for "Bicycle Friendly Roads", though problematic are not worthless.
• On principle, I want to love Open Cycle Maps, an open source resource built on Open Street Map. However, I almost never find it useful. The one thing it has that Google Maps lacks is "official" bike routes. For example, the interim Peninsula bikeway is marked on Open Cycle Maps but not on Google Maps. That said, I cannot think when I have ever found this helpful. I keep returning to Open Cycle Maps hoping my love for it will grow, but so far, it hasn't.
• Also based on Open Street Maps is Google Map Pedometer (its name notwithstanding.) Its primary function is to plan out routes; lay out your route on this resource and you get back the mileage and elevation change. It has one additional critical feature, however, and that is it shows stoplights! When I am trying to plan a route that only crosses busy streets like El Camino at a stop light, by zooming in on any intersection, I can tell if there is a light there.
• What is it that I want from Open Cycle Maps that it lacks? A crowd-sourced compendium of what roads cyclists prefer. Guess who has that? Strava, in their Global Heatmap! This is absurdly cool, but still, I find it more fun than useful. More often that not, I look at the bright red lines of cyclist-favored roads and think "Are these people crazy? That road is much too dangerous!" There are three things missing that prevent this from being the resource I am looking for. First, it is just a counting of where cyclists have happened to go. Thus, regions with high populations and lots of cyclists will have brighter lines for worse roads than regions with lower populations and fewer cyclists. Second, there is no option for feedback. Maybe there is no great road from San Carlos to Facebook, but folks commuting by bicycle do the best they can, taking their chances on uncomfortable roads. If they had the opportunity to rate these routes, that would provide essential information now missing. Third, all riders are lumped together. As I noted at the beginning of this post, different riders are looking for different things. I can think of a variety of ways of stratifying riders that would be helpful.
• Finally, there are curated lists of good biking routes. There are many local organizations that map their favorite rides, here are just a few:
  
  • Given how this whole project started, I have to begin with the Peninsula Bikeway Website.
  • The Stanford Bike Club has an excellent list of local rides. I developed my GoTo ride from information on this list. That said, this resource is better for strenuous rides through the hills than it is for the flatter rides I am looking at here.
  • SF2G stands for San Francisco To Google, and started as a group of bike commuters who worked at Google in Mountain View and lived in San Francisco. (This is a 2-plus hour commute, each way!) They have developed several highly optimized and creative routes for this commute and are an invaluable resource for biking north-south on the Peninsula. Of all the ride lists I have come across, this one is the most directly relevant to this post.

Next Time

With the preliminaries out of the way, I will describe how I have modified the Peninsula Bikeway route to suite my preferences in my next post.

Too Much Fitness is Barely Enough

This graph, from Mandsager et al., shows the rate at which people die, depending on how fit they are. The top 2.3% of the people studied (Elite) had the slowest rate of death, and then each group of less and less fit participants died at a faster and faster rates.

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”

The above quote has been widely attributed to Mark Twain, and although I have not been able to find any source that debunks this attribution, neither have I been able to confirm it to my satisfaction. Anyway, it really doesn't matter who said it, the quote is amusing, especially to those of us who love our whiskey. But it also raises the serious question; is fitness like "anything", or is it like "whiskey"? Over the last few years, there have been a series of scientific journal articles reporting that some extreme athletes have health problems, suggesting that exercise might be a Goldilocks activity, where too little or too much is bad for you, that to stay healthy you want a level of fitness which is "just right". A recent paper [1] (hereafter referred to as Mandsager et al.) on the impact of fitness on longevity weighed in on this topic, and the authors seems to say that, when it comes to fitness, more is better. How convincing is this paper?

The most striking aspect of Mandsager et al. is the number of participants, a stunning 122,007! How did they get so many? They didn't, their participants were actually patients of the Cleveland Clinic who had their cardiopulmonary fitness measured by exercise treadmill testing between 1991 and 2014 as part of their regular medical care. Mandsager et al. reviewed their medical records and asked if there was any relationship between the fitness measured in that test and the probability that the patient had died for each year after the test. What they found was that the the higher the level of fitness, the less likely a patient was to die. But what is perhaps as striking as the number of participants is the magnitude of this effect. To put this into context, they had information about other characteristics of the patients as well, if they smoked for example. Smoking is generally believed to be highly harmful to health, and it is. Smokers in this group of patients were 1.4 times as likely to die in any given year as non-smokers. In comparison, those in the group with the lowest level of fitness were 5 times as likely to die in any given year as those with the highest level of fitness! But is this the right way to answer the question? What is the question? What do they mean by fitness?

Fitness was determined by the maximum speed and steepness of a treadmill the patient could manage before they said they were too tired to continue or until they developed symptoms which required the test to be discontinued. Fitness in this test was measured in units of relative maximum metabolic equivalents (METs.) (Maximum MET is closely related to the VO2max we in the exercise community use so often.) To make the MET scores relative, the patients were divided into groups of similar people. First, men and women were separated into two different groups and then these two groups were subdivided by age into 10 year subgroups. Each of these age and sex groups were ordered by MET score, and divided into the the 25% with the Lowest scores, the Below Average 25% (25%-50%), the Above Average 25% (50%-75%), the 25% with the Highest score (75%-100%) and the Elite 2.3% (97.7%-100%) [2]. In supplementary data, Mandsager et al. also looked at the top 5% and 1%. Groups with different levels of fitness, relative to their age and sex group, were compared one to another with regards to the probability that each group would die during each year following the test.

Could it be that the longevity of the top 2.3% of patients could be due to something other than exercise, their genes for example? Absolutely, this is a possibility that Mandsager et al. explicitly acknowledge in their paper. What can be done to get around this problem? Realistically, nothing. Mandsager et al. is a retrospective study. A retrospective study cannot prove if one thing (e.g. fitness) causes another (e.g. longevity.) The only way to definitively show that fitness leads to longevity would be to do a randomized, prospective study. Such a study would have to use a flip of the coin (or some other random process) to divide its participants into two groups. One group would be required to follow a specific exercise plan as a way to improve their fitness. The other group would be forbidden to exercise, even if they wanted to. Both groups would have to keep up these behaviors for years, or even decades, to determine if those who were randomly selected to exercise died less frequently than those who were randomly prevented from exercising. Even if one could get volunteers for such a study, no Institutional Review Board would approve it, the evidence that exercise (or fitness) improves health is so convincing it would be considered unethical to prevent the no exercise group from exercising. In the face of this impossibility, how can we determine if exercise or fitness is good for health? We do so by combining the results of a wide range different kinds of studies, each with their own limitations, and if all of these different kinds of studies point to the same conclusion, we become more and more convinced that this conclusion is correct. Given the massive amount of data on exercise, fitness, and health we have accumulated over the years, the evidence is strong that exercise and fitness improves health, even in the absence of a definitive, prospective study.

The four things that Mandsager et al. add to our understanding are first, by taking yet one more different approach to looking at this question, they increase the likelihood that our belief that exercise and fitness leads to long life is correct. Second, because of the huge amount of data their study contains, they provide the most striking estimate to date as to the size of this benefit. Third, again because of the amount of data, they can provide a convincing evidence that, within reason, for most people, the fitter you are, the longer you will live. Finally, their study suggests this is true if you are male or female, if you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or not, if you are less than 50 years old or more than 70 years old, this is true; it appears to be true for almost everyone.

Do Mandsager et al. really argue that no amount of fitness is too much? Not quite, the title of my post is an oversimplification. What Mandsager et al. do argue is that within the 122,007 patients examined in their study, very few if any of them were too fit. In fact, even when Mandsager et al. look at the fittest 1% of their participants, it was still the case that they lived longer than the top 2.3%, so within their study group, it seems like too much fitness is barely enough. The problem is that even the fittest 1% of their participants do not have MET scores anywhere near as high as fittest athletes in the world. So, if you are an ultra-marathon runner and are looking for validation for the healthfulness of your hobby, Mandsager et al. provide a weak validation at best. However, for most of us, Mandsager et al. encourage us to get as fit as possible. Finally, it is important to note that although the fittest 2.3% had a 5 times lower mortality rate than the least fit 25%, the next to the worst group, the Below Average 25% to 50%, had a 1.95 times lower mortality rate than the Lowest fitness 0% to 25% group, an effect larger than that of not smoking, so while it is true that the more fitness the better, it is also true that some fitness is much better than none.

It is important to understand the difference between fitness and exercise. For most people, the right amount and the right kind of exercise does increase their fitness, but genetics also has a huge impact, as do many other factors. Two people who exercise the same amount will almost never achieve the same level of fitness. Some people who almost never exercise will have a higher level of fitness than others who exercise diligently. Mandsager et al. in and of themselves do not deal with exercise at all, only fitness. However, there are other studies that survey people, asking them how much they exercise, and then follow those people over time. One such study is Lear et al. [3] (I selected this study in particular, because it also had an extremely large sample size, 130,000 participants. I hope to cover this landmark paper in a future post.) Lear et al. estimated a 1.5-fold increase in longevity due to exercise, still large, but much less than the 5-fold effect due to fitness estimated by Mandsager et al. What could account for the difference? It is impossible to know based just on these studies, and in fact I am unaware of any studies that answer this question convincingly, but there are some obvious guesses. Some or all of that difference might represent the genetic component to fitness, which might also impact longevity. Fitness can also be impacted by general health issues, people who are unwell both cannot exercise as much and also probably don't benefit as much from the exercise they do, so will measure low on the fitness scale. (Mandsager et al. did analyses to rule out this particular concern, but only in part. It is possible that there some illnesses whose impact these analyses could not eliminate.) One point that Mandsanger et al made in support of their approach of looking at fitness rather than exercise is that people are not always honest when surveyed about how much they exercise. They may remember incorrectly and/or flatter themselves by overestimating the amount of exercise they do. Such people would dilute the benefits of exercise found in Lear et al.; they would count as high exercisers but have the life expectancy of low exercisers, meaning that the the 1.5-fold benefit of exercise reported by Lear et al. might be an underestimate.

All the above limitations notwithstanding, taking these two papers at face value [4] leads to some interesting conclusions. Note that the benefit of maximum fitness (5-fold) is much greater than the benefit of maximum exercise (1.5-fold). There are a very large number of theoretical explanations for that observation, but an obvious one is that the benefit of exercise comes not from the act of exercising per se, but from the increased fitness that exercise produces. Thus, when comparing the health benefits of different exercise plans, measuring how much fitness they produce, something that can be done relatively easily in a short term study, may be a good way of determining which exercise plans are better. For example, the results of Gillen et al. advocating for High Intensity Interval Training become more convincing. At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive that 1 minute of high intensity intervals can produce as much health benefit as 45 minutes steady cycling, but because we can easily demonstrate that the impact on fitness is the same, and because we believe that fitness is what determines health, we can accept this counterintuitive result with increased confidence. For an individual, this is even more valuable. There is no way for one individual to measure the effect of any given exercise protocol on their longevity, but it is easy to measure its effect on their fitness. If fitness leads to longevity, then the exercise protocol that leads to the highest level of fitness will also lead to the greatest longevity. Once again, none of this is proven by these studies, it is just one plausible explanation, but one that I find persuasive. Thus, I expect to refer back to this post frequently as it will make interpretation of the exercise literature much easier and more direct. Stay tuned.

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[1] Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing by Kyle Mandsager, MD; Serge Harb, MD; Paul Cremer, MD; Dermot Phelan, MD, PhD; Steven E. Nissen, MD; Wael Jaber, MD in JAMA Network Open (2018) Volume 1 e183605, doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.3605.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428

[2] This seemingly odd choice of the top 2.3% as the elite group was made because this value corresponds to those who are statistically two standard deviations or more above the average level of fitness. For the purposes of this post, it is not important you understand the significance of this, it is here for the curious.

[3] The effect of physical activity on mortality and cardiovascular disease in 130,000 people from 17 high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries: the PURE study by Scott A Lear, Weihong Hu, Sumathy Rangarajan, Danijela Gasevic, Darryl Leong, Romaina Iqbal, Amparo Casanova, Sumathi Swaminathan, R M Anjana, Rajesh Kumar, Annika Rosengren, Li Wei, Wang Yang, Wang Chuangshi, Liu Huaxing, Sanjeev Nair, Rafael Diaz, Hany Swidon, Rajeev Gupta, Noushin Mohammadifard, Patricio Lopez-Jaramillo, Aytekin Oguz, Katarzyna Zatonska, Pamela Seron, Alvaro Avezum, Paul Poirier, Koon Teo, Salim Yusuf in Lancet (2017) Volume 390 Page 2643.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)31634-3/fulltext

[4] ...and noting but not belaboring the "Correlation Does Not Prove Causation" and other stringencies of the scientific method. I have tried to phrase this section cautiously to give such issues their due without obscuring the obvious (if not proven) working conclusions that a reasonable person might draw from these papers.

Sprinting for the Endurance Cyclist

[When I moved to California, I changed my promised posting schedule from once a week to once a month. It has only been a week since my last post, why the change? First, I had accumulated a number of posts and worried that some of them would get stale if I only posted once a month. Second, this and the previous post are sort of Part A and Part B of the same post so that separating them by a month might be too long. This is a very temporary change; I anticipate mostly sticking to a once a month schedule going forward.]

As much as I love reading books about training, there is one thing about them that I find frustrating; finding the information for which I am looking always seems to require jumping around in the book, extracting bits of information from here and there, and sometimes, even going outside the book to find missing bits of information critical to actually figuring out what it is that the author would have me do. Maybe it's just me. I am a very fast reader, and part of the reason for that is that I tend to skim. Maybe if I could just slow down and read carefully I would not have this problem. Sadly, I am who I am and so reconstruction of what I read seems to be a fact of life for me. That being the case, blogging really helps me, it forces me to work through the books I read and the questions I have and to organize them in logical ways, so at the end of writing a blog post, I understand the topic much better than I can by just reading. That was what happened when I wrote my recent post on "Deconstructing the 100K". Although I had read "Distance Cycling" by John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach ("Hughes & Kehlenbach") more than once, it was only when I wrote that post that I finally figured out what they wanted me to do during their "brisk" rides. In the end, everything I needed to know what somewhere in that book, but while I was in the middle of figuring it out, I noted their reference to an electronic article by John Hughes ("Hughes") on the topic, and I purchased it in the hopes of gaining clarity. This article, shown at the top of this post, is published on the "Road Bike Rider" website, and although I did not end up needing Hughes to decode Hughes & Kehlenbach, comparing the two proved interesting.

But why am I even doing this? As I mentioned back in that 100K post, one of the experienced cyclists who commented on my blog advised me to "Throw all that training literature away..." The problem is, this is just one commenter of several; if I consider all the comments I have gotten over the years, they advise to do pretty much everything: ride faster, ride slower, ride more, ride less, read no books, read more books, etc., etc., so at the end of the day I end up where I started, I have to decide for myself. But after all this time, have I not figured this out? Did I not just present a training plan in my 100K post? Yes, I did, but.....

• I'm still not sure. What if I am riding too fast? What if I am riding too slow? How would I know?
• I am chronically frustrated that I am so slow, and that I never seem to get much faster. Maybe if I did the right brisk rides, I could get faster?
• Anyway, I read the Hughes article so I might as well review it. One reason I purchased it was that it was "newly revised for 2016". Have the latest findings changed everything? Does it tell me the same thing as Hughes & Kehlenbach or is it yet another divergent opinion?

One difference between Hughes compared to Hughes & Kehlenbach is that the training zone heart rates have been revised down, so the recommended riding intensities are lower. In my 100K post, I argued that because my "GoTo" ride had so many hills, it forced me into all the different intensities (heart rate zones) as I needed. The change in zones shifted that calculation:

Different Intensities in my GoTo Ride. Because the hills in which I ride, every ride I do is at a mixture of intensities (levels of difficulty.) To determine how much of each intensity I was riding, I wore a heart rate monitor on a GoTo ride. Shown are the minutes of the 110 minute ride spent in the different heart rate zones. (Heart rate zones are a measure of intensity.) The color code is the standard one used throughout this blog; Green is an Easy Intensity. Yellow is my Long Ride Intensity, the intensity I plan for the event I for which I am training. Blue is Pace Intensity, a bit harder than what I plan for my event. Red is my Hard/Fast/Hilly Intensity. The two columns are calculated using the two different sets of heart rate zones given in Hughes & Kehlenbach and in Hughes.

Compared to Hughes and Kehlenbach, Hughes makes my GoTo ride seem more like a Pace ride and less like an Endurance ride. If I take this seriously, this would suggest that I might want to include more rides on the flat parts of The Peninsula in my schedule, which happens to be something I want to do anyway. But that would reduce the amount of "hard" (red) riding I am doing, do I need to compensate for that? As I will discuss below, perhaps not.

Both Hughes and Hughes & Kehlenbach recommend the same three less-than-hard rides; Active Recovery (Zone 1), Endurance (Zone 2), and Tempo (Zone 3). Where Hughes and Hughes & Kehlenbach differ is that Hughes considers five kinds of hard rides whereas Hughes & Kehlenbach consider only one. The five kinds of hard rides in Hughes, in order of increasing intensity, are Sweet Spot (border of Zones 3 and 4), Sub-threshold (Zone 4), Super-Threshold (Zone 5a*), VO2max (Zone 5b*), and Sprints (Zone 5c*). The single hard ride Hughes & Kehlenbach recommends corresponds to the Sub-Threshold (Zone 4) ride of Hughes.

Another difference between Hughes and Hughes & Kehlenbach is that Hughes makes different recommendations for three different kinds of riders, Health and Fitness Riders, Club and Endurance Riders, and Performance Riders. I fall into the first group, or perhaps the second group on a good day, but never in the third group. Hughes & Kehlenbach consider only one kind of rider, one corresponding to the Club and Endurance Rider of Hughes.

For the Health and Fitness rider, Hughes recommends the following: "In addition to active recovery, endurance and tempo rides, you will benefit from sprints and VO2 max intervals; however, if you don’t want to do either of these—don’t!" For the Club and Endurance rider, Hughes says "In addition to active recovery, endurance and tempo rides you will also benefit from sprints, VO2 max intervals and sweet spot training; however, if you don’t want to push yourself that hard I won’t fault you." So the good news is that, according to Hughes, whatever hard riding I do, even if that is none, will be enough.

So are we done at long last? Not quite. Hughes lists nine benefits that come from including at least some hard rides in your schedule. I won't list all nine, but I want to mention one: Better Performance. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned how I am disappointed with my speed and how I would love to find some way to increase it. If my enthusiasm and level of fatigue would allow it, might introducing some specifically hard/fast/brisk rides into my schedule be beneficial? Interestingly, the hard ride recommended by Hughes & Kehlenbach was at the low end of hard, in Zone 4, whereas the two rides Hughes recommends for the Health and Fitness cyclist are at the high end; Sprint (Zone 5c) and VO2max (5b). These last two are not intensities I reach during my GoTo ride, and thus rides at these intensities might add something I would not otherwise get. (For the Club and Endurance rider, Hughes suggests one more hard ride, the "Sweet Spot" ride, at the very low end of hard, at the border between Zones 3 and 4, an intensity that I reach often in my GoTo ride.) But is this madness? Am I about to complicate the beautifully simple schedule I developed for riding a 100K per month? I actually don't think so. I have recently been enjoying riding my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima around the neighborhood. (Because it has sew-up tires which are hard to change on the road, I have been keeping these rides close to home so I could walk home in the case of a flat.) One of the reasons I like riding this classic bike is because it feels fast. Although traffic is a consideration everywhere on The Peninsula, there are some stretches of this neighborhood ride a few blocks long where there is less traffic overall and virtually no cross traffic, so these might be places I could enjoy the speed of this beautiful bike and practice sprinting. If I do this, will it improve my speed? Stay tuned to find out.

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* I have substituted Joe Friel's Zone numbering system (5a, 5b, 5c) for that of Hughes (5, 6, and 7) because Freil's system is the one I have previously used on this blog.

Deconstructing 100K per month

"STOP training. Stop worrying about all the numbers. Throw all that training literature away -- it isn't written for someone 60+ years old with a fairly high resting pulse (60+), anyway. Instead, start riding and enjoying the rides for the sake of the rides."

This comment, from one of my blog posts long ago and far away, is one I think about often. Although I really appreciate the sentiment (and I appreciate that the author took the trouble to post a comment even more), each of the many times I have rethought this comment, I end up telling myself the same thing: "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that." (My name is David so when I talk to myself, I ..., oh, never mind.) Cycling inevitably involves choices, and depending on what choices I make, has consequences. How often do I ride? (A different commenter on that same post chided me for riding two days in a row.) How fast do I ride? (...and chided me for riding too fast.) For how many miles? If I am interested in a group ride, which rides are too long or too hilly and which are just right? All of that said, over the past five years, I have moved some distance in the direction this commenter suggested. Although I own a dozen books on bicycle training, these days, I only look at one, "Distance Cycling" by John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach, the cover of which is at the top of this post. My Garmin stopped working about a year ago, so I no longer track my heart rate during a ride. But I still have choices to make, and this post is about how I am thinking about these choices at this point in my life. In particular, I am going to put this into the context of my recent goal of riding one metric century (100 kilometers or just over 60 miles) a month. This is a big step backwards from five years ago, when my goal was to complete rides twice that long with the hope of working up to even longer rides. What happened? In short, I found a 200K brevet (a bike ride of 200 kilometers or just over 120 miles) much harder than I expected, such that it seemed (and still seems) unlikely I could complete one of these a month, a prerequisite for the longer rides of which I had dreamed. My move to California pushed this dream even farther out of reach. In Texas, the 200K brevets I could ride were relatively flat. In California, they are quite hilly and therefore substantially more difficult. In short, the dream is over, 100K it is.

One more factor I need to mention is that my motives for riding are mixed. Besides "enjoying the rides for the sake of the rides", I must keep riding for my health, mental and physical, whether I enjoy it or not. And therein lies a conflict. Most of the training literature assumes you are starting at a point where you cannot complete your goal ride, and that you will work up to that goal, with no plan for sustaining that level of fitness. In particular, the exercise community builds their recommendations around the concept of a "season". At the end of one season, one quits cycling and then starts the next with a series of activities that start from no cycling and work their way back up to peak fitness. On the other hand, the medical community wants to me exercise 300 minutes a week, every week of my life. One exception to the seasonal approach of the exercise community comes from the randonneuring community in the form of the R12 award given to a randonneur who rides a 200K or longer brevet every month of the year and Hughes and Kehlenbach offer a year around, steady state training plan for earning that award. In this post, I will discuss my thoughts for adapting that plan to my goal of riding a metric century a month while meeting my medically prescribed exercise requirements. I will develop this adaptation in stages.

Original Plan: 200K/month

This is a training plan for maintaining the fitness required to ride a 124 mile bike ride (200K brevet) once a month from Hughes and Kehlenbach. This plan repeats every four weeks. Immediately after having completed a 124 mile/200K/600 minute ride, you ride the easy schedule of Week 1 to recover. You then ride the harder schedules of Weeks 2 and 3 to prepare of another 200K ride in Week 4. That 200K ride is an essential part of the training schedule, if you did not ride it every month, you would have to add some longer rides to make up for it. Of course, 200K group rides do not happen exactly every 4 weeks, so Week 3 can be deleted or duplicated within reason when brevets are more or less than four weeks apart. 

For this schedule, rides shown in green are ridden slowly, those in yellow at the speed planned for the 200K (medium), those in blue are a bit faster than the 200K (medium-fast), and  those in red are fast rides. The numbers are the length of the rides in minutes. The 600 minute ride in Week 4 is the 200K ride that is the goal for the month. The estimated time of 600 minutes comes from what Hughes and Kellenbach advise should be your time before considering advancing to a 300K ride. (For comparison, the fastest I have ever ridden a 200K is 660 minutes.)

For medical reasons, I should ride 300 or more minutes a week. The TOTAL column on the far right gives the sum of minutes ridden per month. In all except the recovery week, the 300 minutes prescribed by my doctor is reached or exceeded, and the average is well over that. However, I already know I cannot maintain a schedule of a 200K ride a month, the best I have managed is a 200K per year, which is why I am now proposing of riding half that, a 100K/month.

Scaled Down Plan: 100K/month

This is identical to the previous schedule, except that I have divided all the times by two. The problem with this schedule is that, if I were to follow it, I would get less than the medically optimum amount of exercise. Only in Week 4 do I meet my goal and the average is just over 240 minutes a week, well below my goal.

Also, the rides I can actually do on the hilly San Francisco Bay Peninsula prevent me from dividing my rides into the very discrete effort levels indicated by the above color codes. What I need to do is to substitute the rides I can actually do, each of which contains a mix of efforts, by making sure that my rides give me at least same total minutes of each effort as the above schedule.

The next schedule is designed to address these issues.

Personalized Plan: 100K/month

In this schedule, I have increased the length of some of the rides so that I now get closer to my medically prescribed 300 minutes a week.  Given that the hills where I ride mean that every ride is, by necessity, a mixture of efforts, what do the color codes in this latest plan mean? Very loosely, they are meant to convey the same things as in the previous plans; the yellow ride is my weekly long ride, which, because it is in the hills, includes a mix of efforts, but in general, is a ride on which I try to moderate my speed. Because the blue ride is shorter, I try to ride it a bit faster. The green rides are rides around my neighborhood which I try to make as easy as possible, but given that I live on a hill, even those are a bit of a mix.

What happened to the fast (red) rides? Because I live in the hills, my medium-fast (blue) and long (yellow) rides are quite strenuous going up the hills and not at all strenuous going down, so rather than a 110 minute ride being 110 minutes of medium effort, it is 14 minutes of easy effort (green), 75 minutes of medium effort (yellow), 17 minutes of medium-fast effort (blue), and 4 minutes of an effort similar in difficulty to the fast rides (red)*. Because all the rides contain some high effort hill climbing, the benefits of the red rides are provided as an unavoidable part of the other rides.

On the surface, this would appear not to add up; the previous schedule had 40-45 minutes of fast (red) rides in Weeks 2 and 3, compared to only 4 minutes of high intensity riding in a 110 minute ride. What equalizes these efforts is a few things. In the first place, the 45 minutes given for the red rides are not that many minutes of hard effort, but include warm up, cool down, and recovery between hard efforts. Thus, a 45 minute fast (red) ride actually contains only of 15 minutes of fast riding. Second, it is not just the 110 minute ride that contains some hard hills, to a greater or lesser extent, all of my rides do. I don't have the same quantitation for all the rides as I do for my 110 minute ride, but a reasonable estimate is that Week 1 of the above schedule contains 8 minutes of high intensity riding, and Weeks 2 and 3 contain 12 minutes each. Finally, note that Week 1 of the previous schedule had no red rides, so summed over the month, the previous schedule contained 30 minutes of hard (fast) riding, whereas this schedule added up to 32 minutes of hard (hilly) riding, effectively the same.

A few caveats with the above calculation are 1) The numbers are close, so if I start substituting flatter long rides for hilly ones, I may come up short on hard/fast/hilly/intense minutes. (Since most of the 100K rides I am considering are hilly, doing so would probably be a mistake anyway.) 2) It is not completely clear that riding hard up hills produces exactly the same kind of fitness as getting my heart up to the same rate by riding fast. 3) This assumes that there is "hard" and "not hard" riding. In fact, many training manuals (though not Hughes and Kehlenbach) suggest riding at different intensities to gain different kinds of fitness. This is probably getting too far into the weeds for an old, casual cyclist like me, so I will not develop scenarios around each of these, but simply note that they are in the back of my mind and might cause me to do some more traditional, fast riding on occasion. Finally, and even at the risk of getting into the weeds, I plan to revisit the question of riding at different intensities one last time in an upcoming post.

How about minutes of easy (green), medium (yellow), and medium-fast (blue) riding? The previous schedule contained 165 minutes of medium-fast riding, 630 minutes of medium riding, and 150 minutes of easy riding. This current schedule contains 170 minutes of medium-fast riding, 750 minutes of medium riding, and 380 minutes of easy riding. This certainly seems at least as good.

How does my doctor feel about all this? The medical community groups exercise levels into light, moderate, and vigorous and gives me no credit for light exercise, suggests that I should participate in 300 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 150 minutes a week of vigorous exercise, or any combination of the two. The problem is in equating my exercise levels to the three medical categories. After a lot of soul searching and poring over the various ways the medical community describes light, moderate, and vigorous exercise, I have come to the conclusion that the best thing for me to do is to describe all my rides as moderate exercise, thus the number of minutes in the TOTAL column represents the number of minutes of moderate exercise I get to report to my doctor. Even in Week 1, my recovery week, I come very close to the optimum 300 minutes of exercise, and significantly exceed that in all other weeks with an average of over 350 minutes a week. I think my doctor would be happy if I could maintain this schedule.

Despite how complicated it was to get here, this personalized schedule is designed to be simplicity itself to ride. The 30 minute easy (green) rides are just rides around my neighborhood. The 110 minute medium (blue) ride is just the "go-to" ride I ride all the time, and the longer (yellow) rides are just simple extensions to that ride. If I start to get bored, significant changes to this schedule should still leave me well prepared for a metric century, so long as I maintain the total number of minutes of riding, don't skip the long ride each week, and do roughly the same amount of riding in the hills. Finally, what happens when life intervenes such that I fail to maintain this schedule, or even stop riding altogether for a period? The consensus of the training literature suggests I should slowly work up to a long ride of between 200 and 225 minutes a week or two before the metric century, after which I could return to this maintenance schedule. The consensus of the endurance cycling (randonneuring) community would suggest that 150 minutes might be enough to prepare for a 100K, and thus once I had worked my way back to this maintenance schedule, I would be good to go. I rode the Art of Survival 8 weeks after having been completely off the bike for 10 weeks due to illness, and followed a schedule much like that recommended by the training literature, working up to a long ride of 230 minutes two weeks before the ride, and that seemed to work well. I was in something of the reverse situation for the Golden Hills metric century, being a bit overtrained seven weeks before, and in that case, rode only one long ride in preparation, 190 minutes, and that, too worked. What is the lesson from these different experiences? I think it is that, unlike a 200K ride, A 100K ride is much closer to what I can comfortably ride day in and day out, so preparing for one is a tweak to my schedule rather than a major effort that requires intense focus and a precise training plan to complete. 

Even though it is relatively easy to prepare for, the benefits of a monthly 100K should not be minimized. A 100K ride is not easy for me but rather is a welcome stretch. Thankfully, there are lots of fun group 100K rides offered in my area, providing an opportunity for making my medically-prescribed riding more entertaining. In short, 100K per month represents a worthwhile upgrade to my riding schedule. Now all that remains is to muster the organization and enthusiasm needed to sign up for metric centuries on a regular basis. Wish me luck!

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* I don't normally use a heart rate monitor on my California rides, but one time I did. These levels of effort were determined from that ride.

Listening to My Body

Recently, I have been doing some longer rides on the commuter bike I inherited from my wife through the flat neighborhoods on the east side of the peninsula. The ride illustrated on the map (shown in the lower half of the figure) went from my house in San Carlos to the house where my father grew up in Palo Alto (shown in the upper half of the figure), an approximately 20 mile ride round trip.

This blog does not have a large number of readers, most of my posts top out at 50 to 100 visits. A handful of these are regular readers, mostly or entirely friends and family (howdy!) and I suspect the rest are people who found a post via a google search. I hope they found what they were looking for, but even if they did, I suspect few of them found a reason to become regular readers. If that's the case, why do I keep posting? My younger son Matthew says "If you want to think, write" a saying I find to be very true, and this post was a perfect example. I started out writing one thing, but as my writing forced me to think things through, I ended up going an entirely different direction.

I initially anticipated that this post would discuss a recent review of the history of the development of a recommended exercise regimen by the medical community, with the goal of underlining how uncertain we are that the current recommendations are optimal, but when I dug into it, I realized everything worth saying in that paper is contained in this sentence. Don't get me wrong, the core advice of the medical community, "exercise lots", is quite solid, it is just the details that remain to be solidified. In fact, there is a recent paper reinforcing the "lots" part which has been picked up by the press (CNN for example),  that I may review one of these days. The bottom line for me is that I am trying to bicycle as much as I can, and therein lies the story for today.

As long time readers of this blog will know, I have done a fair bit of reading in the exercise literature, and one enduring lesson I have gleaned from that reading is that the best way to bicycle as much as possible is not to go out every day and ride until I drop. Doing that would lead to overtraining and, much less riding in the long term. Rather, I have to develop a sustainable exercise plan, one that I can maintain month after month, year after year. Many cyclists, including some who have commented on this blog, have found objective criteria to help them develop such sustainable plans, things like resting heart rate. I have tried a lot of these, and the only metrics that have worked for me are subjective:

1. Measuring my speed on a standard ride.
2. Monitoring my feelings; aching legs, general lethargy, lack of enthusiasm, and mood.

(Even though it may not seem so, speed on a standard ride is subjective. If I have more enthusiasm, I may ride harder and be faster for that reason, not because I am fully recovered, which is what I am testing for. In the end, subjective criteria are the only ones that have worked for me.)

Last August, the last time I talked about my riding schedule, I said: "I increased my riding from three to four rides a week ...[and]... I seem to be handling four days a week OK." (The "rides" I am referring to are identical repeats of my go-to ride, a 23 mile ride with 1300 feet of climbing.) That continued to be true for two more weeks, at which point I noticed that not only was I feeling more tired, but, it "seemed like" the speed at which I could do these rides was getting slower, not faster. Why do I feel the need for the "seemed like" qualifier? It is because there is a great deal of day to day variation in how fast I can do this ride, so that I cannot conclude from one or two slow rides that I am riding too much. It was only after I saw a pattern over a few weeks where my rides were significantly slower on average that I seriously wondered if four rides a week was too much. The problem is that even two weeks of rides is a very small number, statistically speaking, so it is hard to be sure that my rides had really gotten slower. On the other hand, I really couldn't wait much longer than two weeks to make a correction to my routine, should a correction be necessary. While writing this post, I actually went back and forth a few times, sometimes thinking I had overinterpreted the data, that my rides had not gotten significantly slower, and other times thinking that I had gotten it right. As of this writing, I'm thinking I got it right, but that explains the "seems like" in my characterization. So, combining apparently slower rides with a higher incidence of aching legs, low enthusiasm, and general lethargy, I decided to cut back from four of the hilly 23 mile rides a week, to three of those rides plus one shorter, flatter ride. Of course, as always, life intervened and I had to adjust my ride schedule to work around those interventions, but for four weeks, I rode schedules that attempted to approximate that goal, and it seemed like my ride speed was recovering.

On the surface, this all seems like good news; I determined I was riding a bit too much and successfully adjusted my schedule. However, the decision to cut back on my riding felt like a real setback. Four 23-mile rides a week doesn't even come close to the volume of riding I was doing just five years ago when I was participating in 200 kilometer brevets*. Had I really gone so far downhill in those five years? Why, all of a sudden, is seven hours a week too much, when five years ago, I sometimes did that much in a day? There are many possible explanations, each with their own implications for how I ought to be riding. Maybe, at my age, five years older is significant. Maybe, illness and death of my wife is still affecting me. Maybe, I have not yet thrown off all the effects of my pneumonia of last winter. Maybe, other sources of stress in my life are impacting my ability to ride. Against this background, my older son Michael came up with another possibility. "I can't believe you do this same ride over and over again. I think you are just getting bored. Boredom can feel like tiredness, you know." That didn't seem right to me, but he is a very smart man, so I took his advice seriously. With that in mind, when the opportunity came to ride a second metric century with my friend Roger came up, I jumped at it despite having little time to prepare. How little? Well, my speed may have come up a bit, but my subjective feeling was still one of tiredness, so because my body was telling me it was more in need of rest than training, I did only one 39 mile long ride two weeks in advance to prepare, followed by two relatively easy weeks. The metric century went well, I was very tired at the end but had no trouble finishing, so this minimalist training plan seemed to work, though there is, of course, no way to be sure that a different plan might not have worked better.

The metric century was one response to boredom, but another, driven not just by boredom but also inspired by the Peninsula Bikeway ride I took a while back and by my interest in easier rides that still met my medical prescription for 300 minutes of moderate exercise a week, I started exploring routes through the beautiful neighborhoods on the eastern flats of The Peninsula, the ride shown at the top of this post being one. So does this mean I have become a slacker, just easy rides and minimal training going forward? Not at all, I will continue to listen to my body, and if I am feeling strong, will try upping my mileage again, perhaps seeking out some bigger challenges. I am not yet sure if my son was right, that what I was calling fatigue was actually boredom, but I do know that introducing more variety into my riding has been an extremely pleasant change, so I intend to do more of that. The metric century is a very popular distance for group bike rides, and I like being able to participate in one of these at short notice, so I may try to work one longer ride into my weekly schedule such that I could ride a metric century with no extra preparation at all. Stay tuned to see how this all works out.

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* A brevet is just a bicycle ride. Brevet is what randonneurs, a kind of bicycle rider who specializes in long distance challenge rides, calls one of their challenges. A 200 kilometer ride is their shortest brevet, the other common distances being 300, 400, 600, and 1200 kilometers.

Golden Hills Metric Century

Last May, I rode the "The Art of Survival" with my Modesto Roadmen buddy, Roger. During that event, Roger shared with me his ambition to ride a metric century (100 kilometers or 62 miles) once a month. It sounded like a great plan to me, within my capabilities while still being a challenge that encouraged me to go for a little excitement in my cycling. The plan was that, since Roger invited me to "The Art of Survival", it was my turn to come up with a ride near where I live, in the San Francisco Bay area. Well, stuff happened (doesn't it always) which kept me busy, so I kept not getting around to a second metric century, but I never gave up. Finally we managed to arrange something in October, a metric century near Modesto, the city where Roger and I met. The Event was the "Golden Hills Century", which in addition to its eponymous century (100 mile) ride, featured additional shorter rides including the metric century that we rode. The ride started and finished in the tiny, unincorporated town of Knight's Ferry. Knight's Ferry is a bit of a tourist destination both for it's recreational rafting as well as for its scenic, historic covered bridge:

...featuring its own historic plaque:

Knight's Ferry is also a popular cycling destination for rides starting in Modesto, and in fact the two rides I did with Paul, another of my Modesto Roadmen buddies, did just that. The nearest incorporated area, the City of Oakdale, also has a charm of its own. It claims to be the "Cowboy Capital of the World" (a claim some of my former neighbors in Texas might dispute) and is also a cycling hub. The ride was sponsored by the Stanislaus County Bicycle Club and benefited the Second Harvest Food Bank of Modesto. (Modesto, Oakdale, and Knight's Ferry are all within Stanislaus County, thus the name of the club.) Roger and I both drove to Oakdale the night before so we had dinner together, and then met again in the parking lot designated for the ride, got signed in, and at 8 am, started the ride. Here is a picture of Roger with some of the other riders just before the start:

The route went through the rich, agricultural landscape of the San Joaquin Valley and featured almond orchards, vineyards, and cattle ranches. But why is it called the Golden Hills century? The ride went along the edge of the San Joaquin Valley which meant it was in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and thus featured rolling Hills; there was about 2,000 feet of climbing in the ride (and my legs felt every foot of that.) The golden part is a bit of a euphemism. California is actually a fairly dry state, and its Central Valley is technically a desert, it's agricultural richness comes entirely from irrigation. Thus, most of the year the hills are covered with dry grass which, if you have the right attitude, are Golden:

One of the best part of the ride for me was the memories it brought back of my high school days cycling with the Modesto Roadmen. A lot has changed in the fifty years since then, traffic has gotten much heavier for one thing, and the land is much more developed for another, but enough stayed the same, like road names, that I was in close to a perpetual state of nostalgia. My family was brought to Modesto by the phone company who moved my dad there in 1961 and we lived there a total of six years before the phone company moved us along. In contrast, Roger has deep family roots in the area - some of his family were among its first settlers. As a result, he lived there much longer than I did and had even more memories.

Roger was a much stronger rider than me last May, and the same was true for this ride. (Given my current understanding of my fitness, that is unlikely to ever change.) Thus, I spent the ride desperately trying to say with him, often glued to his back wheel, or more often, failing to do so and riding off the back. Roger was very kind and always waited for me (though I assured him he didn't need to) but as a result I didn't take as many pictures as I would have liked, as I was too busy chasing. However, towards the beginning of the ride when I wasn't quite so tired, we came across the Robert's Ferry covered Bridge, and I couldn't resist. Unlike the Knight's Ferry bridge, this is not a carefully preserved historic landmark, but a fully functional working bridge that the farmer's in the area drive through every day, and yet it is charming nonetheless:

The ride was well organized. There was snacks available at signup if you hadn't had a chance to grab breakfast, the 65 miles featured four rest stops, three which provided bathrooms, water, and snacks, and the fourth which provided all that plus "lunch." The lunch was plentiful and excellent (I pigged out on the wonderful seasonal strawberries) and is in quotes only because a second, hot lunch was provided at the end; one ride, two lunches! The map was good, there were arrows on the road throughout the route, flagmen were present at all busy intersections, both the volunteers and riders were friendly, and the whole thing had a wonderfully comfortable vibe. I would most definitely participate in this ride this again despite the horrific traffic I had to drive through to get there, and would recommend it without reservation. Here is a map of the ride:

How about my preparation and fitness? Something I have talked about a little bit on this blog, that I hope to cover in more detail in the future, is that I feel like my body can tolerate very little training these days. Even just the 300 minutes of riding my doctor insists I do for my health leaves me pretty tired, so I felt that resting for this ride was as important as preparing for it. I made two change to my schedule to get ready. Two weeks before this ride, I replaced one of my 23 mile rides with a 39 mile ride. The week after, I reduced both the intensity and the volume of my riding to allow for recovery. My thought was that I was trading off between fitness and exhaustion, and that given that, this schedule was probably the best I could do. There is no way to be sure if my thinking was correct, but given the totality of my experiences over the last year and then over the last ten years, my best guess is that it would have been hard for me to do much better. At the start of the ride, I felt as good as I have for a long time. At about the 40 mile point, my legs got quite sore and I had a lot less "push"; if Roger pulled ahead of me on a hill, there is nothing I could do about it, no matter how hard I tried. By the end of the ride, my legs were completely exhausted. After a two hour drive home, I fell into bed almost immediately for a long, deep sleep. That said, there was never any doubt I would finish, and I enjoyed the ride immensely, even at the end. How best to prepare for challenging, fun rides, and what my limits are in that regard is something I think about constantly. Preparation for this ride represents my best guess for how to do so at present, stay tuned to see how my thinking evolves.