Approximately six years ago I
posted about the first 20,000 miles of cycling I had done since I
restarted cycling in 2008. In this post, I will continue the tradition and blog about reaching 40,000 miles. I went back and re-read that earlier post and was struck by how relevant it still is. By simply updating the numbers I could probably reuse that earlier post, but I don't want to do that. Instead, I am going to look at the subject from a different angle and consider different issues than I did last time. Given that, it seemed appropriate to focus on not just my second 20,000 miles, but to (re)consider all 40,000 miles I have ridden.
So what are the new issues I am looking to consider this time around?
- I did not ride alone. My wife Agi was my most frequent and by far my favorite riding partner and was a significant cyclist in her own right. I won't say I neglected her on this blog, given its original focus and Agi's intense desire for privacy I feel like I did the right thing at the time. Now, however, I feel like it is time to look at her part in all this in more detail.
- 10,000 miles ago, I suffered the worst blow of my life: I lost Agi to cancer. This changed every aspect of my life, cycling included.
- During the 12 years of my second cycling career I also retired, went through the illness and death of both my parents, acquired two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren, moved from a flat part of Texas to a hilly part of California, went through hurricanes and forest fires and now a global pandemic. And let us not forget that, at my age, the physical consequences of getting 12 years older is no small thing. Physically, I am not the same person who started all this so long ago. How I cycle is not just the product of training theories and my interests, but is probably even more the product of these life events.
- I have been learning about modern bicycle technology and training practices. I know so much more now than I did when I started all this back in '08.
As I was approaching 55 years of age I
realized my physical condition had deteriorated badly and that I needed to start an exercise program. I had initial successes with weight training, swimming, and running, but in each case, my resolve eventually faded and the exercise program came to a stop. In early 2008, as I was approaching my 59th birthday, I got a surprise phone call from Paul, a member of my high school bicycle club. Before that call, Paul and I had been out of touch for forty years. We reminisced about our bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen, and as a result, he got on eBay and bought himself a modern carbon road bike and I took my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima to a local bike shop to be returned to a rideable condition, and we both started riding again. My first ride, five miles home from the bike shop, was on August 1, 2008. My second ride was on August 5, 2008. It was five miles around our neighborhood and I was joined by my wife on the 1973 Gitane road bike we had bought for her back when we first started dating. Although not all my riding was done with Agi, a significant fraction was. She was an enthusiastic cyclist and a wonderful partner on a ride. For her landmark 60th birthday that October she decided to celebrate with a
bicycling weekend in the Hill Country of Texas. Just weeks later, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer has a terrible prognosis and we were devastated. We were relatively fortunate, she did much better than the average ovarian cancer patient, living eight more years, many of those cancer free. During those eight years, cycling continued to be one of our favorite things to do. But that was later. Sometime during the 16 months she was too sick to ride, my riding virtually stopped as well. So how is this different from weight training and swimming and running, other forms of exercise which I started and abandoned? As I have confessed on this blog more than once, in many ways, it wasn't. The biggest way it
was different is that I eventually restarted cycling on a regular basis and have continued doing so for ten years and counting. Another way it is different is that
virtually stopped and
stopped are not quite the same thing. During those 16 months, I rode five rides, ranging from 20 to 35 miles in length. In retrospect, I am amazed I could do that. My first five mile ride in August of 2008 left me exhausted. Within a month or two I was easily completing 20, 30 and 40 mile rides, which is the expected result of training, but what was unexpected, at least to me, was that the ability to do those longer rides didn't go away even after six months off the bike. I have no explanation for that.
A final reason that cycling was different from my other attempts at exercising is that although Agi and I stopped
riding, we never stopped
talking about riding. One of the reasons I had stopped riding was that at some point I had ridden over a pothole which damaged the rear rim on my Bianchi making it unrideable. I was both discouraged by the amount of maintenance my Bianchi required and unable to decide what I wanted to do about it: should I try to keep it in its historically pristine but fragile condition or should I make it less authentic but more practical by replacing the sew-up rims with clinchers, for example [2]? Agi was also unhappy with her old Gitane, a relatively low end bike to begin with, so our conversations began to turn towards getting new, matching bikes. As I began to research what we should buy,
I was overwhelmed by the extent to which bicycles had changed since 1973, the last time we had purchased a bike [3]. I finally found two bikes that looked vaguely familiar to me, the Bianchi Volpe and the Surly Crosscheck. We were unable to find a Volpe in my wife's size (they exist, just not in the bike shops of Houston) so we purchased a matched pair of Surlys, and the rest is history.
We got our new Surlys in April of 2010 and went out for a ride the day we brought them home. In May, Agi had her last cycle of chemotherapy; her cancer treatment was over. In June, we were both in San Diego for business and took the opportunity to rent bikes and ride out to a scenic lighthouse. By July we were ready for a
week long cycling vacation in Maine with our two boys. In September, we decided to start checking out some of the local cycling resources, and went on a short, easy ride offered by the Houston Bicycle Club. In November, we picked up a book on the best rides in and around Houston and started trying some of them. Most weekends we would manage to take a local ride or two together. From the day we came home with our Surlys to the end of 2010 was 35 weeks. For 28 of those weeks I managed to reach the minimal medical recommendation of 150 minutes of cycling and for 14 of those weeks I exceeded the optimal 300 minutes [4]. One more important thing happened in 2010. Agi believed that the only way to get the best food was by shopping for different items at different stores. Her favorite store for produce was a farmers market-like Houston institution known as Canino's which was ten miles from where we lived. In October of 2010 we did
our first Canino's shopping trip by bike, officially making us utility cyclists.
In 2011 Agi and I continued with our weekend fun rides and continued bicycling to Canino's to shop for produce. Baylor College of Medicine where I worked was a big supporter of The Tour de Pink, a charity ride which raised money for breast cancer patients.
In September of 2011, Agi and I rode the Tour de Pink for the first time, a ride that would become an annual event for us. In June, our younger son Matthew graduated from the University of Chicago. Because he had so much stuff to bring home and because Agi and I loved long road trips together, we drove from Houston to Chicago, attended the graduation, stuffed our 2006 Honda CR/V (which I am still driving) full of Matthew's stuff and drove him back to Houston.Two weeks later, we gave him our other car, a 2005 Toyota Corolla (which he is still driving) as a graduation present, and I drove it with him to California so he could start his new job in Silicon Valley. Our plan was to replace the car we had given Matthew with a new one. However, we soon found we could get by fairly well with one car. Still, it was a little inconvenient, especially if we forgot to plan ahead, so in March of 2012,
Agi started commuting to work by bicycle. Once she started, she loved it! It was actually faster than driving and had the advantage of providing her with regular exercise. Between that and the shopping trips to Canino's our utility cycling cred was growing.
Once we were in California, Matthew and I took some time to visit friends and family, including Paul, my friend from High School who started this whole thing, and my parents. Although it was lovely for Matthew and I to see Mom and Dad, it was also a shock. We knew Mom had been having some problems with her health but she was much worse than we expected. She wasn't thinking clearly, she kept losing weight, and none of her doctors seemed to know what was wrong with her. At the end of July we all came back for Dad's 90th birthday party. Tragically, Mom could not be there because she was in the hospital. She remained in the hospital through most of August. I flew to California when she was released to help her move from the hospital back home and to get her and my Dad settled. It was clear to both me and my sister (who lived near them) that Dad could not manage this on his own, especially once Mom was finally diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and put into home hospice care, so we agreed to take turns living with them. From then until Mom's death in February of 2012 I spent about half my time in California caring for Mom and Dad and half back home in Texas. Obviously, this impacted my cycling dramatically. In December my wife and kids bought me a California bike, a
2007 Bianchi Volpe so that I could squeeze in the occasional ride while I was caring for Mom and Dad. That Volpe is currently the favorite of all my bikes. At the end of February 2012, Mom died.
In 2011 I retired [5]. (It was only because I retired I was able to spend so much time with Mom and Dad.) My first official day of retirement was September 1, but I had so many accumulated vacation days that my last day at work was in July, and thereafter, I cycled all week long. Even before I retired I rode more often than Agi did, but once I was free to ride during the week, my cycling career bifurcated, weekend bicycling with Agi, weekday cycling on my own. Being on my own, I started asking myself, "What now?" After browsing the Internet to find out what was going on in cycling in this Brave New World, I discovered Randonneuring [1] and for three to four years that became my obsession. In August, I decided to prepare for a 200K (124 mile) brevet. That preparation was interrupted by Mom's illness, but before it was I was able to ride enough to realize that I didn't know what I was doing. I was increasing the length of my training rides too quickly and finding I could not complete them.
Sadly, as soon as Mom died, Dad started to decline. Now I was flying out to California to care for him. At first, the trips were not nearly as frequent or long as they had been for Mom so I was able to prepare for and successfully complete a
200K Brevet in May of 2012. While I had been caring for Mom, Agi had been searching for a training book for me. This time, I followed a training plan from
the book she found and that allowed me to complete my first brevet. In May of 2012 I
posted on this blog for the first time, two weeks to the day after that brevet. That timing was no coincidence. The excitement I felt at having become a randonneur made me want to blog about it, and as a result, the meager two brevets I completed resulted in a disproportionate amount of discussion of randonneuring on this blog. Randonneuring was one part of my cycling I
didn't share with Agi which accounts for her getting relatively little attention. In reality, the role Agi played in my cycling was vastly more important than that played by randonneuring.
What I didn't learn from that book, either because it was not explained well or because I did not read it carefully, is what to do after the brevet. Believe it or not,
after resting a week (good) I assumed that I should just start doing the longest training ride I had worked up to, 90 miles, as my weekly long ride (bad). That lasted two weeks before becoming unsustainable. I then assumed I should just start over from the beginning, and so did that in an attempt to prepare for a second 200K brevet in November. Following that plan, I was
able to ramp up to 80 miles, but was unable to complete a 90 mile ride the week after so had to abandon that brevet attempt. In an effort to figure out what went wrong, I started reading other training books, and for some reason became enamored with Greg Maffetone's "
The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing." I purchased a heart rate monitor and started doing a training ride that was based on
my interpretation of that book, a ride that I called a MAF test.
MAF tests continued to be a major component of my training
until I moved to California five years later. One thing that made the MAF tests work so well for me was a unique Houston resource, the
Rice University Bike Track. That track was located only a few miles from my home and was on Agi's commute to work so that I could keep her company on her ride to work and then do my workout on the track. Physically, the track was not much, it was just some painted lines in one of the Rice University parking lots. What made it special is that the parking lot was unused most of the time (it was used during football games) and so the track was blocked off from cars, making it about the safest place imaginable to ride. It was a third of a mile around, there was no banking on the turns, but for me, that was not a limitation, I could ride it as fast my legs and lungs would allow. My version of the MAF test required me to ride for 45 minutes, maintaining my heart rate between 130 and 140 beats per minute. If I tried to do that in traffic, the distraction of watching my bike computer would have almost certainly caused me to have an accident. On the track, doing so was completely safe. So, the availability of the Rice Bike Track made MAF tests possible. That is why when I moved to California, I could not continue riding MAF tests. The Rice Track was also a great place for intervals and time trials.
Meanwhile, Agi and I had either settled into a pattern or fallen into a rut, depending on how you want to look at it. She was biking to work. We were biking to Canino's for produce. Most weekends, we would go on one or two rides together, but always took the same three or four routes. Most of my weekday cycling was around and around on the Rice Track, a mixture of MAF tests, intervals, time trials, or social rides when I happened to bump into one of my Rice Track buddies. I hadn't yet given up on riding brevets, but in 2014 my local randonneuring club didn't offer a 200K in May so I decided to wait until the November 200K, or that was my plan. Unfortunately, Dad's health continued to deteriorate, and so my efforts to prepare for that brevet were interrupted by trips to California. I worked around those and felt like I was on track to complete that brevet when a
medical emergency had me in California caring for Dad instead, so no brevet in 2014. Dad's illness continued to progress and
he died in July of 2015.
Agi was finding my absence during all those trips to California emotionally difficult so I looked for ways to spend more time with her when I was in Texas. We rode the
Bluebonnet Express, another charity ride, in February of 2015 and we did
a second, longer ride with the Houston Bike Club in March. As Agi and I rode through the Hill Country of Texas together, having been dropped by the other Houston Bike Club riders, Agi turned to me and asked for a favor: "Could you quit riding brevets and instead focus on rides we can do together?" That was the end of my career as a randonneur. A month later her cancer came back. Recurrent ovarian cancer is not curable but it is treatable, so we hoped for several more years together. We were given two. Chemotherapy is never easy, but if you looked at our cycling schedule or at Agi's work schedule, you would never have guessed anything unusual was going on, at least at first.
We rode the Tour de Pink that September, but it was for the last time. By the summer of 2016 she was feeling bad enough that it was difficult for her to throw her leg over her road bike with its traditional diamond frame so we bought her
an urban commuter with a step through frame to allow her to continue biking to work. November 30, 2016, she commuted to work, and that was to be the last bike ride of her life. By December, we started what became a discouraging series of emergency hospital visits. There were still some good times ahead, but by May she was transferred to home hospice care and on June 10, 2017, she died. It goes without saying that Agi's illness impacted my cycling, but I rode when I could, and ten days after her death I reached 30,000 miles of riding since my restart in 2008. Three quarters of this story is now over.
So how did all these ups and downs affect my cycling schedule in terms of health and fitness?
RUSA, the governing organization for randonneuring in the United States, suggests that randonneurs should average at least 5,000 miles a year of cycling. I reached a peak of 5,571 miles during the year between July 2012 to July 2013, but by February of 2014 my average had fallen below that magic 5,000 never to return. I'm not completely sure why that that was, perhaps it was all the MAF tests which are relatively short rides, but if I had been able to attempt a brevet in November of 2014, I would have been considered underprepared. The medical community has a lower bar. They divide exercise intensity into three levels, light, moderate, and vigorous. Bicycling is considered either moderate or vigorous depending on how you ride. To be conservative, I have always counted cycling as moderate exercise. The Medical community wants me to engage in a minimum of 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, and says that ideally I should up that to 300 minutes. Most weeks I managed to easily exceed that 300 minute recommendation. Because of week to week variation, I have started tracking a running average of minutes per week over the last year. That weekly average peaked at 494 in July of 2013 and stayed above 400 until May of 2015. In February of 2017, during some of the worst of Agi's illness, my average weekly minutes finally fell below the magic number of 300.
Losing Agi is the hardest thing I have ever experienced. I couldn't imagine how I could recover from that until I finally accepted that I couldn't, the old me was gone forever, my only recourse was to create a new me. After the burying and mourning and selling of the house and Hurricane Harvey and getting rid of all the stuff that I wasn't taking to California and arranging to have the rest moved, I hopped into my trusty CR/V and started the long road trip from Houston, Texas to San Carlos, California. The drive was not nearly as much fun without Agi by my side. As a result of all these disruptions, there were six weeks where I did no significant riding and my yearly averages continued to fall. But soon, I had started
defining some new go-to rides in my new home state of California and resumed a regular schedule. A few weeks after moving into my new home in San Carlos I reached a low of 1967 miles a year and 180 minutes a week, then slowly, those averages started creeping back up.
As of today, I have ridden 40,336 miles total, 9,776 which have been ridden since I arrived in California, so California now represents a significant chunk of my second cycling career. I seem to have reached a steady state where I am averaging between 300 and 350 minutes a week of riding and 3,000 to 3,500 miles a year. Back in September of 2016, Agi and I attended the
50th reunion of my High School bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen. One of the other attendees was Roger, who showed up with this his gorgeous 1970s Singer touring bike. As I was admiring it, he urged me to bring my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima to the next running of Eroica California, a combination group ride and bike show centered around vintage bikes. Eroica California is held in April, and given Agi's advancing illness, attending in 2017 was out of the question. After I moved to California, I planned attending in 2018 but developed pneumonia and was unable to make it. Roger was disappointed by my absence so suggested that in May, I drive the seven hours up to his place (California is a big state) and ride with him in
The Art of Survival, a metric century (100 kilometer/62 mile) group bike ride, which I did. This gave me the fun challenge my California cycling had been looking for, or rather, two challenges. The first was demonstrably achievable, to ride a metric century. I had just done one, would I do another? It was now my turn to suggest a ride so I started looking for one and came across just the ticket, the
Golden Hills metric century. It's biggest attraction for Roger and me was that it was held on the roads we used to ride together back in the days of The Modesto Roadmen.
The second challenge Roger set for me was more aspirational, one that I have only achieved in the most minimal way possible,
a metric century a month. The closest I have come to that goal is
back to back metric centuries in October and November of 2019, but I get ahead of myself.
In April of 2019, I and my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima finally made it to Eroica. The following month I once again rode the
Art of Survival with Roger, I rode
a short version The Death Ride with my son Michael, and
repeated Golden Hills as well. The new me in my new life in California is not only meeting his medically mandated riding goals, he is finding ways to have fun as well. My plan for 2020 was to do the same, and if possible, more. My reality was
the COVID-19 pandemic. All group rides were cancelled in 2020. Will COVID-19 ever be controlled well enough that we can go back to the way things were or are group rides, at least for the elderly like me, a thing of the past?
So what does the future hold? I confess, 40,000 is pretty lame as round numbers go, wouldn't it have made more sense to wait until I had ridden 50,000 miles to post this? There were three reasons I didn't wait. First, I didn't want to. Second, my previous summary was at 20,000 miles, so it seemed logical to write another post after another 20,000 miles. Third, at my age, it would be presumptuous to assume I have 10,000 more miles in me. "Don't wait until tomorrow to do what you can do today" is advice that becomes more urgent for me as each year goes by. That third reason is probably the most important. And yet, there is no reason for despair. While it would be presumptuous to assume I will be riding 10,000 more miles, it would be silly to assume that I will not. If I am able to continue riding and if I ride at my current level, I would reach 50,000 miles in September of 2023 at which time I will be 74 years old. At my age, time is most definitely not my friend, but it is not impossible that, even riding against that headwind, I might still be able to get a bit more fit than I am today. Will the Zombie make it to 50,000 miles, and if he does, what cycling adventures will he have enjoyed? Stay tuned to find out.
Footnotes
[1] Randonneuring is a subsport within cycling which consists of a series of endurance challenges. The most common rides are 200, 300, 400, 600, and 1200 kilometers long, which translates to between 124 and 744 miles. These rides must be completed within a specified length of time, 13.5 and 90 hours for the 200 and 1200 kilometer rides respectively, with the others falling in between. These rides are referred to as brevets. RUSA is the governing organization for randonneuring in the United States and you can read all about this sport on their website.
[2] This is a debate I have with myself even today.
[3] We did purchase a 10 speed bike for my older son in 1993, but as luck would have it, we purchased one of the last of the old style bikes and failed to notice how different all the other bikes in the store had become.
[4] Besides cycling, Agi walked regularly and did aerobics and yoga at work. For me, cycling was my only exercise.
[5] Agi never did retire. Her last official day as an employee of the University of Texas (albeit a sick day) was the day she died.
