The Counting Talk Test

Back in November, I reviewed a series of videos from the online cycling magazine GCN. In that review I mentioned that the authors felt that heart rate was not a good way to identify one's Zone 2, but that breathing rate was. The criterion they suggested for the top of Zone 2 was the point where conversation is forced but possible. This metric is used, in various forms, by many coaches and is called the Talk Test. I do not find the criterion used by GCN easy to use because it is vague; what exactly does it mean for conversation to be forced but possible? Recently, I encountered an alternative version of the Talk Test which I found much easier to use, a version called the Counting Talk Test.

The Counting Talk Test (CTT) is a way of quantitating the Talk Test. In the Counting Talk Test, you exhale, take a deep breath, then count "One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand..." until you cannot count one number higher without taking a breath. This measurement is made while resting and then during exercise. The results of the Counting Talk Test is expressed as the percentage of number a patient can reach during exercise relative to what they can reach while resting. The table at the top of the post shows the results of my first attempt to use that test. What I did was get on my trainer, set the gears at 61", ride at 60 rpm for five minutes and then executed the CTT. I then increased the gear to 71" (maintaining my cadence at 60 RPM), rode for five more minutes and then repeated the CTT. I repeated this for  80". 91", and 106". At 106" I was only able to continue for 2 minutes. I then reduced the gear to 71" and measured CTT after 5 then 3 minutes. As I acquired more experience with the CTT, I have gotten better executing it. One consequence of this is that I have decided that my resting CTT is closer to 23 counts rather than the 16 counts measured in that first test, so I now calculate my percentages relative to that constant value of 23.

I encountered the Counting Talk Test in the Journal of Exercise Physiologyonline (JEPonline) Volume 5 Number 1 February 2002. This paper, and in fact every paper I have encountered that investigates the Counting Talk Test, considers it in a medical context rather than a sports context (which is why I used the word patient rather than athlete in the previous paragraph.) The medical community mostly uses a three zone Intensity system, Easy, Moderate and Vigorous, as opposed to the seven Intensity zone (Zones 1 through Zone 7) that the coach I follow, Coach John Hughes, uses. However, over the years I have come to the conclusion that the top of most coaches' Zone 2 and the top of the medical communities' Moderate exercise zone are both equal to each other and equal to the aerobic threshold. Since locating my aerobic threshold is probably the most important use I have for the Talk Test, the difference in training zone systems was not a big limitation. What was a big limitation is that the authors of this paper chose not to distinguish between Moderate and Vigorous exercise but considered the two together (they reported a value for the Counting Talk Test of 55% at the bottom of Moderate Exercise and 30% at the top of Vigorous Exercise.) The value I needed, the boundary between Moderate and Vigorous exercise, was not reported. A search for a scientific study that did report that value lead to Frontiers in Physiology Volume 13 article 832647 2022

The Frontiers in Physiology paper was, in fact, a comparison between the Counting Talk Test and an alternative they developed, the Regulated Monosyllabic Talk Test. I was not persuaded to switch to their Regulated Monosyllabic Talk Test but did find this paper useful because it reported the values for the Counting Talk Test at lower and upper boundaries of the Moderate (63% to 48%) and Vigorous (48% to 32%) exercise zones.

Both of these papers had as their goal the use of some version of the Talk Test to find the boundaries of the Moderate and/or Vigorous Exercise zones. To do that, they had to know where these boundaries are and then measure the value of their Talk Tests at these boundaries. How did they define these boundaries? Unfortunately, they did so using Heart Rate, exactly what GCN (and others) have argued should be avoided. In response to that concern, I compared the CTT to the version of the Talk Test used by GCN and determined that the percentages given in the Frontiers in Physiology appear to be about right, at least for me.

How does the CTT compare to heart rate as a way to measure Intensity? The main thing I use heart rate for is to measure average Intensity of a ride and thus cumulative Load over time and the CTT is impractical for that purpose. The reason I initially pursued it was that it was one more test that I could use to determine if I had correctly located my aerobic threshold. Having done that I now continue to use now and again it because it is free of some of the complexities of heart rate. Heart rate can be higher or lower based on fatigue, stress, caffeine, environmental temperature, etc. Based on my experience so far, CTT seems to be much less sensitive to such considerations. Also, heart rate is a lagging indicator, it takes time for it to increase after Intensity increases. As best I can tell, CTT responds to an increase in Intensity with little or no delay.

Does the aerobic threshold I measure using CTT agree with what I had previously assumed it was? The answer to that question is not so simple, as is illustrated by the following output from the software used by my heart rate monitor:

This ride was on my Trainer and done at a constant effort, 70 RPM in a 71 inch gear. The Counting Talk Test yielded a value of 11 counts which corresponds to 48%, the top of Zone 2. However, my average heart rate over the course of that ride is 123 beats per minute which corresponds to the middle of Zone 2. Is this a disagreement? Perhaps, but note that, although I held my Intensity constant over the 30 minute of the ride, my heart rate was not constant but increased during at least the first half of the ride. If I look at only the second half of the ride, my heart rate, estimated by the white line, is at 132 beats per minute, much closer to the top of Zone 2. I suspect that my heart rate during the first half of the ride is not a good indicator of Intensity because heart rate lags behind Intensity. If this explanation is correct, then the Counting Talk Test agrees with the other approaches I have used to locate my lactate threshold.

In summary, I think the Counting Talk Test is a better way to estimate breathing rate than the approaches suggested by the exercise community to date. To be most useful, the exercise community would have to adopt the CTT (or something similar) and calibrate it against reliable laboratory measures of Intensity like blood glucose or O2/CO2 levels in the breath. This would provide a clear, accurate way for the average athlete to locate their aerobic threshold quickly, easily, and inexpensively. 

Heart Rate and Intensity

If I ride a given route quickly, it will leave me more tired than if I ride it slowly despite the fact that I spend more time riding at the slow speed. That assertion  is widely accepted by the vast majority of exercise scientists, coaches, and athletes. How to quantitate that is more controversial. For some purposes, speed (e.g. miles per hour) is used for such a quantitation. For example, many coaches recommend periodic time trials on a fixed course where the speed at which one can ride that time trial is a measure of Fitness. But because simple speed is affected by so many factors (e.g. hills) it is not usually used as a routine measure of Intensity, the generalized term used to quantitate the impact of different riding speeds. The most common measures used to routinely calculate Intensity are heart rate, power, and relative perceived exertion (RPE.) RPE is the simplest, it is just how hard a ride feels. That is the metric I used in last month's post to determine if I had been riding too much or too hard.

Power is something like a normalized version of speed in that it corrects for factors like hills that affect speed. It is measured using a power meter which is incorporated into the drivetrain of the bicycle. These are widely available if somewhat pricey. Power (like speed) needs to be calibrated for differences in the fitness and ability of different athletes. 150 watts of power might be at the upper end of the amount of Intensity I can manage while being an easy ride for a better cyclist, and the meaning of 150 watts would be different for me at the beginning of the season when I am not very fit versus at my peak fitness after I have trained for an important event. I have never owned a power meter and so I use speed on standard routes as something of a proxy for power.

Two months ago, when I posted about Zone 2 training and how the reporter Manon Lloyd used herself as a guinea pig to investigate Zone 2 training, something I did not mention is that when Lloyd developed a training plan with her coach, he specifically advised her to use both a power meter and a heart rate monitor. Why both? In many ways, power is considered to be the superior metric. It responds instantly to changes in Intensity and is independent of many factors that affect heart rate, things such as stress, caffeine, etc. However, power is rapidly affected by training and that changes are significant. At the beginning of her six weeks of training, if Lloyd rode at the top of Intensity Zone 2, she could generate 140 watts of power. At the end of her six weeks of training, she could generate 160 watts of power at the same level of Intensity. Thus, had she used only power to guide her training, she would have been training at too low an Intensity at the end of her training. Heart rate is also affected by training, but on a much longer time scale. Although not given in the videos, it is likely that Lloyd's Zone 2 heart rate at the beginning and end of her six weeks of training would have been similar or identical. In short, for the purpose of keeping her effort within Intensity Zone 2, power was the better metric over the course of one ride but heart rate was the better metric over the course of six weeks of training.

Although I use RPE as my primary measure of average ride Intensity, I use average heart rate as an important secondary measure. The goal of this post was to determine how reliable average heart rate is and specifically, to compare average heart rate of a ride to the speed of that ride on a standard route. I used two standard routes for that comparison, my Cañada route and my Alpine route. As noted above, the impact of training on ride speed would be expected to confound that comparison. As I train and become more fit, I would expect my speed a given heart rate to increase. To remove that confounding factor, I did my comparison over a period of time during which I felt that my fitness stayed relatively constant. The results for the Cañada route are shown at the top of this post. The results for the Alpine route are shown here:

Encouragingly, the results for the two routes were similar. I will focus here on the results for the Alpine route. This graph shows the results for 19 rides on the Alpine route from June 30, 2024 and October 24, 2024. It begins after I had gotten in shape for metric centuries, a period during which I was attempting to maintain my fitness but not trying to increase it. For each ride, I plotted the average speed of that ride on the vertical axis as a function of the average heart rate for that ride on the horizontal axis. The line is the best fit line through those points. The equation for that line (which can be ignored) is shown at the top of the graph as well as the value for R-squared (R².) R-squared is a measure of how effective heart rate is at predicting ride speed. R-squared varies between 0 and 1, and if both heart rate and ride speed were perfect measures of ride Intensity, R-squared would be 1. The value measured for the Alpine route is approximately 0.7, very similar to that measured on the Cañada route. This is a pretty good correlation between speed and heart rate which means that both of them are pretty good measures of Intensity, but that one or both of them are imperfect measures. Besides Intensity, what might affect ride speed? The two things I can think of are fitness and wind. As noted above, I have done my best to control for fitness and my intuition suggests that wind is not a major factor. Besides Intensity, what might affect heart rate? Unfortunately, many things: caffeine, emotional state, and fatigue* to name but a few. This would suggest that speed is a better indicator of Intensity than is heart rate, so why not just use speed? 

There are two reasons not to use speed instead of heart rate as a measure of Intensity:

1. Speed is only a good indicator for one specific route. It is possible that I might be able to map some kind of equivalence for two commonly ridden routes like the Alpine and Cañada routes, though I worry that even this level of data processing could lead to false conclusions. Perhaps more importantly, many of my rides are ridden over a wide variety of routes, none of which I ride commonly enough to provide the data needed to map speed onto Intensity. That is why many cyclists use power meters.
2. The speed corresponding to a given level of Intensity changes with training. The graph at the top of this post shows data for rides on the Cañada route between June 17 and October 26 of 2024. If I do a similar analysis for rides on the Cañada route between July of 2022 and October of 2024, the R-squared value drops from a respectable 0.70 to a useless 0.36. This is because variations in how much I was training and my resulting fitness varied substantially over that longer time period.

Where does this all leave me? In a pretty good place, I think. It is definitely true that heart rate is an imperfect measure of Intensity for any single ride. During the June through October 2024 time period, four of my rides on the Alpine route resulted in an average heart rate of 126 beats per minute. The speeds of those four rides varied between 10.8 and 11.5 miles per hour. However, the most important use I make of average heart rate applies not to single rides but rather to accumulation of fatigue over time, and for that purpose, these variations tend to cancel each other out so that average heart rate is a perfectly adequate metric. In that context, the R-squared value of 0.7 I determined from the comparison of speed and heart rate gives me confidence that recording my average heart rate is helpful to my training. But how do I use that to estimate accumulated fatigue? I plan to discuss that in a future post.

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* Many coaches advise that when an athlete is fatigued, their heart rate will be lower than usual at a given level of effort. A rationalization sometimes given for that result is that the athlete's heart is "too tired" to beat any faster.

Training for Speed

In a post from last September I noted that my cycling speed had fallen significantly since 2020 and proposed to focus my training on attempting to reverse that. How did that go?

Executive Summary

The training schedule I came up with last September to increase my ride speed was poorly thought out. Even so, I rode my fastest ride since 2022 while learning at the same time that, even if I had executed it better, the approach I was taking to increase my speed was probably the wrong approach for me to have taken at that point in time.

The Long Version

From the beginning of February until my birthday ride at the end of July, I followed two relatively familiar training plans, first a plan to get ready for a Metric Century (a 100 kilometer/62 mile long bike ride) and then a plan to continue riding a Metric Century a Month. Once I completed my Birthday Ride at the end of July, I had no additional long rides to prepare for so needed a new plan. Back in September, I posted that I planned to spend the remainder of 2024 attempting to reverse the decline in my cycling speed that has occurred since 2020. My riding in August was intended to allow me to recover from the riding in February through July with my new training plan beginning in September. What training plan did I propose to use to increase my speed? Actually, what I had was more of an aspiration than a plan. The problem is that although I have a well tested and successful plans for building and maintaining endurance (e.g. getting ready for a Metric Century,) I have never developed a plan for building speed. Further, it is my impression that building speed is much more difficult than building endurance; some even say that it cannot be done. Ignoring that discouraging context, I decided to try three things:

1. Increase the speed with which I rode one of my main go-to routes, the Alpine Ride.
2. Add Zone 6 intervals to my training schedule.
3. To avoid overtraining, eliminate my weekly long rides.

How did I execute that plan and how did it go?

Let me start by explaining what I had in mind when I proposed to increase the speed of my Alpine rides. I divide the speed at which I complete rides like this into two general categories named Zone 2 and Pace. For a Zone 2 ride, I carefully modulate my speed, especially uphill, to keep my heart rate within the Zone 2 range, which for me is between 110 and 135 beats per minute. For a Pace ride, I ride at whatever speed feels right. That can result in a range of heart rates from something indistinguishable from a Zone 2 ride (100% Zone 2) to one almost entirely in Zone 3 (135 to 150 beats per minute) and everything in between. What is the difference between a Pace ride where my heart rate is indistinguishable from a Zone 2 ride and a Zone 2 ride? The main difference is one of intent: if I decide to do a Pace ride and come home, look at my TranyaGo Heart Beat Monitor, and see that the entire ride was in Zone 2, I am surprised. Given that distinction, what I meant when I said that I proposed to increase the speed of my Alpine rides was that I planned to ride these as Pace rides rather than Zone 2 rides. Unfortunately, I had not carefully looked back at what riding I had been doing before and as a result it is unclear that this increase ever happened. I had imaged that between February and July most of my Alpine rides had been Zone 2 and that during my subsequent training to increase my speed, most of my Alpine rides would be Pace. In fact when, at the end of the eight weeks of my speed-increasing training I compared the ratio of Zone 2 and Pace rides during those two time periods, they were essentially the same. This was both because I rode more of my Alpine rides as Pace rides back in the first half of the year than I had remembered and because there were many days in September and October when I was feeling quite tired and on those days, I would ride my Alpine rides as Zone 2 rides. In summary, there is no good reason to think my planned change had any impact. There is one counter-argument. My Pace rides during September and October were faster, on average, than my Pace rides during February through July. Specifically, in October I rode an Alpine Ride at 12.3 miles per hour, faster than any Alpine ride since 2022.

The above describes how I did in executing part 1 of my plan (i.e. not well.) I did better in executing parts 2 and 3. With regards to part 3, I rode no long rides during August, September, or October as per the plan. With regards to part 2, my addition of Zone 6 rides was also successful. Zone 6 rides consist of a 15 minute warmup in Zone 1 followed by one or more Zone 6 intervals one minute in length separated by four minute recovery periods, followed by a 15 minute cool-down in Zone 1. I used the same route to accomplish this as I used in my previous Zone 6 intervals back in 2019.  Back then, I was doing three repeats of the one minute Zone 6 Intervals and found that if I tried to do one of these sets a week, I had a build-up of fatigue, and thus switched to one per month. This time, I decided to work up to the three repeats. I started with one repeat, waited a week, did two repeats, waited two weeks and then did three repeats. My plan was to wait four weeks and then do three repeats again, continuing with monthly sets of three repeats through the end of 2024. What happened is that the week I was scheduled to do my second set is the week I diagnosed myself with overtraining and halted this training plan until I felt more rested.

How did I decide I was suffering from overtraining? Mostly it came from listening to my body. In my training log, I track my subjective feeling of tiredness. Two weeks of that log, from September and October, are shown in the figure at the top of this post. I rate my fatigue on a six level scale; Very Tired, Tired, Somewhat Tired, OK, Good, and Strong. As a subjective scale, it has all the problems associated with subjectivity. Might a level of fatigue I call Somewhat Tired for one ride be the same as what I call OK for another? Absolutely. However, an unremitting list of rides rated as Somewhat Tired, Tired, and Very tired is pretty convincing. What does it look like when I am rested? Less convincing, at least on the surface. The best two week period in 2024 is this:

While it is true that this two week period spans the range from Very Tired to Strong, there is a pattern to that variation that makes sense. During this phase of my training I was working on building endurance with weekly long rides on the Alpine-Cañada route. Thus, these were my hardest rides of the week. The general pattern is that I felt good for these rides but was very tired afterwards and then recovered over the next week. This was exactly as it should have been. The problem with my recent riding (shown at the top of the post) is not the Tired or Very Tired days but the fact that I did not recover from them, that there were no Good or Strong days. That absence of Good or Strong days was the primary reason I felt I was overtraining. A secondary but important reason was that, as I was preparing last month's post, I came across a video by a highly respected coach and exercise scientist that described the symptoms of overtraining, and those symptoms closely matched how I was feeling. 

How did this happen? In retrospect, I think did not rest enough after my long rides before attempting this new training plan. Below is my training log for the last two full weeks of that recovery: 

I could easily make the theme of this post what a poor planner I am, but I don't feel that way. When I write a post like this, I force the messiness of real life into an unrealistic, rigid framework. The reality was that I didn't feel all that bad after my Birthday Ride, and yet I had the wisdom to take a bit of a break anyway. Until I wrote this post, I did not have the idea of looking for a trend in several days of my subjective fatigue rating to evaluate my overall fatigue level. When, on Friday, August 23, I went out for a ride on my Alpine route and ended up with a fairly good time (by 2024 standards) and felt pretty good, I really thought I was ready to start the next phase of my training. Looking back with the clarity of thought given to me by the writing of this post, I think that was too soon and that, going forward, I should look for a sustained pattern of lower subjective fatigue before I resume harder training. How am I doing in that regard? Here is my training log for the last two weeks:

Clearly my fatigue is lower than it had been, but not as good as it was back in April. In addition, there is one additional consideration. I will get to that consideration but would like to begin with a question: "What on earth was I thinking, riding a 'Brisk' ride on November 11th?" Brisk rides are my hardest rides. This brisk ride contained intervals in the highest of the Intensity zones, Zone 7. Why would I do a brisk ride during a period of time when my goal is to reduce fatigue? The reason is that additional consideration: we have now entered the Rainy Season here in California. I hate riding in the rain, and when I thought about it, it seemed unwise for an old man like me with my brittle bones to ride on rain-slick roads. This caused me to once again turn my attention to one of my most frequently-referenced publications, Gillen et al.  That publication argues that 3 x 20 second Zone 7 Intervals provides roughly the same health benefits as 45 minutes of Zone 2 training. By increasing that to 6 intervals, an indoor ride on my trainer would, if Gillen is correct, provide about the same benefits as one of my Go-To rides, the Cañada ride. During a week where rain keeps me indoors, I can substitute what I call 'Gillen Intervals' for an outdoor rides and hopefully maintain fitness. I suspect that rain will be a major determinant of how I ride until sometime around the end of January. If I see a pattern in my Subjective Fatigue over a week or two and if weather allows, I may try a few of my Tamarack Sprints (Zone 6) but I am not going to worry if that doesn't happen. I will do my best to maintain as much fitness as I can given the weather and will refocus come February 2025.

GCN and Zone 2

 

Two posts ago, I talked about my attempts to come up with a training plan to reverse the decrease in cycling speed I have been experiencing. In that post I said, with regards to my plan to cut back on long, slow rides in favor of faster, shorter rides, that I had the following concern: "... my slow training in 2021 was based on some of the most respected and widely accepted training advice in the cycling community, the value of Zone 2 training. Even to myself, increasing my speed seemed more like flailing than an upgrade." To address that concern, I am continuing to read and think about Zone 2 training.

[Brief Tutorial: The Intensity (e.g. how fast it is) of a bicycle ride is is usually described in terms of Training Zones, with Zone 1 being the easiest (slowest) ride and Zone 7 being the hardest (fastest.)]

Global Cycling Network (GCN) is an online cycling magazine which I have come to really like. When I have a question about cycling, they often have an answer that is comprehensive, clear, and plausible. I recently stumbled across a four part series they did on Zone 2 training that I found very helpful.

Part 1 was an interview with Iñigo San Millán, PhD, of University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is an exercise scientist and coach to a number of Tour de France riders, including the current wunderkind of cycling, Tadej Pogačar. I did a bit of research on his credentials and I was impressed. He talked about how the slow twitch muscle fibers which are developed by Zone 2 training are critical for supporting the fast twitch muscle fibers used during high intensity racing because they metabolize the lactate generated by those fast twitch muscle fibers. His bottom line recommendation is the same advice I have been reading from several other sources, that the optimum training schedule consists of 80% Zone 2 training and 20% training at higher intensity targeted to one's goals.

Part 2, which was narrated by GCN reporter Simon Richardson, was about how to identify your Zone 2. According to him,  heart rate and power are not good ways to do this, though they are useful for tracking zones once calibrated. Simon's definition of top of Zone 2, confirmed by Dr. Millán, is the point where fat metabolism plateaus. This is determined by measuring O₂ consumption and CO₂ generation during exercise.

The top of Zone 2 is also where blood lactate goes from flat to increasing. There is second level of lactate that is considered significant which is identified by a further increase in the slope of the lactate vs exercise graph and it is useful to describe these two lactate levels together.  As noted above, the first increase in lactate defines the upper boundary of Zone 2. The further increase in the slope of the line defines the upper boundary of Zone 4. Unfortunately, the terminology used for these two levels of lactate is inconsistent and therefore confusing. Even within this series of four videos, different terminologies are used at different times. Some of the names used for the lactate level at the top of Zone 2 are Lactate Threshold (LT), the first Lactate Threshold (LT1) or the Aerobic Lactate Threshold (AeT.)  Similarly names used for the lactate level at the top of Zone 4 are the Lactate Turn Point (LTP), Lactate Threshold 2 (LT2) or the Anaerobic Lactate Threshold (AnT or simply AT.) 

Both lactate and respiratory gas measurements require a laboratory. In the absence of a laboratory, breathing tests are the best measure according to Richardson. The top of Zone 2 where conversation is forced but possible and where one can breathe entirely through the nose. An alternative is to use Relative Perceived Exertion (RPE.) On the standard 6-20 RPE scale, the top of Zone 2 is 12.

Part 3 was both narrated by and focused on GCN reporter Manon Lloyd. (The picture at the top of the post is of Lloyd.) Lloyd had been an elite cyclist earlier in her life, but, in her words, she was "ten times as unfit" now had she had been back then. The premise of this and the next video is that she is going to use herself as a test case for the benefits of Zone 2 training. Besides the results of the experiment, we also get to see a state of the art version of how such an experiment is done.

Lloyd worked with the Human Performance Laboratory of the University of Bath in order to determine her fitness level at the beginning of the test and to establish her heart rate and power output at Zone 2. To do that, her blood lactate and breath O₂/CO₂ were measured every few minutes while she rode an exercise bike at increasing speeds:

Lloyd then met with her former coach to develop a six week Zone 2 training plan.

Part 4 reported the results of that training plan. The same tests were repeated and the results were compared to the results at the beginning of the test. Lloyd saw a significant improvement not only at the lower intensities around Zone 2 but at the high intensity zones as well:

I will go through these results line by line. LT (W) is how much power Lloyd could generate at her lactate threshold. At the beginning of the experiment, it was 140 watts. Six weeks later it was 160 watts. My estimate is this roughly corresponds to an increase in speed on a flat, windless road from 17 mph to 18 mph. LTP (W) (AP on the graph above) is the same value for the Lactate Turn Point and roughly corresponds to an increase in speed from 18 to 19 mph. It can be hard to accurately identify the points on the graph where these two increases in slope occur, and so sometimes these blood lactate levels are identified as absolute concentrations, e.g. 2 mM and 4 mM. The power levels at these two lactate concentrations is shown on lines 3 and 4.

The remaining four lines refer to VO₂peak. This is the more cautious, scientific version of the more commonly used VO₂max and for the purposes of this post, we can consider them to be the same thing. This is the maximum amount of oxygen an athlete can use and occurs near or at their highest level of exercise. Line 5 gives the ratio between the power Lloyd output at LT (the top of Zone 2) and her maximum power output. Line 6 shows the same thing for her power at LTP. Both of these increased during Lloyd's six weeks of training. The seventh line is the absolute value of VO₂peak itself. This increased by about 7% over the six weeks. The values both before and after training would be considered good but not elite. It might be expected that Lloyd could further increase this value with additional training. Finally, in line 8 we see that the maximum amount of power Lloyd could produce increase by about 12% over the six weeks. 

It is unsurprising that the Power Lloyd could generate at LT increased since that is the intensity at which she trained, but it is perhaps less intuitive that her power at LTP and at maximum power (power at VO₂peak) increased as well since these are levels of Intensity much higher than that at which she had trained. This is consistent with an article I posted about in 2021, a case study of an athlete who was having trouble increasing their VO₂max who, when he switched from the Zone 5 and Zone 6 workouts typically prescribed for increasing VO₂max to a three year program heavy on Zone 2, experienced a dramatic increase in his VO₂max.

Besides this four part series, I found some related articles from GCN, one on Sweet Spot training, one on Training Zone definitions, and one on Overtraining. The video on Sweet Spot training was the least useful, but I was pleased that the narrator, reporter Simon Richardson, suggested the same thing I had, that perhaps Sweet Spot training (training at the top of Zone 3 and the bottom of Zone 4) would be useful to cyclists whose time for training is limited. I noted that Dr. Iñigo San Millán was not featured in this video and suspect he would not have agreed. I found the use of training zones in the four part series to be inconsistent, so when I came across a video just about training zones, I had to watch it. The definition of Zones in this video was almost exactly the same as that used by Coach Hughes, which was comforting. The one difference was that Coach Hughes recommends Zone 6 for increasing VO₂max and GCN recommends Zone 5, claiming that Zone 6 is used to anaerobic capacity. That video credited Andrew Coggan as the developer of this 7-zone system, a fun fact I found of interest. Most significant was a third video which was again hosted by Richardson. This video consisted almost entirely of an interview of Dr. Iñigo San Millán. The topic of this video was overtraining. The symptoms of overtraining described in this video described how I am feeling right now with terrifying precision.

How did this series affect my training? As I note frequently, I try to limit the advice I take to one coach, Coach John Hughes, but Coach Hughes' advice is somewhat inconsistent when it comes to the value of training in Zone 2 and Zone 3. Thus, that balance is something I need to decide for myself. I go back and forth on this, and this series of videos pushed me back towards more Zone 2 training. However, the biggest impact on my training came from one of the three extra videos, the one on overtraining. Not that this video told me anything I hadn't heard before and it is not as if I were not wondering if I was suffering from overtraining even before I watched it, rather, it was more like perfect timing. I was ready to hear this message, especially because it came from a prestigious and credible coach and scientist. I let this message sink in, I watched it a second time, and then I decided to take a week off from training. This is not a violation of my determination to focus on Coach Hughes, Coach Hughes also recommends taking a week off from training at appropriate times. If anything, I had been taking off fewer weeks than Coach Hughes recommends. Thus, this video simply focused my attention on something I should have been doing anyway.

Some final, miscellaneous things I learned from this series of videos:

• Lloyd's coach noted that it is important that Zone 2 training rides be long in order to generate the stimulus needed to increased fitness. I have noted in the past that Polarized Training may be more about the lower end of that polarization (Zone 2) than the higher end. Similarly, I am getting the impression that it is the length of Zone 2 rides that makes them valuable.
• Decoupling is the well known phenomenon where heart rate increases at the end of a long ride with no increase in effort. For Zone 2 training, how do you handle that? GCN says when heart rate trends up, you should slow down to bring your heart rate back down. Coach Hughes disagrees. He says to maintain your speed and ignore your heart rate. I haven't decided what I think about this yet, but it is good hear the other side of the story.
• Manon Lloyd complained (as I have) that it is hard not to drift from Zone 2 up into Zone 3 when climbing hills. In the first place, it is comforting for me to realize I am not the only person struggling with this. In the second place, Lloyd's coach said 30 seconds in Zone 3 does not ruin a Zone 2 ride, so that within reason, hills can be ignored. Elsewhere in the series, however, it is noted that it is important to ride at a steady pace because it takes about 5 minutes to feel the intensity of a pace, so such drifts upwards should be kept short. GNC claims that if you do exceed Zone 2 for too long, it takes about 30 minutes to get back to the physiology of Zone 2 where you can obtain its benefits.

Implicit in this post is that I am reexamining my training schedule yet again. I plan to talk about that in more detail in a post in the near future. Stay tuned.

Update on the Banister Model

I track my training to help me train enough to reach my goals while not training so much as to result in overtraining, long term exhaustion, and failure. Listening to my body is my best defense against that, but I find it useful to compare what my body is telling me to how much riding I have been doing to help me decide what rides to do next. The tricky bit is what "how much riding I have been doing" means. It's easy to track how many minutes I spend riding (Volume) and it seems reasonable that, all things being equal, a two hour ride will make me twice as fit (Fitness) and twice as tired (Fatigue) as a one hour ride but how fast I ride (Intensity) during those minutes also affects my levels of Fitness and Fatigue. In that case, however, the question of "By how much?" is not so easily answered. The units of Fitness and Fatigue are arbitrary, so as long as I track only minutes, I only need to worry about relative values, absolute values don't matter.  But when I add how hard a ride was (how fast, how hilly, etc., known as Intensity) I am forced to ask how much an increase of speed of 1 miles per hour (for example) affects my Fitness and Form compared to the effect of adding 60 minutes to the length of that ride. Additionally, not only do Fitness and Fatigue increase in response to riding but both also decrease over time when I don't ride. Finally, how to Fitness and Fatigue interact? In my opinion, the answers to these questions are not known with certainty but I also feel like I should make my best guess to their answers and do the best that I can.

One tool many cyclists use to help answer these questions is the commercial Training Peaks software package. An alternative I have been playing with is the Banister model. Thus, I was excited to stumble across this blog post:  "Implementing the Banister Impulse-Response Model in GoldenCheetah". (GoldenCheetah is an open source software package for analyzing cycling data.) In addition to the contents of the blog post itself, the author cites a scholarly paper by Dave Clarke and Phil Skiba which contains a tutorial and review of the Banister model. The reasons I was excited was the confidence boost I got from the fact that someone besides me is interested in the Banister model and the hope that I could learn from their experiences. One big thing I learned was that the community of scientists, coaches, and athletes using the Banister model is focused on customizing the parameters of that model to each individual athlete, something I blogged about doing myself, though that is still a work in progress. This is a feature that Training Peaks does not have, so someone like me who is using the Banister model without customization is no worse off than one of the many Training Peaks users. Also, the Clarke and Skiba paper suggests that the model is not very sensitive to small changes in the parameters suggesting that customization might not be so important.

I have been using the Banister model for more than two years now and it certainly has not been perfect at predicting the impact of my training on my cycling ability, but I have the impression that it does give me hints that are helpful in combination with what my body tells me in optimizing my training. I hope to post more about this in the future as I learn more. So why post about it now?

Five months ago, I blogged that coming up with an equation for calculating my ride Load was a work in progress.The Banister model includes a formula for calculating Load. Load is a combination of Volume, the duration of a ride in minutes and Intensity (how "hard" a ride is.) They are linked as follows:

Load = Volume x Intensity. 

One way to measure intensity uses Heart Rate and there are many different formulas of calculating Intensity from Heart Rate.  I have compared several of these formulas and a number of them seemed fine. Given that, I decided to use the method proposed by Banister, thinking there might be some value in using the Intensity calculation and the accumulated Form, Fatigue, and Fitness model from the same author.

One disadvantage of the Banister method for calculating Load is that is more more complicated than it needs to be, in my opinion. That said, this complexity doesn't seem to make its estimates any worse and that once I coded this method into the spreadsheet I use to track my training, it didn't make tracking my training any harder, so this is what I am using for now to convert the heart rate I measure to Intensity. 

In an attempt to make Banister's method easier to understand, I am going to break it up into pieces. The first thing to know is that the Banister method is based on Heart Rate Reserve (HRR), the difference between the lowest heart rate an athlete exhibits, the resting heart rate, and the highest heart rate they can attain:

HRR = Heart Rate Reserve = (Maximum Heart Rate - Resting Heart Rate)

Intensity is related to how much of that reserve an athlete uses during a particular level of exercise, what I call Fractional Heart Rate Reserve (FHR):

FHR =  (Exercising Heart Rate - Resting Heart Rate) / (Maximum Heart Rate - Resting Heart Rate)

Finally, FHR is used to calculate Intensity:

Intensity = FHR x 0.64 x e^{(1.92 x FHR)}

0.64 and 1.92 are constants that Banister provides.

I went back and recalculated all my Intensity measurements since I obtained my TranyaG0 sports watch in 2022 and the results consistent with my subjective impressions. Problem solved!

How much of a difference does it make to my training if I track Load instead of just tracking Minutes like most coaches recommend? Not a lot, but some. The way I measure that difference is the ratio of Load to Minutes. If Load made no difference, that ratio would be 1. Since I resumed tracking my heart rate in July of 2022, that ratio (averaged over a week) has gone from a high of 1.5 to a low of 0.4. The 0.4 and similar low ratios occur during weeks when most or all of my rides are Zone 1 recovery rides on my trainer and thus those low values were expected. Perhaps Load is more useful for the weeks where Load is greater than Minutes. As noted on the graph above, it is fairly common for the Load to be 1.25 times as large as Minutes. I have noted in the past that I should try to ride at least 300 minutes a week but if I routinely ride much more than 400 minutes a week I risk buildup of Fatigue. Consider a week when I am feeling strong where I might ride for 400 minutes. I might feel like that was on the edge but not excessive. However, it would not be uncommon that the same week might have a Load score of 500 (Load/Minutes=1.25) making it something worth noting.

After the Birthday Ride

 

My last post, which was about my 75th Birthday Ride, was one of the posts that was the most fun to write because it was about a high point in my life. However, lurking in the background was a darker theme, one that I have been blogging about more and more: I am getting old, and getting old comes with limitations. Although neither a prediction nor a promise, I doubt I will ever do another birthday ride. One reason is that my 75th Birthday Ride was so special that future Birthday Rides would suffer by comparison. The more important reason is that part of what made my 75th Birthday Ride so special is that it was a challenge, a challenge that was quite difficult for me to meet, and each year that challenge will get greater. Obviously, adding 1 mile to the length of the ride each year is not a big deal (at least for a while) but each year I am also getting a year older and at this point in my life that is significant. What was a fun and healthy challenge in 2024 will quickly turn into an inappropriate risk as the years progress.

Given that, what have I been doing since the birthday ride? Have I been doing any riding at all? Is there any plan to that riding? Yes, I have been riding and yes, there is a plan. For the first four weeks after my birthday ride I was feeling very tired, which is as expected. To recover, I rode three to four moderate length (1½ to 2 hour) rides at low intensity (Zone 2 on a scale of 1 to 7) a week. By the end of those four weeks, I started feeling less tired so started upping the intensity of those rides from pure Zone 2 rides to rides that were about a 50:50 mixture of Zone 2 and Zone 3. Why did I make that change in particular? The answer to the question is the topic of the remainder of this post. As is shown in the graph at the top of this post, my ride speed has been dropping for the past several years and for the remainder of 2024 I am going to focus my training on trying to increase that ride speed.

What does it mean to say that "my ride speed has been dropping"? The usual way this would be determined, the way recommended by most coaches, is by riding periodic time trials, a ride on a fixed course ridden as fast as possible. I don't do that. Another way, which I would argue is every bit as good, is to do that ride not as fast as possible, but at a fixed heart rate. The name for such a ride is a MAF test, and between 2012 and 2017 I rode a total of 478 MAF tests. Once I moved to California, I was unable to ride MAF tests and eventually hit upon the idea of averaging my speed on a set of rides I refer to as the Alpine-Like rides. In theory, this is not nearly as reliable as a time trial or a MAF test, but in practice it turned out to be good enough to be useful, and the message of those 341 rides (displayed in the graph at the top of the post) is that I am getting slower. Since I move to California in 2017, my speed on these rides has gone up and down but overall, has decreased by about 1.6 miles per hour since the move. I have done this estimation in a variety of different ways, sometimes comparing average speed, sometimes comparing maximum speeds, and the overall decrease is always about 1.6 miles per hour.

Why did my speed on Alpine-Like rides decreased by 1.6 miles per hour between 2017 and 2024? There are many possible explanations. The obvious one, foreshadowed at the beginning of this post, is that it is due to the fact that I am getting older. Another explanation might start with the observation that I have not gotten slower at a slow, steady rate, but rather my speed has gone up and down. Most dramatically, my average speed increased by about 0.4 miles per hour between the middle of 2017 and the beginning of 2020, and then decreased by about 2 miles per hour thereafter (again, with ups and downs.) Perhaps I made different training decisions at different times and that it is the training decisions I have made since 2020 that are responsible for my current low speed. There are other explanations, of course, and these explanations are not, in general, mutually exclusive; poor training decisions combined with the effects of aging could have worked together to produce my current sad state. It occurred to me that deliberately focusing my training for the rest of 2024 on attempting to increase my speed on my Alpine-Like rides might have a number of benefits. First, it would give my training a focus, it would make it more fun and interesting. Second, I might learn something. To the extent my slowness is due to age, I should not be able to train my way out of it. To the extent it is due to training, then I should. Finally, if I do succeed in increasing my speed, that should benefit both my health and my ability to do more challenging rides in the future, perhaps even with my faster friends.

How would I change my training to focus it on speed? My guess is that well in excess of 90% the massive amount that is published about bicycling claims to provide answers to that question. This literature, besides being massive, is confusing, complex, and contradictory. At some point I decided to bypass all that by taking the advice of only one coach and and the coach I selected was Coach John Hughes. One of his eBooks that I use a lot is "Intensity Training for Cyclists". Hughes suggests that, to build speed, a rider like me might spend something like 20% of my training time in Zone 1, 40% in Zone 2, 30% in Zone 3, and 10% in Zone 6. 

I confess that Coach Hughes was not my first stop in pursuit of speed. I first came up with a training plan on my own. It was based on my history, my intuition, and listening to my body. One additional explanation for my falling speed, and one with particular relevance to my Alpine-Like rides, is that in 2021 I deliberately slowed my speed on those rides as a response to falling performance. So the first part of my plan was to reverse that decision. It even occurred to me that my recovery might be instantaneous - I might be riding slower just because I decided to ride slower. I quickly found out that was not the case. Even when I tried my best, my speeds on my Alpine-Like rides, both my top speeds and my average speeds, were much lower than back when I first moved to California.

My second thought was that if I maintained my higher speeds on my Alpine-like rides, I could train myself back to where I had been. There were two logical flaws with that line of thinking. The first was that from the day I arrived in California, I was achieving higher speeds on my Alpine-Like rides than I am now despite having arrived with a training history that was extremely weak. I had not trained my way into those higher speeds and so I should not have to train my way back into them. The second logical flaw is that my slow training in 2021 was based on some of the most respected and widely accepted training advice in the cycling community, the value of Zone 2 training. Even to myself, increasing my speed seemed more like flailing than an upgrade.

Besides increasing the speed with which I rode my Alpine-Like rides, the other change I decided to make was to try "sprint workouts" one more time. Specifically, I decided to try adding the Tamarack Sprint back to my schedule. In retrospect, my thinking on these kinds of "brisk" or "high intensity" or "sprint" workouts was extremely naive: simply dropping a ride of random intensity into my schedule was logically questionable.

So did I throw all the above ideas out when it finally occurred to me to look at what Coaches Hughes had to say? No, but I did modify them. Either by chance or because I have internalized the ideas of Coach Hughes, the training ideas I came up with on my own were not all that inconsistent with those of Coach Hughes. The main effect of looking at Coach Hughes' recommendations was to moderate my plans, to make my changes less drastic. 

One of the things I really tried to figure out this time around was the benefits that are supposed to accrue from interval training in different training zones. The Tamarack Sprint is a Zone 6 workout. Hughes is less than helpful in helping me figure out the benefits that come from Zone 6 workouts, he says somewhat cryptically that they improve "VO2 Max", but he does recommend Zone 6 workouts for riders like me, so I will keep the Tamarack Sprints in my current training plan. Besides, these rides give me an opportunity to enjoy my antique 1963 Bianchi Specialissima.

The word "speed" appears in Hughes' Intensity descriptions for two Intensities. He describes the purpose of Zone 5 workouts to "Increase Racing Speed" and the purpose of Zone 3 workouts to "Increase Cruising Speed". I'm not a racer and in any case I find it hard to do controlled Zone 5 workouts but increasing cruising speed seems like exactly what I am looking for. When I read Coach Hughes recommendations slowly and carefully I think there is more subtlety than is suggested by the above. What I think he is saying is that to increase my speed I should first do more riding in Zone 3, and then later in the Sweet Spot (an alternative Zone that is on the border of Zones 3 and 4) and only then start including workouts in Zones 4 and 5. When I say that I am riding my Alpine-Like rides faster, that translates to going from riding them almost 100% of the time in Zone 2 to some mix of Zones 2 and 3, with a little bit of Sweet Spot, Zone 4, and Zone 5 mixed in as a bonus, pretty close to what Coach Hughes recommends.

One surprising recommendation from Coach Hughes is that I should be doing more of the recovery rides on my trainer than I had planned to do. Something I struggle with is perverse incentives driven by my compulsive record keeping. Recently, my body has been quite clear in telling me not to overdo my training. What that meant is that when I choose to ride faster, I have to compensate by riding fewer minutes. However, when I project that the minutes I am going to ride in a given week may not reach the arbitrary minimum I have set for myself of 300 minutes, I am tempted to throw in an extra recovery ride just to get 30 more minutes. That logic is terrible! Every ride should have a purpose and gaming my training statistics is not a purpose. However, Coach Hughes has a recommendation for the percentage of my minutes that should be ridden as recovery rides, and the plan I had come up with on my own was well below his minimum, so I now plan to include more recovery rides in my schedule.

Another change reading Coach Hughes had on my training plans for the remainder of 2024 is to include more total minutes and more Zone 2 time in my schedule than I had planned. As noted above, my body is telling me to not overdue the total amount of my training, so if I am going to take that suggestion, I will probably need to cut back somewhere else. Thus, I am now planning fewer of the Tamarack Sprint intervals and fewer fast Alpine-Like rides that I had originally.

Some of this seems like I am giving up and just going back to what I had been doing before. That is an exaggeration. I think the characterization I made above, that I am moderating my changes, is more accurate. However, there is another point to make. If you look at the ups and the downs of my speed on the Alpine-Like rides, the trend for 2024 is quite encouraging. Thus, all things considered, while I still think it is appropriate to change the focus of my training as I am describing in this post, I now see that as a minor adjustment to a training plan that was already working fairly well rather than a major course correction. How will this work out? Stay tuned to find out.

Birthday Ride

There is a tradition in the cycling community of The Birthday Ride. Classically, the tradition is to ride your age in miles on your birthday, though there are variations. This year I turned 75. To me, this felt like a big deal: three quarters of a century! Short of living to be 100, I don't think I will ever have a more special birthday. Never in my life had I ridden a Birthday Ride but it seemed like if I ever were to do one, this should be the year.

I can't remember when it occurred to me that I should to do a birthday ride this year. I did consider a birthday ride in 2021. Back then, that ride would have been 72 miles long. What inspired this was that I was having a bad year. I had just failed to complete my training plan for the Art of Survival metric century and I thought I might be able to compensate for that failure with a Birthday Ride. Unfortunately, the same problems that kept me from preparing for the 60 mile long Art of Survival kept me from preparing for a 72 mile long Birthday Ride. I did have a plan to attempt a 75th Birthday Ride by last February because I mentioned it in a blog post. So it was probably sometime between May of 2021 and February of 2024 when I decided to attempt a 75 mile long birthday ride this July.

The Plan

I knew that completing 75 miles would be a challenge for me at my age and at my level of fitness so I focused on doing everything I could to make it possible for me to complete the ride. To that end, I decided the ride should be flat. To keep things simple, I decided to make the ride local. When I thought of rides that met those criteria, I decided that a ride along the Bay Trail was most promising. The Bay Trail is not yet complete, the current version consists of a collection of disconnected segments. There are two of these segments I ride regularly which I have named Bay Trail North and Bay Trail South. Back in 2019, I did a solo metric century in order to test my Metric a Month training plan and the route for that consisted of both of those segments as well as the city streets needed to get from one to the other. After a lot of thought, I decided that doing that for my Birthday Ride would make the ride too difficult so eliminated that option. If I were to ride only one of these segments, how would I get enough miles? In 2019, the parts of Bay Trail North and Bay Trail South with which I was familiar were similar in length. Since then, I have extended my knowledge of Bay Trail South, and, in addition to the Bay Trail itself, have explored four other high quality trails that connect with this segment of the Bay Trail: The Permanente Creek Trail, the Stephens Creek Trail, the Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and the Guadalupe River Trail. Thus, I decided to string together a subset of these to construct a 75 mile long ride. The ride I actually did is shown in the figure at the top of the post and is discussed in more detail below.

Historically, I have favored bike rides that start and end at my house. More recently, I have been doing more rides where I put my bike on the back of my car and drive to the start point. I am working on a blog post explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each of these options but briefly, driving to the start of a ride opens up a lot of possibilities, especially now when I live in such a hilly neighborhood. For my birthday ride, I drove to the parking lot for Shoreline Lake Park which became the start and finish for the ride.

The Route

This ride took advantage of some of the wonderful cycling infrastructure provided by various governments in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to The Bay Trail about which I have previously blogged, I considered the four other trails listed above for inclusion into this ride. In the end, of the four other trails I considered, the ride included two: the Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and the Guadalupe River Trail. I had ridden the full length of the Guadalupe River Trail during my metric century three weeks before and based on that experience decided to include only the first 6.7 miles of that trail in my Birthday ride. In earlier rides, I had ridden the first part of the Tomas Aquino Trail but had never ridden its full length, so took the opportunity of my Birthday Ride to do so. In the end, these two trails added 24 miles to the ride

The current version of the San Francisco Bay Trail has a somewhat complicated topography: it has gaps, it has branches, it merges with itself, and it has alternative routes. Sometimes it not obvious if one is on the Bay Trail or not and sometimes what the official map shows does not match what is on the ground. Given all that and knowing this section of the Bay Trail as well as I do, I decided that I would declare that everything that wasn't explicitly on one of the other two trails to be on the Bay Trail. Given that assumption, the Bay Trail accounted for 51 miles of the ride. 

Final statistic: If I leave off all the side trails and loops, a ride on the Bay Trail South segment from Cooley Landing to Alviso and back is 34 miles. A similar ride on the Bay Trail North segment from the Belmont Sport Complex through the Coyote Point Recreation Area and back is 20 miles.

The Training

2024 was something of a comeback year for my cycling. As noted above, 2011 was a bad year for my cycling. At the time, I blamed that bad year on my move from a relatively flat neighborhood to a very hilly one, though over time I have become somewhat skeptical of that idea. 2022 was a good year. In 2023, back problems interfered with my cycling, making that a bad year. On February 1, 2024, my level of fitness had reached to a very low level and it was from that low point that began a training program to prepare myself to ride the 2024 Art of Survival Metric Century at the end of May. By then, I had also decided to attempt a Birthday Ride, but did not have a clear plan for training for it. As I trained for and then completed The Art of Survival, I decided to use the Metric Century a Month training plan I had developed back in 2019 to prepare for my Birthday Ride. This plan was not a perfect fit in that the Birthday Ride was to be 75 miles long, longer than the 62 mile long ride for which the plan was developed, but I decided to ignore that mismatch. One implication of that plan is that I would need to ride an additional Metric Century between Art of Survival and the Birthday ride; the monthly Metric Century is an essential part of this training plan and there was two months between those two rides. I decided to do a solo metric century at the end of June to accomplish that requirement.

The Metric Century a Month Training Plan assumes a metric century ride every four weeks. This is somewhat unrealistic, metric century rides are not distributed that regularly across the calendar, and in response to that, it can be adjusted a bit by adding a week or two by repeating week 2 of the schedule, so I had planned to ride one four week schedule and one five week schedule, giving me some flexibility as to when to do my solo metric century; I could do it June 22 or June 29. As seems to always happen for me, my training schedule got disrupted so I was unable to ride my solo metric century on either of those weekends.  How did that happen?

The first four week block of the Metric a Month schedule went according to plan with the exception of one apparently minor change: the first week of that block, the recovery week, contained a few more miles than it should have. That was the result of me being undisciplined. I was feeling good that week and rode 33 miles on a day I was scheduled to ride 17. In retrospect, that may have been more of a mistake than I realized. But it was at the end of this block that my training plan really fell apart. The reasons for that were threefold:

1. I had a bunch of extra, unexpected babysitting to do. (Babysitting takes precedence over even a 75th birthday ride.)
2. There was a heatwave which made it unwise for a 75 year old to ride on some days.
3. The Art of Survival left me more tired than I expected and it took me longer than I expected to recover from that to a point where I felt I could ride a metric century.

These three things are not mutually exclusive, of course. The extra babysitting could have generated fatigue that contributed to my slow recovery, for example. The other thing that could have contributed to that slow recovery was the extra riding four weeks earlier, mentioned above. The result of all this is that I failed to ride a metric century four weeks after The Art of Survival and then again at five weeks. At that point, I was extremely discouraged, I was 90% convinced that I was not going to be able to do the Birthday Ride. What changed that was that one week later, six weeks after the Art of Survival and three weeks before my 75th birthday, I woke up one morning feeling pretty good. I decided to drive out to Shoreline Lake with no preconceptions to do a little scouting and to see just how good I felt. In the end, I rode 61 miles without undue fatigue. At this point, the Birthday Ride was back on, but how to train with three weeks to go? The following week, I rode the first, easy week of my Metric a Month schedule - which is what I should have ridden after the Art of Survival but didn't. Although I hadn't found the 61 mile ride tiring at the time, I felt quite tired during that week - I was having the same trouble with slow recovery as I had had during the previous five weeks. So instead of moving to a harder schedule for the second week, I rode the easy week of that schedule again. As I listened to my body, I had the feeling I was finally recovering from my solo metric century just in time for my Birthday Ride, suggesting this adjustment was a good one.

How Did It Go?

The day was magnificent both as a bike ride and as a birthday celebration. My son Michael decided to join me on the ride. We began by riding 45 miles southwest from Shoreline Park and back before stopping at the delightful restaurant in the park for lunch. My sister and brother-in-law. my son Matthew and his son Graham (age 2), and Michael's wife Robynn and their two children Julia (age 8) and Elliott (age 6) met us there and we had a delightful lunch, including a slice of birthday cake complete with a 75th birthday decoration provided by my cousin Rebecca. Michael and I then did a 3 mile loop around Shoreline Lake with Julia and Elliott so they could be participants in the ride. They are beginning cyclists and so found that loop just enough of a challenge to be exciting. Then Michael and I rode northeast to just past Cooley Landing and back which brought us to 69.7 miles total. We finished things off with two more laps 

around the 3 mile lake loop to reach our goal of 75 miles.

I felt comfortable and strong during almost all of the ride, it was only at the very end that I began to feel some fatigue. However, by the time I got home and took a shower, I was exhausted, a feeling that lasted through the following day. I am definitely riding a recovery schedule for the week after this ride!

My goal for this ride was that it should feel special. During the weeks before the ride when I was feeling like it might not happen, everyone I talked with urged me to scale back my ambitions rather than abandon the ride entirely. These suggestions ranged from riding 75 kilometers (47 miles) to making the visually minor adjustment of reducing it from 75 miles to 7.5 miles. None of these would have felt special. This 75 mile long ride was the longest ride I have done in over 10 years, the longest I have done since moving to California. That's special! Between the challenge of the ride, the delightful lunch, and the participation of my family, I cannot think of a better way to recognize this very special birthday.