Orny's Cycling Journal

It’s been an eventful month since my last update. There are a lot of topics to cover, which means I’ll be only saying a couple sentences about each one. Rapid-fire, go!

After two years of use, at the end of April I brought Pæthos into the shop for a quick tune-up. What a terrible experience! They kept my bike for 15 days… that’s longer than it took me to recover from heart surgery! They never sent the promised estimate, so the $765 fee was a shock; plus they included an extra bicycle chain that I didn’t request. And the tech installed my Di2 rear derailleur cable incorrectly, so the cassette yanked the cable out of the frame. Fortunately I noticed it when I got home and fixed it myself before it caused any serious damage or injury.

Circuit of the Americas

Bicycle House Ride

Friday Truancy Ride

Bloody Knee

The larger problem for me was that I was completely off the bike for those two weeks. My Fitness again plummeted, from 40.6 down to 29.1 (it stood at 56.6 back on March 5th, before my heart surgery). The shop returned my bike only two days before an event I wanted to do. Although my heart was strong enough, after a long layoff post-surgery, followed by an even longer one for the tune-up, my legs just didn’t have the stamina or conditioning for a 100 km event. So I didn’t do the Stampede on the Chisholm Trail ride I’d hoped to try, which was frustrating.

But there was another, less formal ride a week later. The only problem was that suddenly we were in the middle of our first Texas-style heat wave, and… while I might consider 100 km in normal weather, I was in no way prepared to do so at 42°C! So I also bailed on Trek’s Pedal Around Austin ride. Another swing and a miss… but I got some good heat acclimation rides in that week!

Around this time, my partner left on a monthlong trip to the northeast to visit family. That left me with lots of free time, so recently the only limit on my riding has been my ability to recover in between rides!

One highlight was the decidedly low-impact Ride of Silence in honor of cyclists killed or injured on the roadways. I got to ride some new roads, and on my way home I enjoyed my first night ride of the year. I purposely made stops at several scenic locations around town, and finished up just after 10pm.

I’ve done four of my regular Friday Truancy group rides, but even there I had one of those embarrassing low-speed tip-over falls at our cafe stop, which resulted in a scraped knee. And when you’re on blood thinners, such minor mishaps produce an inordinate amount of bleeding, bruising, and tenderness! And if I’m being honest, my inability to even pretend to keep up with this “intermediate” group has been incredibly frustrating.

I have also joined a conveniently-located group ride I discovered, the Saturday morning shop ride out of Bicycle House on Burnet, which I’ve now done twice. They split the sizable group into fast and slow groups, which I found helpful, and about a third of the route is new to me. So that’s promising, and I’ll see if I can get out of the house at 6:30am to make future editions.

And I also managed to make 2025’s final Bike Night ride at the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 racetrack. I usually hit this about twice a year, and it was nice to be back, although that Turn 1 hill always makes this a challenging ride.

That brings us up to present-day. All this riding has brought my CTL back up to 46, with the plan from here featuring more recovery and hopefully some longer rides. There are two main targets…

In two weeks there’s the Fire Ant Tour up in Gatesville, a metric century I’ve done for the past two years. Although I’d aspired to do other events sooner, being ready to complete Fire Ant has been the main goal of my recovery from the medical misadventures of the past eight months. So I’m pretty firmly committed, if the weather cooperates.

I’m also using the Fire Ant Tour to judge my ability to ride another remote “reimagined” Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride this year. I’m still recovering from my stroke and heart surgery, and learning what my new limits are. But hopefully they’ll allow me to do a creditable job of “earning” my sponsors’ donations to support cancer research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, especially now with NIH funding under direct threat from our shortsighted lawmakers.

So stay tuned, because the rubber is about to hit the road…

With Pæthos in the shop for a tune, this seems like a good time for a post-op update.

On March 7, I had a metal mesh plug implanted in my heart in order to close a hole between my two atria: a possible cause for my past and potential future strokes. It’s been seven weeks since the operation, so let’s review how my return to fitness has gone… And, of course, the prognosis going forward.

So grand... and living!

Phase One of my recovery consisted of 10 days completely off the bike. I had incisions into both of my femoral arteries that needed to fully heal before I could do anything as strenuous as walking, climbing stairs, or having a bowel movement, never mind cycling! I had tenderness and a sizable hematoma in my groin, and heart palpitations that mostly dissipated over time. After a few days I started doing short walks around the neighborhood, working up from 1,500 meters to 3 kilometers, but my athletic Fitness (aka CTL, or Chronic Training Load) dropped from a pre-op 56.6 down to 44.6.

During Phase Two, I got back on the indoor bike trainer. The only constraint my cardiologist had given me was to keep my heart rate below 110 BPM, which was the perfect level for me to keep up with one of Zwift’s “robo pace partners” at 1.5 W/kg: a mild but not sedate pace. I Zwifted for 13 of the next 16 days, steadily increasing duration from 15 minutes to 30, 45, 60, and eventually 90 minutes at a time. Being back on the bike felt great, but I wasn’t riding hard enough or long enough to keep my Fitness from continuing to fall to a low of 33.4. The tenderness ended and my hematoma started to fade, but I still had a few palpitations from time to time.

On April 1, 25 days after my surgery, my cardiologist gave me the green light to gradually resume all normal activities, doing whatever felt right for my body. And just in time, because Austin has been having truly glorious spring weather.

That was my signal to begin eagerly-awaited Phase Three: my return to outdoor riding, while gradually increasing both duration and intensity.

Distance and duration came easily. I started with a couple 90-minute rides, and over two weeks moved up to 2-hour 50 kilometer rides, then 3½-hour 80 kms. So long as I stayed below 90% effort, I could ride all day.

Intensity came more slowly. Between my own innate caution and continuing cardiac palpitations, I wasn’t very eager to push my maximum heart rate. So I avoided hills for a couple weeks before gradually testing myself on those inclines, where I reached ≈150 BPM.

Since I got back on the bike, I’ve ridden 29 of the past 39 days, totaling 770 kilometers, or an average of about 20 km per day. To my delight, my partner has already commented on the return of my “distinctive markings”: her terminology for my stark cyclist’s tan lines.

Aside from the joy of being back outdoors on the bike, seeing my Fitness numbers making upward progress has been really encouraging. Long outdoor rides have been vastly more effective than Zwifting in raising my CTL, which has climbed to a recent (but still tepid) 40.6.

But I’m still a ways from where I need to be for major events or even spirited group rides. And I’ll lose a little Fitness this week, while the bike’s in the shop.

However, all that riding has helped me begin to get clarity about what this summer’s riding might look like. My hope all along was that I could do my third 100 KM Fire Ant Tour in mid-June, and that I’d be able to do a creditable (if shortened) ride for my remote Pan-Mass Challenge in August. At this point, those look reasonably likely.

But if I continue to do well, there’s a chance I might be ready earlier, and could ride the Stampede on the Chisholm Trail, another metric century that takes place in two weeks, or two months post-surgery. That would be extra cool because it’s another local event that I’ve never done before.

It’s delightful being back out on the open road again, and looking forward in anticipation of upcoming rides!

Friday I had heart surgery. Even though it was via intravenous catheters and I should fully recover, the recuperation period is still gonna blow a hole in my training and fitness. So this is a good time to get you caught up on what I’ve been up for the past two months, and where things go from here.

So far, 2025 has been a little bit of up-and-down, and a little bit of in-and-out. I took a bit of a break when the calendar flipped, and then it was an odd mix of indoor and outdoor riding, mostly dictated by Austin’s variable winter temps.

Pacing the CEO on a PMC Zwift group ride

Watch on YouTube Video of Austin's Friday Truancy group ride rolling out

Brilliant Texas skies along Walnut Creek trail extension

On the indoor side, I’ve logged about 1,000 km on Zwift, focusing primarily on riding a dozen+ new routes, advancing another four XP levels, and participating in eight delightful PMC group rides, which have just finished up for the season.

But knowing that a surgically-induced enforced break was coming, I did my best to ride outdoors as much as the weather would allow. February in Austin began and ended delightfully, allowing me to rack up over 500 real-world kilometers on a dozen rides, including my first two Friday Truancy group rides since my stroke at the start of October.

My final ride before the operation was last Wednesday’s 80 km trip out the Southern Walnut Creek path to Manor, which was my longest ride – indoor or out – since my stroke. It also marked my max Fitness level for the year (a pretty moderate 56 CTL), having finally recovered all the Fitness I’d lost by resting at the start of January.

So that brings us to the beginning of March, and Friday’s heart surgery. If you want all the details, you can read the accompanying post in my general blog, but here I’ll limit myself to the short- and long-term impacts to my riding.

In the short-term, the surgery is going to require some recuperation time, which means time off the bike. It’s really important that the two incisions into major veins in the hips are allowed to close up and fully heal before attempting any kind of exercise. If things go well, this week I’ll start doing some short walks. A week after that I might introduce some low-intensity work on my partner’s elliptical trainer. Then some easy rides on my indoor trainer. But for the next month I have to always keep my heart rate below an extremely mild 100-110 bpm.

I’ll have some post-op testing and a followup with my cardiologist in about three weeks, at which point I hope to get the green light for a gradual return to actual training. Over the next several weeks of minimal exercise, my Fitness is going to plummet, and April and May will be spent trying to get back to last week’s Fitness level.

And what will the rest of the year look like? It’s hard to say until after that followup appointment. I think I can expect a full return to endurance riding, but when and how long that’ll take is unknown. I’m almost certainly not doing the events I’d hoped to do in April: the American Stroke Association’s CycleNation charity spin-bike ride; and the Red Poppy Ride century. But I might be ready for June’s 100k Fire Ant Tour. We’ll see how it goes.

And what about riding remotely for August’s Pan-Mass Challenge? As I said in December’s annual summary post, that’ll remain a complete unknown until May, so I’ll defer my registration until I have more clarity. Hopefully I’ll be in shape to make it a good couple days of riding, to “properly earn” my sponsors’ donations to DFCI, even if perhaps it might fall short of the traditional 300 kilometers.

But I do expect I’ll be able to return to the endurance riding that I love. It’s just a question of when, and how long it’ll take to train back up to the fitness I need to complete such rides.

But until then I guess I’ll take a few weeks of enforced relaxation!

Every year has its ups and downs, and its major milestones. But every so often something happens that is so significant that you can divide your whole cycling career — perhaps even your entire life – into “before” and “after”.

2024 started quite well; I was riding consistently, tried some new things, made a few events, but missed a few others. In the first nine months of 2024, I knocked out 7,000 kilometers, an average of 25.75 km per day.

Showing off the Austin skyline during my Pan-Mass Challenge ride.

And then there was October 4th: my stroke. Thankfully it was extremely minor, but it negated all my plans and goals as a cyclist in an instant. It reduced everything I’d done before then to history, forcing me to begin again from scratch.

The good news is that I’ve recovered remarkably well. As I mentioned in my first post following my stroke, I’ve prioritized riding the indoor trainer over riding outside. Since I got back on the bike in mid-October, I’ve logged another 2,000 km, or about 25 km per day, a rate which is almost even with my pre-stroke riding.

My plan was to get back out on the road this spring to test my capabilities. But that’s the future; for now, let me look back on the past year and give you an idea how things went both before and after October 4th.

All told, I knocked out a total of 9,250 kilometers, or the distance between London and Tokyo, or from Los Angeles to Rome. That actually surpassed my 2023 total by 1,000 km, and my riding was split 63% outdoor rides and 37% Zwift.

As for whether I met the goals I’d set for myself…

My Original 2024 Goals

Ushered in 2024 with a New Years Day Pan-Mass Challenge group ride on Zwift.

I returned to the Fire Ant Tour metric century for a second year.

Tried the Team Tacodeli group rides, but barely saw anyone but these two…

I was again a regular at the Friday Truancy group rides, tho I struggled to keep up.

Last year at this time, things were still up in the air following our move to Austin, so my 2024 goal-setting exercise was short on specifics. But I did call out three specifics areas of focus.

More 100k and Century Rides

2024 was a little better than 2023 in terms of long rides, but there were also a lot of missed opportunities.

On the plus side… I did complete two centuries: my first Red Poppy Ride, and my solo Pan-Mass Challenge Day 1. As for metric centuries, I rode my second Fire Ant Tour, plus two solo rides out to Manor, one of those comprising my PMC Day 2.

But the list of excuses and missed rides is regrettably long. I didn’t feel ready for the early-season Pedaling the Prairie or the two-day Texas MS 150. I skipped the Tour de Boerne so that I could make a rare kyūdō practice at the outdoor range. I canceled my planned Katy Flatland Century when I learned that the local Trek club was hosting a long tour around Austin, which I still missed because I contracted COVID. And my second Livestrong Challenge eluded me when I had a stroke two weeks before the event.

So I was both happy and a tiny bit disappointed with the first nine months of the year. And after my hospitalization, long rides just weren’t in the cards anymore.

Find My Group Ride Niche

I continued my frustrating quest to find enthusiast-level group rides in Austin.

Continuing last year’s trend, I regularly attended the Friday Truancy rides, making 28 of them before being sidelined by my stroke. However, for the first time in my life I was utterly incapable of keeping up with the group. So, for me, these still wound up being essentially solo rides: group rides in name only.

I did try riding with Team Tacodeli on Monday evenings, which were shorter and at a more moderate pace. I joined them five times in June, but three of those were only attended by two other riders, and once I was the only rider to show up at all! Then they went on summer hiatus, and that was the end of that. To my knowledge they haven’t resumed on any regular basis since.

So despite giving Team Tacodeli a fair shot, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

A Big Pan-Mass Challenge

On a much more positive note: after skipping the event in 2023, I enjoyed a tremendously successful return for an 18th PMC ride. In brief, it was:

• My first PMC ridden remotely in Austin
• My first PMC as a member of Team Kermit
• My first PMC as a sexagenarian
• The ride went really well
• I enjoyed creating an awesome 2024 PMC highlight video
• And I raised $7,300 for cancer research; a stunning 62% increase over my previous ride (2022), bringing my lifetime fundraising total to $130,800

My ride video and all the deets live in my 2024 PMC Ride Report.

So in terms of meeting the goals I’d set for 2024, I’d say I did okay. It certainly could have been better, but I’m still happy with how it went.

Charts

Because I kept riding throughout the winter of 2023-2024, I had virtually no drop-off in my Fitness level, as measured by my Chronic Training Load (CTL) numbers.

Previous years – including my first year in Austin – featured a lot of variability, characterized by peaks in Fitness during the summers, and troughs in the winter. In contrast, my Fitness stayed almost constant throughout 2024. Thus it wound up being my most consistent year on record, as you can see in the following chart.

To quantify how steady it was: in the decade from 2012 to 2023, the standard deviation of my Chronic Training Load averaged 16.7 – and it was never less than 11.7 – but in 2024 it was just 4.9! And it was actually a mere 3.5 before I contracted COVID in July and my stroke in October, which were the only noteworthy hiccups in my training all year.

Another way of looking at it is to compare my Fitness with my long-term average, as you see in the following chart, which zooms in on 2024:

In a February blogpost, I predicted that my my natural response to having rideable weather year-round would produce a much flatter curve than in previous years. I projected that my Fitness would be higher than average during the winter months, but during the extreme heat of summer it would never reach my usual peaks… and might even decline slightly from springtime highs. And that’s exactly what happened in 2024.

Basically, this is what I think it’s gonna look like to be a year-round cyclist in Austin.

The Centuries

Big turnout at the start of the Red Poppy Ride, my first century of the year.

Early morning haul down Lime Creek Road toward Volente on my 2024 Pan-Mass Challenge century.

All I can say is that two is better than one. After one lone imperial century in 2023, I was eagerly planning for Livestrong to bring my 2024 tally to three, but greater concerns intervened. But the two I did complete were:

5/11: Red Poppy Ride

Although marred by a flat tire and criminally bad route markings, this was a delightful return to long-distance riding, and a big relief after the bad experience I had on the 2023 Livestrong Challenge (blogpo). But this ride’s challenges still prompted me to invest in new tire levers and a tire jack.

8/3: Remote PMC Day 1 Century

I’ve already covered this above, but my 110th century and 18th PMC was the biggest high point of my year.

It’s still a little premature to say for sure, but it’s worth mentioning: considering my age and health issues, it’s possible this was the last imperial century that I will ever ride.

Noteworthy Purchases

This year’s spending report falls into two main categories: a ton of mostly minor maintenance stuff, and not one but two automated selfie camera drones.

The first of those drones – the HoverAir X1 – created the entire category of selfie drones, and would have been the best purchase of the year on its own, after giving me the ability to take pretty decent video footage of myself while riding.

But later in the year they released the X1 PRO, which took the groundwork laid by the X1 and improved upon it immensely. I’ll spare you the details, and instead point you to my Gear of the Year blogpost for a full writeup. But in summary, it’s a fantastic piece of equipment that I hope to make even more use of in the upcoming year.

Here’s a two-minute compilation video I made that only uses footage from the original X1. Starting next year perhaps I’ll add a new section to my year-in-review post for an annual cycling highlight video!

Beyond that, my purchases were all pretty regular stuff.

In terms of new kit, I got a new cycling jersey for riding the 2024 Pan-Mass Challenge, and ordered three sets of PMC-branded fingerless gloves. As a team rider, I also purchased a 2024 Team Kermit jersey, and received a couple PMC-branded insulated (non-cycling) water bottles that our team captain had surplused from the ride organizers.

After struggling with hydration on last year’s Livestrong ride, I picked up a bottle of SaltStick electrolyte gelcaps. I’d used them back in Massachusetts in 2010 for cramping, but hadn’t noticed any obvious benefit; however, I was willing to give them another shot in order to help me deal with Texas’ heat. Results continue to be inconclusive.

Routine maintenance included buying inner tubes, CO2 canisters, a new tire, a replacement saddle bag, helmet padding inserts, and a new heart rate monitor. Also had to replace a battery cover on my Garmin power meter pedals, which I’d over-tightened and had to destroy to get into. And I got a new electric shaver (for the legs, of course).

In hopes of alleviating some of my tire-changing worries, I replaced my Park Tool tire levers with ones from Pedro’s, and a funky tire-seating device called the Rehook Tyre Glider; but I actually didn’t get to test either of those, so I can’t say they were of any value. I also tried my hand at patching punctured inner tubes with vulcanizing glue patches, which was an almost universal failure.

So really, aside from the selfie drones, it was a pretty underwhelming year in terms of equipment.

Additional Highlights

Dramatic backdrop on the new Walnut Creek bike path extension to Manor during my PMC Day 2 ride.

A stunning sunset atop Turn 1 at the Circuit of the Americas F1 track.

Unlocked Level 80 on Zwift’s indoor trainer platform.

Proved there was no drop in my FTP after my stroke on Zwift’s new “The Grade” hill climb.

Team Kermit group photo at the finish line of the 2024 Livestrong Challenge.

Obviously, the highest-impact unplanned event of the year was my stroke, and starting my cycling life over from scratch. So far, my recovery seems near complete, even though I’ve kept my focus strictly on the indoor trainer so far. And I also recovered from my first bout of COVID in July.

But before my stroke, there were still some nice surprises. The Southern Walnut Creek trail was extended another nine kilometers to the town of Manor, which could serve as a gateway for rides farther to the northeast of Austin. And I made two trips down to the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 track for Bike Nights, which is the same number of sessions I made in 2023. Sadly, illness forced me to miss their first actual post-sunset “under the lights” night ride.

Life on the indoor trainer was eventful. My Kickr CORE smart trainer got its first firmware updates in 2½ years, adding automatic calibration, which is a nice convenience. I also picked up Zwift Play handlebar-mounted controllers, which provide several convenient functions, including virtual shifting (which I disliked) and in-game steering.

Within Zwift’s virtual world, I began the year at Level 62 and finished at Level 81, although after four poorly-conceived redesigns, they’ve botched the XP system so horribly that levels just don’t mean that much anymore. In addition to an updated heads-up display, Zwift introduced a couple dozen new routes, including two small but noteworthy expansions: The Grade, a hilly section which features a short-form FTP test; and an updated copy of Zwift’s original 8 km Jarvis Island loop. So it took some work for me to reinstate my “Route Hero” status. And after having avoided the initial hoopla, I finally checked out Zwift’s Climb Portal, and had the pleasure of riding up Mt. Fuji while that route was featured back in May. Four years later, I’m still waiting for Zwift to bring it to their permanent Japan-inspired Makuri map.

But I have to call out two of my formerly-favorite vendors, who made stupid, user-hostile decisions that have me seriously reconsidering doing business with them.

Garmin Screws Its Users

I’ve been using Garmin’s portable GPS units to plan routes and record rides since 2000, using the original yellow eTrex, the eTrex Vista, the bike-specific Edge 800 and Edge 820, and about 18 months ago I picked up their newest bike computer, the Edge 840 Solar, which I reviewed here.

For the past two and a half decades, when you connected a Garmin GPS to your computer, it would appear as a disk drive that you could interact with just like any other: copying and moving files on and off the unit as desired. It was incredibly convenient, and one of my top criteria when evaluating bike GPS units.

However, a December update disabled disk access in favor of MTP, simulating an Android device that the user cannot interact with directly.

This is an immense pain in the ass for me. I have automated programs that rely on disk access to automatically save copies of my logs after every activity I complete. Furthermore, I use disk access to backup all my user data, settings, and key system files quarterly. Garmin’s change means there is no way for my programs to read anything on the device, or for me to manually copy files from it.

So far I’ve been able to decline installing the update that does this, but that also means forgoing all future fixes and enhancements. There are shareware programs that give some limited access to MTP volumes, but they’ll never be as scriptable as the simple file system disk interface.

As I said, being able to programmatically read files from the unit is one of my most important criteria when buying a bike GPS. If Garmin is no longer going to support that, it forces this longtime Garmin user to very seriously consider moving to their competitors.

Strava Screws Its Users

Despite being the incumbent athletic social network, Strava has a long history of lack of innovation and user-hostility. But this year they’ve shown a newfound ability to screw their customers.

First, there was their amateurish handling of a substantial price increase, which was never publicly announced and varied pricing dramatically by country.

Next, Strava alienated or outright forbade the API-based applications that most athletes rely on. By prohibiting third-party applications from showing one user’s data to anyone but that user, they immediately destroyed a whole ecosystem of communities that rely on their data, including athlete coaching, athlete leaderboards, and the ability to sync Strava data with other platforms. Strava has stupidly banned the very apps that make it useful to its customers!

Finally, in another completely unannounced change, Strava stepped up its effort to get rid of spammers. But in typical Strava fashion, they completely botched it. Instead of using technology to identify problematic users, they simply decided one day to ban every Strava user from using URLs. Suddenly overnight, and without any notice, any link posted in a user profile, an activity description, or a post simply disappeared, with no error message or notice. Worse yet, this was so poorly coded that even decimal numbers like “30.4 kilometers” were deleted for looking too much like those dreaded URLs!

This is all just so typical Strava, and it absolutely underscores the company’s completely user-hostile orientation. Needless to say, I’m unlikely to renew my paid subscription when it comes up for renewal next spring.

Blogposts

In recent years, I’ve had less to say in blog form, and loaded more of those things into my usual ride reports or my annual year in review. But here’s this year’s inventory:

• 2/11: The Shape of Things to Come (charting changes in my seasonal cycling pattern)
• 5/16: Poppies! (Red Poppy Ride century ride report)
• 5/10: Anty Up (Fire Ant 100k ride report)
• 8/20: 2024 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined (just a pointer to my full PMC ride report page)
• 9/15: Covidiocy (comparing my fitness pre- and post-COVID)
• 11/14: Livestroke Challenge (my cancelled Livestrong Challenge and cycling after my stroke)
• 12/7: Gear of the Year (my new HoverAir X1 selfie drone)
• 12/31: 2024: Second Life (my year in review: you’re reading it!)

Goals for 2025

Ornoth’s 2024 cycling calendar/log

My 2024 Strava Year in Sport summary

For the past few years, this section could have been shortened to just “more of the same”. I wish I could say the same again for 2025, but my life as a cyclist has changed at a fundamental level, forcing a complete reset in my expectations. So we start with my most basic and important goal:

Stroke & Cardiac Recovery

While the symptoms of my stroke have long passed, the followup continues, with several hematology and cardiology visits planned.

I have two more months of relative normailty, but then I will have cardiac surgery to repair a hole between my atria, and will be under doctor’s orders for absolutely zero exercise for all of March and into April.

Once I’m cleared to exercise again, cycling life will start from scratch all over again, while I first test whether I’m okay to ride, then rebuild some fitness, and finally test my endurance and learn what demands my body will still be capable of meeting.

My questions won’t have changed much since I came home from the hospital: Will I be able to participate in group rides? Can I still do a metric century? An imperial? Will I be able to trust my body again? Can I ever return to what used to be “normal”?

My 19th Pan-Mass Challenge?

Sadly, the PMC is once again a big question mark. While I really want to do it, I won’t have any idea what’s physically achievable until May, at earliest.

Even if I were in perfect health, there are still a lot of questions up in the air. Would I try to simulate the full 2-day, 300 km route? Would I still do it in August, or perhaps choose a different time? Would I ride as a member of Team Kermit or return to being a solo rider? And will I have time and energy to fundraise?

Like everything else, I won’t have any way to answer these questions until I get through my upcoming heart surgery.

More, Better Videos!

Whatever riding I do, I hope to capture it with the newer, more capable HoverAir X1 PRO autonomous selfie drone. With video quality, subject tracking, and speed all improved, I’m excited to see what I’ll be able to do with it, and equally excited to share the results with you in this cycling blog and on my Strava feed.

My trusty steed waits, ready for another summer in the Texas sun.

Some Anticipated Purchases

Having spent the past three months on the indoor trainer, I’ve been sitting on a few ideas for next year’s cycling upgrades, including the following:

On the bike: After two years and almost 18,000 kilometers, my bike could probably benefit from its first thorough tune-up. And some new bar tape.

Cycling kit: Although my current ones are only 18 months old, I could probably use a couple new pairs of bibshorts. And my Shimano cycling sandals really need to be replaced.

As for tires: I’m really tired of struggling to get my Conti GP5000 tires mounted on my tubeless-ready rims, so when they wear out, I’m going to replace them with Pirelli P-Zero tires and see how that goes. And I’m perpetually on the fence about whether I should try running lighter and higher-performance latex or TPU inner tubes, instead of the much more convenient and economical default latex. Maybe next year we’ll give those a shot; just don’t expect to ever see me going tubeless!

Conclusion

2024 started well, but ended on a sour note. The high points that I’ll remember include a very successful first solo Austin PMC ride, and the purchase and videos captured with my first autonomous selfie drone.

But by far the most defining moment of the past year was my stroke. It was a miracle that I came away from it without any significant loss of function, but also a very grim reminder that one’s time is limited, and life can disappear in any instant. And my upcoming cardiac work casts an immense shadow onto 2025 and beyond.

It’s hard to get past that realization and return to making plans and setting goals as if nothing had changed.

And at the same time, it underscores how precious every day – and every ride – is, how big a blessing it is simply to be able to get out, travel around under our own power, and experience nature and the world around us.

That’s the attitude I’ll try to bring with me on every precious ride this year as I deal with my surgery, then try to recover enough to resume outdoor riding.

Happy 2025 to everyone I share these roads with!

No shit, there I was… lying in the hospital, being told I’d had a stroke, two weeks before this year’s Livestrong Challenge ride.

That was about six weeks ago. For my initial reactions, read this post and this followup in my general blog.

Here, in this post, I’ll talk specifically about the stroke’s implications for my cycling, as well as how it’s gone on the bike over the past month. Then I’ll circle back to my unexpectedly limited participation in Team Kermit’s Livestrong weekend.

Cycling Post-Stroke

When I came home three days after my stroke, I had the following concerns with respect to my cycling career:

• How much numbness would I have in my left hand, and would there be any loss of control?
• I’d been warned by the doctors to expect my stamina to be reduced. By how much? Would that affect both my strength and endurance?
• How monomanically would I have to monitor my blood sugar and hydration, which are critical for both cyclists and stroke survivors?
• Would I ever regain enough fitness to return to group rides?
• Would I ever be able to get back to doing long rides? Metric centuries? Imperial centuries?

2024 Tour of Watopia

Having received nothing but encouragement from my medical team, my rehab plan was to start riding on the indoor trainer to learn my new limitations and regain confidence in my health before hopefully returning to the road.

So five days after leaving the hospital and eight days after my stroke, I updated my months-idle Zwift setup and did my first indoor trainer ride. It was a slow 45-minute, 20km effort where I gently ramped my heart rate up from 90 to 150 BPM and back. I wasn’t strong, but the ride was successful.

By chance, my resumption of indoor training coincided with the beginning Zwift’s popular six-week Tour of Watopia event, so I made regular use of those rides to rebuild a little lost fitness and a whole lot of lost confidence. Aside from some concerns about cardiac palpitations, it’s been mostly clear sailing since then, with rides up to 54 KM proving eminently feasible.

Despite doing a bunch of indoor riding, it took a while before I felt comfortable cycling alone, outdoor, away from the safety of home. Between that and my focus on Zwift, I’ve only done one short outdoor ride so far, but that went fine. At this point there’s really nothing stopping me from riding outdoors… up to a certain distance and intensity.

So a month later, do I have answers to my questions?

• I’ve had zero numbness or loss of control. All’s well there.
• My endurance actually seems all right. My raw sprint power is off a bit, but that might just be detraining while I was recovering, and I’d rather not push my heart until I’ve talked with my cardiologist.
• I’m making major changes to my diet, but can still be more relaxed about high-glycemic foods on days that I ride. I really do need to master hydration. There’ll be a post on my experience with a nutritionist at some point in the future.
• Even before my stroke, I was already off the back on competitive-paced group rides, so I may have to step away from them, or at least temper my expectations. Hopefully I can find some less pacey rides, although that’s been a challenge in Austin.
• Although I haven’t tested myself, I think I’m still good for a metric century. But imperial centuries were already a big ask for a 60 year old, and they’re only getting harder, especially in the Texas heat! I just don’t know how many centuries I’ve got left in me… if any.

Some of my questions just won’t be answered until next spring, when I’ll have more information and hope to ramp my outdoor training back up again. I still have several upcoming diagnostic tests and followup appointments that could change my plans completely.

As for that event I had planned…

Livestrong Weekend

I registered for October’s 100-mile Livestrong Challenge back in May, not knowing that I’d have a stroke just two weeks before the event. Although I had just started riding my indoor trainer on Zwift, I had not attempted a single outdoor ride before the event. So there was no way I could do the ride.

As usual, my Boston-based PMC and Team Kermit buddies came to town. The Thursday before the event, I drove over to Jewboy Burgers to meet up with Steven, Christophe, and David as they refueled in the middle of their post-arrival shakedown ride.

On Friday I drove in to Mellow Johnny’s bike shop to pick up my ride registration packet, tee shirt, and rider swag. As a member of Team Kermit, I’d been given VIP tag #32, four places down from last year’s #28.

After leaving the shop, I synced up with Paulie and the riders at the start of the regular Friday Truancy group ride. We chatted before they set off, and I learned that local rider Clint is a longtime stroke survivor, which was both a new connection and an encouraging data point at a time when I needed them. After they rolled out to begin their ride, I went home and jumped on Zwift for an hour.

Sunday was Livestrong’s event day. While Team Kermit were out on the course, I started my day with an indoor ride. It was my token “Livestrong Challenge”, although at 32 KM it was the same distance as the event’s shortest route! After a shower and lunch, I drove into town to meet Team Kermit’s full contingent at the finish line. It was a delightful afternoon chatting with familiar PMC buddies as we waited for our two 100-mile riders to reach the finish.

I was, of course, disappointed that I had to cancel doing my own planned 100-mile Livestrong ride – which would have been my 111th imperial century – but this was one of those times when circumstances dictate that you just take the loss gracefully.

Looking Forward

The plan from here is pretty straightforward and definitely gradual.

Despite almost year-round cycling weather here in Austin, I’ll be concentrating mostly on Zwift until spring. First, it’s just safer for me to stay at home, especially as I gradually test myself on increasingly longer “distances”. Plus Zwift’s Tour of Watopia runs through November 19th, and that sweet double XP beckons. And they’ve added a couple dozen new routes for me to knock off. On top of all that, I will be hanging out with my PMC buddies on the weekly Pan-Mass Challenge Zwift group rides, which have also resumed. And I hope Zwift’s usual monthly gran fondo series will run again this winter, as well. So there’s lots of incentives to ride the indoor trainer for a while.

Outdoor rides will be a distant second priority. I’ll need to regain my comfort riding solo, then my confidence in riding longer distances. Whether I return to group rides or longer events won’t be answered until sometime in the spring. But with lingering health questions and cooler weather in the coming months, I’m happy to take my time building back up to that level of fitness. After all, if I were back in Boston – or even Pittsburgh – I wouldn’t be riding outdoors through the winter anyways!

Next spring I’ll have a much better handle on where I’m at both mentally and physically as I recover from an extremely harrowing brush with death. Things seem pretty good at the moment… Though, as I’ve learned, it can all change in any instant.

This is just a placeholder to direct you to my 2024 Pan-Mass Challenge Ride Report, for the full details of this year's remote "Reimagined" PMC ride. As always, my lengthy writeup is supplemented with photos, videos, maps, and GPS logs.

This year, I also created the following 4½-minute summary montage. I hope you enjoy it!

Been a long time, I know. But thus far, my 2024 cycling has been uneventful but steady, as evinced by my Fitness chart, which has hovered almost unchanged since November… albeit at a level I consider reasonably active. Group rides have included ten PMC Zwift rides during the first two months of the year, which then transitioned to a dozen outdoor Friday Truancy rides as the weather improved.

Aside from just riding around, I’ve had to replace a lot of equipment due to wear and tear, including a saddle bag, gloves, three punctured inner tubes, and my heart rate monitor. My most noteworthy new purchase was a HoverAir X1 automated selfie drone, but I’ll discuss that in a separate, future blogpo.

I’d planned to undertake 2024’s first organized cycling event back in February. But as I packed the car the evening before my 2-hour drive to Hempstead, I left the interior cabin light on, and climbed into the car at 5am to discover a dead battery. Needless to say, I wound up aborting my Pedaling the Prairie ride.

With few events that early in the year, it wasn’t until this past weekend that I lined up for my first century of 2024: the Red Poppy Ride in Georgetown, 30 minutes north of Austin.

I approached it with a bit of trepidation. I’ve done no long rides this year, and an imperial century (at 161 KM) would be twice the distance of my longest indoor (82 KM) and outdoor (72 KM) rides thus far. I’ve also only done one century in the past 18 months; that was last September’s Livestrong Challenge, which pushed me beyond my limit and resulted in ignominiously puking my guts out into a trash bin at the finish line. That left me wondering if I am still physically suited to riding 100 miles now that I’m 60 years old.

Ride start: not a small ride!

After the half-hour drive to the start, I picked up my bib number (a grossly inappropriate #357) and joined a large field of several hundred riders, although most were doing shorter routes. Typical of Hill Country mornings, the sky was about 70 percent obscured by thin clouds, and the temperature hovered around 20°. You couldn’t ask for a better forecast for a long ride.

Having suffered three flats in recent months, I imagined that my rear tire wasn’t holding air pressure well and chose ask the mechanical support tent to replace my inner tube at the last minute. That work left me with just enough time to line up at the start with my buddy Jordan and his friends John, John, and Bob.

While swapping my tube, I heard snippets of the organizer’s pre-ride announcements, which mentioned some rough gravel sections of the route, a detour, and route markings. He said something about the 100-mile route coming back the to the start and then going out again on a second route to complete the full distance. I was already confused about the route because the organizer hadn’t provided a downloadable GPS course, while the cue sheet and two maps on the event website all disagreed with one another. And none of them had shown a mid-ride return to the start.

So as we rolled out at 8am, I wasn’t just worried about aging and my fitness, but also my tire, the route and any detours, the gravel sections, and the route arrows.

The first 22 km of the ride included a couple small hills before the course flattened out. More taxing was the 20 km/h headwind, which would persist through the north- and east-ward first third of the ride. We were quickly onto empty country roads through endless farmland and cornfields already showing ears with silks… in mid-May!

Fields and fields and fields and fields and...

I was taking it easy, but keeping up with the pack. My friend Jordan disappeared down the road, but his outgoing buddy Bob and I chatted off and on as the miles ticked away. I zipped past the first two water stops before finally pulling off at rest stop #3 for a 5-minute break. It was 9:20am, and I’d covered 37 km.

Having finished the northeast-bound part of the course, we turned south. The change put the wind behind us, which was a delightful benefit on the endless false flats we covered. At 10:30am I pulled into water stop #4 for another quick refill. With 65 km down, I was on pace to complete my century in 6:10!

This was where things got frustrating. First my GoPro battery died after just 17 still photos. And 30 minutes on I felt the tell-tale squishiness of my rear tire going flat: the very misfortune that I’d hoped to avoid by installing a new inner tube. Ironically, it wasn’t due to a puncture; the leak was at the valve stem, indicating a manufacturing defect in the brand-new tube I’d gotten at the support tent.

Somehow, one of the few support vehicles pulled up almost immediately, followed – equally improbably – by the aforementioned Bob, John, and John trio. After installing my remaining spare tube, it took two of us to manhandle the tire back onto the rim, and we’d lost 20 minutes by the time we set out again. With 85 km still to go, no spare tubes, and gun-shy after my recent spate of flats, I decided it would be safest to continue riding with these guys, who were doing a more relaxed pace than I had been.

Having just had a long break, we skipped nearby stop #5 and rode on to stop #6, where we arrived just after noontime with 99 km on the odo. There was still some high overcast, but much of the fog had burned off, and temperatures had climbed moderately toward 26°.

Along the way, one of the Johns and I discussed the route, because none of the riders or support staff had any idea which of the several conflicting routes was the “real” one. Fortunately, John’s plan and my route gleaned from the cue sheet were in agreement, so we committed to that option, and to hell with the official route, whatever it was.

Texas: not unlike Ohio, Penna, or Mass

On the following segment, we endured about a mile of gravel road (where I fretted about my tire), followed by a gulley where Opossum Creek was just high enough to spill over the roadway, forcing a ginger water crossing. Along the way, Bob and the other John peeled off to complete shorter routes; but the remaining John and I were joined by another century rider named Dodge.

We rolled into rest stop #8 at 1:26pm, having completed 125 km. I was starting to feel the effort in my legs and traps. The whole day my Garmin bike computer had steadily predicted – based on my previous training – that I’d run out of stamina after 115 to 120 km, and it was eerily accurate.

This was actually the same location as stop #1, so we were pretty close to the start. But in order to complete the full century route, we needed another 35 km. This was the dubious part of the route, but the three of us agreed to follow the cue sheet, which did a 28 km loop by doubling back and rejoining the roads we’d already ridden. That included a second passage of the short gravel section and the Opossum Creek crossing, where I dunked my cycling sandal-clad feet in the stream to cool off.

And in no time (about 70 minutes, akshually) we rolled right back into the same rest stop, arriving at 2:50pm, now with just 9 km left to go.

After a minimal rest we knocked out the final segment back to the start/finish, hitting 100 miles (161 km) just before the end, celebrating Dodge’s first-ever 100-mile ride – and my 109th!

Reflections

While I can’t say this ride was spectacularly special, it did provide some memorable elements.

Most importantly, it gave me back my mojo, after such a difficult experience on my last century, eight months ago. It proved that – despite my age – I still have the strength to complete a 100-mile ride, even early in the year and in the absence of adequate training rides.

One of the reasons why it wasn’t a more painful experience is that riding with Bob and John forced me to pace myself. Although I thought I was being conservative at the start, my average power riding solo before I flatted was 152W, while after I flatted and joined them it was 112W.

My only physical complaints were growing pain in my traps toward the end of the ride, and saddle irritation in the days following.

One mistake was that I forgot to take the electrolyte caplets I’d brought along. That wasn’t an issue thanks to the temperate weather, but I don’t want to overlook that in future, more challenging (i.e. hotter) events.

In terms of equipment, the obvious issue was riding on an untested inner tube and worn tire. The entire second half of the ride was tinged with fear that I might have a second flat, but my backup tube performed flawlessly. But I do need to practice re-seating my tire on the rim, and am considering trying out a set of Pirelli P-Zeros over the tight-fitting Conti GP5000s.

And I can’t let it pass that I finished the 7½-hour ride with 56% battery charge left on my Garmin cycling computer, thanks in part to the 45 minutes of charge gained from its built-in solar panel. It’s nice no longer needing to carry a USB power bank and plug it in halfway through a long ride. And the unit’s stamina estimates again proved surprisingly accurate.

But the biggest worry and inconvenience was the organizer’s poor communication of the ride route. The overview map depicting all half-dozen courses was unclear. The 100-mile route map was incorrect, only showing an 86-mile route with no inner loop. The cue sheet included that inner loop, but that contradicted the other two maps. And the verbal announcement at the start said something about returning to the start, which wasn’t on the cue sheet or any map!

Out on the road, the half dozen routes were marked by colored arrows, but no one had labeled which color arrows went with which distance, so when they diverged, riders had to guess which arrow to follow. At every rest stop, riders were asking which route was correct, and the volunteers couldn’t do anything but point at the map. And after all that, the arrows painted on the road veered off and went in yet another direction altogether!

Of course, all this would have been avoided if the organizer did what every other event does: provide GPS route files that can be downloaded to one’s bike computer. I have no idea why the organizer neglected to offer this basic service, especially when their vague maps and cue sheets and arrows all contradicted each another. But setting that frustration aside, in the same way as I did during the ride…

I did enjoy the event. It had been nearly two years since I had a satisfying century ride, and I really needed the confidence boost that this one provided. I’m glad I did it, and glad to have my first century of 2024 under my belt. And I expect to return to the Red Poppy Ride, albeit after taking extra precautions to clarify the intended route.

It was the most of times; it was the least of times. My 2023 cycling year was very noteworthy, but in ways that were mostly peripherally related to riding my bike.

Welcome to the new hometown!

On the downside, I began the year off the bike for two months due to our move from Pittsburgh to Austin and subsequent discovery of a fatal crack in my beloved primary bike of the past ten years. Then I lost another month in September for a warranty replacement of the rear wheel on my new, successor bike. I only completed one century – my fewest since 2007 – and vomited right after finishing it. Throw in a couple frustrating flat tires, the challenge of navigating a new town, and the harsh reality of turning sixty years old. 2023 provided a litany of disappointments, and my Fitness and distance numbers reflected it.

But there were a lot of major high points, too. I got a brand new bike that I love, at a steal of a discount! I replaced my old, frail bike GPS with Garmin’s newest model, which has tons of cool new features and reliable battery life! I enjoyed meeting local cyclists and exploring my new hometown of Austin, and even got to bike on a Formula One race track! At my first Livestrong century, my old grammar school friend Scott came down from New Hampshire; it was also my first event as an official member of Team Kermit, and I got to ride with several old and new Pan-Mass Challenge friends who had flown in from Boston!

From an athletic standpoint, 2023 wasn’t a superlative year, but a decent one. And I’m pleased by all the memorable stuff that did happen.

My Original 2023 Goals

At this time last year, my bike and all my cycling gear was locked away in a moving van in an unknown location somewhere between Pittsburgh and Austin, while Inna and I spent our last couple days in Pennsylvania at her mother’s apartment.

Therefore I had no idea what cycling in Austin would be like, or even what our lives would look like when we got there. So it made no sense setting any specific goals for 2023. The new year was going to be imperfect, but that meant that whatever I did achieve would be gravy.

However, I did list four general themes that I thought would be foremost. They were:

Moving and Orienting in Austin

I knew this year’s biggest change would be finding my niche in a new city, and I did okay, as outlined in my Austin On-Ramp blogpost. However, I still need to put more energy into this, in every category of knowledge. I explored a few group rides, but there are several more that I haven’t. I’m familiar with a few bike shops, but still haven’t found “the one”. I’ve done a couple big event rides, but nowhere near as many as usual. Similar to my move to Pittsburgh in 2015, I’ve leveraged Strava’s Flyby feature and other riders to find some good routes for solo riding, but my options are still extremely limited. So orienting myself and finding my crew is still a work-in-progress.

All smiles on a scorching Friday Truancy group ride

Showing off the new 2023 Æthos

Celebrating another XP-filled Tour of Watopia on Zwift

Another looming concern with the move was coping with the Texas heat, and the summer of 2023 delivered, with no less than 78 days above 37°C (100°F). I continued to ride through it, but limited myself to short rides first thing in the morning… Except for the Friday Truancy group ride, which – despite being the most congenial group ride I found – was often a challenging mid-afternoon scorcher!

I knew I couldn’t commit to riding 10,000 kilometers this year, but thought I might be good for 8,000 KM – the same as last year – which I surpassed. In actuality, I rode at an 11,000 KM per year pace for nine months of the year, but couldn’t ride at all for the other three.

Amusingly, in last year’s writeup I mused that “I might go and buy myself a new steed”. That happened unexpectedly at the start of the year, right after the move, when a local shop discovered a crack in my old bike’s frame. More about that below, where I talk about the year’s purchases.

18th Pan-Mass Challenge and $125,000

I kinda knew that I wouldn’t be able to do a remote PMC ride this year. I had no idea what I could use for a route, what the August heat would be like, whether I’d have the time to do the required fundraising, or if I’d be in physical shape for 300 KM over two days. So I bagged it, and rode a lesser substitute: joining the PMC’s visiting Team Kermit to ride Austin’s Livestrong Challenge in September. Goal deferred; I’ll reconsider this in 2024.

Zwift Level 60

I also didn’t know how much I’d use the smart trainer in Austin, but I did rack up 3,400 indoor KM, which was was more than 2022. Although it can be prohibitively hot or cold to ride in our uninsulated and unheated garage, Zwift incentivized me by creating new roads and moving the Tour of Watopia from March to October. And in December I completed my fifth year on their platform.

I advanced from Level 53 to Level 58 on my slow and painful trudge toward Zwift’s pinnacle: Level 60. Then, with a month left to the year and 85% of the way through Level 58, Zwift moved the goalposts. On one hand, they made it easier to reach Level 60 by reducing the amount of XP needed to level up by about 75 percent. But at the same time, they made it harder to reach the top XP level by tacking on forty new levels, from 61 to 100!

The easier leveling let me zip through Level 59 and reach Level 60 in a matter of days, even finishing the year on Level 62. Although I achieved my goal of reaching Level 60, it’s just not as satisfying because Zwift made the last couple steps much easier to achieve.

Health and Turning 60

On the other hand, no one made the “Turning 60 years old” achievement any easier. I definitely checked that one off, and my flagging on-bike performance showed it, as I discussed in this blogpo.

Fortunately, my time in the saddle wasn’t limited by my health. A heart monitor investigating my cardiac palpitations produced a mostly clear result, with the interesting side-note of registering a sleeping low heart rate as low as 37 BPM! Otherwise there were the usual inconveniences: threw my back out, saddle sores, saddle abrasion, and the joys of colonoscopy prep.

The biggest health question I faced was how to manage heat and hydration in order to avoid problems like I experienced on September’s Livestrong century ride. Before moving to Texas, I could easily do a century without paying much attention to that equation, but now it’s something I really need to solve.

Charts

This year I made my Fitness charts a little wider, and added red vertical lines denoting significant dates. These make it a little easier to see major changes and some context for why they happened.

Let’s begin by comparing 2023 to previous years.

There’s really three things to note here. First, due to the move, I started 2023 at my lowest level of Fitness (as measured by CTL) since January 2017. Second, 2023 continued a clear trend of decreasing Fitness highs from my recent peak in 2021. As any stock analyst will tell you, a sequence of lower highs and lower lows makes for an unhappy trendline.

And finally, my level of Fitness in 2023 was quite similar to 2018, which was my last year without an indoor trainer; a year that was hampered by tons of travel, record-setting rain, plus malaise and fatigue following the intensely challenging Dirty Dozen ride the preceding fall.

That comparison to 2018 is extremely apt. If you count by Fitness or long rides or number of hours on the bike, 2023 was my worst year since 2018.

So let’s take a closer look at how 2023 unfolded in detail:

The year breaks down into five distinct periods: down, up, flat, down, and up; all of it swerving above and below the grey line that represents my average Fitness level throughout the year.

I didn’t ride at all in January, while we were still unpacking from our move. In February, I brought my beloved, ten year old bike to the shop for a major overhaul, only to learn that there was a crack in the frame. I put a few miles on my old folding bike while I waited for Specialized to decide whether I was eligible for their Assisted Replacement Policy, and then procure and assemble my new steed. After more than two months off the bike, my Fitness was at a six-year low, way behind where I’d normally be.

Then the “up” phase. When I finally received my new Specialized Æthos, I rode every day for two months straight, as shown by my steadily increasing Fitness in March and April. When my consecutive rides streak ended on May 1th, I was well ahead of my usual training, and at my peak Fitness for the whole year.

I rode regularly during the summer months from May into September, but coped with the Texas summer by only doing short rides, early in the morning, and focusing on the cheeky goal of being the rider who did the most ascents (within 90 days) of the notorious Ladera Norte climb. With no major events and low riding volume, my Fitness plateaued just below my seasonal average. Summer ended with a secondary Fitness peak in September following the Livestrong Challenge, my only imperial century of the year.

But my planned autumnal riding came to a screeching halt when I discovered that during the Livestrong ride, a rock strike had broken my carbon fiber rear wheel rim. I spent the next month off the bike completely, my Fitness plummeting again while I waited for Specialized to get me a warranty replacement.

Once that was fixed, I was back where I’d been in March: spending most of the fourth quarter recovering the Fitness I’d lost during my hiatus. But similar June’s recovery, I ended the year at a tertiary Fitness peak, well ahead of my wintertime average, and that will carry over into the nascent 2024 season.

In the end, it was a year dominated by stops and starts, but I still accrued a respectable 8,250 KM of riding.

The Centuries

I rode with Team Kermit at the Livestrong Challenge

Ornoth limping across the finish line

Pæthos at autumnal Lake Austin

But it was a terrible year in terms of long rides. Between bike repair woes, lack of fitness, unfamiliarity with the area, and prohibitive Texas heat, I only attempted one imperial century in 2023. That’s the fewest I’ve done in sixteen years, since 2007.

In fact, I only did seven rides over 100 KM (62 miles): four Zwift fondos on the indoor trainer, a ride down to the Veloway and back, the Fire Ant metric, and my one century, which was:

9/10: Livestrong Challenge

While I only did one – and suffered tremendously, vomiting shortly after finishing – at least it was noteworthy. It was:

• My first and only century of 2023
• My first imperial century in 11 months
• My first century in Texas
• My first century on my new bike: Pæthos
• My first century with my new Garmin Edge 840 Solar bike GPS
• My first event as an official member of Team Kermit
• My first Livestrong ride

Noteworthy Purchases

In contrast, 2023 was an incredibly productive year for the “procurement department”. With so many new toys, I’ll try to keep it brief…

Topping the list is my new bike: Pæthos, a Specialized Æthos that Specialized gave me an unexpectedly generous discount on. It’s been a very worthy addition, carrying on the performance endurance lineage that my previously-favored Roubaix model abandoned when it went all comfort/gravel/gimmicky. I’m slowly transitioning my kit to match its understated “Chameleon Oil Tint / Flake Silver” (aka black & white) design. My only complaint was the short-lived carbon wheels, which Spesh replaced after the rear wheel broke on its first century ride. Otherwise it’s been a complete delight. In-depth review here.

With a new bike came a handful of new accessories. Hearing rumors of fragility, I picked up a spare seatpost clamp and derailleur hanger in case of breakage. Frustration with flat tires led me to pick up a bunch of spare inner tubes, a CO2 dispenser, and a new Lezyne mini-pump. The latter frees up the bottle cage mount that my old frame pump occupied, so I have finally added a second bottle cage, which will be handy for long rides in the Texas heat. Also a handful of plastic disc brake spacers.

There’s been lots of regular gear replacement as well, including a new Garmin HRM-Dual heart rate monitor, and two new pairs of Craft bibshorts. The new bike needed to be supplied with 28mm Conti GP5000 tires, and a new set of name tag stickers (this time in white, to match Specialized’s own logo decals).

After the bike, another huge development was upgrading my bike GPS head unit from my decrepit old Garmin Edge 820 to the long-awaited new Edge 840 Solar. It too has been an absolute delight, so it also warranted its own separate in-depth review. Since that writeup, Garmin has added the ability for the head unit to display images and photos in incoming text messages.

In addition to new daily-wear bibshorts, I gained a couple other bits of new kit. A jersey from the Buddhist Bike Pilgrimage: a ride I completed back in 2012. And a 2023 Livestrong Challenge jersey, which I earned for surpassing $500 in fundraising. And my very own 2023 Team Kermit jersey and bibshorts. The team uniform even included my very own Kermit the Frog stuffed doll for mounting on my helmet: a traditional (but decidedly non-aerodynamic) part of the team kit.

My most recent purchase was an Ekrin Bantam cordless massage gun, which has been delightful to use, but its effectiveness and safety are still under evaluation.

And finally, the most notable addition to my indoor pain cave was Zwift’s Play controllers. These mount to your handlebars and offer lots of shortcut buttons for in-game actions. But the most useful function they provide is the ability to steer, allowing you to position your avatar in or out of the draft or take an optimal line through corners.

Big sky fulla giant Ornoths at the Fire Ant Tour

Bike night at the Circuit of the Americas

Red Bud Isle (more green than red, akshually)

Additional Highlights

Naturally, moving to a new city produced a lot of new experiences. I rode a challenging Fire Ant 100k up in Gatesville. I got to ride on Austin’s dedicated cycling circuit, the Veloway. I spent two evenings “zooming” around the Circuit of the Americas: Austin’s Formula One grand prix track. I joined more than a dozen Friday Truancy group rides. And it was great hosting old and new New England friends on Team Kermit rides in the lead-up to the Livestrong Challenge.

Flats – and a non-functioning frame pump – were a problem this year. I had to call a Lyft rideshare to get home after a quadruple snakebite on Blue Bluff, and also walked to The Peddler for repairs after taking a screw on 51st in Mueller. Hence all the new flat-repair equipment mentioned above.

I’m tempted to list out the two dozen Strava “Local Legend” achievements I earned by being the person who rode a segment more than anyone else in a 90-day period, but that’d be a waste. I’ll just mention the two biggies: becoming LCL on Austin’s infamous Ladera Norte climb, and the Friday Truancy ride’s spiker up the Arpdale to Cedarview Kicker.

In terms of Zwift highlights, the indoor training simulator released several enhancements. You can now capture short videos of your ride and share them directly to Strava. They added their new Climbing Portal, the Scotland world, the southern coastal road in Watopia, and introduced the Zwift Play controllers and the Repack Rush steering challenge. As mentioned above, they moved the popular double-XP Tour of Watopia to the fall, and introduced some major (and frankly asinine) changes to the XP system when they unveiled new levels 61 to 100. And there are rumors of more changes in the works.

Blogposts

• 2/10: Clowning Around In Austin (riding the folding bike post-move)
• 3/7: The Pæthos Æxpert (a brand new bike!)
• 5/4: Jalapeno Ketchup (spring catch-up post)
• 5/10: VC Sniper! (name decal vendor recc)
• 6/15: Fire Ant Cookout (first Texas 100k event)
• 7/5: Austin On-Ramp (first impressions of riding in Austin)
• 8/6: Legend on the Ladera (Ladera Norte Local Legend)
• 9/19: The Edge of the Sun (new Garmin Edge 840 Solar GPS review)
• 9/21: It's Not Easy Being Green in the Face (Livestrong Challenge & century ride report)
• 11/4: The Aging Cyclist (cycling as a sixty year old)
• 12/3: ‘Tis the Season (autumnal catch-up post)
• 12/31: 2023: Austin City Limits (my year in review: you’re reading it!)

Goals for 2024

Ornoth’s 2023 cycling calendar/log

My 2023 Strava Year in Sport summary

I knew that 2023 was going to be a chaotic year. Looking forward to 2024, I don’t know if I can plan on it being much better. I’m still learning about Austin and what is gonna work for me here, so most of my goals remain pretty vague.

More 100k and Century Rides

For various reasons, I haven’t done as many event rides as I hoped, so next year I’d like to do more. There’ll probably be another Livestrong ride, and I’m hoping to do the two-day Texas MS Ride in April, and possibly a repeat of the Fire Ant metric. Instead of limiting myself primarily to 100-mile events, as I’ve done previously, I’m thinking of signing up for more 100-kilometer rides, which seem more prevalent and feasible for a sixty year old riding in Texas heat.

Find My Group Ride Niche

I just don’t fit anywhere in Austin’s group ride scene, which is mostly divided between flat-out hammerfests for active racers, and short, plodding social rides for non-athletes. I’m hoping someday I’ll find a ride that splits the difference, much like Pittsburgh’s Team Decaf ride or Boston’s old Quad Cycles rides. There’s got to be more mid-tier endurance and charity riders like me in this area; but where are they?

A Big Pan-Mass Challenge

2024 is kind of a big year for both me and the PMC. It will be the organization’s 45th ride, and they will celebrate surpassing the immense and impressive $1 billion fundraising threshold. For myself, it would be my 18th ride, and bring my own fundraising to over $125,000. And it’d be my first PMC as a sixty year old.

I’m committed to ride, but still stumped by what it will look like. A 300 KM solo ride in August heat doesn’t sound very feasible. I’d consider returning to Boston for the in-person ride, but that’s impossibly expensive, between airfare, hotels, car rental, and transporting my bike. Plus the $6,000+ fundraising minimum is far beyond my current ability, and I’ll have to personally cover any shortfall. I could extend my Livestrong Challenge weekend riding while fundraising for the PMC instead of the Livestrong Foundation… But that’d be in October, rather than on the traditional PMC weekend in August.

There’s just no good option, but the decision needs to be made now, as the traditional PMC route will sell out before the end of January. I wish there was a better choice.

Conclusion

So 2023 was a mixed bag. I turned sixty, said goodbye to my beloved primary bike, was off the bike for three months, skipped the PMC, and only attempted one imperial century. But I also had fun exploring my new town, rode with Team Kermit, got a snazzy new bike, new GPS, a cordless massager, and lots more.

After less than a year, my settling into the Austin scene is far from complete, so that process will be ongoing. I’m looking forward to finding more people, places, and events to enjoy in 2024. Stay tuned to hear how it goes!

I was 35 years old when I started my adult cycling career. In those early years, my rapidly-growing cycling fitness more than compensated for any loss of overall fitness that came as I aged.

As the years passed, my cycling fitness reached a stable plateau, while the effects of aging slowly but consistently gained momentum. But I wasn’t worried; throughout my forties I could easily keep up with riders ten years younger.

But when I turned 50, I noticed it took increasingly more effort to keep up with the kids. And now that I’m 60 years old, I have to admit that I’m simply not keeping up with them anymore, and never will again, no matter how hard I train.

So in case you’re on that same career path, here’s a few observations about my experience as an aging cyclist.

It’s easiest to see in the numbers. It wasn’t as linear as the “220 minus age” formula implies, but my max heart rate has dropped significantly over the past 15 years, from 175+ down to 160. And the inevitable loss of muscle mass has been reflected in my FTP and other measurements of power output like sprinting duration and max power.

The media always invokes the idea that we need more recovery time after hard efforts as we age. For me, that manifests mostly in my ability to do repeated bursts of high-intensity effort within a ride. I don’t feel I need more recovery time between rides; if I need more time for anything after a hard ride, it’s for my motivation to recover! And of course the standard prescription for maintaining fitness as we age is to continue doing severely painful intensity workouts. Ugh!

One generalization I can confirm is that as I’ve aged, my sleep cycle has become shorter and less refreshing. Gotta start embracing the nap, although they’ve always left me feeling nauseous afterward.

Another change is that I’m less willing to tolerate bad weather. I’m good with heat, but I’m kind of done thinking that riding in the cold is any fun. Doubly so for rain, and the annoying cleanup routine that follows a wet ride. Yes, it can be done; no, I don’t think it’s worth it anymore.

But once you’re out on the road on a nice day, what does riding “over the hill” feel like? It feels like having one of those days where you’re not performing at your best… every single day! Whether it’s heavy legs or lack of aerobic fitness, it always feels as if there’s something limiting me. There aren’t many of those strong days when you’re at peak fitness and everything comes effortlessly.

Instead of looking forward to hills as a place to attack your group, you begin to fear them as places where you’ll fall behind the group. And they drop you more frequently on those climbs… and on the flats… and on descents. You still participate in group rides, but you wind up isolated and riding by yourself much of the time.

You get discouraged on group rides, because you’re the last person to each rest stop, which means you always get the least rest before the group sets out again, despite being the person who needs recovery the most. So you give up on the group and spend more time doing solo rides.

That’s what it’s like. I’ve had an undeniable drop-off in physiological performance due to aging. But at the same time, psychologically I’m just less willing to tolerate the suffering inherent in high-intensity, maximal efforts. To keep up with other riders, I have to spend more and more of my time riding at my limit, and it’s harder and harder to marshal the motivation to spend long hours riding at that limit.

While I was slowly getting older, I spent 25 amazing years near the front of the pack. Now that I’m 60 years old, that’s simply no longer a possibility. It’s time to set ego aside and get used to being one of the slower riders that other people have to wait for. It’s either that, or ride solo, which is something I’ve always done quite a lot of.

While I may not be the strongest cyclist in the pack any more, I still have the advantage of being significantly healthier than my sedentary age-group peers. And I still have as much passion for cycling as I’ve ever had. The bottom line is that I need to accept my reduced capabilities, adjust my goals to match them, find groups that will tolerate them, and just ride on.

May the road before you be a long, enjoyable one!

In addition to the HUI-VUI, I’ve discovered another thing that happens every six years: I purchase a new GPS bike computer. In this case, we’re talking the Garmin Edge 840 Solar, which I picked up last month after it came out back in April. A new GPS head unit is a really big deal for someone who spends as much time in the saddle as I do.

Before diving into the new unit, let’s look at how far we’ve come. I first used a GPS to log bike rides waay back in 2000, using Garmin’s original yellow eTrex handheld, but the tech back then was so primitive that it didn’t have maps or routes or points of interest; just a blank monochrome 64 x 128 pixel LCD with a breadcrumb trail of where you had gone, and even that initially suffered from “Selective Availability”: an intentional inaccuracy imposed by the government on civilian GPS signals. Six years later I grabbed an eTrex Vista (my review), which had finally added color and some very rudimentary maps. In 2011 Garmin released the cycling-specific Edge 800, then 2017’s Edge 820 (my review), and this year’s Edge 840.

Along the way, I’ve watched these units evolve into incredibly useful and sophisticated navigational and analytical tools. Garmin updates their cycling products about every three years, so I’ve usually skipped a generation (e.g., the Edge 810 and Edge 830). So when I buy a new unit, there are some substantial improvements and compelling new features to check out.

And by that point, my old unit is usually pretty worn out. That was certainly true of my loyal old Edge 820. To begin with, its touch screen – a novelty at the time – was very sluggish, and the processor took forever to calculate routes or pan and zoom the map display. And the Micro USB connector was outdated technology from the start. After a few years the screen faded significantly, leaving a prominent grid of its LCD guts showing through its faint display. And its battery life – originally billed as lasting 15 hours – had shrunk to about 90 minutes. These were the shortcomings that I expected the new Edge 840 to fix.

With that, let’s look at the new beast. As always, I’ll divide this review into four sections: things I’m neutral about; features I don’t know much about because I didn’t test them; features I’m excited about; and the things that already disappoint me. With an executive summary at the end.

The Neutrals

My main display: speed, distance, with power and heart rate charts

One of the most noticeable changes is a revamped UI. It works fine. Its organization of functions isn’t 100% intuitive. And it’s still based on “activity profiles” rather than gear, which has always seemed a bit clunky to me.

The unit also supports phone-based configuration. I really don’t see a ton of value in that over configuring the unit on a computer or the device itself.

Potentially useful features include alerts for upcoming sharp turns and high-speed roads. But the high-speed road alerts arrive way too late to be actionable (e.g. navigating to avoid them). And the last thing you want when speeding around a sharp turn is having to read and dismiss an alert popping up on your head unit. They’re nice ideas, but not practical (at least not with the current implementation).

An unexpected surprise was that when following a route, the GPS can now have your phone verbally announce navigational cues as you approach them. “In fifty meters turn right on Mesa Drive.” Another cool idea, but they’re just not intelligible when your phone is stuffed into a jersey pocket on your back.

The unit can also walk you through a heart rate variability stress test. This isn’t for general health purposes, but for telling you how well or poorly you have recovered from your previous rides. That’s not something I need to wait around for three minutes for a device to tell me.

The Cycling Ability feature can tell you what your general cycling strengths and weaknesses are, as a very gross training aid. Garmin doesn’t add much value by telling me that I’m an endurance specialist.

Same with their measurement of heat acclimation. A simple percentage is way too simplistic to be of any actionable value.

Another hamstrung feature is showing the battery status for all your sensors (e.g. heart rate monitor, electronic shifters, power meter), where you really need more discrete battery levels than “okay” and “dead”.

There’s also a ton of features that I don’t really care much about, but you might. But to be honest I really don’t have any opinion about things like incident detection, structured training plans, mountain biking metrics, hydration alerts, an integrated bike alarm, lost device finder, etc.

The Unknowns

It might surprise you that I didn’t bother testing the unit’s integration with my indoor trainer. But the only useful function that provides would be the ability to simulate the gradients of riding a known real-world course, which isn’t as engaging as riding in the richer worlds on Zwift.

The Power Guide feature gives you a plan for specific power numbers to match when following a particular route. Just not something I’m likely to want.

Same story with the Event Training Plan feature. I hate structured training and already know how to build and taper for a major event. Not something I need, and not something I’d look to a head unit to provide.

There’s also the new and very promising Group Ride feature, which lets groups of riders share their route, in-ride messages, and live map with everyone’s location. This sounds like a really awesome feature if a critical number of rides and riders adopt it, although it’s limited to Garmin’s most recent units. It’s only in my “Unknowns” section because I haven’t had any opportunity to test it out.

The Positives

My customized boot screen

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

ClimbPro displaying map, elevation profile, current grade and power

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Let’s start with the basics: critical things my Edge 820 did that the 840 still does. I can still download my activity FIT data files to my laptop, as mentioned above. It still communicates with my Di2 electronic shifting and displays what gear combination I’m in. I can still capture screen shots, as you can see at right. I can still set the text that appears on the startup screen. And you can still charge it from a portable USB battery while using it. Good!

Then there’s things that aren’t new, but are features the Edge 840 has improved upon. Starting with the most important improvement: battery duration is now listed at 32 to 60 hours! The touch screen is so much more responsive that it’s actually usable now! Panning and zooming maps is reasonably quick! Calculating and re-calculating routes takes a second or two instead of five to ten minutes! Adding the GNSS GPS system improves GPS accuracy in cities and other challenging areas! And while my old unit would show alerts when calls or text messages came in, the 840 also shows email and all other phone notifications! Very nice!

The passive solar receiver adds around 8 to 10 minutes of extra power per hour in Texas sun, which might not be a huge deal for folks in cloudier locales, and there’s a data page showing the unit’s solar efficiency. Even I debated buying the non-solar model when I learned that the special glass makes the solar screen a little less bright, but it seems fine, and way better than my old, faded Edge 820.

On the topic of charging, we’ve finally made the transition from a MicroUSB to a USB-C charging & data port!

One of the highlights of the new interface is a home screen with “Glances”, little UI widgets that summarize important information and link to the most frequently-used functions. For example, there’s a Weather Glance that shows current conditions and clicks through to a dedicated weather page. And the Navigation Glance will show and give you one-touch access to the route you most recently downloaded onto the unit.

But by far the most massive UI enhancement is the widespread addition of graphical data fields! Heart rate and power are no longer a single number, but also time-series charts that are color-coded for intensity. Solar power, route elevation and gradient, and several other data fields can be shown as color graphs that encapsulate a ton of information in a small screen factor. Very cool!

One special application of charts is the new Climb Pro page. When you begin a climb, a new page pops up to show your current power, how much longer the hill is, its current slope, and a chart that shows where you are on the climb, and color-coded undulations of how steep it gets over its entire duration. It’s a very handy little tool for managing your effort, especially on long or steep ascents.

And if you need to manage your effort over an entire long ride, the Real-Time Stamina page is a great new feature. It uses your history to estimate what percentage of your total endurance you’ve used up – and therefore how much you still have left in the tank – and what that translates to in terms of time or distance until you hit the wall and your performance plummets. This sounds like a gimmicky pseudo-feature, but on my recent 100-mile Livestrong ride, it accurately foretold that I’d run out of juice about 30 km before the finish.

I could have included this in my “enhanced features” above, but it deserves its own paragraph: enhanced text message functionality. On my old Edge 820, when replying to someone’s text message, I could only pick from a pre-set list of 8-10 basic canned responses. Now there’s about three times as many canned responses. And you can customize them in their mobile app. And you can add emoji. And the Holy Grail: you can even compose your own responses on the fly, using the on-device keyboard! Finally Garmin no longer artificially limits me to replying with “Yes”, “No”, or “Almost there”!

The Negatives

The most obvious and glaring negative is that the meager screen resolution (246 x 322 pixels) hasn’t increased. It’s not a huge issue, but a higher resolution display would improve my perception of the unit a great deal.

Garmin advertises a cool feature that will tell you your “fitness age” based on your measured physiology. Why is that a negative? Because you don’t get that piece of data unless you buy both a connected scale and wear a 24-hour fitness watch that’s paired to their central database. Garmin advertising this feature as available on their bike computer is completely misleading.

While I haven’t sussed out exactly which features require it, the bike computer will nag the user to not only install but keep Garmin’s smartphone app open and running in order to take advantage of certain online features (IIRC things like current weather, voice navigation, text messages, and phone notifications).

The only true malfunction I’ve experienced is that a distance alert I set failed to trigger on my recent 100-mile Livestrong ride. Unfortunately, I’ve only done one century ride, so this isn’t something I can test very often!

Finally, the unit often hangs whenever I disconnect it from a cable connection to my laptop. It’s recoverable, and most people probably don’t do this very often, but I download my activity data file after every ride, so it’s a big annoyance for me. Aside from the fact that the unit shouldn’t hang under normal operating conditions to begin with!

The Bottom Line

Six years ago, I was disappointed after buying Garmin’s Edge 820. After defining and owning the GPS bike computer market, they released an underwhelming product that was unimaginative, behind the times, and deeply flawed. As a result, more agile competitors like Wahoo and Hammerhead eagerly and justifiably took major chunks out of Garmin’s once-dominant market share.

Garmin seems to have learned their lesson. The Edge 840 has improved on several old features and introduced a raft of new functions. I’m genuinely excited by the improved UI and graphical data fields, the passive solar charging, ClimbPro, Real-Time Stamina, the enhanced SMS capabilities, and the potential of the Group Ride features. Assuming they figure out the missing distance alert, my only knock on it is the meager screen resolution; but that’s still markedly brighter and more responsive than my old, fading 820’s terrible display.

Am I happy with it? I’m delighted! While it’s not perfect, the Edge 840 is a tremendous improvement over my old 820, with far fewer built-in flaws.