Heart of Glass

[ornoth_cycling]

Last we heard from our hero, he was looking forward to an “almost normal” year. That lasted all of four days.

On January 5th I did a Step Test: the first of three rides that comprise my usual functional threshold power (FTP) testing regime, to determine my baseline fitness level. These are vomit-inducing long-duration maximum intensity efforts. If you’re doing it correctly, you should feel like you’re dying. This one went “well”, producing a respectable FTP of 218 Watts.

Ready to die on that hill

2022 Tour of Watopia

Buddies on the PMC group ride

Fineview overlook

First Team Decaf group ride of 2022

However, that part about dying? That was just a leetle hyperbolic. I finished that workout with two kinds of chest pain: sharp, painful contractions on my left side that went away after 24 hours, and a dull ache in the center of my chest that remained for a few days.

Having experienced heart palpitations around this time last year as well, I was so concerned that I aborted my other two planned FTP tests and backed off my training frequency, duration, and intensity.

In recent weeks I underwent a coronary CT scan which mostly gave my arteries a clean bill of heath. So I’m gradually adding frequency, duration, and intensity back into my regime to see whether my heart explodes or not.

As you might imagine, my health has been by far the biggest item of note so far this year.

Next on the list would be the power meter pedals I picked up, but I already told you about those in this blogpo.

And that’s followed by my training status, or lack thereof. To give you an idea, during this year’s Tour of Watopia I rode 600 km over 9 stages; compare that to 2021, when I rode 1,350 km and completed 42 stages!

I haven’t entered spring at such a low level of fitness since 2018, before I bought my indoor trainer and when I was demoralized after successfully completing Pittsburgh’s Dirty Dozen. You can, of course, see my minimal 2022 training graphically on my Fitness Charts page.

However I still clocked 460 km in January, 520 in February, and 740 in March, and got out on unseasonably warm days to enjoy five 50-70 km outdoor rides

During that time, I attended every one of the Tuesday night virtual group rides on Zwift organized by the Pan-Mass Challenge. The camaraderie of the shared event and cause combines with the small size of the group to provide a close-knit social environment that I really enjoy. But in the back of my mind I quietly hope that the PMC Zwift ride never becomes so big that it loses its personal feel.

Which is exactly what happened to my previous Zwift virtual cycling club, the Herd. You might remember that I drove to Michigan and rode an IRL century with them back in 2019 (blogpo). Unfortunately, what in 2018 used to be an intimate little group of a few dozen riders now numbers sixteen thousand members, and all the people I knew well have moved on. I sadly just don’t feel any connection to the club anymore, and I’ve almost entirely stopped riding with them.

As for this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge main event, I’ve delayed committing to ride until I get more clarity about my health and what I’m physically able to do. Pittsburgh’s Rough Diamond Century – an event I’ve never done – is scheduled on PMC Saturday, so that seems like a viable way to conduct my own remote PMC ride. But I’m still operating in wait-and-see mode.

Another development was my New Years resolution to go 100 percent metric in all aspects of my life. So far that’s been both successful and painless for me (but not my partner). More details on that in a blogpo on my main blog.

With less time on the bike, I have more time on my hands for other things, which included a few updates to the Zenturizer, a tool I wrote in 2020 to find virtual routes on Zwift that match the distance and climbing on any real-world route. Enhancements included moving the data to a database, supporting event-only routes, adding new routes that Zwift has added, and much more intelligent handling of point-to-point routes that aren’t continual loops.

Still, the main storyline is that 2022 has started poorly, thanks to my chest pains. But we’re finally returning to a normal post-Covid calendar of major events, mostly clumped into the traditional high season: June, July, and August. I’m hopeful that by then I’ll be able to ride them without fear.

For now, outdoor riding season has begun, including weekly Team Decaf group rides, which conveniently occupy the same day and time as the (winter-only) PMC Zwift rides. I’ve got a bit of travel to get thru, but then plan to test my health out during the month of May, to see whether I should attempt the long major events in June, July, and August.