2022: Bye Bye Burghie!

[ornoth_cycling]

2022 began poorly. For the second year in a row, my winter training was interrupted by worrying chest pains, and also a lengthy scouting trip to Austin in April.

However, the majority of 2022 was pretty satisfying. Another year brought another incremental step toward normality following the Covid-19 pandemic. I got to enjoy many of the major events that Covid had interrupted, although I missed some opportunities due to weather and other considerations. As summer turned to fall, I was pretty pleased with how my season had gone.

Ornoth and the Allegheny River, with the downtown Pittsburgh skyline in the background.

The FTP test that set off my January chest pain and interrupted my training.

The first Team Decaf group ride of 2022 at the Point State Park fountain.

Four friends' ride out to Sewickley, with Suraj, Ornoth, Ben, and Oscar.

Ornoth modeling the 2022 PMC Jersey with downtown Pittsburgh as a backdrop.

But the year also ended abruptly. I spent some time off the bike in November, recovering from saddle sores and a tooth extraction, and that was followed by another two-week trip to Austin over Thanksgiving to secure housing. My early winter training was crowded out by the hectic insanity of packing up house in preparation for our move, which is currently in-process. Really… We said goodbye to all our belongings – including my bikes and indoor trainer – on Wednesday, and won’t see them again for a couple weeks!

2022 was a pleasant return to my “normal” summertime routine. However, it might be the last year I’ll enjoy the standard six-month summer cycling season I’ve always been accustomed to. I expect the seasonality of my riding might look somewhat different once I set my wheels down in Austin!

My Original 2022 Goals

As always, let’s begin with how well I achieved the goals I set out for myself when 2022 began…

Go 100% metric

My big New Years resolution was to go fully metric, and that was surprisingly easy. It was like learning a new language, but one with only a couple dozen words and prefixes, so it quickly became familiar to me, to the annoyance of my life partner.

Another 10,000 KM year

My January chest pains and our April travel immediately put me behind the pace I needed to ride 10,000 kilometers in 2022. And my late-year health issues, November travel, and packing meant this goal just couldn’t be met. But I still racked up a thoroughly enjoyable 8,000 KM.

While I’m on that topic, I should mention that 61% of that distance was outdoors, making 2002 the first year since 2019 that I’ve ridden more outside than I did indoors on Zwift!

More major events

This year I enjoyed several events that had been suspended or shortened in recent years due to Covid. In addition to 18 weekly Team Decaf group rides, I returned to the Absolutely Beautiful Country ride, the PMTCC 3-State Century, Pedal the Lakes, and Pittsburgh’s Every Neighborhood Ride. But travel, weather, and cancellations meant I still missed several annual favorites.

Video ride reports

I expected to put together a handful of ride videos this year, following last year’s purchase of a new GoPro action camera. Unfortunately, videos are a lot of work to assemble and put together, so I wound up doing just one 7-minute video for my “reimagined” 2022 Pan-Mass Challenge ride. Still, the GoPro was handy to carry around to capture still photos.

Although not full ride reports, I did capture and post a few brief video clips. Strava began allowing users to attach short videos to their activities, so I took advantage of that cool new feature several times.

Another remote PMC?

Although I attended 21 consecutive PMC group rides on Zwift over the winter, I delayed registering for my 17th Pan-Mass Challenge – my third riding remotely – due to my chest pains. At the last minute, the event I’d planned this year’s ride around changed its date, and then wet weather caused me to do a 130 KM indoor ride on Saturday, followed by a 170 KM outdoor century up to Butler and back. It wasn’t the ride I’d planned for, but it was still fun, and I raised another $4,500 for cancer research and treatment.

Zwift team time trial?

Although a TTT has been on my radar for several years, I’ve always been stymied by the chest pains that come when I push myself to my maximum. Needless to say, it was absolutely not happening this year. I might just have to let this one go.

Bike repairs?

My worn chainrings have become a huge issue, causing frequent chain drops when trying to sprint, but my options for fixing them remain very limited. All the bike shops I’ve gone to have told me the only thing I can do is scour Ebay for used, second-hand parts, which I’m reluctant to do.

I could, of course, replace my entire bike. I’d rather not do that because I really love my R2-Di2, and would rather keep riding it. But after our impending move, this might be something I can look into in the next year or so, once I know exactly what kind of riding I’ll be doing in our new location.

Charts

Every year I post and discuss my training and fitness as measured by my Chronic Training Load (CTL). That’s nice, but I update these charts after every ride, and I thought it might be cool to share that up-to-date data. So this year I added constantly-updated charts to a pinned/sticky post that will always appear at the top of my cycling blog. So now you can see how my year is going anytime you want, here.

But let’s talk about how my 2022 performance compares to previous years. Here’s the chart:

While it looks like a pretty good year, I never reached the same level of fitness I had in the previous three years. That’s because I started ramping up my training a lot later in the year, thanks to taking time off for chest pains and our trip to Texas. That was followed by a great summer, but I tailed off pretty quickly toward the end of the year due to health and relocation.

Now let’s zoom in on this year in more detail:

Here you can really see how much my fitness declined in January, and then again during that April trip to Austin. But after training back up in May and June, I enjoyed a productive summer, with six century-plus rides (the red dots). And note how my fitness plummeted due to health issues in October, travel in November, and packing and moving in December.

Still, six centuries is two more than I did last year. Let’s talk about those…

The Centuries

Rolling through flat, exposed Ohio farmland on the Akron Bike Club's ABC Century ride.

What passes for a Pittsburgh sunrise over Lake Wilhelm before setting out on the 2022 PtL ride.

Ornoth & Phil at Tomlinson Run SP in West Virginia during the 3-State Century.

Ornoth & Phil receive their finishers' medals following the 3-State Century.

My new Garmin Rally XC200 power meter pedals!

In addition to being two more than last year’s total, none of this year’s six centuries were simulated on the indoor trainer. I hadn’t done six or more outdoor centuries in one year since the good old days before Covid (2019)! And now I haven’t done an indoor “Zentury” in nearly two years (March 2021)!

Not that it was all great. The only reason why I didn’t do an early-season “Zentury” was because of my chest pain. Then I wanted to do the Pittsburgh Randonneurs 200k, but was away in Austin that weekend. I wasn’t trained up enough to do June’s two-day Escape to the Lake. I was rained out of doing my first Sunday in June. The Tour of Mercer County cancelled its century route due to insufficient registrants. The cursed Mon Valley Century cancelled yet again. And the Rough Diamond century on PMC weekend both changed its date on me, and then got rained out!

But neither you nor future-me want to read about rides I didn’t do, so let’s celebrate the long rides that did come off.

5/31: Bunola solo
This familiar route was an important test of both my cardiac health as well as my delayed training. I enjoyed the summery weather, but I really suffered from lack of form.

7/10: Absolutely Beautiful Country
Six weeks later, I drove to Ohio for one of my favorites – the ABC ride – which I last rode back in 2019. The weather was stellar, and my performance felt pretty normal. My only disappointment was that my power meter decided to conk out for the last 30 KM.

7/31: PMTCC 3 State Century
My friend Phil always seems to be my constant companion for this ride, and so it was in 2022. The day was temperate and a bit grey, providing (for once) unchallenging weather. It was a pleasant ride up until about 10 KM from the finish, when it started to drizzle. And then I pinch-flatted on a poorly-set railroad crossing on our finishing loop. But we made repairs and finished the ride.

8/7: Butler solo Reimagined Pan-Mass Challenge
I’d planned my “Reimagined” PMC as the Rough Diamond century on Saturday, but when they moved the date, I was left with no specific plan. When it rained on Saturday, I decided to do a shorter ride indoors, then made up the lost distance with a full outdoor century on a slightly-drier Sunday, using the familiar route up to Butler and back. It wasn’t the ride I’d hoped for, but it was successful enough.

9/3: Pedal the Lakes
Another ride I hadn’t done since 2019, the PtL route had been largely redesigned, broken into 50 and 110 KM loops. It wound up being an overcast, solitary ride, but pleasant, and I finished in exactly seven hours.

10/8: Every Neighborhood Ride
My final century was the always-challenging ENR, which I last rode back in 2018. I rode with the slower group and enjoyed a much less taxing ride. Between the pace, rest stops, and extending it to a full century, it was a 12-hour marathon. It seems appropriate that ENR was my last century before leaving Pittsburgh.

Noteworthy Purchases

This year’s most noteworthy addition has to be my Garmin Rally power meter pedals. I’ve wanted an SPD pedal-based power meter for many years, and I’m delighted with these.

A smaller but memorable change was when I got new brake pads, after suffering three straight flat tires when my worn, misaligned old pads wore through the sidewall of my tire! Gotta remember to keep an eye on that!

I also picked up the Fanttik Apex battery-powered tire inflator, mostly for our car’s steady leaks, but it also came with a Presta valve. However, its compressor is way too loud for indoor use, so I’ll probably only use it to top off before rides I’ve driven to, rather than packing my floor pump.

And I finally picked up something I’ve thought about for a long time: white brake hood covers! I’ll put these on next spring with some new white bar tape. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look quite as good as when I still had my bike’s stock white saddle, but maybe that can be switched up, too, depending on how long the R2-Di2 continues to be my primary vehicle.

Does a cardboard bike box and movers count as purchases? Perhaps not, but this is the first time I’ve ever had to box and ship a bike. Stay tuned to see whether that winds up being a success or a tragedy!

Additional Highlights

I’ve written enough about my chest pains interrupting my early-season training.

Aside from that, this year’s overarching theme has been enjoying my last season in Pittsburgh. But return visits are expected, due to intolerable Texas summers and Inna’s mother still living in Pittsburgh.

This year I was very consistent: I rode almost every single Tuesday, either the Team Decaf outdoor group rides or indoor PMC rides. I only missed a couple weeks, usually because I was in Austin at the time.

I was also pleased when a small riding crew spontaneously formed with locals Ben, Gary, Suraj, and Oscar. But it was also a year marred by friends having big crashes: Ben on a trip to Toronto, Suraj coming off multiple times, and a woman being seriously hurt on one of the Decaf rides.

Another big development was finally moving my blogs off Russian-owned Livejournal. As you know, my cycling blog now lives at https://ornoth-cycling.dreamwidth.org/ and also has a sticky post with my up-to-the-minute fitness charts.

In other social networking news, I started posting short videos of up to 30 seconds on Strava, and started using the ActivityFix plugin to automate some previously manual tasks when I post. And I started moving my fitness data over to the Elevate app rather than the browser plugin, which is being de-emphasized.

I did manage to assemble a video ride report for this year’s PMC ride. Although I haven’t used it yet, I also learned how to synchronize and overlay data from my bike computer on top of video, which could be fun and useful in some circumstances.

And there have been developments on the indoor training front, too. Zwift recently added roads in a new region called Urukazi, which is modeled after Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, and they’ve said that a small Scotland expansion will arrive in the next month or two. Another major update was their release of Levels 51 to 60, and I advanced to Level 53 on my last ride of the year. That also came with some new “fire socks” that leave a cool trail of fire during hard sprints. And I also unlocked the rider jersey from the “Long Riders” cycling anime series.

And then there was a final goodbye to the Plastic Bullet, my first road bike, which saw me through 30 centuries and seven PMCs.

Blogposts

• 5/16: Sticky: Up-To-Date Fitness Charts (new sticky post with current CTL charts)
• 4/8: Pedal to the Medal (power meter pedal purchase)
• 4/18: Heart of Glass (chest pain & winter summary)
• 5/30: The Fix Is In (ActivityFix plugin for Strava)
• 6/1: Bunola: Corn Goodness! (solo century ride report)
• 7/14: Ohio Gozaimasu (Absolutely Beautiful Country ride report)
• 8/2: Three States of Matter (3-State Century ride report)
• 8/17: 2022 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined (just a pointer to my full PMC ride report page)
• 9/12: Pedal More Lakes (Pedal the Lakes ride report)
• 10/11: Neighborhood of Make-Believe (Every Neighborhood Ride report)
• 12/7: Everybody Called It Good Clean Fun (saying goodbye to the Plastic Bullet, my first road bike)
• 12/31: 2022: Bye Bye Burghie! (my year in review: you’re reading it!)

Goals for 2023

Ornoth's 2022 cycling calendar/log.

My 2022 Strava "Year in Sport" summary, averaging 22 kilometers per day.

That pretty much covers 2022. What does 2023 hold? Thanks to the move, I have almost no idea! But here’s a couple aspirational guesses:

Moving and Orienting in Austin

This will be a chaotic year, for sure. I’ll be trying to orient in a new city and region, trying to find riding friends, group rides, and some noteworthy major events. I’ll be dealing with Texas heat, belligerent redneck drivers, and SUV-centric roadway design. And I expect my usual seasonality to get all screwed up. After all, Texas presents the possibility of riding more through the winter, but will perhaps force me to ride less in the summer, reversing my usual annual riding pattern!

I certainly won’t be committing to any 10,000 KM distance goal this year, and might even find my time taken up by gainful employment for the first time in years. And then there’s also the possibility that I might go and buy myself a new steed, or at least repair the old one. The move is going to be the biggest change my 22-year cycling career has ever seen.

And for the Yinzers in the audience… Just getting out of our new house’s cul-de-sac is a short 15-20% climb, and there’s a certifiable Dirty Dozen-difficulty hill called Ladera Norte (“North Slope” in Spanish) just 4km from home . So I can’t throw those Pittsburgh climbing legs away just yet!

18th Pan-Mass Challenge and $125,000

Even my remote participation in this year’s PMC is in question. Will Texas provide a suitable outdoor course and tolerable weather – and will I be ready to fundraise and ride it – in August heat? I have absolutely no idea! But I’m on the threshold of $125,000 in lifetime fundraising for cancer research, which is a tempting milestone.

And perhaps a summer trip back to Boston might be in order sometime… although the traditional route’s $6,000+ fundraising minimum would be nearly impossible to meet.

Zwift Level 60

How much use will my indoor trainer get over an Austin winter? Or summer? I have absolutely no idea! But I do know that I’ll continue doing the weekly PMC virtual training rides and progressing toward Zwift’s new peak: Level 60.

Health and Turning 60

While I’m here expressing my hopes for 2023, how about just getting through the year without a cardiac scare or other health issues such as dental surgery, saddle sores, calf pain, whatever… While aging comes with inevitable limitations and loss of performance, it’d be nice to enjoy a healthy last summer before I turn the big six-oh. And maybe I should start giving some thought to how I want to spend this milestone birthday…

Conclusion

R2-Di2 at Mon Wharf with river tug hauling coal barges beneath the Fort Pitt Bridge.

2022 saw the end of a seven year long chapter in Pittsburgh. I won’t try to summarize my time in Western PA; you need only read backwards through my blog to review those experiences. The cycling here has been superlative in both positive and less-positive ways, but in both cases it’s certainly been memorable, and I’m happy to have met some good people and gotten so much use of the topography of Western PA.

As the calendar transitions to a new year, I find myself making an immense, intimidating, and exciting change as Inna and I relocate to Austin. I hope you’ll stay tuned and continue to share this road with me!