Orny's Cycling Journal

Red… and Popped!

2026-04-30T02:38:20Z

How do I even start to summarize my experience of the 2026 Red Poppy Ride?

Let’s start with the ominous omens. Last month I did my first event ride of the year – the Rosedale Ride – and endured a litany of frustrating mishaps, as explained in that blogpost. The only previous time I’d ridden the Red Poppy Ride was in 2024, when the route was terribly marked, and I suffered a flat tire and limped home gingerly (ride report). I also mused about whether my 113th imperial century would be an ominous number or not. And as I got ready to drive to the start at 6:20am, I spilled half a glass of orange juice all over my computer desk. Hmmm…

Counterbalancing that, I thought I was ready to undertake my first 100-mile ride since a very satisfactory Livestrong Challenge six months ago. I’d done 100k rides on three consecutive weeks, along with steady Friday Truancy group rides and a good night at the Circuit of the Americas F1 track. And knowing that 160 kilometers would be a major increase in distance, I’d been careful to taper my training so that I’d be fresh for that challenge.

That’s the mise-en-scène. But before I describe the ride, a quick diversion…

About 700 riders at the start

A very sprinkly rollout

Three days before the ride, Inna and I bought a new car. As we sat in Jason the financing guy’s office, out of the blue he looked at me and asked, “So how long have you been a cyclist?” Apparently he’d noticed the tan lines on my hands: what Inna calls my “distinctive markings”. That was a surprise, but even more noteworthy was that he would also be doing the Red Poppy Ride that weekend, as his own first 100-mile ride. Small world!

With a field of around 700 riders, I was surprised when Jason found me as I was pulling my bike out of the car before the start. I wished him well, checked in, made double-sure that I hadn’t forgotten anything on my pre-ride checklist, then lined up for the start. Conditions looked perfect for a Texas ride: not too warm at 24°C, not too sunny with a heavy overcast, and a benign 7 km/h south wind… although the weather was predicted to clear and warm up considerably.

The ride begins in Georgetown and takes in some of the same familiar farmland and rural roads northwest of Austin that are covered by the Barrow Volksride (starting in Salado) that I rode back in October; the Rosedale Ride (in Taylor) that I completed in March; and the Stampede on the Chisholm Trail (in Belton) that I hope to do next month. But those are all 60-mile “metric centuries”, whereas Red Poppy is a full 100 miles.

This year’s revised route was an odd one. In 2024 we rode a big outer loop and then a smaller inner loop to round out our century. But this year it was structured as an out-and-back, doing 80 percent of that big outer loop and then turning right around and heading back to the start by covering the exact same roads in the opposite direction. At least this year the organizers provided downloadable GPS routes!

The century route comprised four equal segments: a long drag northeast, turning southwest into the wind to the halfway turnaround, then returning northeast before a long final haul against the wind. So I’ll use those four segments to describe my ride.

The first segment went easily, and I covered 40 km in 2½ hours. The weather repeatedly fluctuated from overcast to misty to a steady sprinkle… Heavy enough that water droplets reacted with my bike computer’s touchscreen, somehow causing the power and distance fields on its display to swap places! I had a funny exchange at the first rest stop, overhearing one rider say he was from Dover, Massachusetts, and the volunteer he was speaking to from Andover, whereupon I offered up my hometown of Gloucester. Ominously, my Garmin offered two foreboding data points: my “Performance Condition” had dropped from +4 to -3, and it estimated I would run out of stamina 20 km before the end of the ride. I had no idea why its estimate of my stamina had fallen so precipitously, but those were just numbers, right?

Welp, the next 40 kilometers were into what was now a 17 km/h headwind, and the sun was starting to burn away the clouds, yielding a warm and very muggy 27°C. I pulled into the turnaround rest stop at 11:15am with 51 km ridden, but I was struggling, as my Garmin reflected with a Performance Condition of -5. Jason pulled in while I was grabbing a much-needed ten-minute rest. Although I was hurting, I was still firmly in the middle of the pack, and I was looking forward to having the wind at my back for the next section.

That did help keep my speed up, although my legs were starting to cramp and could only put out half the power they had at the start of the day. I took a couple micro-rests while recording some video with my selfie drone, then had to take my first impromptu roadside break just as the route turned back into a 24 km/h headwind (gusting to 43 km/h) for the brutal slog home in the oppressive 32° heat.

Those short roadside breaks – plus spending much more time at the rest stops – are a sure signal that I’m on the ropes, and as they became increasingly frequent, I really started to lose time on other riders (and draw attention from the support crew). I reached the final rest stop just as they started packing things up, and I was the last rider to leave, with the event’s “SAG wagon” patiently trailing behind me. Fortunately, I shook the SAG wagon and saved myself the ignominy of being the last rider on course by passing another lost soul a couple kilometers from the finish.

I finally finished at 4:20pm, having taken a dismal 8⅓ hours to cover 163 kilometers. My little friend told me that my Performance Condition was -7.

I can’t put into words how much I suffered and how utterly drained I was. I had already been operating on fumes by the halfway point, and it took me an additional five hours of abject torture to slowly and painfully crawl my way back to the start. The only thing that kept me going was the desire to check off another century ride, which has long been how I’ve judged my fitness. And even after the ride, I had to sit down and take multiple breaks just to muster the strength needed to pack my bike into the car in the empty parking lot.

Am I glad I did it? Well, it certainly was a valuable sanity check on my fitness level, and a stark warning to take these extra-long rides seriously. If you can somehow set aside the immense suffering, it was a pleasant enough day. But the ride really kicked my ass.

And therein lies the salient mystery. Since moving to Austin, I’ve done six hundred-mile rides; four of those went fine, but two were brutal sufferfests (the other being my 2023 Livestrong ride). It sure would be nice if I could figure out what was the determining factor in how painful a ride would be, but I suspect there’s no obvious smoking gun. So as yet, no real insights. Just gotta keep putting myself out there and hope for the best.

comments

Tag & Release

2026-04-16T20:11:26Z

Some years ago, I participated in a cycling scavenger hunt game called Tag-o-Rama. In brief, someone posts a photo of their bike in a somewhat-recognizable local location. Then people have to figure out the location and ride there. The first person to take and post a photo of their bike in the same spot then gets to post a new mystery photo of their own devising, and the game continues from there.

I discovered Tag-o-Rama when I moved to Pittsburgh, where the game was hosted on BikePGH’s public discussion group. From 2016 to 2019, I claimed no less than 45 tags before it all fell apart. I quit when one participant started being openly abusive to others, then BikePGH shut down their forums, COVID-19 hit, and I moved to Austin.

If you want, you can read my first post about Pittsburgh’s Tag-o-Rama, or all my posts that talk about the game.

Pittsburgh’s game was fun while it lasted. At first – being new to town – it was a struggle identifying places, but it became a good way to learn about what the city had to offer (and how to get there by bike). Then it kept me riding through my big lull in 2018.

As you might imagine by now, the upshot is that there is a similar “bike tag” game here in Austin, hosted on the BikingATX Reddit subgroup, and today I claimed my first tag.

It’s kind of funny, because I find myself in the exact same situation: having moved to a new city, trying to familiarize myself with its sights and bike routes.

But there is one difference worth noting. Having picked up the HoverAir selfie drone, I now have the option of a whole new viewpoint with aerial shots. Here’s the photo I used to claim my first tag in Austin:

As rewarding as my first tag pickup here feels, I probably won’t get as involved with Austin’s game as I was in Pittsburgh. I’m still upset by how BikePGH’s game turned so ugly. Plus Austin’s still unfamiliar, a bit too spread-out, and harder to get around.

But I’ll keep an eye out for targets of opportunity. However, there’s no sense picking up another tag until I’ve found a good location for my subsequent tag drop…

comments

Rosedale Rookie

2026-03-31T15:57:08Z

The Rosedale Ride is an annual fundraiser for Austin’s Rosedale School for students with disabilities. While previous editions began in Austin, this year they moved it half an hour out of town to more rural Taylor, TX. I had never done this early-season metric century before, so I decided to check it out as my first organized event of 2026.

It was cursed. I mean, the ride itself was fine, but I suffered one mishap after another. Nothing too serious, mind you, but a dozen of them… So many that I’m structuring this ride report entirely around my pratfalls, with a brief reflection from a broader perspective at the very end.

Typical central Texas farmland

So what went wrong? Let’s start with the weather. After eight straight sunny days with highs exceeding 87°F, my ride never got above a temp of 63°. Chilly enough that this spokesmodel for cycling sandals donned socks and regular shoes, a baselayer, arm warmers, and a windbreaker! The sky was socked in with heavy clouds that never cleared, instead dropping a few isolated raindrops on riders partway through the course.

But worst of all was a cold north wind that blew steadily at 15 mph gusting to 21. It made the first third of the ride a slog before riders turned eastward, only to discover that the wind had shifted with them toward the northeast. We fought against the wind for about 70% of the ride.

But I’m getting ahead of my narrative. My problems began as soon as I parked the car. Somehow while donning my cycling kit, I managed to lose my cell phone. After considerable searching I enlisted another rider to try calling my phone number so that it would ring, only to realize that it was still silenced from the night before. At the last minute, I realized that it had somehow fallen down into the back of my bibshorts, where it was comfortably nestled between my cheeks! Good thing I had yet to jump onto my saddle! But that delay flustered me and put me under time pressure to get registered and line up for the start.

Not having time to go through my usual preride routine, I started noticing problems as soon as we rolled out. First was that my bike computer was displaying no heart rate data. That wasn’t a huge surprise, because my HRM had been complaining about low battery for days, and I was just waiting for it to run out completely before changing it. So its time had come, and I wasn’t going to bother fixing it until I got home. No heart rate data isn’t the end of the world.

But what would be the end of the world is having no power data. It seemed like my bike computer decided that if it couldn’t connect to my HRM, then it wasn’t gonna connect to anything at all. So the first few miles of my ride were spent fiddling in my Garmin’s menus to manually reconnect my power meter pedals, then again to connect to my electronic shifters.

At that point I thought everything was settled. I was wrong. A couple hours later, I noticed that my phone had made a couple notification chimes, but nothing had come up on my bike computer, and another light bulb went off. I had failed to open the Garmin Connect app on my phone, which meant I wouldn’t get phone notifications during my ride. Or weather updates. Or a lot of other useful information. So I spent another few minutes soft-pedaling while I opened the app and got that connected, too.

After 55 kilometers and more than two hours fighting the headwinds, I pulled into our second water stop in Granger and went to record my usual rest stop voice notes… but my phone’s screen was frozen. Unhappily, it refused to respond, and I could neither reboot it nor power it off without screen input. While not having voice notes isn’t the end of the world, I worried about what I would do if I couldn’t rely on Google Maps for the drive back to Austin!

Granger Dam reservoir on a grim day

Next, as I approached the third water stop, I started feeling a pain in my inner thigh, as if it was rubbing against something sharp with each pedal stroke. As it become more intense, I felt down there and discovered that there was a hole in my bibshorts. At the rest stop, I found the culprit; the hard plastic hook-side of the Velcro attaching my saddle bag to my seat post was sticking out, and had abraded my bib shorts. It had torn clean through them and started abrading my inner thigh, had ripped through my skin and muscle before opening a hole in my femoral artery, whereupon I died from blood loss. Well, maybe not that last bit, but after 16 thousand pedal strokes it sure hurt a lot, and now I have to throw away an otherwise good pair of $200 bibshorts.

After all these minor mishaps, I started getting jumpy, questioning every rattle coming from the bike as it traversed the rough roads of Texas farmland, vowing to hand-check every bolt after I got home.

But Pæthos held together and I completed the 100 kilometer course in 4h8m, which is very respectable given the pervasive headwind, with an average power of 151 Watts.

But lest any of us thought all my mishaps were over… When I packed up and drove off, our 2009 Accord started flashing a “check gas cap” warning. Yeesh! So that was my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

But stepping aside and reflecting, I’m still glad I did it. It was great to introduce myself to another popular local event. This one has a generally nice, flat route that briefly runs alongside the Granger Dam reservoir. And it’s a good season-opening metric century to build up a little training stress to start the year. For all these reasons, I was glad to have ridden it.

But from a course perspective, it was extremely similar to the Red Poppy Ride and the Fire Ant Tour. These events are all held in the flat farmlands north and east of Austin, presumably because the organizers think cyclists prefer avoiding the lumpier Hill Country to the west. However, they’re really only exchanging hills for brisk headwinds, which are just as physically demanding. So I’ve come to expect windy conditions on these rides, while casting a more interested eye toward any events being held to the west of here.

But despite the cool weather and misfortunes, I’d say Rosedale was a good ride and worth a place in the annual ride calendar.

comments

But Why?!?

2026-01-20T16:49:46Z

In my previous post celebrating 100,000 miles on the bike, I promised an upcoming post about the motivations that underlie my passion for cycling. Here it is, with a shorter bonus postscript listing some things I actually dislike about cycling.

I started pedaling when I was around five years old, when my parents first plunked my ass down on a Marx Big Wheel plastic tricycle and turned me loose in our driveway. I’ve been pedaling ever since, with the only break happening during college (when I got my first car) through my first full-time job (and my first new car).

That tallies up to about 45 years where cycling has been a central part of my life.

It might seem a little late to think about this, but I’ve decided to take a look at why. What is it that motivates me to keep pedaling, after having already ridden for such a ridiculously long time?

The impetus for looking into that question came from a recent GCN video, wherein one of the presenters asked himself why he never got tired of cycling. It might be worth a watch if the question is meaningful to you. A few of the answers he shared resonated with me, and some of them absolutely did not, but the question remained…

What is it about riding a bike that still appeals to me?

But two items of business need to be mentioned before I can share my own answers.

First, after I’ve shared my motivations, I’ll share the much shorter list of things I hate about cycling, which might actually be more interesting to some.

And second: writing about my motivations is tricky. The list of factors is long and detailed, and it would be difficult to convey my depth of feeling without getting really verbose and boring my audience to death. So I’m going to keep my comments brief, and ask the reader to infer that depth of feeling. So keep that in mind while you read my summary descriptions.

That said, here’s my list. There’s a dozen of them, in single-sentence bullet-list form:

Cycling – especially the sensation of speed – is exciting and fun, and that’s just as true at age 60 as it was at age 6.
Cycling allows me to enjoy the outdoors, connecting with nature, breathing fresh air, and feeling the sunshine and wind.
It gets me out into the world around me, seeing the countryside and the varying contours of the land, while learning all kinds of details about the places I ride through.
I’ve always needed a physical outlet for expending excess energy, and cycling provides a healthy way to work myself to fatigue or exhaustion.
The health benefits of cycling are greater than almost any other human activity, contributing directly to cardiac, respiratory, circulatory, muscular, and digestive health (without even mentioning mental and emotional health).
Cycling can burn a tremendous amount of calories, which makes it great for dieting, or (as in my case) a good way to get away with eating lots and poorly.
I get to exercise my analytical side by tracking and comparing all the quantitive data that’s produced, such as my mileage, power, and fitness numbers.
With such clear ways to quantify performance, cycling makes it easy to set goals for myself, and a genuine sense of achievement upon reaching my goals.
Group rides offer a social element that is lacking in many of my other daily activities, and I’ve made a number of good friends as a result of this pastime.
Many rides wind up as treasured memories that I look back upon and will enjoy for a lifetime.
As everyone knows, one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done is raising money to support cancer research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, through my 26-year devotion to the Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride.
For all these reasons, cycling is clearly a great use of my time; among the many options I have for spending time, cycling beats nearly all other alternatives.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s an extremely compelling list of reasons to get out and ride, even – or perhaps especially – now that I’m into my sixties.

In contrast, there are certain aspects of cycling that I avoid like the plague. So, as promised, here is my much shorter list of the things that I hate about cycling.

Number one is that I only ride on the road. There are lots of other cycling disciplines, including mountain biking, gravel riding, cyclocross, track riding, bikepacking, downhill, stunt riding, and more. I don’t do those. I am a roadie, and exclusively a roadie.

I don’t race. In the U.S., most bike races are criteriums, taking place on small, technical courses with lots of turns. That kind of close-quarters racing is insanely dangerous, and I’m just not interested in courting crashes and injuries. And while I might enjoy other formats like hill climbs or time trials, I really have no desire to compete against other cyclists. I much prefer challenging myself with completing a long and/or difficult course like a century or a brevet.

I don’t do interval workouts or structured training programs. Although high intensity work is a vital part of any training regimen, I detest the self-induced extreme suffering of riding according to a spreadsheet and a stopwatch. What works best for me is the Swedish idea of “Fartlek” – or “speed-play” – where you emphasize varying your intensity based on the terrain around you, with some degree of both spontaneity and specificity.

I don’t ride a bike with motorized assist. While there might come a day when old age and feebleness force me to accept powered assistance from an e-bike, I will avoid that as long as I possibly can. Since exercise intensity is also an important part of healthy aging, I’m not going to surrender any of my fitness until I’m forced to.

And finally… I don’t mind big hills, darkness, or cold weather – I have appropriate gear for any of that stuff – but I do my best to avoid riding in wet weather. Even though it’s really only miserable at first (once you’re soaked thru, you can’t get any wetter), it wreaks havoc on the equipment and necessitates very thorough post-ride cleaning and maintenance: a messy, tedious chore I’d much rather avoid.

All this might leave you thinking that I‘m always ready and eager to ride, but that’s not always the case. In fact, there’s often times when cycling is the last thing I want to do. Usually that’s because I’m overtrained, when I’ve worked myself too hard for too long, without giving my body sufficient time to fully recover, leaving me tired and irritable. After all, it’s a fundamental cycling truth that you don’t get stronger while riding; that’s when you incur the damage that promotes muscle growth. That growth and strengthening can only happen while you’re resting, so it’s important for cyclists to rest just as diligently as they train.

That’s why I have time to contemplate and share why I’m still in love with cycling… Because I’m taking a much-needed rest day after riding for six days in a row! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe there’s a big ole burrito downstairs with my name on it…

comments

Riding It Out

2026-01-19T01:53:18Z

In mid-October of 2000, I bought a bike: my Devinci Monaco. Although I’d done a little riding off and on before then, that’s the date I began logging how many miles I rode. And thus, I consider that the start of my career as an adult cyclist.

A little over 25 years later, today my cycling log ticked over 100,000 miles. Mathematically that averages out to 4,000 miles per year. Or roughly an hour-long, 11-mile ride, every single day for 9,226 consecutive days without break.

That may or may not sound like a lot to you. But as I said in my recent 2025 year-in-review, 100,000 miles is a common expected lifespan of a typical automobile. It’s the equivalent of riding around the Earth at the equator… four times. Or perhaps it’ll make sense if I tell you that it’s like traveling the whole Oregon Trail 46 times, without dying of dysentery!

Of course, it’s not that accurate a measurement. I did a bit of riding – on two previous bikes – before I started my mileage log, so those miles weren’t counted. And some of my riding – such as pre-ride warmups and pre-Zwift indoor trainer rides – never got logged. And all the miles I’ve done on Zwift are only estimates based on their rather optimistic algorithms. And 100,000 miles has no inherent meaning other than being a round number; if you converted that to 160,934 kilometers, then it doesn’t seem like a noteworthy milestone at all.

But despite the inaccuracy, I’m definitely in the ballpark, and 100,000 miles is my best estimate for my total distance as an adult cyclist.

Since that inaccuracy meant I couldn’t pinpoint a precise moment when it happened, I didn’t feel any pressure to commemorate it with some sort of memorable ride. Instead, I just watched my odometer until it ticked over on today’s lumpy but rather typical route into Austin’s Northwest Hills.

But this arbitrary number does capture how long I’ve been committed to cycling as a lifestyle. How many activities have you consistently stuck with for more than 25 years?

Yeah, cycling is a lifelong passion of mine, driven by several different, mostly-healthy obsessions. I will revisit the topic of motivation in full detail in an upcoming blogpo.

With my performance numbers undeniably in decline in recent years, and after my recent health scares, I can’t help but ask myself how much longer will I be able to ride.

The answer is, of course: no one knows. But every mile brings me one mile closer to the end. I try to keep that in mind, remembering that every ride is a treasure. And whatever adversity comes my way, I’ll do my best to “ride it out”…

comments

Commitment Ceremony

2026-01-12T17:04:20Z

Preview of the 2026 PMC rider's jersey.

Welcome to 2026! A new year has begun, and with it, new aspirations and goals. By far my biggest objective for the year is my 20th Pan-Mass Challenge.

In a sense, this will be my most ambitious PMC ever. Not because of the riding, but because – instead of riding remotely as I’ve done since 2020 – this year I’m undertaking the trip back to Boston to take part in the mass in-person event for the first time since 2014, while also surpassing a lifetime fundraising total of $150,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Having never traveled with my bike before, the logistics of getting myself and my bike to Boston, renting a vehicle, securing lodging, and doing the ride are intimidating. That’s why I‘ve done my last five PMC rides solo and remotely in Pittsburgh and Austin.

When I wrote about this year’s PMC in my 2025 end-of-year summary a couple weeks ago, it was with a measure of precaution. I figured I could always back out of the trip if necessary. After all, I’ve come up short on some previous annual goals, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world, right?

But time has a cruel sense of humor. Only nine days after posting about this year’s goal, registration for the 2026 PMC ride opened. And since the most desirable routes sell out very quickly, you really have to sign up as early as you can.

So today I registered for the traditional two-day route, which – beginning this year – now runs from Worcester to Provincetown. Registration includes a binding promise to raise a minimum of $6,000. And for me, it sets in stone my commitment to make the trip back to Boston to ride.

For me, the most insidious of the Pan-Mass Challenge’s slogans is “Commit: you’ll figure it out”, referring to the dual challenge of a formidable 300-kilometer bike ride and the daunting $6,000 fundraising minimum.

But this year it also applies to my individual challenge: the logistics of getting myself, my bike, my support person, and all my gear from Texas to the starting line in Worcester… A journey that I’m now fully committed to, after having completed my registration.

Of course, I have enough wisdom to realize that these are just typical jitters about doing something new and unfamiliar. The travel will be planned and executed. And my Team Kermit buddies are a helpful example, having made this commute annually for Austin’s Livestrong Challenge. So now that I’m committed, I just need to trust that I will indeed “figure it out”.

And I know it’s going to be worth the discomfort. I’ll see lots of very dear New England riding buddies whom I’ve missed greatly. And I’ll get to celebrate with some of my oldest friends and most loyal and generous PMC sponsors. I’ll be riding over roads I haven’t seen in 12 years that hold so many personal and poignant memories, while cancer patients and their families line the entire route, thanking us for helping fund the research that they or their loved ones have benefited from. I’ll be celebrating my 20th PMC ride, and taking pride from the accomplishment of raising $150,000 for cancer research. And with enough help from my donors, I might even qualify for PMC “Heavy Hitter” status for the 10th time. It’s gonna be an awesome trip, I know.

There’s so much to look forward to, and I’m certain the reality will be far more powerful than I can convey to you here, or in my followup ride report.

You’ll hear me say it often, once I kick off this year’s fundraising push in a few months, but I do hope you’ll be part of my celebratory 20th PMC ride, in one way or another.

But until then, in addition to lots of anticipation and a whole lot of riding, I’ve gotta get to work on that “figure it out” part of my 2026 Pan-Mass Challenge. Let’s get to it!

comments

2025: Ya Gotta Have Heart

2025-12-31T19:27:03Z

Ornoth modeling the 2025 Team Kermit jersey.

Just as 2024 was all about my late-season stroke and return to fitness, 2025 was defined by my heart surgery in March, and my post-op recovery.

Happily, the procedure went well, and after a two-month break, I was able to resume training, taking three months to build up to a successful remote Pan-Mass Challenge ride in August, followed in November by the 100-mile Livestrong Challenge.

In the end, 2025 was a very successful year, and there were lots of milestones and noteworthy highlights along the way. Here’s my year-in-review post to distill it all down to a coherent narrative.

My Original 2025 Goals

Last December 31st, my 2025 New Year’s Eve began with a visit to my cardiologist to schedule my PFO closure heart surgery, which I learned would take place on March 7th. After that appointment, I drove home, finalized my list of cycling goals for the coming year, and posted them in my 2024 annual summary blogpost.

At that time – just months after my stroke and facing impending heart surgery – it was hard to commit to any concrete goals, but here’s what I thought made sense at this time last year, and how it played out.

Stroke & Cardiac Recovery

The Amplatzer Talisman Patent Foramen Ovale Occluder they implanted inside my heart!

Ornoth meets the sunrise, already four hours into his Day 1 PMC ride.

Taking a quick break as a freight train passes Austin's 1947 Amtrak station.

Obviously, my primary goal was to get back to full health and fitness following my heart surgery.

I was off the bike for 10 days surrounding the March procedure, and wasn’t allowed to do any meaningful training for another month. Although I hoped to recover as quickly as I could, it would be a long, gradual process, exacerbated by my bike being in the shop for an unexpected two weeks.

However, from today’s vantage point, it went miraculously well. Just 2½ months after resuming training, I was able to complete the Fire Ant Tour: a metric century. That gave me the confidence to register for my big remote PMC ride, which I completed in August. And in November I rode the 100-mile Livestrong Challenge, which I’d missed in 2024 due to my stroke.

It took me four or five months to get back to my normal level of fitness and endurance, but I’m as confident and capable as cyclist today as I was before my stroke, and that’s an immensely satisfying feeling.

My 19th Pan-Mass Challenge

Although I listed riding another PMC as one of my goals for 2025, it was with a humongous questionmark. Would it even be physically possible?

After surgery in March, I would have barely enough time to recover, train up to adequate physical fitness, and do the necessary fundraising work. Thankfully, I suffered no physical setbacks, and on PMC weekend I completed my usual two-day, 300 kilometer remote PMC ride. It was incredibly heartening to show that I’d overcome my health issues, and a poignant reminder of what a blessing it is to be able to spend a long day in the saddle.

Given the Trump administration’s 44% cuts to the NIH budget, this year’s PMC fundraising was more important than ever, and I brought in a post-hiatus and post-pandemic record of $9,450 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I chose to earmark 25% of my fundraising for the pediatric neurological cancer lab favored by Team Kermit, and the rest was unrestricted, so that DFCI can use it wherever it is most needed.

That’s all I’ll say about this year’s PMC. For my full writeup – plus my 5-minute highlight video – be sure to check out my 2025 Pan-Mass Challenge Ride Report.

And look below for my Goals for 2026 and some exciting news about next year’s PMC!

More, Better Videos!

In terms of video, I could have done better. I made limited use of the new selfie drone and its expanded capabilities, but I did capture a number of short video clips here and there.

On the plus side, I pushed out another 30-second PMC ride jersey reveal, produced another PMC ride video, and gathered many of my little clips into a second yearly highlights reel, which appears just below.

I hope to do even better next year, especially since I recently picked up a wireless DJI mic that’ll hopefully allow me to capture decent in-ride audio.

Some Anticipated Purchases

When I wrote last year’s goals, I was grasping for anything I could, so I included a “goal” of pulling the trigger on several planned upgrades. That was kinda lame, since I always devote an entire section of my annual review to stuff I’ve bought, anyways.

But briefly: I made those expected purchases, as well as several others. As expected, 2025 was an interesting year in terms of equipment; however, I’ll enumerate all that in detail in the “Noteworthy Purchases” section below.

But taken as a whole, while 2025 won’t top my list of greatest cycling achievements, I’m absolutely delighted by the success I’ve had in achieving these goals and exceeding the expectations I had, coming into 2025.

Highlight Video

Here we go: a quick 2½ minute look back at some of this year’s highlights (or at least the ones I got on camera).

For my Pan-Mass Challenge buddies, you might see how many different PMC jerseys you can count!

Charts

Let’s start this section with a new chart to understand how my cycling has changed in recent years. Here’s how many kilometers I’ve logged each year since getting back on the bike as an adult cyclist 25 years ago.

There are two things I want to call out. The first is that I’ve ridden considerably more each year after 2018. As you can see, that extra ~4,000 km per year is almost entirely attributable to Zwift and the indoor trainer I purchased at the end of that year. And that trend has surprisingly continued even after our 2023 move to Texas.

The second thing has to do with 2025 in particular. This year I logged 9,500 kilometers in the saddle, split pretty evenly between the indoor trainer (47%) and the open road (53%). It might not look like much on the chart, but despite losing a big chunk of time due to my surgery, I still rode more this year than any year since 2021!

Now let’s look at my cycling Fitness numbers, which only go back to 2011. Still, that’s a full 15 years of Fitness data, as you can see in the following chart.

Looking at this, I’d concentrate on the right half of the chart. 2017 was a normal year, but it ended with my only Dirty Dozen ride, which left me shattered, leading to a very mediocre 2018.

But at the end of 2018, I bought an indoor trainer, which allowed me to begin each spring at a higher level of Fitness, leading to higher summertime peaks. In terms of Fitness, the four years from 2019 through 2022 were my lifetime peak.

My most recent inflection point was at the end of 2022 when we moved to Austin. Two years ago I wrote a blogpost entitled “The Shape of Things to Come”, considering how my riding might change following the move. I expected my Fitness to be much more steady throughout the year, with fewer lows during the winter months and fewer peaks in the summer. And, as you can see above, that’s exactly how the past three years played out.

Now, let’s look more closely at 2025:

Having regained my Fitness following my stroke, and with heart surgery coming in March, I spent January and February doing as much cycling as I could and maintaining a fairly high Fitness level.

March and April show two consecutive dips in my Fitness, as I recovered from heart surgery and then sat around doing nothing while my bike was serviced. My Fitness plummeted to its lowest point since I bought my new bike three years ago.

In May, June, and July, I was committed and focused on steadily rebuilding my Fitness in time for August’s two-day Pan-Mass Challenge. I was overjoyed to complete it, which also marked my maximum Fitness of the year.

For the rest of 2025, I tried to keep my Fitness at a reasonably high level, including a secondary peak leading up to November’s Livestrong Challenge century. Then things fluctuated a bit in December, while I recovered from a pulled hamstring and broken toe.

The Centuries

Crossing the finish line after 100 miles of the Livestrong Challenge.

Last year, I wrote that – due to my age and health issues – I might have ridden my last 100-mile ride. I’m happy to tell you it wasn’t true. This year I trained back up and knocked out two imperial centuries. You already know what they were, but here are my ride reports:

8/3: Remote PMC Day 1 Century This year’s Pan-Mass Challenge was my 111th imperial century and a signal accomplishment in my recovery from stroke and heart surgery.
11/2: Livestrong Challenge A full year after my stroke, I enjoyed a triumphant return to the Livestrong Challenge, capping an insanely busy week that included a big concert the night before my 112th 100-mile ride.

My Year in Zwift

For the first time since the COVID lockdown, I rode nearly as many kilometers on my indoor trainer using Zwift as I did outdoors. And because Zwift usually gives me several things to talk about, I’m going to put all the Zwift-related business into this new section. And since there’s so much of that this year, I’m just gonna do bullet points.

Modeling the Level 100 jersey in front of Zwift's Austin-inspired 360 Bridge.

Ornoth (in his Didi the Devil cap) leading the PMC group ride on Zwift.

I started the year at XP Level 81 and successfully made my way to Level 100, which is the highest you can go… for now! This was a huge achievement that was 7 years and 34,000 kilometers in the making (see blogpo).
When I reached Level 85, Zwift sent me a free pair of Zwift Play controllers, which replaced my old ones that had been malfunctioning. But Zwift also decided to stop making them.
Zwift started granting experience points for regular outdoor rides, with four outdoor kilometers earning the same XP as one km in Zwift. Yaay!
Zwift held big events to introduce major expansions and new routes in France and New York City, plus a handful of miscellaneous other routes.
By completing the “Tour Fever” Climb Portal challenge, I earned a full Didi the Devil cycling kit. While I usually wear the in-game PMC kit, my avatar still wears the skullcap with devil horns from the Didi kit.
Zwift introduced a handful of new in-game bikes, but also implemented ways for users to earn five levels of upgrades for their bikes, and the ability to unlock (frankly stupid looking) “halo” bikes.
They also introduced a major new long-term challenge: the Factory Tour, which eventually unlocks “lightning socks”.
Zwift also finally added TSS points, Fitness, and Form charts and trendlines: the same data I’ve tracked and charted for the past 14 years.
They also replaced the beloved double-XP Tour of Watopia with a new Zwift Unlocked Tour. It still grants 2x XP, but they moved the time frame from late winter (when you’re building fitness for spring) to mid-autumn (when you should be relaxing), which is disappointing.
The PMC’s Zwift group rides decreased from weekly to monthly, and moved to 7am on Saturdays. Not a huge fan, but we’ll make it work somehow.

All this (plus the XP bonus for keeping a weekly ride streak alive) actually kept me Zwifting throughout the summer, when I would normally put the indoor trainer away. There’s no denying that Zwift has been a major contributor to both my recovery from medical issues and my overall fitness each year since 2019.

Noteworthy Purchases

It was a good year for shopping, and there’s a lot to cover. To conserve spacetime, let’s divide this year’s purchases into two groups and just list them out.

First the new kit:

Two pair of Craft bibshorts, which were discounted by 20% after I talked with customer support
A new pair of Shimano SD501 cycling sandals to replace my old ones
The 2025 Team Kermit cycling jersey
Of course, the 2025 Pan-Mass Challenge jersey
A blue & gold Reggie Miller “BoomBaby” cycling jersey
Doublewide wrist sweatbands for Zwifting and occasional outdoor use; although I never used to sweat, having it running down my arms has been a problem since moving south!

A lot of my cycling equipment purchases were covered in my October blogpost “Rolling Resistance”, so here’s just a quick enumeration:

My inexplicably slow and expensive tune-up included new brake pads, chains, bar tape, and cassettes (I erroneously ordered the 30-tooth version rather than the 34), and a long-awaited firmware update for my Di2 shifters.
New Pirelli P-Zero clincher tires were great, if prone to cuts, but TPU plastic inner tubes proved completely unusable.
Fanttik battery-powered pocket air compressor/inflator has been a lifesaver.
I enthusiastically recommend the Rehook Tyre Glider to easily mount & dismount even stubborn tires; I will never ride without one!
Replaced my outer chainring, after I bent the old one when I dropped the bike.
Installed a pair of cheap but very useful plastic enlargers for the hidden buttons on my Di2 shifters.
A new CamelBak Podium Ice water bottle (plus a new dishwasher to clean them!)
DJI Mic Mini Bluetooth microphone to capture quality audio to go with the video I capture while riding (to debut next year).

Finally… This might be a bit odd, but it’s worth mentioning three products that I was eagerly awaiting, but did not purchase. Coincidentally, all three were announced on the same day: September 9th! Those were:

Wahoo Kickr CORE 2 indoor trainer: My original Kickr CORE – from 2018! – is still working fine after 34,000 simulated kilometers, and the new, revised version doesn’t have any compelling improvements, other than being $250 cheaper. It can wait.
Garmin Rally 210 SPD power meter pedals: Similarly, the second generation of my power meter pedals aren’t significantly better than my old ones, and come with a 10% price increase. Plus they’re a whopping 60% more expensive than Assioma’s equivalent power meter pedals! No thanks.
Garmin Edge 850 GPS bike computer: I’m a huge fan of advanced bike computers, but Garmin’s newest generation is a big step backward compared my two year old Edge 840. Garmin cut the battery life in half; they removed the solar charging feature; its weather maps are awkward and crash the unit; and they raised the price 30-40%! Those are the kind of “improvements” I can live without.

Additional Highlights

Riding past Salado Creek on the Volksride 100k.

Friday Truancy group ride on Austin's Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge.

The Bicycle House ride regrouping at Walnut Creek Park.

Ornoth's 2025 cycling calendar/log.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what else stood out about 2025? Here’s a small handful of significant bits.

Outside of my centuries, I did a few noteworthy event rides. My first long ride after surgery was June’s Fire Ant metric century (my third year). And my late-season included doing the Barrow Volksride metric for the first time. And I made it out to the Circuit of the Americas F1 track once in May, just before they closed it up for the year (they didn’t open for their usual fall dates).

Between surgery, Zwift, and event rides, I didn’t do as many Friday Truancy group rides (about 20), and when I did I was mostly alone off the back, as I’m really not able to hold the pack’s pace anymore. But I tried a half dozen Saturday morning shop rides out of Bicycle House, and those went really well (except for having to get up at 6am on a weekend).

I also reported out on my experience consulting with a nutritionist, which was marginally useful.

In one of the more noteworthy developments, I finally canceled my paid membership on Strava, which is why you won’t see my “Strava Year in Sport” summary image for this year. Although they’re the default social network for cyclists, in recent years Strava has taken numerous corporate actions that are overtly hostile to their users. I complained about them in last year’s annual summary, and somehow it got even worse in 2025! Those actions have included: banning all users from posting any links in activities, comments, or posts; claiming ownership of users’ data; surprise price increases; lack of new feature development and bug fixes, especially on the website; drastically restricting their API and thereby breaking numerous popular third-party tools and services with no warning; and filing a frivolous lawsuit against Garmin – their closest business partner and number one data provider – for requiring the exact same data attributions that Strava themselves force on their third party developers. Strava’s corporate “leadership” is deluded, out of touch, and utterly out of control, and I (along with many other users) are done giving them money to enable their asinine, hostile behavior. Don’t let the door hit you in the face as we leave, Strava!

Blogposts

I only post about once a month, but when I do, my articles are kinda long and jammed with detail. Here’s this year’s inventory, in case you wanna dig deeper into any particular topic:

1/7: Rolling into 2025 (a notable update to my blog’s Fitness chart)
3/10: Special Operations (leadup to my heart surgery)
4/16: I Care About Nutrition (my experience consulting a nutritionist)
4/24: Rode to Recovery (my progress seven weeks after surgery)
5/1: Why Specialized? (why I ride their bikes)
6/2: Event-ful… Or Not (missed some events, made some others)
6/18: Adamant (my 3rd Fire Ant 100 km event)
8/18: 2025 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined (just the usual brief pointer to my full 2025 PMC ride report page)
10/5: Rolling Resistance (lots of new equipment, especially tires & tubes)
10/23: Volksriden (my first Barrow Volksride 100 km event)
11/13: Strong Living (my return to Austin’s Livestrong Challenge)
12/4: Zenturion (hitting the max Level 100 after 7 years of Zwifting)
12/31: 2025: Ya Gotta Have Heart (my year in review: you’re reading it!)

Goals for 2026

So that was 2025. Let’s talk about next year’s goals, because now that I’m fully back, there’s some big things I’m looking forward to. Let me share ’em with you…

Surpass 100,000 Adult Cycling Miles

In the arbitrary milestone category, I am about to surpass 100,000 miles of riding since I took up cycling as an adult back in 2000.

100,000 miles is a common lifespan of the typical family car. It’s the equivalent of riding around the Earth at the equator… four times. Or perhaps it’ll make sense if I tell you that it’s like traveling the whole Oregon Trail 46 times, without dying of dysentery!

That also means I’ve averaged nearly 4,000 miles a year for the past 25 years. That’s a measure of how devoted I’ve been to this particular pastime.

With good weather and only a couple hundred miles left to go, I ought to tick this one off soon. Look for a commemorative blogpo before the end of January.

Return to Boston to celebrate my 20th PMC and $150,000 in fundraising

Yes, it’ll be my 20th Pan-Mass Challenge. Yes, I’m coming back to Boston to do the in-person ride for the first time since 2014! It’ll be my 15th traditional PMC, having ridden my last five alone and remotely in Pittsburgh or Austin. And in 2026 the PMC will be inaugurating a new starting location in Worcester, rather than the traditional (and now former) start in Sturbridge. Very exciting!

Plus, I have a huge fundraising goal: to surpass a lifetime total of $150,000 raised for cancer research at the Dana-Farber. Raising the necessary $10,000 is a makeable stretch goal, and I’m asking you and all my amazing sponsors past and present to help. Plus if fundraising goes exceptionally well, it could also mark my return for a 10th year as a PMC “Heavy Hitter”.

The PMC has always been the most important highlight of my year, but next year’s PMC is going to be out-of-this-world special, and deeply emotional. I hope you will be part of it too, in one way or another!

Conclusion

My Previous
Annual Summaries

2024 2023 2022 2021
2020 2019 2018 2017
2016 2015 2014 2013
2012 2011 2010 2009
2008 2007 2006 2005
2004 2003

So that’s 2025 in the books.

Starting with last year’s stroke, and through my heart surgery nine months ago, I had no idea whether I’d be able to continue riding. After eight long months of uncertainty, I’ve worked my way back to full fitness and proved that – even in my sixties – I’ve still got what it takes.

Despite my age and health challenges, 2025 was a surprisingly successful and memorable year, highlighted by covering more ground than any year since 2021, strong performances in my solo PMC and Livestrong century rides, tripping Level 100 in Zwift, raising another $9,450 for Dana-Farber, as well as all the other bits I’ve mentioned in this writeup.

After nearly a year of uncertainty, today life as a cyclist is pretty much back to normal again, and that’s an incredibly rewarding and reassuring feeling.

And it’s great to be able to look forward to an exciting 2026 season, featuring a very special trip back to Boston to ride and enjoy and celebrate my 20th Pan-Mass Challenge, with renewed confidence and free of worry.

Ready? Let’s do it!

comments

Zenturion

2025-12-05T02:15:36Z

This just in, from our “Unexpected Accomplishments” department…

Like many games, Zwift – the most popular online multiuser cycling “world” for indoor trainer users – has always had user experience “levels” roughly corresponding to how far you’ve ridden. Since I joined up back in 2018, Zwift has recurrently increased the number of XP levels, from 25 to 50, then 60, and two years ago they added levels 61 thru 100.

There’s always been some cachet for being a rider at the maximum XP level, a status I first attained in April 2021, when I reached Level 50 after 2.4 years of Zwifting, which I wrote about here. But 18 months later, Zwift went and added 10 more levels, and then another 40 soon after that! So to regain my place on top of the heap, I spent the last five years “grinding” levels, as the gamer-geeks would say.

Zwift Level 100 Banner

Modeling Zwift Level 100 Kit

Zwift experience points gauge

Zwift rider profile page statistics

By default, Zwift awards riders 20 experience points (XP) per kilometer ridden. And if that were the only way to earn XP, it would take 40,000 kilometers of riding to accrue the 807,000 XP required to reach Level 100.

But here’s a kick in the teeth: that 807,000 XP only applies if you started Zwifting today, as a brand new rider. Because I spent time as a max-level rider back in 2021, Zwift penalized me, forcing me to re-earn XP I’d already accrued… at an “accelerated” rate. But they also changed it so that instead of needing 807,000 XP to reach Level 100, I needed 1,087,000 XP!

You read that right: because I am a loyal, longtime user, Zwift made it 35% harder for me to level up than a new first-time user who started riding yesterday!

Fortunately, I didn’t have to ride 54,000 KM to get there, because there are a handful of ways that all riders can accrue XP bonuses and level up faster.

The first is simply to do a Zwift ride every week. You get a bonus (typically 500 XP) after completing your first ride of each week. That can add up very nicely over time, and I’m presently on a 61-week streak.

Another is to ride new routes. In most cases, when you complete a route for the first time, you are awarded a bonus that essentially doubles that ride’s XP. Plus you get a route completion badge in your list of achievements. So a lot of people focus on completing all of Zwift’s ~275 routes. And I’ve done ‘em all.

But for the biggest benefit of all: once a year Zwift puts on a six-week-long “tour” where every ride offers double XP, and you can ride as often as you want during that time. In the past, that was their “Tour of Watopia”, which (sensibly) ran in the early spring, when most riders are ramping up their training. However, this fall they replaced it with another tour – called “Zwift Unlocked” – which counterintuitively begins in October (do not want!). Since these events offer the opportunity to level up twice as rapidly as usual, they’re extremely popular. I usually manage to do 30-50 double-XP rides.

This year I’ve made use of all those strategies and more, as I laboriously pulled myself upward from Level 80 (where I stood at the end of 2024). When I set this year’s cycling goals, I never imagined Level 100 would be achievable in 2025; but because Zwift ran both the final Tour of Watopia in the spring and the first Zwift Unlimited tour this fall, here we are!

Even with all the ways I’ve (legally) gamed the system, it still took me seven years of riding to reach Level 100. And in that time I’ve logged 1,130 hours and covered 33,500 kilometers on the indoor trainer (if I have to do the math for you, that’s nearly 21,000 miles).

I should note that it took exactly seven years, because I timed my rides such that I hit Level 100 on December 3: my seventh Zwiftiversary. As an aside… I’ve done a Zwift ride on every one of my Zwiftiversaries, and usually something a little special. Twice I completed a 100 km Zwift gran fondo; two other times I earned a badge from doing a new route for the first time; and one year it coincided with one of my PMC group rides. This year, the timing worked out just right so that I could reach Level 100 at the conclusion my seventh year.

In the lead-up to that day, I thought about how I’d capture the moment. Obviously, I’d record the achievement banner that pops up, and I also wanted a picture of my avatar wearing the hard-won “Level 100” jersey… But what would be the best setting, among the near-infinite number of views in Zwift’s dozen virtual worlds?

After brief consideration, the answer came easily: on Watopia’s 360 Bridge, of course! For more than a decade, the fictional world of “Watopia” has been Zwift’s primary virtual setting. And while it isn’t the most picturesque spot, Watopia’s arcing 360 Bridge was the obvious choice.

Why? Well, it was added to Zwift back in 2015 by co-founder John Mayfield, who grew up in Austin. It is a virtual rendering of the 1982 Pennybacker Bridge spanning Lake Austin on the Loop 360 highway that local cyclists sometimes use. Since it’s located just four kilometers from where I live, how could I not rep it in Zwift? On top of that, it was a highlight in my 3rd Zwift ride, back in 2018, as part of my first-ever FTP test. Hence it appears in the screenshots at right.

Reaching Level 100 is an immense achievement. I’ve been looking forward to this day since they piled on more levels back in 2022. It has been the primary goal I’ve worked toward for more than three years. Now I can finally take pride in once again calling myself a max-level rider.

Two years ago, when I was a Level 58 rider, just about to reach the then-max Level 60, Zwift moved the goalpost by adding 40 more XP levels. Psych! That was pretty discouraging, so I’m delighted they didn’t do that to me again, just before I reached Level 100!

And before that, in 2021 my time as a max Level 50 rider only lasted 18 months before Zwift added Levels 51-60. That leaves me wondering how soon Zwift might surprise us by adding more XP levels beyond 100. During his popular Thanksgiving Day ride, Zwift founder Eric Min even admitted that it was in the works already! TBH, I wouldn’t mind having more levels to chase… but let me enjoy being a max-level rider again for a little while, first!

In my 2021 blogpo after I reached Level 50, I wondered whether I’d continue Zwifting as much as I had before reaching its then-highest level. I wrote that Zwift would probably add more levels or other ways to incentivize riders, and that’s exactly what happened. So today I’m not worried about losing motivation just because I’ve reached the end of the XP treadmill. Zwift will keep adding more routes, more achievements, new program features, and probably additional XP levels…

And I’ll keep riding, tho for now with a little less obsessive focus on maximizing my XP tally. And hopefully – once I get past a nagging pulled hammie – I’ll be able to close out the year with more outdoor riding, now that I’ve finally conquered the highest attainment in all of Zwift…

For the time being, at least.

comments

Strong Living

2025-11-13T21:40:43Z

Coming into the 2025 event, my history with the Livestrong Challenge was not pleasant. In 2023 I suffered mightily in extreme heat, puking my guts out just after completing the 100-mile route, then needing to call my partner to drive me home; all later documented in a blogpo entitled “It's Not Easy Being Green in the Face”. And in 2024 I had to cancel my ride, having been hospitalized with a stroke less than two weeks before the event. But in 2025, with all that behind me, would the third time be the charm?

Chilly, Foggy Morning in Austin

Team Kermit

Lined Up at Sunrise

Crossing the Finish Line

Greeted by Team Leader at the Finish

Ride 'Em Cowboy

One thing was certain: it was gonna be a hectic week. Within seven days of the ride, I observed my birthday, took my partner Inna to the airport for a 6-day trip and picked her up on her return, dealt with Halloween, voted in the state election, attended a baroque concert, waited for big news from the Pan-Mass Challenge’s record-setting check presentation ceremony, booked my hotel on Cape Cod for next year’s PMC, balanced riding in Zwift’s “Unlocked” series of rides with tapering my training, replaced my cell phone, and watched local team Austin FC’s brief run in the MLS Cup playoffs. That doesn’t even include the group rides and social events organized by my Team Kermit buddies who came down to Austin from New England, plus the seasonal daylight saving clock change and a big concert by Devo and the B-52s , both of which took place the night before the ride!

Anything else noteworthy in the lead-up? My training featured the Barrows Volksride 100k and the new Zwift Unlocked series of rides on the indoor trainer. But I was still iffy about whether I’d have the legs to do the 100-mile imperial century versus the 100-kilometer metric. It was also my first test of setting intermediate waypoints on my Garmin Edge bike computer, which worked marginally well (the waypoint list being useful, but the associated popup messages disappeared too quickly while riding). I also was shocked to learn that despite fielding over 500 riders, Livestrong hadn’t bothered to set up a “SAG” telephone number for riders who needed assistance on-route.

As usual, my Team Kermit buddies were down from New England, tho we were short a couple people I was looking forward to seeing. Sadly, I missed the team’s ride and meals on Thursday because I’d initially been left off the group emails.

Once that was corrected, I joined them on Friday for a ride out the Walnut Creek Trail, even though the 70 KM I accrued probably hurt my freshness form Sunday’s main event. Then Friday evening the team held an all-you-can-meat extravaganza at the Salt Lick BBQ joint way down in Driftwood.

Saturday I did all my prep and gathered my kit for the ride, then met the Kermits for packet pickup and a publicity photoshoot at Livestrong HQ. Then an early dinner of Thai food before heading down to the Devo & B-52s concert, where I basically spent a long 4½ hours standing around – including through a downpour and thunderstorm – the night before the ride! You can read about that here. That left me four hours to sleep – plus another hour gained thanks to the seasonal clock change! – before my pre-ride wakeup call.

Sunday morning I arose to dense fog and a chilly temperature of 10° C, so I added a base layer, arm warmers, and a windbreaker to my normal cycling kit. Since Inna was out of town, I drove myself down to the event, rather than endure a cold and time-consuming bike ride. Knowing I’d need space to store that extra clothing once the day warmed up, I decided to forego bringing my video selfie drone. But I got to the start, found my Team Kermit buddies, lined up with them in the VIP starting area, and kicked the ride off at 7:30am.

One of my goals was to start out at a relaxed pace, conserving some energy. In 2023, the combination of a fast start and extreme heat had taken an immense toll, as my pace faltered and slowed to a crawl as the ride wore on. By keeping a moderate pace, I hoped to avoid blowing up and beat that previous time.

But as soon as 25 KM in, I questioned that aspiration and the wisdom of doing the full 100-mile route. I was cold, sleep-deprived, dehydrated, poorly fueled, and not fully recovered from Friday’s 70 KM ride. I felt pretty lousy as I pulled into the Driftwood rest stop at 45 KM. However, I downed a banana and grabbed a couple chocolate chip cookies, and seemed to recover my strength. I was also buoyed as the skies cleared and the temperature rose.

Shortly after leaving that Driftwood stop, I picked up a wheelsucker, which would be the salient feature of the day. By riding just behind another cyclist, you can save anywhere from 15 to 35% of your power, so sitting on another rider’s wheel is a tactic for riders who want a brief rest. In pacelines, riders rotate from front to back, spending a little extra effort at the front in exchange for lots of time to rest in the protected draft of everyone else.

That wasn’t what my wheelsucker did, tho. He sat on my wheel for the next four hours, benefiting from my draft for 90 KM, without once taking a pull on the front. Through the next five rest stops, whether I stopped for 10 minutes or didn’t pull in at all, he remained glued to my wheel. To be fair, I didn’t complain – having no real reason to – and he did apologize, but it was kinda disconcerting nonetheless. I shrugged it off and just did my own ride, and when I took a little extra time to recover at the last rest stop, he finally chose to continue on without me.

As I mentioned above, one of my goals was to beat my 2023 time. While I started out slower this year, I figured I’d gain a lot of time in the latter half of the course, because in 2023 I’d slowed significantly as I fatigued, plus I had wasted a lot of time at rest stops, trying to recover. My theory more than proved out. Although I was 20 minutes behind my 2023 time in reaching the Driftwood stop, I’d begun pulling that back by the halfway point. And in the end I crossed the finish line at 2:08pm, beating my previous time by exactly an hour!

After the ride, I was in a much better physical state than I’d been in 2023. I grabbed my finisher’s medal, hung out to cheer the teammates who finished after me, and downed 4 slices of pizza and a couple cans of cola. In my email I found the announcement that this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge (which I’d ridden remotely) had donated a record $78 million to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. And in another unexpected surprise, one of our Team Kermit riders won a gorgeous hand-built wooden kayak after entering the Livestrong raffle!

When the team eventually moseyed back to their hotel, I hopped back on the bike to ride an extra 11 KM. See, the Livestrong route is actually a little bit short of 100 miles, and I wanted to make sure I did a full century. Plus, during the ride I’d accidentally paused my bike computer’s activity for about 15 minutes, so my recorded mileage was short by another 7 KM. So I chose to ride a little extra, to avoid any controversy about my second 100 mile ride of the year and 112th in total. Only then did I pack up and head home for my appointment with a massage gun and a bowl of ice cream.

As I said at the top, it was an intensely hectic week, culminating with a difficult endurance event. But I came through it successfully, and felt really accomplished, as well as exhausted. I spent a little more social time with Team Kermit, and enjoyed a couple brief conversations with my grammar school buddy turned Livestrong board member, Scott.

It was an immense improvement over last year, when I had to cheer from the sidelines following my stroke, and over 2023, when I struggled to complete the ride before promptly retching liters of undigested sports drink into a handy trash bin. The 2025 Livestrong Challenge weekend was just as intense as those previous years, but it was memorable for far more positive reasons.

comments

Volksriden

2025-10-23T20:32:35Z

Since imperial centuries have become as rare as hen’s teeth for me, I guess I have to start reporting out on the metric centuries I do, or at least the 100 km “event rides”.

After a post-PMC lull, which included last month’s trip to South Carolina, my October was focused on building back up to fitness in preparation for the upcoming Livestrong Challenge. Two weeks before Livestrong, there was a nearby event ride that I figured would be a great warm-up.

So last Saturday I rode the Barrows Volksride. It was my first 100 km ride since my PMC, 2½ months ago. And it had been 18 months since I did a “new-to-me” organized event as a first-time rider.

As I was focused on building fitness, I decided not to taper my training, only taking one day off the bike to freshen the legs somewhat.

Ironically, during that rest day I discovered the Real Ale Ride down in Blanco, another local event which took place at the same time. Both are put on by breweries (something I feel pretty iffy about), but raise money for their local volunteer fire departments. With Austin cycling events being pretty rare to begin with, it seems stupid for these two fundraisers to take place on the exact same day.

For the Volksride, at 8am three or four hundred riders set out on the roads around Salado and Holland, Texas. The delightful mid-October weather started out around 22° C, with scattered clouds. A 13 kph wind out of the south was at our backs for the first third of the ride, allowing us to easily roll along at 38 kph with minimal effort. There was a long section of fresh chipseal, but it was well-packed, and thus not too painful. The biggest negative was the morning sun directly in our faces, occasionally blinding us.

For the first time in a big event ride, I broke out my HoverAir selfie drone and captured some video as I rode past Summers Mill on Salado Creek, but it wasn’t smart enough to get the framing I wanted. As I stopped to retrieve it, it recalcitrantly kept its distance, until I sneakily turned and leapt up to snag it out of mid-air.

Although the ride mostly featured flat farmlands, there were two noteworthy hills right after the second water stop, 40 km into the ride. After that point, the route turned south into the teeth of a 24 kph headwind, making progress a hard, painful slog for the next 30 km.

After 90 minutes of fighting the wind, I reached the final rest stop at 10:54am. Temps had risen to a record 30° C, but at least the steady wind kept the heat from building on the roads. As we zig-zagged north and west, I’d hit segments where I could easily cruise, and others where you had to fight for every meter.

My lower back started complaining, so I took numerous opportunities to stand and ride out of the saddle. My fitness held out until the very last corner, when I started feeling the first hints of leg cramps. I looked forward to working those out with my impact massager later in the evening.

Just 250 meters later, I crossed the ride’s finishing gate at 12:06pm. I’d accrued 102 km in just over 4 hours, with a modest but surprising 730 meters of climbing. More importantly, I’d gained 240 points of Training Stress (TSS), and yet another big finisher’s medal to add to my trophy case.

But the important part here is to give you my impression after doing this ride for the first time. Overall, it was a pretty good ride. It was a nice, unchallenging route (save for the wind), and it made for a pleasant morning in the saddle, accruing training load. I’d consider returning, although I might also want to try the Real Ale Ride too, which is held in a lumpier – but potentially more scenic – section of the Hill Country.

And now we look ahead, toward the next big challenge…

comments

Rolling Resistance

2025-10-05T14:40:50Z

Back in June, on my third Bicycle House shop ride, I had a flat tire. Replacing my inner tube (plus a second tube and CO2 cartridge given to me by the ride leader) required a trip to the bike shop to replenish my parts inventory. In turn, that was an opportunity to finally try some changes to my wheel setup that I’d been considering for more than a year.

One change I made was simply making use of a new-ish tool that had been sitting in a drawer for months. I’ve struggled for years with how difficult it is to mount and dismount my tires, especially in a roadside repair. And recently moving to tighter-fitting “tubeless-ready” tires and wheels made that problem significantly worse.

The Tyre Glider is a little blue plastic device that makes both removing and installing tires considerably easier, replacing traditional tire levers and bulky tire jacks. After finally pulling mine out and putting it to the test, I can say it delivers on its promise. Not only can I get stubborn tires onto the rim, but I also don’t run the risk of puncturing brand-new inner tubes while mounting them. Two greasy thumbs-up!

Another item I’d been contemplating for years was a pocket-sized battery-powered inflator, which could replace both my frame pump and CO2 cartridges. These innovative little devices have become commoditized, and I used Amazon Prime Day to pick one up at 30% off. It’s the Fanttik X10 Ace Mini, from the same brand that makes the larger inflator I use for our car. While I haven’t used the Ace Mini a ton, my early results have been very positive.

Having struggled (as I said above) with mounting my tubeless-ready Continental GP5000 tires onto my rims, I’ve wanted to try a different brand, to see if they might go on easier. I’d heard positive things about Pirelli P-Zeros, and discovered that they still offered an expressly non-tubeless clincher version, which would be an easier fit. I picked up a pair of those and have been running them ever since. They feel great, and my only complaint is that they don’t seem quite as durable as other tires I’ve used.

At the same time, I also picked up some Pirelli TPU (plastic) inner tubes that I was eager to try. They are considerably lighter than traditional butyl rubber tubes, and are more manageable than the third alternative: latex tubes. A lot of riders keep TPU tubes as spares because they’re lighter and more compact, but I’d rather run TPUs all the time and have a reliable old butyl tube as my emergency backup.

Because I swapped tires and tubes at the same time, I can’t say whether the changes in my bike’s ride-feel were due to the P-Zeros or the TPU tubes… probably a combination. On top of that, the differences were pretty subtle, and I’m not the best at discerning minuscule differences in ride feel.

In comparison to my previous tires and tubes, it’s possible the new combination of P-Zeros and TPU tubes felt lighter, rode smoother, was a little quieter, held air a little better, and had a little less rolling resistance. But any difference was slight.

But there were two huge differences that were specific to the TPU tubes.

First was price. At around $30, each TPU tube cost three times as much as a butyl tube. We’re not talking huge dollars here, but for triple the price, I expected a vastly superior product.

And then there’s durability, which is where I’ve struggled to justify running TPU tubes at all, even though I really, really wanted to switch over to them. My first TPU tube lasted just 180 kilometers: 5 rides, or 8½ hours of ride time. The second went flat just 23 km into its first ride. The third didn’t survive 3 rides, or 86 km. That’s your three strikes; yer out.

So while running TPU tubes, I had 3 flats in 290 km; in contrast, my last butyl tube had served for more than 7,800 km! At that rate, I could run butyl tubes for $10 per year, or burn through $2,900 per year on TPU tubes!

The confounding thing is that those TPU flats were all on my rear tire, while the TPU tube I installed on the front has served flawlessly for more than 2,000 km! I guess the real test will be to move that tube to the rear wheel and see how much longer it lasts…

While I might prefer TPU tubes’ ride feel, they’re just not worth the cost, especially because TPU tubes just don’t work in real-life usage. End of experiment.

Before I close, I’ll share three other noteworthy purchases which don’t have anything to do with tires.

One was a set of plastic inserts from Risk that increase the size of the hidden buttons underneath Di2 shifter brake hoods. The stock buttons are really tiny, making them hard to activate. These simple inserts provide a larger active surface area, increasing the usability of those buttons. At $8 for four, they’re cheap, easy to install, and effective: just the kinda thing I like!

I also had to replace my big chainring, which was damaged during one of my many TPU flat repairs (long story). After I ordered the part, it took just 15 minutes for the Trek store to perform a while-you-wait installation. That’s a big improvement over the treatment I got at the Specialized shop earlier this year, which kept my bike for 15 days to do a simple tune-up!

And if you bike in Texas, you need to learn how to manage the copious amount of sweat you generate. So I’m currently testing the efficacy of double-width wrist sweatbands. So far, so good, but I’m afraid of getting even stupider (sic) tan lines, so we’ll see how that goes.

I might not have blogged much lately, but from an “equipment” perspective, it’s been an eventful summer!

comments

2025 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined

2025-08-18T22:17:11Z

This is just a placeholder to direct you to my 2025 Pan-Mass Challenge Ride Report. It contains the full details of this year's “Reimagined” PMC ride, which I rode solo at home in Austin. As always, a lengthy writeup is supplemented with photos, videos, maps, charts, and GPS tracklogs.

Like 2024, this year I created a 5-minute ride summary video montage, which you see below. I hope you enjoy it!

This year’s ride report also includes a big announcement about next year’s ride, which I hope you’ll read.

comments

Adamant

2025-06-18T18:41:59Z

Saturday’s Fire Ant Tour was an important ride. Most importantly, it was the longest ride I’ve done since my heart surgery back in March, and since my stroke last October. In fact, it was my first metric century since my solo PMC ride last August, and my first organized event ride since the 2024 Fire Ant Tour, a full year ago! On top of all that, this was my final opportunity to test my readiness before registration closes for this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge.

I’d already missed several other opportunities for long rides this spring, which I talked about in my previous update. But this post is about the ride I completed, so with all my hopes for a post-op recovery pinned on this event, how did it go?

Enjoying the scenery while earning mah kibble!

Looking strong crossing the line after 100 km.

Showing off a hard-earned finisher's medal.

The lead-in to the event was unsettled, in more ways than one. The weather was a little iffy after a week of scattered thunderstorms. In addition to my general health questions, I wasn’t sure I’d trained sufficiently. Then my final equipment check found a gouge in my rear tire that necessitated a swap back to an old tire I’d kept around.

I had concerns about the course, too. The organizers had tweaked the route, making it the event’s third different course in as many years. And at the last minute riders were warned that the local DPW had just resurfaced one of the final roads on the course with universally-hated chipseal.

Nonetheless, riders set out at 7:15am. My plan was to conserve energy by keeping my effort level moderate, around 130 Watts. And I closely monitored the estimate of my remaining stamina that my Garmin bike computer provided. In the end, that all worked out very well.

I also wanted to concentrate on fueling and hydrating more than usual, with mixed success. I managed to down a couple chocolate chip cookies at the rest stops, but completely forgot to take any of the electrolyte supplements I’d brought.

Having learned from previous editions, I’d expected challenging weather, specifically, hot and very windy conditions. The morning began with ideal conditions: 22°, with overcast skies, and no wind to speak of. As the sun climbed, the clouds gradually burned off, temperatures jumped to 30°, and the wind picked up, coming out of the south at 20 km/h and gusting to 31. But that was still kind of benign as compared to previous years.

The route began with a familiar 40 km loop, which went by quickly due to strong legs, light winds, and moderate temperatures. That was followed by a new 40 km out-and-back on FM 215 that illustrated how much impact the wind had. With a tailwind on the northbound leg, I averaged 123W for 47 minutes; but returning against the wind, I had to average 126W for 65 minutes to cover the same distance. Despite sustaining more power for an additional 18 minutes, I went 7.3 km/h slower heading south!

After nursing it home for the final 20 km, I crossed the finish line at 11:50am with 101 km under my belt.

The ride was a little challenging, mostly because I just wasn’t fully trained up for that distance yet. But thanks to the weather I wasn’t quite as thoroughly wiped as I’ve been in previous years. Taking into account my comeback from stroke and heart surgery, as well as my incomplete training, I was extremely happy with my performance.

Most noteworthy, this has cleared the way for me to finally register for my remote Pan-Mass Challenge ride, confident that I can at least put in a creditable performance to “earn” my sponsors’ donations for cancer research at the Dana-Farber. The scary part is that PMC weekend is only six weeks away, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for fundraising and long training rides… Yikes!

I can’t finish this ride report without covering the rest of my day. After happily completing my first cycling event in more than a year, I picked up a very nice finisher’s medal before heading back to Austin. After the drive home, I filled up on fresh strawberries and some Ben & Jerry’s mint Oreo cookie ice cream, followed by two trips to our free and shockingly uncrowded neighborhood swimming pool (after a thunderstorm caused that interruption). It was one of those idyllic, self-indulgent summer days that you dream about.

I hope that sets the tone for the rest of the year!

comments

Event-ful… Or Not

2025-06-02T16:46:57Z

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…

comments

Why Specialized?

2025-05-01T20:31:07Z

For whatever reasons, a lot of people dislike the major bicycle manufacturers. I’ve ridden Specialized bikes for two decades now, and one question I haven’t talked about is: “Why Specialized”?

So I wrote this big long essay following my progression as a cyclist over time and describing all my bikes and how much I used them and… never got around to answering the question.

So instead of a multi-volume encyclopedic life history, how about I just answer the goddamned question?

Episode One: The Plastic Bullet

The Plastic Bullet at the 2007 PMC.

I bought my first Specialized bike in 2005. At that point, I’d already ridden five Pan-Mass Challenge charity rides, and was a regular at Bobby Mac’s long group rides out of Quad Cycles. I’d transitioned into a committed endurance cyclist, after having started out as a short-distance bike commuter.

But that transition wasn’t something that suited my straight-bar hybrid commuter bike. I needed something faster, lighter, and more aerodynamic; something as zippy as the typical racing road bike but more comfortable, tailored for epically long days in the saddle. But no one sold such a thing!

Enter Specialized, who had just designed a carbon fiber bike that was fast enough for pro racing, but more reliable and forgiving in the cobblestone-strewn European spring classics races. They gave it a longer wheelbase, more front fork rake, and elastomer inserts to produce a smoother ride. In their new Specialized Roubaix, they had created the first bike in a whole new category: performance endurance bikes.

When I wanted a bike that combined top performance with all-day comfort, Specialized was the only company that could meet my needs. And the Plastic Bullet delivered on its “performance endurance” reputation, accompanying me through 7 PMCs, 30 imperial centuries, and 35,000 kilometers.

Episode Two: R2-Di2

R2-Di2 at Boston’s Charles River Esplanade

Fast-forward seven years, and it was time to replace my trusty steed. Other manufacturers had introduced their endurance bikes, and I had grown into a discriminating roadie, so I took the time to test-ride eight different bikes.

However, nothing held a candle to the fourth-generation Roubaix, which was lighter, stiffer, and came with Shimano’s Di2 electronic shifting. Specialized was still the undisputed king of the performance endurance category.

Besides being my top pick, Specialized offered me a 20% manufacturer’s discount on the new Roubaix. By offering me an amazing bike at an amazing price, they ensured I’d be a loyal Specialized rider for the next chapter in my cycling career.

And R2-Di2 delivered in spades. Together over 10 years, we ticked off 45,000 kilometers, 59 imperial centuries, and another 6 PMC rides… PLUS 22,000 virtual kilometers on the indoor trainer, along with 13 Zwift centuries!

Episode Three: Pæthos

Pæthos at Austin’s Redbud Isle

I was already delighted with Specialized, but when R2 finally came down with a fatal crack in the frame, they blew me away.

First, they have a discounted replacement plan for frames that break after their 2-year warranty expires. That’s pretty cool to begin with.

Unfortunately, that coverage stops after five years, and R2 was a decade old. But after they inspected my bike, they not only included me in the program, but offered me the 35% discount that you’d only get for a bike that was less than three years old! Imagine trading in a 10 year old bike and getting $2,500 toward a brand new model. Wow!

My only hesitation was that over that decade, the Roubaix had forgotten its “performance” heritage and evolved into a gimmicky, cushy family cruiser that no longer suited me. When I asked if I could apply the replacement discount to a different model… No problem! So they let me order an Æthos, their lightweight climbing race bike. Yay!

But there was a problem. This was toward the end of the Covid pandemic, when bike inventory had all been bought up, and the whole industry’s supply chain was in ruins. There was only one Æthos in my size left in the entire country, and it was in a bike shop in Denver, Colorado. But my incredibly responsive rep persuaded them to surrender it and ship it down to Austin for me.

So although I lost a very dear friend in my 2013 Roubaix, Specialized gave me an upgrade to an amazing, brand-new Æthos at an unbelievable price. I hope to put my new Pæthos through the wringer, too!

The Bottom Line

So to finally answer the question…

I ride Specialized because their products have been excellent: well-designed, durable, and suited to my needs as a devoted endurance cyclist.

While I’ve come to expect petty greed from big corporations, Specialized has been shockingly generous with me, offering huge discounts well in excess of their corporate policies.

And beyond all that, they’ve been stunningly friendly and flexible, letting me apply my frame replacement discount to a different model, and then helping me track down and acquire the solitary bike in the country that fulfilled my needs.

Buying my first Specialized Roubaix road bike filled me with excitement and delight. That joy has stayed with me through three bike purchase cycles, over 100 imperial centuries, and more than 100,000 kilometers of riding. And Specialized’s bicycles and their treatment of me as a customer have been a significant part of the delight and enjoyment I’ve gotten throughout 20 years of cycling. Thank you, and well done!

The only area where they’ve disappointed me is in not offering more paint schemes or a custom paint program. You’d think that after 50 years in business, they would have figured that out. How about it, Spesh?

comments

Rode to Recovery

2025-04-24T14:30:51Z

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!

comments

I Care About Nutrition

2025-04-16T22:32:28Z

For reasons I’ll explain in a second, improving my diet became a critical consideration following my stroke. But I had lots of questions about the areas where healthy eating directly conflicts with sports nutrition’s best practices for endurance athletes. I decided to get answers from a professional, and this blogpost summarizes what I got out of consulting a nutritionist for the first time in my life.

This is one of those posts where it’s not clear whether it belongs on my general blog or here on my cycling-specific blog. Since I came at this from a cyclist’s perspective, I decided to post it to the latter, so that other cyclists would more readily find it. But most of this is equally relevant to my non-cycling readers.

Where I Started

The statistics say that 25 percent of stroke survivors will have a second stroke. And, according to the hospitalist who was in charge of me during my hospitalization, the greatest determinant of whether you have another stroke is diet. Survivors who didn’t change to a heart-healthy diet had the most readmissions, in contrast to those who took dietary advice to heart.

What did she specifically advocate? This:

Reduce inflammation and chances of developing diabetes by cutting intake of simple sugars
Reduce cardiac risks by limiting dietary fat intake, especially saturated and trans fats
Avoid hypertension by reducing intake of table salt and highly processed foods
Maintain healthy blood volume by staying fully hydrated

That was the first advice I got following my stroke, and – as a Type A personality and someone with an intense fear of stroke – I took her opinions extremely seriously. Even though I’m significantly younger, healthier, and more active than most stroke survivors, improving my diet seemed, at that time, to be a matter of life and death.

However, as an endurance cyclist, two of those strictures are problematic for me. Simple carbs are the preferred and primary fuel for athletes; would I be risking my health by continuing to emphasize them in my diet? And it’s pretty hard to avoid chronic dehydration if you’re riding hard in the Texas sun for a multiple hours every day.

Although I’ve stayed on top of changing dietary recommendations for decades, these contradictory needs convinced me that it would make sense to consult a nutritionist for the first time in my life.

Another factor is that I was very concerned about weight loss. From 2011 through 2022, my body weight stayed in a narrow range, mostly between 76 and 79 kg, averaging out at 77.3. But in the last five months of 2022 I suddenly and inexplicably dropped 6½ kilos (15 lbs). I gained about half of that back, but then lost another 3½ kg in the weeks following my stroke, bringing me down to an adult-era low weight of 71.2 kg (157 lbs). A nutritionist could help me figure out how to stem my ongoing weight loss while simultaneously cutting both carbohydrates and fat out of my diet.

More Medical Advice I Got

I’ve already outlined the alarmist attitude that my hospitalist instilled in me right after my stroke, and where that advice led me.

But I immediately started getting contradictory advice from every other healthcare provider I talked to.

A week after my stroke, I had a followup with my family physician, who told me that nutrition was a long-term concern and not to overdo any drastic changes to my diet. But as a PCP he’s a generalist, so I remained skeptical, while making sure I got a referral to a nutritionist out of him.

A week after that, I had a followup with my neurologist, whose attitude was that nutrition is just about general health and preventing blood clots, which is more of a cardiologist’s domain.

It took another month before a long-awaited meeting with my cardiologist. His attitude was another surprising counterpoint to the hospitalist. He also claimed that diet is purely a long-term concern, saying both “Go eat a pizza if you want,” and “Eating heart-healthy is not the most pleasant thing.”

After all that, I really didn’t know what to think. The obvious consensus was that diet wasn’t the smoking gun that the hospitalist had portrayed. But it was still hard for me to cast aside her staunchly-held opinion, since it was the only obvious thing that I could control.

But maybe my nutritionist would provide a decisive opinion…

My Nutritionist Experience

I’ve never really thought of nutritionists as a highly skilled profession. As I see it, there are two main aspects to the job.

One part is staying up-to-date on the ever-changing “science” – separating genuine dietary knowledge from the deluge of biased pseudo-science – and distilling that down into a form that’s digestible for their uninformed clients.

This would be of some benefit to me. Having paid attention to sports nutrition for 25 years, I’m pretty well-informed. But I’m less up-to-date on heart- and health-related topics, and never had to deal with problematic weight loss. And it’d be nice to get the current scoop on perpetual debates like “Are eggs good or bad?” and “Which is healthier: butter or margarine?”

The other – and possibly larger – aspect to the job is similar to that of a therapist: talking with clients and trying to manage them into growing the self-discipline required to make lasting dietary changes.

As I mentioned above, I’m a Type A; I don’t need external support once I’ve decided to change my behavior. So the coaching aspect of the nutritionist’s job is really of no value to me.

The most valuable and immediate advice she game me was when she confirmed what my other healthcare providers had said: that I didn’t need to approach dietary changes with a crisis response and rigidity, and that no one individual choice is gonna kill you. I didn’t need to eliminate all fats and simple carbs from my diet, after all. I was already living a pretty healthy lifestyle, and the emphasis should be on fitting increasingly beneficial habits into a healthy diet whose results compound over time.

But beyond that high-level advice, after four meetings in five months, I’m still not convinced that a nutritionist brings a ton of expertise and value to the table. My nutritionist mostly just repeated standard advice that variety is most important and that even “bad” foods are okay when taken in moderation.

At the same time, I don’t want to sell her short. I did get some novel, useful information from her that manifested in some dietary changes I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. So let’s take a look at those…

Specific Dietary Recommendations

It’s pointless talking about the changes I’ve made without first reviewing my diet prior to my stroke. After all, I made a number of significant improvements over the years, and those remain a noteworthy part of the overall equation. Here are some positive features of my baseline diet that I’ve observed for some time:

Daily multivitamin and psyllium husk fiber supplements
Replace full- and low-fat milk with fat-free/skim
Virtually eliminate beef intake
Never, ever add salt to anything (except corn on the cob)
Cook at home; eating out is a rarity
Emphasize broccoli as my primary leafy vegetable
Replace ice cream with sorbet/sherbet or fruit pops
Replace high-fat sauces like alfredo with low-fat tomato sauces like marinara
Keep an eye on the ever-changing recommendations regarding eggs, butter vs. oil-based spreads, etc.
Reduce or eliminate soft drink intake, replace with fruit juices like OJ, apple cider, lime- and lemonade, and fruit punch
No significant intake of caffeine outside of major events and medicinally
No alcohol in any form, ever, period

Even after accepting that the hospitalist’s alarmist warning was misguided, I still wanted to make incremental improvements to my diet. Specifically, I wanted to reduce fats, sodium, and simple carbs (beyond my athletic needs). Between my own research and input from my nutritionist and cardiologist, I’ve landed on the following new guidelines:

Daily statin prescription to keep cholesterol down, even tho my numbers were never high
Daily Omega-3 fatty acid supplements (algae-based rather than fish oil)
Whey protein isolate powder supplement
Eliminate or curtail high-fat foods, particularly commercially-prepared baked goods, cocoa, frozen pizza, etc.
Read labels to select lower-fat chocolate candies, and healthier salty snacks that are baked or use healthier oils like avocado
Reduce overall cheese intake, and use 2% milkfat cheese over full-fat
Sauté and stir-fry in avocado oil rather than corn or peanut oils (it has a higher smoke point than olive oil)
Substitute ground turkey and pork for ground beef
Supplement wheat-based pastas with lentil-based
Favor lower-sodium soups like corn chowder; at some point start making my own soups
Expand meal repertoire by reintroducing or increasing things like:
- Boiled chicken
- Oatmeal (with raisins, sunflower seeds, and dried fruits)
- Baked beans
- Mashed potato
- Sweet potato
- Nuts, especially hazelnuts
- Apples

Conclusion

Despite having a longstanding interest in sports nutrition, I never bothered consulting a nutritionist until now. I always doubted whether a nutritionist could add any useful information beyond what any self-educated layman could glean from readily-available public sources.

After a 5-month engagement, I mostly stand by that opinion, although it does need to be refined. My nutritionist helped refute the bad advice I got, and provided some suggestions that were truly useful. But those were largely tactical adjustments, rather than significant course changes. So she definitely did add value… just perhaps not as much as I had hoped for from a licensed medical professional.

I’d be temped to conclude that it wasn’t worth the money, but my health insurance covered the entire tab! All it cost me was time, so in that respect I got way more valuable insights than I paid for.

But I’m still skeptical about whether consulting a nutritionist is worth it for most cyclists or your average non-cyclist. If you have a very particular situation, like I did, then perhaps it would be. But if you’re interested enough to have questions about nutrition, you’re probably also motivated enough to find the answers for yourself, rather than pay someone else to do it for you. A nutritionist really isn’t privy to any information that can’t be found elsewhere.

It absolutely does make all kinds of sense for a cyclist to learn the basics of sports nutrition, and there’s no shortage of available material. For myself, my bookshelf includes the fairly lightweight “Bicycling Magazine’s Nutrition for Peak Performance” by Ed Pavelka, and the more comprehensive “Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes” by Monique Ryan. But these days there’s ample other sources, too.

That’s it! Now let’s go eat to ride, and ride to eat!

comments

Special Operations

2025-03-10T19:09:28Z

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

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!

comments

Rolling into 2025

2025-01-08T02:13:12Z

This one’s just a minor but significant (to me) blog update. It’s not really even worth bringing others’ attention to it, except that I’m pleased with how I was able to make it work. So what is it?

Yawl know that there’s a sticky/pinned post pinned to the top of my blog with charts that track my Fitness as of my most recent ride.

And one of those charts has always shown my Fitness for the current calendar year.

The problem was: when the year is new (like it is now), that chart would be mostly empty, and it would take weeks or months for it to show any kind of meaningful data.

The obvious solution was to stop segmenting the chart by calendar year, and instead have it show my Fitness over a rolling 12-month period, kinda (exactly) like what you see below. That way it always shows a full year’s worth of data, with new data being added every day, and old data points rolling off.

Setting this up to happen automatically – without any user intervention – required a little tech wizardry to implement, but it’s now done and live on that pinned Up-To-Date Fitness Charts posting. I think it’s a nice little enhancement, and just wanted to call it out so that folks can take note of it.

Here’s what it looks like:

comments

2024: Second Life

2024-12-31T23:08:42Z

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!

My Previous
Annual Summaries

2023 2022 2021
2020 2019 2018
2017 2016 2015
2014 2013 2012
2011 2010 2009
2008 2007 2006
2005 2004 2003

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!

comments

Gear of the Year

2024-12-08T02:15:08Z

Sorry this post is so late in coming. I’ve been sitting on it for months, but the slow holiday season gave me the time to compile the output you’ll see at the bottom of the page. So I’m really happy to finally be able to share it with you!

In the early days of my cycling career, despite thousands of hours in the saddle, cyclists rarely got images of themselves riding. Maybe a fellow rider with a compact digital camera might catch you in a blurry, blocky photo, or you might take part in an organized event that happened to have a competent film photographer on-course. But these were pretty rare opportunities.

That started to change around 2010. Cellphone cameras finally improved to the point where they produced tolerable images. But more important was the 2012 release of the GoPro Hero3 action camera, whose tiny form factor allowed riders to capture usable still images – and even video! – while riding. I still remember the eye-popping wow factor when GoPro first let you take broadcast-quality video from a device the size of a deck of cards, that was easily carried in a jersey pocket.

With the rise in popularity of selfie sticks, you could easily stop and take a quick static portrait. But if you wanted video footage of yourself riding, you still needed to have someone else operating the camera…

Until now. Imagine having an automated camera that has the ability to follow you around, taking professional-grade video from various angles, distances, and heights, without requiring anyone else to operate it. And best of all: it still fits in a jersey pocket!

My Friend, Buzz

Get ready to surpass the sense of awe you felt when you saw your first GoPro action clip, because last year a company called Zero Zero Robotics blazed the trail with the world’s first and best pocket-sized autonomous-tracking flying selfie drone!

I first heard about their original HoverAir X1 model last March and immediately snagged one. If you read this blog, or follow my Strava feed, or saw my 2024 PMC Ride Report, you’ve already seen what it can do. The drone folds up to the size of a paperback book. Whip it out, select a flight pattern, give it a second to lock onto you visually, and it’ll do its thing – hover in place while keeping you in frame, zoom away from you and back in, zoom high above you and back down, fly in an orbit around you, follow you from behind, float alongside you as you move, or look back from ahead of you as you move toward it – all the while taking pretty usable video (2.7K @ 30 fps). And best of all: you mostly don’t have to worry about the governmental airspace restrictions that apply to larger drones.

When I started using it, I was totally blown away, but at the same time I still wanted more. The usability was great, but it took time to set up some of the shot parameters using their phone app. Once programmed, the drone struggled in windy conditions, and couldn’t keep pace with me above 20 km/h, which is a pretty pedestrian pace on a bike. And it would get fatally confused if you flew it in low light, over a body of water, or above terrain with sharp ups and downs.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from using it to capture various shots of myself and my rides. I used it for half the shots in my 2024 PMC ride video, plus my 2024 PMC jersey reveal, and several clips attached to the ride logs I posted on Strava.

But I also didn’t use it as often as I’d anticipated. See, you really don’t want to fly this thing when there are other people (or riders) around, or if there are cars nearby. So it’s kinda relegated to solo rides on quiet bike paths or completely empty roads. It’s just not safe to let it fly around autonomously on mass participation events or typical roadways.

Soon after I purchased my X1, I started hearing rumors about a potential new model. Of course, I dismissed those as just hopeful speculation, given that until recently Zero Zero Robotics was nothing more than a couple PhD students building prototypes.

But right after I published my PMC ride video in August, we learned that the rumored update – actually two new models – were coming, and a crowdfunding campaign opened for early adopters. I was curious but not that invested, since I already had an X1. I didn’t need a new drone unless they completely addressed all the shortcomings that limited its usefulness to me as a cyclist.

But then I read the spec sheet on their new models, especially the consumer-level X1 PRO, which blew the original X1 away in every respect. Instead of shooting 2.7K video @ 30 fps, it can shoot 4K @ 60 fps and 1080p at 120 fps. Battery duration jumped from 11 minutes to 16. Follow speed jumped from 20 km/h to 42 km/h, with short bursts up to 60 km/h! Instead of programming flight parameters on the phone, you can now do so right on the device. It can now fly against 40 km/h winds, in low light, above water and snow, or over high elevation changes like balconies or cliffs! A new handheld beacon improves how effectively it can track you, while also allowing you to see what its camera sees in real time, and use voice commands to control the drone! They also improved collision avoidance, the distance it can go from the user, and slightly reduced the noise level. And the X1 PRO MAX model is even more capable!

Basically, they addressed almost every complaint anyone had about the original X1. The only downside is that the new model is slightly heavier, slightly larger, and more-than-slightly higher priced… but it still fits in a cycling jersey pocket!

I was so impressed – both with the original X1 as well as the new units’ specs – that I jumped in on the early bird crowdfunding campaign as one of their first 2,400 customers, and received my new drone in early October.

Unfortunately, it arrived the day I came home from the hospital following a minor stroke, so it has sat on a shelf while I recuperated and rode my indoor trainer exclusively. But that was probably a good thing, because the original, hurried software and firmware have received numerous updates to ensure they delivered the functionality they’d promised.

I look forward to sharing the improved video I’ll be able to take on the new X1 PRO when I return to the roads in the spring. But in the meantime, here’s a painless 2-minute compilation of footage I took with the original X1 to demonstrate what even the older unit can do:

And I have every intention of sharing many more – and much better – videos from the new X1 PRO in the coming year. Be on the lookout ferum!

comments

Livestroke Challenge

2024-11-14T15:24:32Z

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.

comments

Covidiocy

2024-09-15T23:28:13Z

It took better than four years, but COVID finally found our residence, just in time to knock everyone down over the Fourth of July holiday.

In my 2024 PMC Ride Report I talked about how it interrupted my training for the biggest cycling event of my year, so I won’t go over that again. But I haven’t felt quite as strong on the bike since then, so I wanted to take a quick peek at whether COVID had any long-term effect on my cycling.

I decided to run some numbers, and if there’s one thing I have, it’s numbers!

To be unbiased, I decided on my protocol without looking at things beforehand. I’d compare my statistics across three two-month time periods:

May 1 to June 30 2024: the two months just before I contracted COVID
July 16 to September 15 2024: the two months right after I recovered from COVID
July 16 to September 15 2023: the same two months, but one year earlier

My hypothesis was that any post-COVID effects might show up as a decline in power and O2 saturation, and possibly an increase in heart rate.

Now let’s see the resulting numbers. I lined them up in chronological order.

Statistic	Jul-Sep 2023	May-Jun 2024	Jul-Sep 2024
Activities	42	42	40
Activity Hours	74	69	79
Avg. Power	127	130	124
Max. Power	680	677	721
Avg. HR	127	125	126
Max. HR	154	147	150
Resting HR	52	54	53
Weight	74	76	75
Temperature	36.6	36.7	36.7
BP	106 / 78	109 / 76	108 / 72
O2 Sat.	95	94	93
Body Fat	15.3	17.3	16.6
Hydration	54.1	52.6	52.9

The numbers are pretty clear: there’s no evidence of a systemic decrease in my fitness as a result of COVID.

In fact, if I looked at these numbers out of context, I’d say that the (pre-COVID) May-June period shows a slight decrease in performance from my 2023 numbers, but that there was a slight improvement in the July-September period (following COVID). Counterintuitively, nearly every statistic was either flat or slightly improved post-COVID! Of particular note were improvements in my max power and body fat percentage.

There were only two stats that were noticeably down, and they were the exact ones I hypothesized: a 4.6% decrease in my average power, and a slightly lower O2 saturation. The former was only a decrease of six Watts, which isn’t huge and could be partially explained by my workload composition. The latter stat does decrease with age, and I have a history of asthma and chronic bronchitis, but a two-month average of 93% is pretty low, even for a senior.

But those two stats didn’t change very significantly, so I can’t attribute it specifically to COVID. And all the other data point to the past two months being pretty normal for me and my body. So I guess I won’t argue with that!

comments

2024 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined

2024-08-20T16:20:32Z

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!

comments

Anty Up

2024-06-10T19:23:42Z

Last year’s 100 km Fire Ant Tour was both my first organized cycling event in Texas, and the first one on my new bike (writeup). And this past weekend it became the first Texas event I’ve repeated for a second time. I approached it with more confidence this year, having already completed my first century a month ago (writeup).

Cruising to a strong finish

Line of early starters rolling out

All blue sky and sunshine

Texas ain't all desert yanno

Since I normally only do writeups for imperial centuries – and this wasn’t one – I’ll limit myself to some brief highlights.

In an effort to avoid the afternoon heat, this year 230 riders rolled out at 7:15 rather than 8am, which meant I climbed out of bed at 4am and hit the road at 5:15 for the 90-minute drive up to Gatesville. Although it was 23° at the start, a cloudless sky promised a hot pre-solstice afternoon and a strong wind out of the south.

The first 25 km was the same route as last year, but then we veered off for a 45 km out-and-back spur toward Crawford that included 6 km of the worst “paved” surface I’ve ever ridden. After skipping the first two water stops, I pulled in to Stop 3 at 8:35 with 39 km down: more than a third complete!

After taking on some water – and nothing else, due to the disappointing selection – I got back on the road, completed the rest of the outbound leg, and turned around and went back the way I’d come. That rough section wasn’t quite as bad on the way back, but now we were fighting a 20 km/h headwind with 37 km/h gusts. At least the wind provided a little cooling, with the temperature now above 30°. I rolled into the next stop at Osage at 10am, with my GPS reading 71 km: two-thirds down!

With the heat, a headwind, tiring legs, and my hands and back aching from the rough roads, I split the final third into two legs. The remaining 30 km returned to roads from last year’s route, which included a very hard hill just before the final rest stop, where I arrived at 10:55am, with 87 km done.

After a bit of rest, I nursed it home, finishing 100 km with 636 meters of climbing at 11:30am. I was wiped, but nowhere near as devastated as last year, thanks in part to the earlier start allowing me to avoid the noonday heat by climbing off the bike 90 minutes earlier. I picked up my finisher’s medal, rested in the air conditioned civic center, and used a wet facecloth to wash off the layers of sunblock, sweat, road grime, bugs, and Gatorade (my bad: doused myself with the wrong bottle!) that had accumulated on my arms and legs.

Since event rides have been rare, it’s worth closing with some general reflections.

I was interested in my GPS’ estimation of my stamina remaining, which even at the end said my legs had another 90 km in them. Which is nice, but color me a bit skeptical on that point.

I even more closely watched my power numbers for each segment. I’m trying to be more aware and structured about not starting out too hard, and this provided some good data, as my average wattage dropped from 151 to 137, 127, and finally 97 on the final leg.

Equipment changes included ingesting electrolyte pills (the jury’s still out, but it can’t hurt), bringing a post-ride sweat towel (good idea), and my tire jack (wasn’t needed, but gave peace of mind). I chose not to bring my HoverAir X1 selfie drone, which isn’t really ideal to carry and deploy in the middle of a large event.

But overall, this year’s Fire Ant Tour was pretty satisfying. Now that I feel more comfortable with my new bike and riding in Texas, a hundred kilometers doesn’t feel like the major milestone it was at this time last year. But it was an enjoyable day in the saddle out in the wide-open farmland of Central Texas. And there won’t be many of these long organized events over the coming summer months.

Plus this was good training for my remote PMC charity ride, which is less than eight weeks away. I’d really love to have your support in raising money to eradicate cancer in this, my 18th Pan-Mass Challenge.

comments

Orny's Cycling Journal

Red… and Popped!

Tag & Release

Rosedale Rookie

But Why?!?

Riding It Out

Commitment Ceremony

2025: Ya Gotta Have Heart

My Original 2025 Goals

Highlight Video

Charts

The Centuries

My Year in Zwift

Noteworthy Purchases

Additional Highlights

Blogposts

Goals for 2026

Conclusion

My PreviousAnnual Summaries

Zenturion

Strong Living

Volksriden

Rolling Resistance

2025 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined

Adamant

Event-ful… Or Not

Why Specialized?

Episode One: The Plastic Bullet

Episode Two: R2-Di2

Episode Three: Pæthos

The Bottom Line

Rode to Recovery

I Care About Nutrition

Where I Started

More Medical Advice I Got

My Nutritionist Experience

Specific Dietary Recommendations

Conclusion

Special Operations

Rolling into 2025

2024: Second Life

My Original 2024 Goals

Charts

The Centuries

Noteworthy Purchases

Additional Highlights

Blogposts

Goals for 2025

My PreviousAnnual Summaries

Conclusion

Gear of the Year

Livestroke Challenge

Cycling Post-Stroke

Livestrong Weekend

Looking Forward

Covidiocy

2024 Pan-Mass Challenge Reimagined

Anty Up

My Previous
Annual Summaries

My Previous
Annual Summaries