Orny's Cycling Journal

To the uninitiated, endurance cycling would seem exclusively about the legs. Looking at a rider, there isn’t anything else going on other than propelling the bike forward, mile after mile.

But the reality—and one of the things that draws me to it—is that long-distance cycling involves nearly every part of the body, and stresses many bodily systems to their maximum capacity.

Imagine bringing your heart rate up to 80 or 90 percent of your max and holding it there—not just for a few minutes, but for seven or eight hours. Imagine the load on your circulatory system of 50,000 extra heartbeats. Think about the demand that big muscles, hungry for oxygen, place on your lungs and respiratory system.

Working muscles also need fuel in the form of glycogen. A cyclist quickly depletes what’s stored in the muscle tissue, then burns through the larger reserves stockpiled in the liver. After that, it’s up to the digestive system to make the carbohydrates you ingest available to your muscles as quickly as possible. And do it without making much demand on the circulatory system, which is already overtaxed.

Meanwhile, your body is trying to cool itself through perspiration, losing precious fluid and electrolytes. Here again, you dehydrate quickly, then rely on the digestive system to rapidly replace what your body loses through sweat. While sweating, the skin is also protecting you from wind, dirt, insects, gravel, and solar radiation.

While your legs are pumping to propel you forward, the rest of your muscles are working, too. Arm muscles are used to maintain your grip on the handlebars, and to pull against the bars while climbing. Your back, neck, and core muscle groups constantly adjust to maintain your balance as well as an unnatural and somewhat uncomfortable aerodynamic position. When I finish a long ride, my traps are usually in far more pain than my legs.

All your weight rests on your hands, feet, and butt, and these contact points are sometimes worked raw. And your hands are constantly working: shifting gears, braking, manipulating the bike computer, delivering food and fluid, signaling your intentions, and more. Your eyes and ears are equally busy, watching for threats, maintaining balance, and helping you navigate.

All of this input data is fed up to the brain, where it’s all coordinated: maintaining your balance, making decisions, assessing your effort level, calculating angles on descents, figuring out how to react to the immediate conditions, and at a higher level how to navigate from Point A to Point B. And it’s doing that while impeded by a very limited amount of fuel, since it relies exclusively on glycogen to function, which your muscles burn through at a prodigious rate.

I’m always taken by surprise when non-cyclists ask what I think about all day on one of my long rides. What to think about? There’s precious little time or energy or attention to spare for contemplation. In fact, on a lengthy ride, too much thinking is probably a sign that something has already gone wrong!

Even when the ride is done, your body continues working hard, repairing itself, recovering, replenishing, and building stronger muscles in response to the training load.

… Looking back at what I’ve written, even enumerating the bodily systems that cycling calls on still fails to communicate the raw intensity of those demands.

I often simply collapse on the bed for an hour or two at the end of a real hard ride; there’s precious little left over that you would call human. And ironically, that very emptying out provides a transcendent experience for the rider. A challenging ride is the crucible wherein we surpass normal human limits, and breathe the same rarified air as the greatest athletes among us.

These days, the descriptor “epic” gets thrown around pretty casually, but “epic” is a very fitting word for the ride that demands everything a cyclist has got. Every cyclist’s palmares is speckled with rides that truly are that monumental: destined to become oft-recalled personal legends. Such epic rides transform the cyclist, no matter how mundane, into an heroic figure, for having the simple audacity to test not just the strength of his legs, but all the diverse limits of his bodily endurance.

Sorry; I misspoke earlier. I haven’t got tendonitis, but bursitis. It’s owie, and slow to heal. I brought it on by trying to go from six miles per week to 150 miles per week in one leap, with no ramp-up. A lot of that is because work has kept me from riding much during the week, and the weekends have been spotty.

After a couple weeks of living with it, I finally admitted defeat on June 18th. In the past three weeks, I’ve barely been on the bike at all, and only done one ride longer than two miles. The bursitis has been pretty bad, and it’s lousy timing, since this is supposed to be the height of my training. Last year at this time I’d covered over 2500 miles; this year I’ve done much less than half that.

Now I’m going to go into the ride undertrained, which really shouldn’t be too bad, as long as my knees have recovered and hold together; that’s my main concern, which is why I’m resting, rather than pushing to get back on the bike.

However, the Fourth of July has always been a day I take off and bike. This year I got back on and went out to Waltham to meet my coworker Jay, and rode back to Boston, showing him the Charles River bike paths that he could take to commute in to work.

It was all good until he flatted a couple miles from home. I patched his tube and we continued, but he’s a stocky guy, and he blew out the patch after about a half mile. I pulled out my spare tube, only to discover a gaping hole in it. So I put two more patches on the old tube. But as I was getting the tire back over the bead, I pinched the tube and it popped. So we wound up walking our bikes a mile and a half back to my place, where I gave him a new tube and sent him home.

The highlight, tho, was getting to ride on Storrow Drive, one of Boston’s busiest highways, which is closed one day each year on the Fourth. And even that’ll stop soon, since they’re moving the fireworks over to Boston Harbor starting in 2008 or so.

Overall, I did maybe 30 miles, which was a lot more than I originally intended. My knees… were a little ginger. They definitely need more time to heal, but at least I was able to put a few miles in. And now I know where I stand: my knees are recovering, but need another week or two of rest. And there’s only four weeks to the ride.

One benefit to reduced training hours is that I had the time to send out a ton of fundraising letters. I’m well ahead of even last year’s record pace, although I’m not sure that in the end I’ll raise as much as I did last year. That’ll take a lot more money, and only time will tell.

Another benefit of the time off is that I was able to get the bike into the shop for routine maintenance. The only major item was that I needed to replace my bottom bracket. So the bike’s in good shape now… better shape than the rider, that’s for sure!

Oh yeah, and I bought a tiny new point & shoot camera for use on the ride, so you can look forward to better pictures, as well as some movie clips, after this year’s ride!

The other thing I’ve been experimenting with are devices to reduce wind noise, which is a real problem when riding. I saw an advertisement for Slipstreamz, and went to their site, where they say the way to test how much noise is reduced by their product is to put a finger right next to the leading edge of your ear, which does seem to make a big difference.

So a week or so ago I took a couple foam tubes—okay, they were Nerf darts—and taped them to one of the straps of my helmet. They really do seem to work, but they look kinda silly, like peyot, the wispy curly sideburns thingies that Hasidic Jews have. So I actually ordered some Slipstreamz, and will report back how effective they are once I’ve given them a thorough testing.

But that isn’t happening yet. Gotta let the damage control process continue to work on the kneecaps. I miss being out on the road, tho.

Amazing. My last entry talked about how the last week in January was going to be my first week off the bike in over three years, and that it was due to a business trip to Seoul, unlike the knee problems that kept me off the bike for three weeks back in 2002.

I spoke too soon. Literally the very next day I developed a serious medical issue that would keep me off the bike for a while. On top of that, I was so exhausted after the week in Seoul that I passed out and gave myself a concussion. Those two things combined meant that my planned one week hiatus turned into two weeks off the bike, followed by another recovery week when I only managed one commute totaling six miles.

Fortunately, I’ve recovered quite a bit over the past month, so I guess I’m ready to get back into training. That’s good, because I have a 125-mile ride two months from now, and possibly a 190-mile ride three weeks later. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and make serious training a possibility this spring, otherwise I may have to skip the brevet series again this year.

The other thing to note is that I’ve started moving onto my new laptop, and that means the charts on my Training Page are being updated once again, after a three-month hiatus. The overall assessment is that this was my best winter season ever, until things went to hell at the end of January. Hopefully the charts will show a positive trend again very shortly! I'm really dying to put some serious miles on the Plastic Bullet, if only my body, my workplace, and the weather would all cooperate for a while!

Well, it has been a real bad month for biking, I must say. There was one nice weekend in April when I did 140 miles, but that’s virtually all the training I’ve been able to do.

First there’s the weather. It’s been rainy and raw the entire month of May, much like April 2004 was. Then there have been a handful of physical problems. Although it’s not uncommon for my backside to bruise after the first long spring rides, that 140-mile weekend resulted in bruising and some actual scabbing that kept me off the bike for a week. About the time I was recovering from that, my back went out.

For those who don’t know, back pain is utterly debilitating. For most of a week, I had to use a cane, and still couldn’t stand up straight. On the second day, it took me about 20 minutes to get from my bedroom to the kitchen and back. And there’s no way to tell how long it will last. I’ve had episodes that have lasted a couple days, and others have gone on for eight weeks or more. Fortunately, the acute phase of this one only lasted a few days, but the less debilitating pain has lingered for a couple weeks now, keeping me in bed most of the time.

About a week ago I decided it might be okay to bike a short distance and do some hill repeats. Stupid idea, because when you’re climbing out of the saddle, all you’re doing is bouncing up and down on your spine. Hence a bit of a relapse followed, which I’m still recovering from. Still, I did a 40-mile ride yesterday (the weather was wonderful, and I made sure to go very easy on myself). Although I’m still in pain today, at least things didn’t seem to get any worse.

And then next week, even if my back gets better, I’m off to Michigan for my writers’ group, so I still won’t be doing any significant riding until the beginning of June! I know, that still gives me two months until the PMC, but I really miss being out on the road.

I’ll be glad when this damned back is straightened out again. Grrrr!

Over the past couple weeks, my bursitis has been slowly receding, so I got on the bike for the first time in nearly two months today, doing a 15-mile loop down to the Arboretum and back. While I was taking it a little easy, my knee seemed to be fine for most riding; I even made the summit of Bussey Hill. So hopefully the enforced inactivity is over, and I can get back to doing some riding again, even if it's about 30 degrees colder now than it was the last time I was in the saddle...

Thursday I woke to discover a large, fluid swelling just below my right knee. Today I was diagnosed with acute pre-patellar bursitis (see here for details). If I don't use the joint for kneeling or heavy cycling, it should go away in a few weeks, but it's possible that it could become a chronic condition if I continue to irritate it. So that's basically the end of the cycling season for now. I'm hoping, however, that the bursitis came about from kneeling to do work for an art school project, rather than cycling, because I really don't want to give up riding. Only time will tell, though.

This year's Midnight Ride was interesting. It runs from midnight to 8am, and is mostly an architectural tour of Boston. Unfortunately, so much time is wasted in keeping the huge, slow-moving group together that less than half that time is spent riding. This year's tour stopped at the Vendome Fire Memorial while the tour leaders talked about my building and its history, which includes the 1972 fire that is infamous for the deaths of nine firemen (story, photos). We also went through the Ted Williams Tunnel under Boston Harbor and rode the East Boston Greenway before returning, again through the tunnel, and we got to see the sun rise by the Kennedy Library and Castle Island. I've put some photos on the Cycling Photos page. Unfortunately, my knee didn't react well to being back on the bike again, and I'm really paying the price. I'm hoping it won't wind up being a persistent issue...

After my 38-mile ride to Nahant, the hamstring tendons behind my knees really bothered me (the first time that's ever happened), so I took it easy for a few days. However, today was the start of Massachusetts Bike Week, and this is the first year I've been free to participate, so I went to the opening day ceremonies down at Franklin Park. I participated in two group rides, both approximately 18 miles, and both focusing on doing the tallest and steepest hills in Boston. By the end of the day, I'd climbed 17 hills, cycling 50 miles through a lot of new territory in Mattapan, Roslindale, Hyde Park, West Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, South Boston, and Roxbury. Specific hills included Wellington Hill, Mount Hope, Metropolitan Hill, Monterrey Hill, Bearberry Hill, Bellevue Hill (the highest point in Boston), Peak Hill, Peters Hill, Bussey Hill, Green Hill, Popes Hill, Mount Ida, Savin Hill, Telegraph Hill/Dorchester Heights, and Parker Hill. After that, I rode out to MassArt to see their "Pedal-In Film Fest". Even though I took it easy to baby them, my knees are again in pain, and I'll take a few days again to rest up.

I lied about taking it easy. Today I did a leisurely tour around Gloucester and the circumference of Cape Ann with my sponsor Sheeri and some folks from the BRC. The trip was about 40 miles, but instead of taking the train back to Boston with everyone else, I rode all the way home from Gloucester, bringing my day's ride up over 70 miles -- the second time I've rode that far in the past two weeks! So much for "a few easy spins"! But I will be taking it easy the rest of the week. Unfortunately, it was also Klutz Day as I managed to scrape up my thigh, bend both thumbs back, and drive my chainring teeth into the back of my heel. Ever try digging chain grease out of a deep puncture wound? Owww!