ornoth_cycling | Entries tagged with frustration

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…

I’ll admit it: I respond well to gamification, whether that’s keeping my streak of consecutive days of meditation alive on Insight Timer or—more pertinent to this forum—my indoor cycling on Zwift.

This fall Zwift added 25 new achievements to their existing set. The new ones are based on completing specific routes, which earn both an achievement badge as well as bonus experience points. A sucker for XP, I recently finished completing the entire set.

Of Zwift’s known cycling achievements, I’ve earned 57, leaving 7 badges that I’ve yet to achieve. And therein lies the rub.

One of them is simply a matter of time. Once you’ve climbed Alpe du Zwift—Zwift’s in-game copy of France’s Alpe d’Huez—25 times, you earn the “Masochist” badge. It’s a tough climb, but no problem there; I’ve already ridden it 11 times.

The second badge is too stupid to consider: the “Everest" badge for climbing the height of the world’s tallest mountain in a single ride. That’s the equivalent of nine Alpes back-to-back, which would probably take me more than 15 hours. That’s not fun; that’s just flat-out stupid.

Four of the remaining badges have to do with sprinting power. I’m no sprinter, but I’ve already earned the 500, 600, 700, and 800 watt badges; however, there are additional ones for hitting 900, 1000, 1100, and 1200 watts. I might conceivably earn the 900W badge, but it’d require a lot of force, shaking the trainer and possibly damaging my bike. But beyond that, I’m okay admitting I’ve never been capable of sprinting that hard.

And then there’s the final badge—the one that really irritates me—the “Liftoff” badge (above) that you earn for climbing the Alpe du Zwift in less than 60 minutes.

As of today, I’ve made 11 ascents, with an average time of 69 minutes and a best time of 62m46s. I’ve tried really hard, and come tantalizingly close.

It takes about 3 W/kg to break 60 minutes. At my weight, that means sustaining 230W for the whole hour. But my FTP—which is literally my maximum sustainable power over an hour—ranges around 200 to 220W. Unless I somehow get 5% stronger without gaining weight—or reduce my weight by 6% without losing any strength—the numbers unequivocally state that I cannot break the 60 minute barrier. Neither of those options are particularly feasible, and I’m not getting any younger here, folks.

And it’s pissing me off. I have no problem letting go of ludicrously stupid goals like Everesting; and I’m not bothered by challenges that are categorically impossible for me, like (literally) kilowatt sprinting.

But it’s this goal that’s perpetually just out of reach that irks me: something I could have done five or ten years ago, but can’t seem to surpass. It’s just too close to simply let it go and walk away from this particular challenge. So like a cycling Sisyphus, I keep destroying myself by attempting it—on the off chance it might happen—even though I know it will probably remain beyond my ability as an aging cyclist.

Psychologically, there’s a vociferous part of me that just can’t accept that it’s beyond me. I’m frustrated as hell; not so much because I can’t surpass the challenge, but because I keep listening to that goddamned voice and trying…

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