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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

Cycling Fitness: 2011-2024

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:

Cycling Fitness: 2024 Calendar Year (vs. average)

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.

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.

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.

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.

A stunning sunset atop Turn 1 at the Circuit of the Americas F1 track.

Unlocked Level 80 on Zwift’s indoor trainer platform.

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.

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.

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:

Goals for 2025

Ornoth's 2024 cycling calendar/log

Ornoth’s 2024 cycling calendar/log

My 2024 Strava Year in Sport summary

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.

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!

Poppies!

May. 16th, 2024 12:58 pm

Been a long time, I know. But thus far, my 2024 cycling has been uneventful but steady, as evinced by my Fitness chart, which has hovered almost unchanged since November… albeit at a level I consider reasonably active. Group rides have included ten PMC Zwift rides during the first two months of the year, which then transitioned to a dozen outdoor Friday Truancy rides as the weather improved.

Aside from just riding around, I’ve had to replace a lot of equipment due to wear and tear, including a saddle bag, gloves, three punctured inner tubes, and my heart rate monitor. My most noteworthy new purchase was a HoverAir X1 automated selfie drone, but I’ll discuss that in a separate, future blogpo.

I’d planned to undertake 2024’s first organized cycling event back in February. But as I packed the car the evening before my 2-hour drive to Hempstead, I left the interior cabin light on, and climbed into the car at 5am to discover a dead battery. Needless to say, I wound up aborting my Pedaling the Prairie ride.

With few events that early in the year, it wasn’t until this past weekend that I lined up for my first century of 2024: the Red Poppy Ride in Georgetown, 30 minutes north of Austin.

I approached it with a bit of trepidation. I’ve done no long rides this year, and an imperial century (at 161 KM) would be twice the distance of my longest indoor (82 KM) and outdoor (72 KM) rides thus far. I’ve also only done one century in the past 18 months; that was last September’s Livestrong Challenge, which pushed me beyond my limit and resulted in ignominiously puking my guts out into a trash bin at the finish line. That left me wondering if I am still physically suited to riding 100 miles now that I’m 60 years old.

Ride start: not a small ride!

Ride start: not a small ride!

After the half-hour drive to the start, I picked up my bib number (a grossly inappropriate #357) and joined a large field of several hundred riders, although most were doing shorter routes. Typical of Hill Country mornings, the sky was about 70 percent obscured by thin clouds, and the temperature hovered around 20°. You couldn’t ask for a better forecast for a long ride.

Having suffered three flats in recent months, I imagined that my rear tire wasn’t holding air pressure well and chose ask the mechanical support tent to replace my inner tube at the last minute. That work left me with just enough time to line up at the start with my buddy Jordan and his friends John, John, and Bob.

While swapping my tube, I heard snippets of the organizer’s pre-ride announcements, which mentioned some rough gravel sections of the route, a detour, and route markings. He said something about the 100-mile route coming back the to the start and then going out again on a second route to complete the full distance. I was already confused about the route because the organizer hadn’t provided a downloadable GPS course, while the cue sheet and two maps on the event website all disagreed with one another. And none of them had shown a mid-ride return to the start.

So as we rolled out at 8am, I wasn’t just worried about aging and my fitness, but also my tire, the route and any detours, the gravel sections, and the route arrows.

The first 22 km of the ride included a couple small hills before the course flattened out. More taxing was the 20 km/h headwind, which would persist through the north- and east-ward first third of the ride. We were quickly onto empty country roads through endless farmland and cornfields already showing ears with silks… in mid-May!

Fields and fields and fields and fields and...

Fields and fields and fields and fields and...

I was taking it easy, but keeping up with the pack. My friend Jordan disappeared down the road, but his outgoing buddy Bob and I chatted off and on as the miles ticked away. I zipped past the first two water stops before finally pulling off at rest stop #3 for a 5-minute break. It was 9:20am, and I’d covered 37 km.

Having finished the northeast-bound part of the course, we turned south. The change put the wind behind us, which was a delightful benefit on the endless false flats we covered. At 10:30am I pulled into water stop #4 for another quick refill. With 65 km down, I was on pace to complete my century in 6:10!

This was where things got frustrating. First my GoPro battery died after just 17 still photos. And 30 minutes on I felt the tell-tale squishiness of my rear tire going flat: the very misfortune that I’d hoped to avoid by installing a new inner tube. Ironically, it wasn’t due to a puncture; the leak was at the valve stem, indicating a manufacturing defect in the brand-new tube I’d gotten at the support tent.

Somehow, one of the few support vehicles pulled up almost immediately, followed – equally improbably – by the aforementioned Bob, John, and John trio. After installing my remaining spare tube, it took two of us to manhandle the tire back onto the rim, and we’d lost 20 minutes by the time we set out again. With 85 km still to go, no spare tubes, and gun-shy after my recent spate of flats, I decided it would be safest to continue riding with these guys, who were doing a more relaxed pace than I had been.

Having just had a long break, we skipped nearby stop #5 and rode on to stop #6, where we arrived just after noontime with 99 km on the odo. There was still some high overcast, but much of the fog had burned off, and temperatures had climbed moderately toward 26°.

Along the way, one of the Johns and I discussed the route, because none of the riders or support staff had any idea which of the several conflicting routes was the “real” one. Fortunately, John’s plan and my route gleaned from the cue sheet were in agreement, so we committed to that option, and to hell with the official route, whatever it was.

Texas: not unlike Ohio, Penna, or Mass

Texas: not unlike Ohio, Penna, or Mass

On the following segment, we endured about a mile of gravel road (where I fretted about my tire), followed by a gulley where Opossum Creek was just high enough to spill over the roadway, forcing a ginger water crossing. Along the way, Bob and the other John peeled off to complete shorter routes; but the remaining John and I were joined by another century rider named Dodge.

We rolled into rest stop #8 at 1:26pm, having completed 125 km. I was starting to feel the effort in my legs and traps. The whole day my Garmin bike computer had steadily predicted – based on my previous training – that I’d run out of stamina after 115 to 120 km, and it was eerily accurate.

This was actually the same location as stop #1, so we were pretty close to the start. But in order to complete the full century route, we needed another 35 km. This was the dubious part of the route, but the three of us agreed to follow the cue sheet, which did a 28 km loop by doubling back and rejoining the roads we’d already ridden. That included a second passage of the short gravel section and the Opossum Creek crossing, where I dunked my cycling sandal-clad feet in the stream to cool off.

And in no time (about 70 minutes, akshually) we rolled right back into the same rest stop, arriving at 2:50pm, now with just 9 km left to go.

After a minimal rest we knocked out the final segment back to the start/finish, hitting 100 miles (161 km) just before the end, celebrating Dodge’s first-ever 100-mile ride – and my 109th!

Reflections

While I can’t say this ride was spectacularly special, it did provide some memorable elements.

Most importantly, it gave me back my mojo, after such a difficult experience on my last century, eight months ago. It proved that – despite my age – I still have the strength to complete a 100-mile ride, even early in the year and in the absence of adequate training rides.

One of the reasons why it wasn’t a more painful experience is that riding with Bob and John forced me to pace myself. Although I thought I was being conservative at the start, my average power riding solo before I flatted was 152W, while after I flatted and joined them it was 112W.

My only physical complaints were growing pain in my traps toward the end of the ride, and saddle irritation in the days following.

One mistake was that I forgot to take the electrolyte caplets I’d brought along. That wasn’t an issue thanks to the temperate weather, but I don’t want to overlook that in future, more challenging (i.e. hotter) events.

In terms of equipment, the obvious issue was riding on an untested inner tube and worn tire. The entire second half of the ride was tinged with fear that I might have a second flat, but my backup tube performed flawlessly. But I do need to practice re-seating my tire on the rim, and am considering trying out a set of Pirelli P-Zeros over the tight-fitting Conti GP5000s.

And I can’t let it pass that I finished the 7½-hour ride with 56% battery charge left on my Garmin cycling computer, thanks in part to the 45 minutes of charge gained from its built-in solar panel. It’s nice no longer needing to carry a USB power bank and plug it in halfway through a long ride. And the unit’s stamina estimates again proved surprisingly accurate.

But the biggest worry and inconvenience was the organizer’s poor communication of the ride route. The overview map depicting all half-dozen courses was unclear. The 100-mile route map was incorrect, only showing an 86-mile route with no inner loop. The cue sheet included that inner loop, but that contradicted the other two maps. And the verbal announcement at the start said something about returning to the start, which wasn’t on the cue sheet or any map!

Out on the road, the half dozen routes were marked by colored arrows, but no one had labeled which color arrows went with which distance, so when they diverged, riders had to guess which arrow to follow. At every rest stop, riders were asking which route was correct, and the volunteers couldn’t do anything but point at the map. And after all that, the arrows painted on the road veered off and went in yet another direction altogether!

Of course, all this would have been avoided if the organizer did what every other event does: provide GPS route files that can be downloaded to one’s bike computer. I have no idea why the organizer neglected to offer this basic service, especially when their vague maps and cue sheets and arrows all contradicted each another. But setting that frustration aside, in the same way as I did during the ride…

I did enjoy the event. It had been nearly two years since I had a satisfying century ride, and I really needed the confidence boost that this one provided. I’m glad I did it, and glad to have my first century of 2024 under my belt. And I expect to return to the Red Poppy Ride, albeit after taking extra precautions to clarify the intended route.

It was the most of times; it was the least of times. My 2023 cycling year was very noteworthy, but in ways that were mostly peripherally related to riding my bike.

Welcome to the new hometown!

Welcome to the new hometown!

On the downside, I began the year off the bike for two months due to our move from Pittsburgh to Austin and subsequent discovery of a fatal crack in my beloved primary bike of the past ten years. Then I lost another month in September for a warranty replacement of the rear wheel on my new, successor bike. I only completed one century – my fewest since 2007 – and vomited right after finishing it. Throw in a couple frustrating flat tires, the challenge of navigating a new town, and the harsh reality of turning sixty years old. 2023 provided a litany of disappointments, and my Fitness and distance numbers reflected it.

But there were a lot of major high points, too. I got a brand new bike that I love, at a steal of a discount! I replaced my old, frail bike GPS with Garmin’s newest model, which has tons of cool new features and reliable battery life! I enjoyed meeting local cyclists and exploring my new hometown of Austin, and even got to bike on a Formula One race track! At my first Livestrong century, my old grammar school friend Scott came down from New Hampshire; it was also my first event as an official member of Team Kermit, and I got to ride with several old and new Pan-Mass Challenge friends who had flown in from Boston!

From an athletic standpoint, 2023 wasn’t a superlative year, but a decent one. And I’m pleased by all the memorable stuff that did happen.

My Original 2023 Goals

At this time last year, my bike and all my cycling gear was locked away in a moving van in an unknown location somewhere between Pittsburgh and Austin, while Inna and I spent our last couple days in Pennsylvania at her mother’s apartment.

Therefore I had no idea what cycling in Austin would be like, or even what our lives would look like when we got there. So it made no sense setting any specific goals for 2023. The new year was going to be imperfect, but that meant that whatever I did achieve would be gravy.

However, I did list four general themes that I thought would be foremost. They were:

Moving and Orienting in Austin

I knew this year’s biggest change would be finding my niche in a new city, and I did okay, as outlined in my Austin On-Ramp blogpost. However, I still need to put more energy into this, in every category of knowledge. I explored a few group rides, but there are several more that I haven’t. I’m familiar with a few bike shops, but still haven’t found “the one”. I’ve done a couple big event rides, but nowhere near as many as usual. Similar to my move to Pittsburgh in 2015, I’ve leveraged Strava’s Flyby feature and other riders to find some good routes for solo riding, but my options are still extremely limited. So orienting myself and finding my crew is still a work-in-progress.

All smiles on a scorching Friday Truancy group ride

All smiles on a scorching Friday Truancy group ride

Showing off the new 2023 Æthos

Showing off the new 2023 Æthos

Celebrating another XP-filled Tour of Watopia on Zwift

Celebrating another XP-filled Tour of Watopia on Zwift

Another looming concern with the move was coping with the Texas heat, and the summer of 2023 delivered, with no less than 78 days above 37°C (100°F). I continued to ride through it, but limited myself to short rides first thing in the morning… Except for the Friday Truancy group ride, which – despite being the most congenial group ride I found – was often a challenging mid-afternoon scorcher!

I knew I couldn’t commit to riding 10,000 kilometers this year, but thought I might be good for 8,000 KM – the same as last year – which I surpassed. In actuality, I rode at an 11,000 KM per year pace for nine months of the year, but couldn’t ride at all for the other three.

Amusingly, in last year’s writeup I mused that “I might go and buy myself a new steed”. That happened unexpectedly at the start of the year, right after the move, when a local shop discovered a crack in my old bike’s frame. More about that below, where I talk about the year’s purchases.

18th Pan-Mass Challenge and $125,000

I kinda knew that I wouldn’t be able to do a remote PMC ride this year. I had no idea what I could use for a route, what the August heat would be like, whether I’d have the time to do the required fundraising, or if I’d be in physical shape for 300 KM over two days. So I bagged it, and rode a lesser substitute: joining the PMC’s visiting Team Kermit to ride Austin’s Livestrong Challenge in September. Goal deferred; I’ll reconsider this in 2024.

Zwift Level 60

I also didn’t know how much I’d use the smart trainer in Austin, but I did rack up 3,400 indoor KM, which was was more than 2022. Although it can be prohibitively hot or cold to ride in our uninsulated and unheated garage, Zwift incentivized me by creating new roads and moving the Tour of Watopia from March to October. And in December I completed my fifth year on their platform.

I advanced from Level 53 to Level 58 on my slow and painful trudge toward Zwift’s pinnacle: Level 60. Then, with a month left to the year and 85% of the way through Level 58, Zwift moved the goalposts. On one hand, they made it easier to reach Level 60 by reducing the amount of XP needed to level up by about 75 percent. But at the same time, they made it harder to reach the top XP level by tacking on forty new levels, from 61 to 100!

The easier leveling let me zip through Level 59 and reach Level 60 in a matter of days, even finishing the year on Level 62. Although I achieved my goal of reaching Level 60, it’s just not as satisfying because Zwift made the last couple steps much easier to achieve.

Health and Turning 60

On the other hand, no one made the “Turning 60 years old” achievement any easier. I definitely checked that one off, and my flagging on-bike performance showed it, as I discussed in this blogpo.

Fortunately, my time in the saddle wasn’t limited by my health. A heart monitor investigating my cardiac palpitations produced a mostly clear result, with the interesting side-note of registering a sleeping low heart rate as low as 37 BPM! Otherwise there were the usual inconveniences: threw my back out, saddle sores, saddle abrasion, and the joys of colonoscopy prep.

The biggest health question I faced was how to manage heat and hydration in order to avoid problems like I experienced on September’s Livestrong century ride. Before moving to Texas, I could easily do a century without paying much attention to that equation, but now it’s something I really need to solve.

Charts

This year I made my Fitness charts a little wider, and added red vertical lines denoting significant dates. These make it a little easier to see major changes and some context for why they happened.

Let’s begin by comparing 2023 to previous years.

Cycling Fitness: 2011-2023

There’s really three things to note here. First, due to the move, I started 2023 at my lowest level of Fitness (as measured by CTL) since January 2017. Second, 2023 continued a clear trend of decreasing Fitness highs from my recent peak in 2021. As any stock analyst will tell you, a sequence of lower highs and lower lows makes for an unhappy trendline.

And finally, my level of Fitness in 2023 was quite similar to 2018, which was my last year without an indoor trainer; a year that was hampered by tons of travel, record-setting rain, plus malaise and fatigue following the intensely challenging Dirty Dozen ride the preceding fall.

That comparison to 2018 is extremely apt. If you count by Fitness or long rides or number of hours on the bike, 2023 was my worst year since 2018.

So let’s take a closer look at how 2023 unfolded in detail:

Cycling Fitness: 2023 Calendar Year (vs. average)

The year breaks down into five distinct periods: down, up, flat, down, and up; all of it swerving above and below the grey line that represents my average Fitness level throughout the year.

I didn’t ride at all in January, while we were still unpacking from our move. In February, I brought my beloved, ten year old bike to the shop for a major overhaul, only to learn that there was a crack in the frame. I put a few miles on my old folding bike while I waited for Specialized to decide whether I was eligible for their Assisted Replacement Policy, and then procure and assemble my new steed. After more than two months off the bike, my Fitness was at a six-year low, way behind where I’d normally be.

Then the “up” phase. When I finally received my new Specialized Æthos, I rode every day for two months straight, as shown by my steadily increasing Fitness in March and April. When my consecutive rides streak ended on May 1th, I was well ahead of my usual training, and at my peak Fitness for the whole year.

I rode regularly during the summer months from May into September, but coped with the Texas summer by only doing short rides, early in the morning, and focusing on the cheeky goal of being the rider who did the most ascents (within 90 days) of the notorious Ladera Norte climb. With no major events and low riding volume, my Fitness plateaued just below my seasonal average. Summer ended with a secondary Fitness peak in September following the Livestrong Challenge, my only imperial century of the year.

But my planned autumnal riding came to a screeching halt when I discovered that during the Livestrong ride, a rock strike had broken my carbon fiber rear wheel rim. I spent the next month off the bike completely, my Fitness plummeting again while I waited for Specialized to get me a warranty replacement.

Once that was fixed, I was back where I’d been in March: spending most of the fourth quarter recovering the Fitness I’d lost during my hiatus. But similar June’s recovery, I ended the year at a tertiary Fitness peak, well ahead of my wintertime average, and that will carry over into the nascent 2024 season.

In the end, it was a year dominated by stops and starts, but I still accrued a respectable 8,250 KM of riding.

The Centuries

I rode with Team Kermit at the Livestrong Challenge

I rode with Team Kermit at the Livestrong Challenge

Ornoth limping across the finish line

Ornoth limping across the finish line

Pæthos at autumnal Lake Austin

Pæthos at autumnal Lake Austin

But it was a terrible year in terms of long rides. Between bike repair woes, lack of fitness, unfamiliarity with the area, and prohibitive Texas heat, I only attempted one imperial century in 2023. That’s the fewest I’ve done in sixteen years, since 2007.

In fact, I only did seven rides over 100 KM (62 miles): four Zwift fondos on the indoor trainer, a ride down to the Veloway and back, the Fire Ant metric, and my one century, which was:

9/10: Livestrong Challenge

While I only did one – and suffered tremendously, vomiting shortly after finishing – at least it was noteworthy. It was:

  • My first and only century of 2023
  • My first imperial century in 11 months
  • My first century in Texas
  • My first century on my new bike: Pæthos
  • My first century with my new Garmin Edge 840 Solar bike GPS
  • My first event as an official member of Team Kermit
  • My first Livestrong ride

Noteworthy Purchases

In contrast, 2023 was an incredibly productive year for the “procurement department”. With so many new toys, I’ll try to keep it brief…

Topping the list is my new bike: Pæthos, a Specialized Æthos that Specialized gave me an unexpectedly generous discount on. It’s been a very worthy addition, carrying on the performance endurance lineage that my previously-favored Roubaix model abandoned when it went all comfort/gravel/gimmicky. I’m slowly transitioning my kit to match its understated “Chameleon Oil Tint / Flake Silver” (aka black & white) design. My only complaint was the short-lived carbon wheels, which Spesh replaced after the rear wheel broke on its first century ride. Otherwise it’s been a complete delight. In-depth review here.

With a new bike came a handful of new accessories. Hearing rumors of fragility, I picked up a spare seatpost clamp and derailleur hanger in case of breakage. Frustration with flat tires led me to pick up a bunch of spare inner tubes, a CO2 dispenser, and a new Lezyne mini-pump. The latter frees up the bottle cage mount that my old frame pump occupied, so I have finally added a second bottle cage, which will be handy for long rides in the Texas heat. Also a handful of plastic disc brake spacers.

There’s been lots of regular gear replacement as well, including a new Garmin HRM-Dual heart rate monitor, and two new pairs of Craft bibshorts. The new bike needed to be supplied with 28mm Conti GP5000 tires, and a new set of name tag stickers (this time in white, to match Specialized’s own logo decals).

After the bike, another huge development was upgrading my bike GPS head unit from my decrepit old Garmin Edge 820 to the long-awaited new Edge 840 Solar. It too has been an absolute delight, so it also warranted its own separate in-depth review. Since that writeup, Garmin has added the ability for the head unit to display images and photos in incoming text messages.

In addition to new daily-wear bibshorts, I gained a couple other bits of new kit. A jersey from the Buddhist Bike Pilgrimage: a ride I completed back in 2012. And a 2023 Livestrong Challenge jersey, which I earned for surpassing $500 in fundraising. And my very own 2023 Team Kermit jersey and bibshorts. The team uniform even included my very own Kermit the Frog stuffed doll for mounting on my helmet: a traditional (but decidedly non-aerodynamic) part of the team kit.

My most recent purchase was an Ekrin Bantam cordless massage gun, which has been delightful to use, but its effectiveness and safety are still under evaluation.

And finally, the most notable addition to my indoor pain cave was Zwift’s Play controllers. These mount to your handlebars and offer lots of shortcut buttons for in-game actions. But the most useful function they provide is the ability to steer, allowing you to position your avatar in or out of the draft or take an optimal line through corners.

Big sky fulla giant Ornoths at the Fire Ant Tour

Big sky fulla giant Ornoths at the Fire Ant Tour

Bike night at the Circuit of the Americas

Bike night at the Circuit of the Americas

Red Bud Isle (more green than red, akshually)

Red Bud Isle (more green than red, akshually)

Additional Highlights

Naturally, moving to a new city produced a lot of new experiences. I rode a challenging Fire Ant 100k up in Gatesville. I got to ride on Austin’s dedicated cycling circuit, the Veloway. I spent two evenings “zooming” around the Circuit of the Americas: Austin’s Formula One grand prix track. I joined more than a dozen Friday Truancy group rides. And it was great hosting old and new New England friends on Team Kermit rides in the lead-up to the Livestrong Challenge.

Flats – and a non-functioning frame pump – were a problem this year. I had to call a Lyft rideshare to get home after a quadruple snakebite on Blue Bluff, and also walked to The Peddler for repairs after taking a screw on 51st in Mueller. Hence all the new flat-repair equipment mentioned above.

I’m tempted to list out the two dozen Strava “Local Legend” achievements I earned by being the person who rode a segment more than anyone else in a 90-day period, but that’d be a waste. I’ll just mention the two biggies: becoming LCL on Austin’s infamous Ladera Norte climb, and the Friday Truancy ride’s spiker up the Arpdale to Cedarview Kicker.

In terms of Zwift highlights, the indoor training simulator released several enhancements. You can now capture short videos of your ride and share them directly to Strava. They added their new Climbing Portal, the Scotland world, the southern coastal road in Watopia, and introduced the Zwift Play controllers and the Repack Rush steering challenge. As mentioned above, they moved the popular double-XP Tour of Watopia to the fall, and introduced some major (and frankly asinine) changes to the XP system when they unveiled new levels 61 to 100. And there are rumors of more changes in the works.

Blogposts

Goals for 2024

Ornoth's 2023 cycling calendar/log

Ornoth’s 2023 cycling calendar/log

My 2023 Strava Year in Sport summary

My 2023 Strava Year in Sport summary

I knew that 2023 was going to be a chaotic year. Looking forward to 2024, I don’t know if I can plan on it being much better. I’m still learning about Austin and what is gonna work for me here, so most of my goals remain pretty vague.

More 100k and Century Rides

For various reasons, I haven’t done as many event rides as I hoped, so next year I’d like to do more. There’ll probably be another Livestrong ride, and I’m hoping to do the two-day Texas MS Ride in April, and possibly a repeat of the Fire Ant metric. Instead of limiting myself primarily to 100-mile events, as I’ve done previously, I’m thinking of signing up for more 100-kilometer rides, which seem more prevalent and feasible for a sixty year old riding in Texas heat.

Find My Group Ride Niche

I just don’t fit anywhere in Austin’s group ride scene, which is mostly divided between flat-out hammerfests for active racers, and short, plodding social rides for non-athletes. I’m hoping someday I’ll find a ride that splits the difference, much like Pittsburgh’s Team Decaf ride or Boston’s old Quad Cycles rides. There’s got to be more mid-tier endurance and charity riders like me in this area; but where are they?

A Big Pan-Mass Challenge

2024 is kind of a big year for both me and the PMC. It will be the organization’s 45th ride, and they will celebrate surpassing the immense and impressive $1 billion fundraising threshold. For myself, it would be my 18th ride, and bring my own fundraising to over $125,000. And it’d be my first PMC as a sixty year old.

I’m committed to ride, but still stumped by what it will look like. A 300 KM solo ride in August heat doesn’t sound very feasible. I’d consider returning to Boston for the in-person ride, but that’s impossibly expensive, between airfare, hotels, car rental, and transporting my bike. Plus the $6,000+ fundraising minimum is far beyond my current ability, and I’ll have to personally cover any shortfall. I could extend my Livestrong Challenge weekend riding while fundraising for the PMC instead of the Livestrong Foundation… But that’d be in October, rather than on the traditional PMC weekend in August.

There’s just no good option, but the decision needs to be made now, as the traditional PMC route will sell out before the end of January. I wish there was a better choice.

Conclusion

So 2023 was a mixed bag. I turned sixty, said goodbye to my beloved primary bike, was off the bike for three months, skipped the PMC, and only attempted one imperial century. But I also had fun exploring my new town, rode with Team Kermit, got a snazzy new bike, new GPS, a cordless massager, and lots more.

After less than a year, my settling into the Austin scene is far from complete, so that process will be ongoing. I’m looking forward to finding more people, places, and events to enjoy in 2024. Stay tuned to hear how it goes!

Back on September 10th, I completed the 100-mile Livestrong Challenge Austin ride and raised $875 for the Livestrong Foundation.

Rather than give you the usual chronological ride report, I’m gonna organize this mostly by themes, in hopes that it will be both more effective and readable. Are you with me here? Let’s start with the elephant in the peloton

The Decision

My decision to participate will surprise those of you who know my feelings about Lance Armstrong, the Livestrong Foundation’s disgraced founder. I don’t ever want to contribute in any way to the fame or fortune he has amassed from lying to the public and terrorizing the people around him.

So what convinced me to do the Livestrong ride? Here are the factors that went into my choice:

  • Lance has left the organization and is no longer involved in any official way. After suffering due to their association, Livestrong have wisely distanced themselves from him, although he remains their largest financial backer.
  • There are surprisingly few century rides here in Austin, and it’s been a long eleven months since my last one (back in Pittsburgh).
  • I hate cancer even more than I hate Lance, and Livestrong does admirable work for cancer survivors.
  • I have two friends who are Livestrong bigwigs, and their vocal support of the foundation earns it a degree of approval. My childhood friend Scott is on their Board of Directors and is a survivor of testicular cancer; and Steven, the leader of the Pan-Mass Challenge’s popular Team Kermit, is a Livestrong Ambassador (i.e. a distinguished volunteer).
  • Along with Steven, several other PMC friends from Boston come down to Austin for the Livestrong ride.

So while I hate the idea of being associated with Lance Armstrong, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to take part in this ride. But I took perverse pride in wearing my 2011 PMC jersey during the event.

Poor Training and Lead-Up

Ornoth with Scott & MJ

Ornoth with Scott & MJ

Scott, Ornoth, & Steven before the start

Scott, Ornoth, & Steven before the start

Ornoth lined up in the VIP starting area

Ornoth lined up in the VIP starting area

MJ & Scott, Steven & Ornoth ready for the start

MJ & Scott, Steven & Ornoth ready for the start

Ornoth rolling out with Team Kermit

Ornoth rolling out with Team Kermit

Rolling through the ranchland in Driftwood

Rolling through the ranchland in Driftwood

Scenic level crossing on the Blanco River

Scenic level crossing on the Blanco River

ClimbPro showing Fulton Ranch hill

ClimbPro showing Fulton Ranch hill

Team Kermit's Ornoth, Christophe, and Steve after conquering Fulton Ranch hill

Team Kermit's Ornoth, Christophe, and Steve after conquering Fulton Ranch hill

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Ornoth dragging himself toward the finish

Ornoth dragging himself toward the finish

Ornoth crossing the finish line

Ornoth crossing the finish line

And having finished, collapsing

And having finished, collapsing

Not looking good post vomiting after the finish

Not looking good post vomiting after the finish

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

May, June, and July were filled with short rides focused on becoming Local Legend on the Ladera Norte hill. So I didn’t begin training for distance until August. And August’s training was cut short after badly throwing my back out. Right when my training should have been peaking, I was off the bike for ten days, while the small training effect I’d gained atrophied away.

Four days before the event, I was just getting back onto the bike when Team Kermit members started assembling in Austin. They were looking to meet up and ride every day, right when I would normally be tapering my training in order to be well-rested for the event.

Instead, on Thursday before the (Sunday) event, local Austin Kermit member Scott led a group of five of us up the Walnut Creek Trail, then back to 51th Street for lunch at Jewboy Burgers. Then on Friday I led a sightseeing ride up the Shoal Creek bikeway and back down Scenic Drive. We finished at event packet pickup, where I received a Livestrong Challenge cycling jersey and VIP rider bib tag #28.

I took Saturday off while the Kermiteers spent the day doing another long ride down to the Veloway park. I’d ridden 150 km in two days and was suffering for it. My back was still iffy, my ass was abraded, and my legs were too tired to tackle a hundred-mile ride without rest. At the same time, I hadn’t eaten or slept well, was already dehydrated, and down 1.8 kilos of body weight in a week. For the first time, my final ride prep included zip-tying a stuffed Kermit doll to my helmet, complete with white cowboy hat and rodeo bull-riding pose.

Quick Ride Summary

My Strava activity’s description summed my Livestrong Challenge up best: it was very good until it wasn’t.

After about five hours of sleep, I got up at 4:30am and set out in darkness at 5:45 on the 15 km ride downtown. I rode with Team Kermit from their hotel to the start, where we lined up in the VIP section before being set loose on the streets of Austin at 7:30am.

At the tail end of a brutally hot summer, the ride began under pleasant temperatures that warmed considerably, but not to the extremes that we’ve lived under for the past three months. South from Austin to Buda, then west and south through Driftwood.

Enjoying the freedom of having two water bottles rather than one, I skipped the first three rest stops out of a desire to stay ahead of the pack and beat the time limits for the 100-mile route, which the organizers had shortened by 30 minutes. So my first break came two hours in, after 57 km, (or 72 km if you include my 15 km commute to the start). As you might guess by such a long stretch without a break, I had been feeling good thus far.

I refilled my bottles and marshaled some strength for the long, steep hill at the end of the next segment. I enjoyed the pleasant tree-lined streets near Wimberley, and a stunning level crossing of the Blanco River. Then came the 15% grade climb up Fulton Ranch hill, which is essentially the halfway point of the course. It was quite manageable for a cyclist used to the much lumpier terrain back in Pittsburgh. At the top, a water stop beckoned; I pulled in at 10:30am, having taken three hours to knock out 77 km (or 92 km).

While resting here, Team Kermit members Christophe and Steve rolled in, and we would leapfrog each other for the rest of the 110 km trek back to Austin. But this would be the point when things slowly started going to hell. The temps climbed through the 30s, and I was feeling the effort in my feet, legs, lower back, traps, and hands.

As my reserves dwindled, my speed and power dropped, and my horizon shrank to simply reaching the next rest stop. I hadn’t eaten any solid food during the whole ride, and was pounding fluid in an attempt to address both heat and thirst. Extended 15-minute rest stops and hand towels soaked in ice water were just enough to keep me from blowing up.

I stopped twice to battle fatigue and nausea during the last segment to the finish, but completed the final loop around Auditorium Shores. The event photographers captured my grim visage as I crossed the finish line at 3:07pm. I’d completed the official 158 km official course in 7h 37m, but had fulfilled my 108th imperial century by riding 15 extra km to the start.

I collapsed in exhaustion underneath the Team Kermit tent and waved off others’ attempts at congratulations, accepting only a folding chair and an ice-water towel. And then came that feeling we’re all familiar with: a particular certainty that it’s time to find a convenient but discreet place to deposit some biological material. So I staggered nonchalantly over to a nearby trash can and retched about three gallons of undigested fluid that I’d carried with me over the preceding few dozen kilometers.

So my Livestrong Challenge ended successfully but ignobly. I managed to recuperate enough to stand for a team picture before I said goodbye, then met up with my partner Inna, who mercifully drove me those extra 15 km back home.

My First Century in Eleven Months

This was my first 100-mile ride since October 2022. Eleven months is a long layoff; I haven’t gone that long between centuries in fifteen years (since 2007-2008)! You ask me how it went? Go back and read the summary: it was very good until it wasn’t.

Mistakes were made. Looking back on it, nearly all of them were about my personal physical fitness and decisionmaking, not my equipment or the location or the event. So I guess that would be the logical place to start…

My Fitness and Decisionmaking

A century always demands a lot of stamina and will power from me, but this was an exceptional case. Despite being one of the first dozen riders out of the gate, then skipping three rest stops, I only marginally beat the last finishers on the course.

I could blame the Texas heat, but even at 37°C (98°C) it was mercifully moderate in comparison to the seventy days above 38°C (100°F) that Austin experienced over the summer.

Or I could blame my age. After all, I’m only weeks away from my sixtieth birthday, and that’s the kind of thing that can slow a guy down.

While those are valid considerations, there was a whole panoply of other factors that impaired my performance, leaving me with weak legs and zero stamina toward the end of the ride.

Despite not doing any long rides in nearly a year, I barely did any lengthy training rides prior to the event. I went into it fatigued and dehydrated from too little sleep and too much riding just before the event. I was insufficiently fueled due to an irregular eating schedule and not eating any solid food during the ride. And I still had lingering injuries to my lower back and my backside (the latter attributable to insufficient time in the saddle).

But the biggest wildcard was hydration. Consuming two bottles over the first five segments of my ride – especially since the first segment was a casual commute – doesn’t seem like an especially egregious error. But it set me up poorly for the second half of the ride, where my perceptions of thirst and heat were clearly malfunctioning, causing me to take in more fluid than I could digest. This is the biggest thing I’ll have to monitor on future long rides.

There were lots of physical niggles along the road, of course. Early on, I had to make a quick roadside stop to flush some stinging sunblock out of my eyes. In my cycling sandals, some pain developed in my big toes, but I got away without a repeat of the abrasions I’d gotten on top of my feet a couple weeks earlier.

And I’d expected pain in my hands due to a slight change in my position on the new bike. I did have some discomfort, but not the severe palsy that I’d feared. It would be prudent to address this soon by buying new cycling gloves and plush handlebar tape.

The New Bike

Like its owner’s ride, my new Specialized Æthos was very good until it wasn’t.

It looked like Pæthos came through its first century in flying colors, to the extent that I had very little to say about it, other than that it suited me well and earned my full confidence.

Two weeks before the event, I’d gotten a flat on a pair of brand new tires. That got me so worried about the rough chipseal of Texas back roads that I’d carried two spare inner tubes, in addition to a pump, a CO2 dispenser, and a Shrader-to-Presta adapter in case I needed an automotive air compressor. That was all overkill; Pæthos appeared to handle everything that was thrown at it.

Just before the ride, I’d also converted from one water bottle cage to two, which was a big win. That gives me the flexibility to ride farther unsupported or without stopping (e.g. skipping three water stops). But it also gave me the option of carrying both sport drink for hydration and clear water to pour over my head and body when the heat was at its worst. And I did lots of that on the Livestrong ride!

But those Texas roads did get me in the end. After I got home, I noticed a break in the carbon rim of my rear wheel, which most likely happened due to a rock strike somewhere along the Livestrong route. I took it in to Specialized to see if it was rideable or a case for a warranty replacement, and they chose to replace the rim. Pretty ridiculous that my first set of carbon wheels lasted a mere 4,000 km.

The New GPS Bike Computer

This was also the first century-length test for the Garmin Edge 840 Solar that I picked up last month, which delighted me in nearly every way. On top of flawlessly handling mapping and turn-by-turn navigation, it now sports graphical data fields (e.g. power and heart rate charts), and the new ClimbPro feature, which tracks your location on an elevation profile of the current climb.

While cool, I had already tested that stuff; I was more eager to try out some other features that could only be done on a century-length ride. After all, I couldn’t finish my full review until I’ve put it through all my typical use cases.

Top of the list was battery life. The battery on my old Edge 820 had deteriorated to the point where I had to plug it into a portable USB battery for any rides longer than 90 minutes. The new unit claimed 26 to 32 hours, and I finished my 10-hour day with a whopping 72% charge remaining. I think I can finally leave my USB charger at home for good!

Of course, that includes the benefit I derived from the unit’s solar charging feature, which in Texas is a painless way to give the battery slight boost. Over 9h 15m the unit gained about 72 minutes worth of solar power, or about 8 minutes per hour. Not revolutionary, but not trivial either!

The other major feature I wanted to test was Garmin’s new “real-time stamina” estimate, which supposedly learns your physiology and provides a real-time guess about how long you can go until exhaustion. At my first rest stop, it estimated that I had 55% stamina remaining, and – ominously – that my reserves would run out 40 km before the end. I monitored that number all afternoon as it fluctuated, but it consistently told me that I’d have nothing left in the tank for the last 25-35 km of the ride, which is exactly how things played out. It was surprisingly accurate, given the variables that it didn’t know about, like fueling and hydration.

One feature came as a complete surprise to me. When Kermit team leader Steven texted us to ask where we were on the course, I deliriously scrolled down through the usual canned, stock responses for something appropriate as I continued pedaling. At the bottom of the list was something my old unit had lacked: the ability to actually type a freehand text response right there on the head unit! So I was able to pound out a response that truly captured my feelings in the moment. In response to his “How far out are you??”, I answered “Lifetimes”.

The only glitch I had was a minor one. I’ve always had an alert set to pop up when I reached the 100 mile threshold, but it never showed up on the new computer. I’ll have to re-test that, the next time I get the opportunity to pound out a hundred-mile ride.

My Friend Scott

As I mentioned above, my childhood friend Scott is on the Livestrong Board of Directors and is a survivor of testicular cancer.

Our friendship goes back fifty years to 1972: 3rd grade back in Maine, Cub Scouts, then French and several other classes through middle and high school. After going separate ways for college, 25 years later we rediscovered each other and our common commitment to cycling to combat cancer. In 2008 he rode the Pan-Mass Challenge, so it seemed appropriate for me to take part in his preferred event, especially since I’m now based in Austin.

I ran into him and his partner MJ outside the hotel as we were both heading to the start, and got to chat with them a little more just before we lined up for the depart. It was the first time I’d seen him in ten years, and it was wonderful to touch base, although it was much briefer than it deserved… Hopefully another time.

Steven and Team Kermit

My friend Steven is both a Livestrong Ambassador and the captain of the Pan-Mass Challenge’s very popular Team Kermit, founded in honor of – and continuing in memory of – his son Jared. I have several connections in the group and have ridden alongside numerous Team Kermit riders in the PMC all the way back to their founding in 2005. Most recently, I’ve nurtured friendships with several Kermiteers by riding with them virtually on the weekly PMC Zwift indoor trainer rides.

While I’ve never ridden the PMC as part of a team, I thought it would be fun to bolster Team Kermit’s numbers on the Livestrong ride, so I registered as an official team member. The days preceding the ride were spent tagging along – and even leading – some fun local sightseeing rides for our traveling visitors. Taking charge was local Austinite and Team Kermit member Scott.

Riders Christophe and Steve I only knew from the Zwift group rides, so it was nice to put names with their faces. They rode with me for the second half of the century route, and their companionship was absolutely invaluable.

I’m very much a lone wolf, so there were several times when I felt awkward as a member of a team, especially a team who decorates our helmets with large, stuffed Kermit toy dolls, which gets a ton of attention and comments! But they’re truly good people, and I was happy to be allowed to represent them.

Riding in Texas

This was my first century-length ride in the Lone Star State, which I view as a milestone, since it’s such a vastly different environment from my familiar riding in the Northeast.

My top concern was the Texas heat, especially after months of temperatures hovering at or above 40°C. Riding in that kind of heat is seriously dangerous, and I wanted to be sure my first long ride offered the kind of generous support you get on large charity rides. Wisely, most centuries down here take place in the spring and fall, and we were lucky that event day hovered just below 40°C. But temperature concerns will always be present for every ride I do down here.

My second concern was the roads, not knowing quite what to expect in terms of traffic, surface quality, and space to ride. In the end, those things all vary. There were trafficky bits and quiet bits; there was smooth tarmac and ample rough chipseal; broad roads with dedicated bike lanes and narrow, single-lane roads without even a shoulder. Finding quiet, comfortable roads for long, solo rides is just going to require some investigation.

Once outside of the city and its immediate suburbs, the terrain was mostly what I’ll call scrubland. Plots of large ranches with low, hardy, weatherbeaten vegetation like juniper (which Texans call “cedar”) and live oak. There aren’t a ton of rivers and creeks – and those are nearly all dry after the summer’s heatwave – where you often see dramatic exposed limestone. It has a lot of character, without being entirely desert or prairie. The Blanco River crossing was really interesting, and I even shared the road with a roadrunner while climbing out of it.

At a macro level, riding in Texas is going to take some adjustment, but it should be amply doable, with careful scouting and route selection, and more experience managing my hydration.

Livestrong: the Event

This was also my first Livestrong ride. How was that?

The route was mostly fine. My only complaint was is that because the start/finish is downtown, a large percentage of the ride was urban and suburban strip mall hell, leaving less than a third of the route for scenic rural country roads. The entire second half of the ride paralleled ugly Interstate 35 on the run back to Austin. But the scenic bits we did get were thoroughly pleasant.

Ride support was generally great, with no less than nine water stops spaced about 16 km apart, well-stocked with ample ice and wet towels, although no cola was available until the end.

As a rider, the cutoff times for the century route were not especially generous, particularly after they were shortened an extra 30 minutes. Fortunately they weren’t an issue for me, though.

The fundraising minimum (ZERO!) was surprisingly welcoming, with premiums offered at varying – and entirely voluntary – fundraising thresholds. By raising $875, I earned an on-course tribute sign, a tote bag, a tee shirt, a cheap mini Bluetooth speaker, the ubiquitous water bottle, an event cycling jersey, and a finisher’s medal, plus the right to line up in the VIP section at the head of the ride. That’s a much friendlier model when compared to the PMC’s $2,000 to $6,000 fundraising requirement just to participate!

Unlike the PMC, where thousands of spectators — often former patients and their families – line the entire route and thank you for riding, community support was mostly non-existent on the Livestrong ride. Other than the crowd at the start/finish, a few bystanders waving from nearby bus stops, and water stop volunteers, during the entire ride I only encountered one couple sitting at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, cheering their hearts out. The two events couldn’t be more different in that respect.

It all adds up to a mixed picture: a well-run and rider-friendly event for an organization that has wisely distanced itself from its shameful founder, and which Scott and Steven have convinced me does admirable work helping cancer patients and their families. And even if it’s no Pan-Mass Challenge or Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I’m very likely to participate again in the future, for the same reasons I outlined above.

Epilogue

So there you have it; it was a landmark ride. To encapsulate, it was:

  • My first Livestrong ride
  • My first imperial century in 11 months
  • My first century of 2023
  • My first century in Texas
  • My first century on Pæthos, my new bike
  • My first century with my new Garmin bike GPS
  • My first event as an official member of Team Kermit (or any team, for that matter)

While this century included a grim struggle and an ignoble footnote, I hold to my words that it was very good until it wasn’t. Troubles aside, I completed the course safely and enjoyed the overwhelming majority of it, and gained lots of lessons to bring forward for future rides. I enjoyed it immensely and am glad to have done it.

In addition to the HUI-VUI, I’ve discovered another thing that happens every six years: I purchase a new GPS bike computer. In this case, we’re talking the Garmin Edge 840 Solar, which I picked up last month after it came out back in April. A new GPS head unit is a really big deal for someone who spends as much time in the saddle as I do.

The Garmin Edge 840 Solar

Before diving into the new unit, let’s look at how far we’ve come. I first used a GPS to log bike rides waay back in 2000, using Garmin’s original yellow eTrex handheld, but the tech back then was so primitive that it didn’t have maps or routes or points of interest; just a blank monochrome 64 x 128 pixel LCD with a breadcrumb trail of where you had gone, and even that initially suffered from “Selective Availability”: an intentional inaccuracy imposed by the government on civilian GPS signals. Six years later I grabbed an eTrex Vista (my review), which had finally added color and some very rudimentary maps. In 2011 Garmin released the cycling-specific Edge 800, then 2017’s Edge 820 (my review), and this year’s Edge 840.

Along the way, I’ve watched these units evolve into incredibly useful and sophisticated navigational and analytical tools. Garmin updates their cycling products about every three years, so I’ve usually skipped a generation (e.g., the Edge 810 and Edge 830). So when I buy a new unit, there are some substantial improvements and compelling new features to check out.

And by that point, my old unit is usually pretty worn out. That was certainly true of my loyal old Edge 820. To begin with, its touch screen – a novelty at the time – was very sluggish, and the processor took forever to calculate routes or pan and zoom the map display. And the Micro USB connector was outdated technology from the start. After a few years the screen faded significantly, leaving a prominent grid of its LCD guts showing through its faint display. And its battery life – originally billed as lasting 15 hours – had shrunk to about 90 minutes. These were the shortcomings that I expected the new Edge 840 to fix.

With that, let’s look at the new beast. As always, I’ll divide this review into four sections: things I’m neutral about; features I don’t know much about because I didn’t test them; features I’m excited about; and the things that already disappoint me. With an executive summary at the end.

The Neutrals

My main display: speed, distance, with power and heart rate charts

My main display: speed, distance, with power and heart rate charts

One of the most noticeable changes is a revamped UI. It works fine. Its organization of functions isn’t 100% intuitive. And it’s still based on “activity profiles” rather than gear, which has always seemed a bit clunky to me.

The unit also supports phone-based configuration. I really don’t see a ton of value in that over configuring the unit on a computer or the device itself.

Potentially useful features include alerts for upcoming sharp turns and high-speed roads. But the high-speed road alerts arrive way too late to be actionable (e.g. navigating to avoid them). And the last thing you want when speeding around a sharp turn is having to read and dismiss an alert popping up on your head unit. They’re nice ideas, but not practical (at least not with the current implementation).

An unexpected surprise was that when following a route, the GPS can now have your phone verbally announce navigational cues as you approach them. “In fifty meters turn right on Mesa Drive.” Another cool idea, but they’re just not intelligible when your phone is stuffed into a jersey pocket on your back.

The unit can also walk you through a heart rate variability stress test. This isn’t for general health purposes, but for telling you how well or poorly you have recovered from your previous rides. That’s not something I need to wait around for three minutes for a device to tell me.

The Cycling Ability feature can tell you what your general cycling strengths and weaknesses are, as a very gross training aid. Garmin doesn’t add much value by telling me that I’m an endurance specialist.

Same with their measurement of heat acclimation. A simple percentage is way too simplistic to be of any actionable value.

Another hamstrung feature is showing the battery status for all your sensors (e.g. heart rate monitor, electronic shifters, power meter), where you really need more discrete battery levels than “okay” and “dead”.

There’s also a ton of features that I don’t really care much about, but you might. But to be honest I really don’t have any opinion about things like incident detection, structured training plans, mountain biking metrics, hydration alerts, an integrated bike alarm, lost device finder, etc.

The Unknowns

It might surprise you that I didn’t bother testing the unit’s integration with my indoor trainer. But the only useful function that provides would be the ability to simulate the gradients of riding a known real-world course, which isn’t as engaging as riding in the richer worlds on Zwift.

The Power Guide feature gives you a plan for specific power numbers to match when following a particular route. Just not something I’m likely to want.

Same story with the Event Training Plan feature. I hate structured training and already know how to build and taper for a major event. Not something I need, and not something I’d look to a head unit to provide.

There’s also the new and very promising Group Ride feature, which lets groups of riders share their route, in-ride messages, and live map with everyone’s location. This sounds like a really awesome feature if a critical number of rides and riders adopt it, although it’s limited to Garmin’s most recent units. It’s only in my “Unknowns” section because I haven’t had any opportunity to test it out.

The Positives

My customized boot screen

My customized boot screen

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

ClimbPro displaying map, elevation profile, current grade and power

ClimbPro displaying map, elevation profile, current grade and power

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Let’s start with the basics: critical things my Edge 820 did that the 840 still does. I can still download my activity FIT data files to my laptop, as mentioned above. It still communicates with my Di2 electronic shifting and displays what gear combination I’m in. I can still capture screen shots, as you can see at right. I can still set the text that appears on the startup screen. And you can still charge it from a portable USB battery while using it. Good!

Then there’s things that aren’t new, but are features the Edge 840 has improved upon. Starting with the most important improvement: battery duration is now listed at 32 to 60 hours! The touch screen is so much more responsive that it’s actually usable now! Panning and zooming maps is reasonably quick! Calculating and re-calculating routes takes a second or two instead of five to ten minutes! Adding the GNSS GPS system improves GPS accuracy in cities and other challenging areas! And while my old unit would show alerts when calls or text messages came in, the 840 also shows email and all other phone notifications! Very nice!

The passive solar receiver adds around 8 to 10 minutes of extra power per hour in Texas sun, which might not be a huge deal for folks in cloudier locales, and there’s a data page showing the unit’s solar efficiency. Even I debated buying the non-solar model when I learned that the special glass makes the solar screen a little less bright, but it seems fine, and way better than my old, faded Edge 820.

On the topic of charging, we’ve finally made the transition from a MicroUSB to a USB-C charging & data port!

One of the highlights of the new interface is a home screen with “Glances”, little UI widgets that summarize important information and link to the most frequently-used functions. For example, there’s a Weather Glance that shows current conditions and clicks through to a dedicated weather page. And the Navigation Glance will show and give you one-touch access to the route you most recently downloaded onto the unit.

But by far the most massive UI enhancement is the widespread addition of graphical data fields! Heart rate and power are no longer a single number, but also time-series charts that are color-coded for intensity. Solar power, route elevation and gradient, and several other data fields can be shown as color graphs that encapsulate a ton of information in a small screen factor. Very cool!

One special application of charts is the new Climb Pro page. When you begin a climb, a new page pops up to show your current power, how much longer the hill is, its current slope, and a chart that shows where you are on the climb, and color-coded undulations of how steep it gets over its entire duration. It’s a very handy little tool for managing your effort, especially on long or steep ascents.

And if you need to manage your effort over an entire long ride, the Real-Time Stamina page is a great new feature. It uses your history to estimate what percentage of your total endurance you’ve used up – and therefore how much you still have left in the tank – and what that translates to in terms of time or distance until you hit the wall and your performance plummets. This sounds like a gimmicky pseudo-feature, but on my recent 100-mile Livestrong ride, it accurately foretold that I’d run out of juice about 30 km before the finish.

I could have included this in my “enhanced features” above, but it deserves its own paragraph: enhanced text message functionality. On my old Edge 820, when replying to someone’s text message, I could only pick from a pre-set list of 8-10 basic canned responses. Now there’s about three times as many canned responses. And you can customize them in their mobile app. And you can add emoji. And the Holy Grail: you can even compose your own responses on the fly, using the on-device keyboard! Finally Garmin no longer artificially limits me to replying with “Yes”, “No”, or “Almost there”!

The Negatives

The most obvious and glaring negative is that the meager screen resolution (246 x 322 pixels) hasn’t increased. It’s not a huge issue, but a higher resolution display would improve my perception of the unit a great deal.

Garmin advertises a cool feature that will tell you your “fitness age” based on your measured physiology. Why is that a negative? Because you don’t get that piece of data unless you buy both a connected scale and wear a 24-hour fitness watch that’s paired to their central database. Garmin advertising this feature as available on their bike computer is completely misleading.

While I haven’t sussed out exactly which features require it, the bike computer will nag the user to not only install but keep Garmin’s smartphone app open and running in order to take advantage of certain online features (IIRC things like current weather, voice navigation, text messages, and phone notifications).

The only true malfunction I’ve experienced is that a distance alert I set failed to trigger on my recent 100-mile Livestrong ride. Unfortunately, I’ve only done one century ride, so this isn’t something I can test very often!

Finally, the unit often hangs whenever I disconnect it from a cable connection to my laptop. It’s recoverable, and most people probably don’t do this very often, but I download my activity data file after every ride, so it’s a big annoyance for me. Aside from the fact that the unit shouldn’t hang under normal operating conditions to begin with!

The Bottom Line

Six years ago, I was disappointed after buying Garmin’s Edge 820. After defining and owning the GPS bike computer market, they released an underwhelming product that was unimaginative, behind the times, and deeply flawed. As a result, more agile competitors like Wahoo and Hammerhead eagerly and justifiably took major chunks out of Garmin’s once-dominant market share.

Garmin seems to have learned their lesson. The Edge 840 has improved on several old features and introduced a raft of new functions. I’m genuinely excited by the improved UI and graphical data fields, the passive solar charging, ClimbPro, Real-Time Stamina, the enhanced SMS capabilities, and the potential of the Group Ride features. Assuming they figure out the missing distance alert, my only knock on it is the meager screen resolution; but that’s still markedly brighter and more responsive than my old, fading 820’s terrible display.

Am I happy with it? I’m delighted! While it’s not perfect, the Edge 840 is a tremendous improvement over my old 820, with far fewer built-in flaws.

You’d think a ride visiting every recognized neighborhood in the city would be fairly straightforward… but it’s not.

No, actually it’s one of the hardest rides I’ve done. First, there are no less than 90 neighborhoods, separated by Pittsburgh’s canonical three rivers. That means it’s going to be a long ride: about 120 km, in fact. Also remember that this is the hilliest city in America, so the route has to pack in over 2,000 meters of climbing (over 1¼ miles of vertical elevation, for the primitives in the audience). Combine the two, and you’re talking a minimum 8+ hours in the saddle. Plus it used to be held in the worst of August’s heat.

Although I debated whether I really wanted to, in the end there was no choice but to do this year’s Every Neighborhood Ride (ENR).

The handful of finishers at Arsenal Park

The handful of finishers at Arsenal Park

Riders gathering at Doughboy Square

Riders gathering at Doughboy Square

Riding along the Allegheny on Pittsburgh's North Side

Riding along the Allegheny on Pittsburgh's North Side

Why? First, it would be something entertaining to do while my partner Inna was out of town for a week. Second, the date got moved from the heat of summer to early October, which would make it a lot easier. Plus, although I loyally rode in 2016, 2017, and 2018, I missed the 2019 ride while up in Michigan doing LHT, and it wasn’t held in the Covid years of 2020 and 2021. And if missing the ride for three years wasn’t reason enough, riding a few miles farther would also allow me to complete my sixth century of 2022.

So Saturday I found myself on the road at 7:20am, pedaling the short 6 km down to Doughboy Square in a very chilly 5°C. I’d donned most of my cold-weather riding gear, including full-fingered gloves and my priceless thermal cycling jacket and bib tights.

About two dozen riders gathered there and chatted before perfunctory instructions and our roll-out. Within a block the group had split, with about ten riders speeding ahead in Jake’s fast group. I maintained the self-discipline to stick to my plan of staying with Jen’s slow group, having paid the price in previous years for over-exerting myself chasing Jake.

The first leg saw us cross the Allegheny to touch Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhoods, then make a very quick trip across the Ohio and back to set foot in the West End. A dozen kilometers in, we faced our first long climb – East Street – where I got ahead of the group and waited at the top. After a screaming descent down Marshall Ave., we finished up the North Side and crossed the Ohio to hit McKees Rocks and the climb up to the first rest stop at Chartiers Playground.

It was 10am and we were 30 km in. The sky was heavy overcast, but the sun had broken through the clouds for a few seconds. It wasn’t warming up much, but my gear kept me warm everywhere except my face. My biggest concern was for my 5½ year old bike GPS, whose feeble battery could barely hold a charge in the cold. Fortunately, I’d brought along two portable chargers to see me through.

The second leg caught almost all the neighborhoods in the South Hills, which was the lumpiest portion of the route, causing the group to start rubber-banding a bit. That meant the pace was very gentle, with lots of brief rests while the slower riders caught up. People usually begin dropping off near the second rest stop, so a few riders said goodbye at that opportunity.

We reached that halfway stop in Allentown at 12:25pm with 60 km done. At 10°C, I felt it was warm enough to strip the arm warmers underneath my jacket, as well as my skull cap. At this point, the ride had been so relaxed that I began to entertain the idea of riding the extra 40km to finish my sixth imperial century of the year.

In the third leg, we finished off the South Hills by illegally crossing some active rail lines, taking the GAP bike path through Hays and down to Lincoln Place, then crossing the Monongahela River. But as soon as we did, one rider flatted, which provided an unplanned 20-minute delay. That was followed by the familiar but long climb up Hazelwood, the screaming descent down Forward, and the short gravel hike-a-bike through Frick Park along Nine Mile Run to our final rest stop, which had been relocated due to January’s Fern Hollow bridge collapse.

It was 2:40pm, and we’d covered 89 km. The clouds were starting to way, and the temps had reached a still-chill 12°C, and would only go down from here. We lost a couple more people, but gained the three that were left in Jake’s fast group. My bike GPS had finally exhausted my first portable charger after five full charge cycles, so I swapped to the second.

The final segment is always something of a cluster. It amounts to a hilly circle and a half of the inner city, and many exhausted riders simply peel off toward home whenever it’s convenient, rather than completing the full ride. And the few who remain require frequent regrouping and ad hoc rest stops. Along the way I finally took off and stowed my heavy gloves.

The chaos was compounded by construction and a route change occasioned by the absence of the Fern Hollow bridge, which was formerly part of the route. On top of that, my bike GPS wouldn’t navigate any farther, because it had exhausted its route storage of 200 waypoints; so instead of helping navigate, I was glued to the ride leaders for the rest of the ride.

Finally nine weary riders pulled into the finish at Arsenal Park at 5:16pm, having covered 123 km and climbed 1,788 meters in 9¼ hours. Post-ride chat was amicable but brief, as people looked homeward. With the clouds mostly gone and sunlight fading, I made my own farewells, hoping to squeeze out another flat 40 km to complete my imperial century. I was going to be cutting it close…

Actually no, I wasn’t. I still had 15 km to go when the sun set at 6:51pm, and I didn’t pull into our driveway until 7:35, after more than 12 hours of riding. But before then I covered the bike paths out to the Penitentiary, then the jail trail, Panther Hollow, and the always-frustrating final climb back up to Squirrel Hill, the latter in complete darkness with no headlight. But I was happy to complete my sixth century of the year.

Despite riding 100 miles and climbing over 2,000 meters, the casual pace had conserved my strength, and most of my aches weren’t from over-exertion but simply accumulated time in the saddle.

The Every Neighborhood Ride is one of Pittsburgh’s best and most unique cycling events. You’re usually in a small group of companions, all working to overcome this city’s profoundly ill-conceived topography. And it’s unique among group rides in that you’re with that same set of companions for seven, nine, maybe twelve hours, chatting, encouraging, and getting to know one another. That, plus congenial ride leaders, makes ENR one Pittsburgh ride that I’ll miss when I move on from here. It was nice to come back to it after three years away, and it was a nice and easy – if very long – day out.

Measuring power is the gold standard of performance management on the bike. I’ve waited years for the industry to provide a pedal-based power meter that is accurate, uses mountain bike-style SPD cleats, is reasonably easy to use, and “affordable”.

In 2018 I bought a Wahoo Kickr Core indoor trainer, which allowed me to finally measure my power output over the winter. But when I took the bike off the trainer for the summer, I had to give up measuring power, and go back to estimating power (and thus fitness and fatigue) indirectly based on heart rate data.

Garmin Rally XC200 power meter pedals

However, after over a decade of waiting, last month I opened my wallet and acquired a set of Garmin Rally XC200 power meter pedals. Here’s some background and insight into how it’s been for me so far…

Why pedal-based? These days, you can throw a power meter on a bike in several places: pedals, crankarms, chainring spider, rear hub… A pedal-based system made sense for me because it’s the easiest to install, and the easiest to move from one bike to another. And unlike a hub or indoor trainer, it measures your power output earlier in the process, because some power is lost to friction and inefficiency in the drive train (as we’ll see in detail below).

Why the Garmin ones? One other option, the SRM X-Power, was about the same price, but they have a bad rep with pedals, and just didn’t seem able to manufacture them very quickly.

The only other option would be to buy a pair of non-SPD Favero Assioma pedals, rip out the internals, and plug that into a pair of Favero SPD pedal bodies. That would have been a couple hundred bucks cheaper, but would have voided their warranty, which is meaningful on a nearly $1,000 purchase.

Another argument in favor of the Garmins is that they have 2 to 4 times better battery life than the others.

A lot of this gets covered in exhaustive detail by the incomparable DC Rainmaker in his exhaustive Garmin Rally review from last year, as well as this year’s power meter pedal buyer’s guide.

Some miscellaneous notes: All these pedal-based units are double-sided (a necessary convenience), and also transmit your cadence to your bike computer, eliminating the need for a separate cadence monitor.

Like the Assiomas, the Garmin power meter is housed in the pedal spindle, and can be moved between pedal bodies of different styles. So if I ever decided to switch from SPD pedals to SPD-SL or Look Keo style cleats, I could just buy some empty pedal bodies and plug the power meter spindle right in.

Also, although the Garmins were very expensive, I got a tasty $240 discount thanks to REI’s spring members’ sale. Plus forthcoming reward bucks that could be applied to a new Garmin bike computer, if they were to ever release a new model…

Some usage notes: You need to keep a couple things in mind in addition to your battery life. One is that you need to let the unit acclimate to the outdoor temperature in order to get accurate readings, and that can take about ten minutes if you store and ride your bike in very different temperatures. And then you also need to do a zero-offset calibration about 10 or 15 minutes into every ride. It’s a bit of a bother, but it’s much better than we used to do with older power meters.

One big difference is the weight of the pedals. These pedals weigh 443g; they are replacing my current pedals, which weigh in at 306g. Although I’ll also be removing my dedicated cadence sensor from the bike, which is an additional 10g.

So what data do I get? I’ve already mentioned power (in Watts) and cadence, but there’s a shitton more. You get the power balance between your left and right legs. You get how much time you rode seated versus standing. You get measurements of how much power you produce at all points throughout the pedaling circle (even if that’s not of any practical value to anyone). You get measurements of whether your power is being delivered at the center of the pedal, or off to one side, which might indicate a bit of a fitting problem. And all of these are logged second-by-second for later analysis.

Can this get any geekier? I’m glad you asked!

So one of the biggest questions to ask of any power meter is its accuracy. The first units claimed to be accurate to ±5%, and up til now I’ve been assuming my Kickr is performing up to its ±2% claim. Most power meters these days (including my pedals) advertise ±1% accuracy, but how do I know? Well, let’s compare them against one another!

I’m going to look at two indoor trainer rides. The first is a March 31th 50-minute ride of Zwift’s Tour of Watopia Stage 3 on the hilly Downtown Titans route. The second, longer ride is ToW Stage 2’s flatter Watopia’s Waistband route on April 2th.

For each ride, I simultaneously recorded the power data coming from my Wahoo Kickr Core, and also that coming from my Garmin Rally XC200 pedals. So if things are working correctly, the measurements coming from each ride should be almost identical.

First, the numbers: As expected, cadence was virtually identical between the pedals and the crank-mounted dedicated cadence sensor (I did not take cadence from the Kickr, as trainers aren’t reliable for cadence data).

In contrast, the pedals registered an average power that was 2.7 to 4.1% higher than the trainer. Similarly, average weighted power came in 3.0 to 4.5% higher. Does that mean one power meter is slightly off, and how do we know which one?

No, everything’s fine. That small difference is eminently explainable by that thing I mentioned way back in paragraph four: power numbers coming from a trainer will be lower due to drive train losses that occur due to friction and flexion somewhere between the pedals, crankarms, chainrings, chain, cogset, and trainer. So they’ll naturally report a little lower numbers than pedals, which measure power transfer much earlier in the process. That would easily explain the 2.7 to 4.5% variation I saw.

But interestingly, when you look at maximum power (e.g. sprinting), the difference between the pedals and trainer falls to 0.6 to 1.0%. I haven’t got a good explanation for that yet.

But that’s all just summary data, and averages aren’t a great way to validate data over time. Much more revealing (and interesting) is the second-by-second detailed data. For that, we need some charts!

Next, the charts: So let’s compare the power data for each ride in the DC Rainmaker Analyzer Tool, overlaying the numbers for each ride from our two data sources to see how closely they match up. In all these charts, the red line is my Kickr Core trainer’s data, and the Garmin pedals are in green, and hopefully those lines will be almost identical.

First, let’s look at the power charts for the whole duration of both rides.

Chart: 3/31 power over 50 minutes Chart: 4/2 power over 90 minutes

It’s a little easier to see on the first chart, since it’s less busy, but in general the numbers reported by my pedals and my trainer line up really well, with the pedals giving slightly higher numbers, as expected.

Remember tho that the first chart is 50 minutes long, and the second is 90 minutes. So although things look pretty good (yay!), this is at an extremely coarse level. For a better comparison, we really need to zoom in a little closer. Let’s find a couple representative chunks in the 7- to 10-minute range.

Chart: 3/31 power over 7 minutes Chart: 4/2 power over 10 minutes

And there you go. Aside from the pedals’ slightly higher readings, the ups and downs of the charts are almost identical, close enough that the difference could easily be put down by the devices’ different sampling rates. No dropouts, no crazy spikes, or big differences between the curves.

In addition to a simple time-series comparison, there’s another way athletes look at power that might confirm our conclusion. For a sprinter, your overall power doesn’t matter so much as the maximum power you can put out and sustain over five, ten, maybe thirty seconds. So the critical power curve shows the maximum power you sustained over a particular duration. Obviously, the human body can generate a lot of power in short bursts, but can only sustain a more moderate power over durations measured in minutes and hours.

Unfortunately, as I’ve noted before, I’m keeping an eye on some cardiac issues and my chainrings are so worn that I can’t really sprint without dropping my chain, so my numbers are very pedestrian. Still, we can still draw some conclusions from my critical power curves for those two rides.

Chart: 3/31 critical power Chart: 4/2 critical power

And this perfectly confirms everything we’ve seen so far. At just about every duration, the pedals consistently read 3 to 5% higher than the trainer, as expected. The only variance is at durations shorter than 15 seconds, where the devices’ sampling rates might impact the numbers.

So my overall conclusion is that I can definitely rely on these pedals to produce accurate power data that is very consistent with my indoor trainer, keeping drive train losses in mind.

Unless you’re a cyclist, it’s hard to convey how exciting and interesting it is to finally have a power meter on the bike year-round. At the big-picture level, this means my power data will finally be consistent between indoor and outdoor seasons, thus giving me more reliable fitness and fatigue numbers.

This means I can not only monitor my fitness and fatigue month-by-month and year-over-year, but also precisely quantify and properly pace my level of effort and reserves on a minute-by-minute basis during an individual ride of whatever duration.

My second year riding in Pittsburgh somehow felt both pleasantly normal as well as superlative and memorable in so many ways. Overall, I rode a ton, befriended some good folks, grew more familiar with my new hometown, set some new records, met all my goals, vanquished Pittsburgh’s hardest challenge, and had a blast doing so. Here’s my year in review…

Team Decaf group ride at the Point

Team Decaf group ride at the Point, with Ornoth back center

Ornoth crushing a hill

Ornoth crushing a hill on the Escape to the Lake MS ride

Ornoth & Monica finishing the 100k

Ornoth & Monica finishing the Pittsburgh Randonneurs' 100k populaire

Ornoth leading a pack through the city

Ornoth leading a pack through the city during PedalPGH

Ornoth descending Dirty Dozen Hill 6 (Rialto) from the neighborhood of Troy Hill.

Video of Ornoth (in black) amongst a group of Dirty Dozen riders (around 3:02) to the top of Suffolk St.

Great closeup action shot of Ornoth ascending Dirty Dozen Hill 9 (Canton Ave).

Video of Ornoth conquering the upper half of Canton Ave (10:50 to 11:00).

The tired-but-happy look of an official Dirty Dozen finisher!

Ornoth's 2017 Cycling Calendar

My Original 2017 Goals

This time last year, I set four explicit goals for 2017.

Purchase and learn how to use a new Garmin Edge 820 GPS cyclo-computer. This was the first thing I did upon getting back to Pittsburgh in February. The 820 has a lot of new features, some of which actually work. The D-Fly integration with my electronic shifters has mostly worked, despite the added drain on the Di2’s battery, and I’ve enjoyed perusing my shifting data on di2stats.com. I created my own custom data field (feet of ascent per mile) for display on the 820, and got Shimano’s E-TUBE app working such that I can update my shifters’ firmware from my phone. While the 820 didn’t live up to what it should have been, it’s been a steady performer and a worthwhile purchase. Read my full Garmin Edge 820 review.

Ride both days of the 2017 Escape to the Lake MS Ride. My partner Inna’s support made this weekend expedition possible, and it was a lovely experience. Not only did I get to complete the event and finish on the very shore of Lake Erie, but Inna and I stayed and spent an extra day lounging on the lakeside beaches of Presque Isle State Park. It was very reminiscent of my Cape Cod trips with Sheeri back when she supported my Pan-Mass Challenge rides. Read my Escape to the Lake ride report.

Complete the 2017 Woiner Cancer Foundation 3-2-1 Ride. This became a primary goal after I missed the 2016 ride during my mother’s hospitalization. In 2017, they offered a special 80-mile route to VIP fundraisers from 2016 (which I qualified for), so on October 1st I saddled up for a long, chilly, flat ride along the Great Allegheny Passage from Ohiopyle back to Pittsburgh, most of it on crushed limestone rail trail. I enjoyed exploring some new territory while further increasing the amount of money I’ve raised for cancer research. Read my 3-2-1 Ride report.

Attempt my first Dirty Dozen race. Climbing the city’s 13 steepest hills, including the steepest public street in the world, this is an immense challenge, and the city’s most infamous ride. I missed last year’s edition while caretaking my mother, but this year I participated in all the training rides, then enjoyed an immensely fulfilling and memorable ride on race day, earning hard-won lifetime bragging rights. Unquestionably the highlight of the year. See my training rides blogpost, my full Dirty Dozen ride report, and my time-lapse videos of the most difficult hills.

Additional Highlights

Achieving all my explicit goals guaranteed that I had a good year. But there was an awful lot more to 2017 on top of that…

  • Further deferring my job hunt gave me the entire year off to devote to cycling, and I made good use of the opportunity. I topped 4,000 miles for the first time since 2010. And I shattered my record for number of rides per year; this year’s 154 rides is about double number of rides I used to do in Boston.
  • I continued meeting and befriending lots of local cyclists, which has been rewarding, and one of the biggest overall themes for 2017. It’s nice when someone recognizes you, which is happening regularly now, so I’m starting to feel more like a known community member than an unfamiliar outsider.
  • I attended both the Spring Rally and Fall Rally organized by the Western Pennsylvania Wheelmen, and got a snazzy new WPW jersey.
  • I claimed 13 more tags in the BikePGH forums’ Tag-o-Rama cycling and photography game, placing me within the Top 20 players. It’s been an interesting way to learn more about the city. See all my Tag-o-Rama photos.
  • I was quoted (anonymously) in BikePGH’s summary of their survey of cyclists’ attitudes toward self-driving vehicles, and re-quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article covering the survey. I was righteously amused. Read my self-driving vehicle blogpost.
  • I participated in the National Bike Challenge, confirming that I’m around the Top 10% most active cyclists locally, state-wide, and nationally. Read my National Bike Challenge blogpost.
  • I joined a half dozen other BikePGH forum readers in playing Velogames’ annual Tour de France fantasy league. It was interesting, but my team selections placed me near the middle of the pack. Oh well!
  • I picked up an attractive graphic poster of the “Hell of the North: Paris-Roubaix”, which is hung above my desk at home.
  • I continued to maintain BikingPGH’s Annual Ride Calendar, as I described here, and also iterated on my paper-based cycling wall calendar. Both have been useful planning tools that I’ll continue working on for 2018. Here’s a link to the full size 2017 version.
  • I picked up two absolutely pivotal pieces of kit: a thermal cycling jacket and a pair of thermal full-leg bibs, both from my favorite manufacturer: Craft. Those have utterly transformed my relationship to cold-weather riding, and made even the 17° Dirty Dozen practice ride a pleasant experience.
  • My Strava trophy case added badges for completing climbing challenges and gran fondos for April, May, June, July, and August, plus a gran fondo for October. Ironically, despite training for and completing the Dirty Dozen, as well as my 250,000-foot climbing goal, I failed to earn Strava’s climbing challenge badges for October, November, or December!
  • That 250,000-foot goal, as well as the six centuries I rode in 2017, are highlights that I’ll discuss in more detail in the next section.

The Charthouse

Last year’s annual summary included a chart showing that my first year riding in Pittsburgh utterly shattered all the previous climbing records set during my years in Boston.

In 2017, I eclipsed last year’s record, surpassing a quarter million feet of climbing (47 vertical miles), more than double the climbing I’d ever done back in Boston. My 62 feet of ascent per mile ridden is also a new record. You can see an updated version of that climbing chart by reading my 250,000 foot blogpost.

Also in last year’s summary, I used the Strava Premium and Stravistix TRIMP “fitness and freshness” charts to tell the story of my year and put it into context with previous years, so I’ll do that again here. In 2017 I used the detailed TRIMP charts exhaustively in planning my pre-event training and recovery, which proved remarkably effective.

2017 TRIMP fitness chart

The above chart shows my fitness level over the past twelve months, with major rides highlighted. Obviously, I started the year with zero fitness after spending five months off the bike while caretaking my mother. You see a big jump when I got home in February, followed by a period of consolidation; another jump in mid-April, which kicked off a lengthy and consistent improvement leading up to my first century of the year: the two-day Escape to the Lake MS Ride in mid-June.

After finally notching that first 100-mile ride, my fitness stayed at a high level through my four summer centuries: the Akron Bicycle Club’s ABC Ride in July (a new event to me), followed a week later by the PMTCC 3-State Ride (when my fitness peaked), then August’s Every Neighborhood Ride, and PedalPGH (which were both long group rides that I extended into full centuries).

My fitness dipped noticeably during a two-week vacation in September before a quick spike for my first 3-2-1 Ride on October 1 (a long charity ride that I extended for my sixth and final century of the year).

The next two months were spent preparing for the Dirty Dozen ride, but hill climbs don’t accrue as much fitness benefit as endurance rides, so although I was gaining power, you see a jagged slight downward trend in fitness there. After the Dirty Dozen, my fitness remained high to the end the year, while I polished off my goal of climbing a quarter million feet in 2017.

2011-2017 TRIMP fitness chart

Tacking my 2017 fitness onto the end of the chart to depict my past seven seasons tells the same story in brief: beginning from ground zero, an initial kick, consolidation, and a second kick up to peak fitness. I stayed at a high level of fitness for a much longer time this year, thanks to training for November’s Dirty Dozen and my climbing goal-driven riding in December.

All that late-season riding drives the major difference between 2017’s curve and that of previous years: I’m ending the calendar year at a much higher level of fitness than ever before. Now, whether that will translate to better form next spring is an open question, and will depend on how much riding I do in January, February, and March.

I’m sure there’ll be days that call me outside for a ride, but right now I’ll happily take a couple months to rest and recover.

Goals for 2018

It feels kind of strange, but I’m going into 2018 without any major cycling goals.

Having two seasons under my belt, I’ve done all the new rides that I wanted to experience when I moved here, so I don’t feel like I have any unfinished business that needs particular attention.

I’m happy with my fitness, my equipment, my knowledge of the area, and the relationships I’ve been growing in the local cycling community.

So my overall attitude going into 2018 is: “Nothing specific, but more of the same, please.”

That said, there are a couple things I anticipate for 2018.

With a trip to Italy planned for May, I do hope to do some riding around the Tuscan hills, and hopefully spectate a stage of the Giro d’Italia, as well. That trip would probably be the highlight of my year, and it’s the only new experience I’m specifically targeting.

And there’s a rumor that GCN might be sending a crew to Pittsburgh next year, presumably for November’s Dirty Dozen, or at least a peek at the route. It would be fun to be involved with that somehow, although I’m not relishing the idea of doing that ride again!

And along the way, I’ll pass two milestones on my R2-Di2 bike seen here; I’ll eclipse 15,000 miles on it, which is just a round number, but at 16,800 miles I’ll surpass all the riding I did on my first bike—the Devinci hybrid seen here—reminding me that after five years “the new bike” ain’t quite so new as she used to was.

But other than those things, I’m happy to take 2018 as it comes. If it’s anything like how enjoyable and eventful 2017 was, I’ll have absolutely no cause to complain!

September’s been a dud as far as riding goes. It’s been unseasonably cold and rainy, I started the month still suffering from a summer cold, and to be honest even when the weather’s conducive I just haven’t had much desire to lay down the miles. Poop on that!

WPW Fall Rally: Morning on the Yough

WPW Fall Rally: Morning on the Yough

WPW Fall Rally: Soutersville Train

WPW Fall Rally: Soutersville Train

I skipped the Pedal the Lakes century up in Mercer County due to a showery forecast and the organizers’ persistent refusal to provide GPS route data, something which has become de rigueur for everyone else.

I had the opportunity to do a 1am night-start 200k brevet, but just couldn’t motivate myself. It was a cold night, a very hilly route, I haven’t got the form, and it was Inna’s last night at home before a long trip. Having seen the weary finishers—all three of them!—I’m glad I gave it a pass.

That 200k ended at the Western PA Wheelmen’s fall rally, which I did go to (at a more respectable 9am). It was still cold and foggy, but it wasn’t dark, and I only had to pedal 35 miles instead of 135! I still went off course twice, and it was hilly enough to dissuade my lazy ass from undertaking an additional 32-mile route after lunch.

On the other hand, I saw the 200k riders finish, got to socialize with a bunch of folks, picked up the snazzy new argyley WPW jersey I’d ordered, and got a free (surplus) WPW “ride leader” tech tee and wind vest.

This month of poop gets even worse going forward, as I’m leaving to join Inna for a week in Seattle and Victoria. There goes what’s left of my late-season fitness!

Unfortunately, I could really use that fitness, because with the change of seasons comes the transition from endurance riding to obscenely steep and painful hill repeats in preparation for my first infamous Dirty Dozen ride. And if I get enough climbing in, I’m hoping to hit a quarter million feet of ascending by the end of the year. But in order to do any of that, I need to re-find my lost bikey mojo.

The sole bright spot has been new advances with my Edge 820 bike computer. First, I was able to wirelessly connect my new phone to my Di2 electronic shifters, download new firmware patches, and install those patches myself. Previously, you had to pay a bike shop to have their mechanics do all that; and even when Shimano’s hardware and firmware supported it, my old phone didn’t. Now, when Shimano introduces new functionality, I can just download and install it myself. So that’s quite a convenience.

And after posting an idea for a new data field on Garmin’s product forum, I found a guy who wrote a ConnectIQ app called AppBuilder that you can download to your bike computer and program to calculate your own data fields, which is exactly what I did. So now, in addition to the regular fields that Garmin supplies, my bike computer now displays how many feet of ascent I’ve done per mile for the current ride. That’s something I’ve been following since moving from flat Boston to hilly Pittsburgh, and having my cyclocomputer display it for the current ride is pretty darned cool.

But the reckoning is coming… DD minus 10 and a half weeks.

Three months ago, I replaced my aging Garmin Edge 800 GPS cycling computer with the new Garmin Edge 820. After 52 rides and 1,400 miles, it’s time for an in-depth review.

I’m a data weenie. I was logging my weekly miles all the way back in 2000, and saving GPS tracks of significant rides using a handheld GPS long before GPS tracking was integrated into bike computers. So I’m sensitive to the features, usability, and reliability of my bike computer.

Edge 820 Di2 gearing & Strava Suffer Score page

I was really happy with the Edge 800, which I bought when they first came out in 2011. Over the years, Garmin introduced the newer Edge 810 and the larger Edge 1000, plus the smaller Edge 500 and 510, but the 800 was so good that I never felt the need to upgrade.

However, after six years, my Edge 800’s battery had begun to flag, and I was tempted by all the improved features and functions of the new units. Last July, when Garmin released a new unit in the 800 series, I read the reviews like a hawk, and finally picked up my unit in February, after I returned from my five-month stay up in Maine.

I’ll divide this review up into four sections: basic features and things I’m neutral about; features I don’t know much about because I didn’t test them; features I like and am excited about; and the things that disappoint me about the unit. Then the executive summary is at the end.

The Neutral

My biggest problem with my aging Edge 800 was battery life. I need a device that will record GPS data and provide navigational cues through at least a 9-hour 200k ride. I recently completed a 7-hour century ride, and had over 40 percent charge left, which means the Edge 820 can be expected to live up to its spec of 12-hour battery life.

I was a little concerned that the 820 has a smaller screen than the 800. On the other hand, it has better resolution. So far, reading the screen has not been a problem at all.

At a minimum, I need to be able to import GPX-formatted route data from the computer to the unit. No problem with the 820.

I also download all my raw GPS data (Garmin .FIT files) to my computer for archival. Thankfully, the 820 still supports this type of access.

Rather than coming with an SD card slot, this device has a fixed memory capacity of 8 GB. So far that hasn’t been an issue, and I can only see it becoming so if you were to load multiple continents’ worth of map data. Activity .FIT files don’t take up very much space at all.

Sometimes, if you were following a course and deviated from the path, my 800 would simply give up trying to navigate for you. The 820 hasn’t been bad, in that it tries to get you back onto the course.

Some folks have complained about the altimeter being off, or drifting during rides. I haven’t noticed a problem, given the understanding that barometric altimeters have limited accuracy by definition.

One new feature on the 820 is real-time weather alerts. This would be a cool feature, except it only receives major alerts like flash floods. Useful, but only rarely. Given that the device has a live Internet connection through a Bluetooth link to your cellphone, I’d rather see live local radar and notices of impending rain. There’s an app for that in Garmin’s ConnectIQ Store, but I haven’t tried it out yet.

Another new feature is the display of “recovery time” at the end of each ride. Basically, it’s a gratuitous, dumb feature. Recovery varies from person to person, and even a novice rider can sense how long they’ll take to recover from any given effort. I’ve turned that feature off.

One undocumented feature on the Edge 800 was the ability to set the boot screen text that displays when the unit powers up. I had set that to an inspirational message—“Always lead, never follow”—plus my phone number in case the unit was lost. I was happy to learn that the feature still works on the 820.

One evening, I learned that the Edge 820 automatically switches to an inverted-color display at night for better visibility. I’d love to say that’s an improvement, but it’s a feature that was also available on the 800; I had merely turned it off at some point!

The Unknowns

The Edge 820 comes with a power saving mode that comes on when the battery reserves start getting low. I haven’t tested it yet.

It also introduces an “incident detection” feature, where it’ll alert a contact if it thinks you’ve crashed. So many other users reported false positives that I have never turned the feature on.

Presumably you can load your own maps onto the unit. That’s a feature that existed on the Edge 800, but I’ve never felt any desire to mess with the maps that it came with. Though it might be a handy thing if you traveled or moved to a different continent…

Although Garmin did away with the idea of bike profiles, you can still set odometer values based on the sensors that are on each bike. Seems like a lot of work, and I don’t need total odometer readings while riding. I can just get that from the laptop.

The most exciting and useful feature that I haven’t had the opportunity to test is the Edge 820’s FE-C indoor trainer integration, which should allow the computer to set the trainer’s resistance level. In addition to using the Zwift social training app, theoretically you can follow a real-world course that you rode, and the unit will alter resistance to simulate the terrain. I’m looking forward to that, but that’ll require a very expensive trainer purchase, which I’ve been delaying.

The Positives

Edge 820 map page
Edge 820 Strava Live Segment page
Edge 820 Profile page
Di2stats.com gearing pie chart

Let’s start with the obvious. Coming from a seven year old model, the Edge 820 has updated maps, and lots of software updates, both built-in as well as regular firmware updates going forward. It’s nice to be back on a supported platform!

In addition to GPS satellites, the new unit also has the ability to receive signal from the Russian GLONASS constellation, making GPS locks faster, more accurate, and stable. I suspect this is also the reason why the regular signal stops/dropouts/starts I used to have near heavy infrastructure (e.g. bridges, railways) on the Edge 800 are almost completely gone.

With a Bluetooth connection to my phone, the Edge 820 will display incoming SMS messages, and notifications for incoming calls. It works well, and has been a nice convenience, given how many hours I’m on the bike.

For ultra distance rides, you can plug the Edge 820 into a portable battery pack and it’ll charge itself, while continuing to record ride data. To be honest, I think my Edge 800 could do this, but I never bothered to test it. However, I tested the 820 for this review, and it worked well.

With my Edge 800, after a ride I had to connect the device to my laptop and manually kick off a synchronization job to upload my data to Garmin Connect, then manually upload to Strava, as well. The 820 will use Bluetooth or Wifi to automatically upload ride data to both sites without a wired connection. Very convenient, especially when you’re away from home at a multi-day event.

Garmin has created an open API called ConnectIQ for developers to add their own apps and custom data fields to the unit. A favorite is the Strava Live Suffer Score data field, which displays how hard your ride is. I’ve got a great idea for my own custom data field, but setting up the required Windows dev environment is a huge bother.

The Edge 820 also will store your favorite Strava road segments and display a countdown and timer when you are on them, allowing you to measure your effort against your PR or the KoM holder in real time. It’s a cool feature, except for the discouraging Sad Trombone sound it makes when the record-holding time finishes before you do…

With an extra bit of hardware, the Edge 820 will communicate with your Shimano Di2 electronic shifting groupset. That allows me to display which chainring and cog I’m in (both numerically and graphically), as well as the system’s current battery level. It’ll beep when you’re at your absolute highest and lowest gears, and give you a text alert if the Di2 battery goes below 25 percent charge. On top of all that, all your shifting data gets added to your ride logs, which you can analyze later through sites like di2stats.com.

The Negatives

The touch screen is really poor… nearly unusable. Every interaction with the unit must be very deliberate, and often repeated. My unit is barely tolerable, but many people have simply given up and returned theirs for a refund. It’s terrible.

Scrolling and zooming the map are incredibly slow. Like, almost unusably slow. If there’s one thing a mapping GPS should get right…

Loading and calculating routes is even worse! If I have a stored GPS breadcrumb track, it shouldn’t take upwards of five minutes for the unit to begin offering navigation cues. Why would it take even longer than the Edge 800?

When I first started using the unit, it spontaneously turned itself off several times. Fortunately, after a little while, that stopped happening.

Along with SMS and incoming call notifications, it would be nice if the unit offered incoming email notifications, as well. Missed opportunity.

I had a lot of trouble setting my Max Heart Rate. By default, the unit will override any number you specify with whatever it gets from a heart rate sensor. But since HRM straps are notorious for occasionally giving ludicrously high readings (e.g. above 220 BPM), it kept resetting itself until I shut off the auto setting and entered a fixed HR max.

Presumably, the Edge 820 supports Live Track, where you can send a URL to a friend, and they can visit a site that shows where you are in real time. In my experience, the data connection to the phone is too fragile, and I’ve never gotten Live Track to work… not even once. Both Google Maps’ Location Sharing feature and the Glympse app work far better.

Then there’s Group Track, where you and your riding buddies can presumably “Live Track” each other, with the head unit displaying the locations of your other riding buddies in real time. Even if I had other riding buddies with compatible head units (not very likely), the fact that it depends entirely on the utterly non-functional Live Track feature means I can’t use it anyways.

That cool Shimano Di2 integration I talked about above took *way* more time, effort, and money than it should have. First, to get the Di2 to talk to the Garmin, I knew I had to order and add a tiny wireless transmitter and a cable to my Di2 system, plus the special tool to connect the cable. When that didn’t work, I learned that I also had to order and replace my old battery mount. Tiring of the runaround when that didn’t work, I brought it in to the bike shop, where they individually updated the firmware on every piece of my Di2 setup. That didn’t work, either, so I ordered a new front junction box, plus two more new cables. When those came in, we installed them and did two more whole rounds of firmware updates during several phone calls with Shimano support. Then we finally had to pair the Di2 transmitter with the Garmin, and iron out a few minor bugs in the system (not reading battery level, thinking it had 11 sprockets rather than 10). In the end, it took a couple months, three trips to the LBS, a few calls to Shimano support, seven new parts from four separate orders, and an extra $450 in parts and labor to set up, just for my head unit to display what gear I’m in. Had I known that at the beginning, I never would have bothered.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the unit mostly works, and is generally okay. It’s a good step up from my aging Edge 800. I like the auto-upload, custom data fields, Di2 integration, phone and text message notifications, and Strava Live Segments. And I’m hoping that the FE-C trainer integration works well. But none of those are must-haves, so I wouldn’t say I’m blown away by the new features.

On the other hand, a lot of people really hate the unit, and I can understand why. The touch interface is terrible, basic functions such as loading routes and map data are ridiculously slow, and key features like Live Track, Group Track, and incident detection simply don’t work.

While Garmin enjoyed a market-leadership position in GPS cycling computers for several years, riders who are frustrated with Garmin’s lack of responsiveness are turning to other vendors, now that quality alternatives are available like the Wahoo Element Bolt.

By all measures, the Edge 820 should have continued Garmin’s domination of the GPS cyclocomputer market. I really hope they have learned the drawbacks of releasing such a flawed product and do a better job next time. In the meantime, hopefully they’ll keep issuing firmware updates that fix the Edge 820’s broken features and provide more compelling functionality.

It’s still a good unit, but it’s definitely not the category-redefining product that I had hoped it would be.

It’s been seven weeks since my February post, which related my having ridden six days out of seven. After that, March was pretty much a write-off from a cycling standpoint, but April is coming together nicely.

I guess I can’t complain too loudly about being unable to ride in March. It was still winter, after all, and the weather was cold and rainy. I’ve aged out of the desire to ride in weather below 40 or 50 degrees. But even on the passable days, I found it hard to self-motivate. Trying to recover lost fitness each spring is always painful, but I’ve been more discouraged than usual this year, since I spent so many months completely off the bike.

Spring is for cobbled climbs
Neighborhood switchback
Rolling Pennsylvania farmland

Once you do motivate yourself to ride, there’s a certain amount of “training stress” that is necessary for building fitness, and that training stress is really good… until it isn’t. Working too hard too soon, without proper recovery time, leaves one with heavy legs, dreading heading out, intimidated by the traffic and so many hills to climb. There’s no real good way to tell when you’ve crossed that line from good stress to bad, but with repeated experience one learns to carefully monitor one’s desire to ride.

That was pretty much how March went for me. Although the Pittsburgh Randonneurs held a 100k and 200k in March and another 200k in early April, I skipped them all. They were earlier in the year than usual, which ensured that I was nowhere near trained up enough to succeed, and the early date also meant that the weather was near freezing. Not the kind of ride I’d enjoy.

Three good things did happen last month, tho. First, I got to play around with my new Garmin Edge 820 bike computer and get it all settled, including the frustratingly finicky Shimano Di2 integration; a full review of the unit will come after a little more road testing. I also picked up a Tag-o-Rama tag down in Turtle Creek, and set my new one in Garfield.

Finally, I learned of another alternate route up to Squirrel Hill (home) from the Eliza Furnace trailhead. Unlike the other two routes, which are kinda hilly, the new one is *obscenely* hilly, taking a couple switchbacks up a steep hill from Greenfield to Bigelow Street, which itself is a very long, steep uphill drag (involving both bricks and Belgian block) to the top of Hazelwood. It’s a nice workout, if I am capable of taking it on after whatever ride leaves me at the end of the EFT.

Although April began with a late-season snowfall, winter couldn’t hang on forever, and the past week provided great riding weather. Since last Sunday’s always-inspiring Paris-Roubaix, I’ve matched my February achievement of riding six days out of the past seven, but logged 236 miles rather than February’s mere 166.

On the 9th, I undertook a 33-mile ride east to visit the sites of two of Allegheny County’s seven active underground coal mine fires, some of which have been burning for more than fifty or sixty years!

The 10th I followed the route of a local club ride north for my first 50-mile ride in seven and a half months. The wind made it extra difficult, and my lack of training (and lack of acclimatization to the sun) produced a mild sunburn on my arms. It hasn’t taken long for my “distinctive markings” to return!

The 11th was a flat 30-mile recovery ride down the GAP bike path.

The 12th I went short (20 miles), but packed several really steep climbs to (further) stress the legs.

That was followed by my one rest day on the 13th.

With beautiful weather scheduled for Friday the 14th, I opted for a long 100k ride down Bunola Road to Monongahela, which wound up being 72 miles when bridge repairs necessitated a surprisingly pleasant and scenic detour up Raccoon Run and down Church Hollow. That capped my first 200-mile week in—believe it or not—nearly two years (since June 2015)!

Then on Saturday I got 30 more recovery-ish miles in my first group ride of the year with the Performance Bike crew. Hopefully I’ll get out one of these Tuesday nights for a spirited ride with the Team Decaf group.

But before I do that, I could use a day or two of recovery to consolidate my fitness gains and take the fatigue out of my legs. I figure it’d be nice to give the bike a rest too, since today is R2-Di2’s fourth birthday!

But the bottom line is that after a fallow March, the first half of April has featured a lot more miles in the saddle, with more expected. But happily, I can afford to take my time building up to peak fitness; with the Pittsburgh Randonneurs’ 200k rides already past, I don’t have any other significant events planned until mid-June.

This post covers a very busy month of July, which included a solo century, the Tour de Cure, the 3-State Century, and more.

As usual, July began with Fourth of July weekend, which is always a perfect time to lay down some hefty miles, whether three or four rides in a row or a single century.

Bursh Creek covered bridge

Looking for my first long ride since June’s endo, I chose to do my first Pittsburgh solo century, and my third hundred-plus mile ride of the year. For a course, I cobbled together a flattish out-and-back route to Brush Creek Park. Just shy of Ellwood City, it covered some of the same ground as the final third of the 200k brevet that I did back in March.

Thanks to my early start (6:20am), the day began with a lot of mist and fog, and a surprising amount of wildlife: 6 rabbits, 4 deer, 2 groundhogs, and a horse being ridden down the road.

At the park that was my halfway turnaround point, I took a photo of my bike in front of a covered bridge before pushing on. I hadn’t ridden too hard, and continued to feel good until the last 15-20 miles. I struggled through the last 5-10 miles, stopping at a neighborhood convenience store to down a cola and a candy bar before finishing the job. I really need to do better with eating and drinking on long rides.

In the end, it was a nice ride, but pretty challenging toward the end.

Two weeks later came my first Tour de Cure charity ride for the American Diabetes Association, for which I again footed my own fundraising. That was my fourth century of the year. More importantly, it was also my first ever gran fondo, an endurance ride where riders are timed on certain segments of the course.

Ornoth climbing segment one

The weather was awesome, and I wore my Kraftwerk Tour de France jersey, a tricolor that looks a lot like the French champion’s jersey, in honor of both the ongoing tour as well as those affected by a terrorist attack in Nice. Around 80 riders took off with me at 7am for the century route.

There were three timed fondo segments, and I estimated my times using nearby Strava segments, to give myself a number to shoot for. Although I am reasonably pleased with my performance, it was nothing as compared to riders 30 years younger, who also had the support of an entire semi-pro team.

The first segment was 1.4 miles, featuring a half-mile climb. My estimate had been 6 minutes, and I actually traversed the Strava segment in 6:02. The second segment was a long, 6.7-mile time trial with some descending but minimal climbing. After estimating 22 minutes, I brought it home in 19:31. The final segment was a 1.7-mile brutal rolling climb. After a 10-minute prediction, I finished in 9:11. Out of a total of 36 gran fondo riders, I placed 25th, 20th, and 26th on those segments, placing 23rd overall, or 36th percentile. What do you expect from an old man?

I rode a fair amount of the day with a young guy named Eric, whom I’ve talked to at the Tuesday night Team Decaf rides, who was doing his first-ever century. I should also note that I beat him on two of the three timed segments, pipping him by a combined 19 seconds overall. Later in the day, at mile 66, he somehow managed to get his chain jammed underneath his bike’s chain catcher, which took us about 10 minutes to un-wedge.

I had mechanical issues of my own, too. Around mile 60, my right-side pedal, which I’d just had serviced by my local bike shop, started making sounds like it was about to fall apart. Fortunately, it hung together till the end, albeit making crunchy-poppy noises with every turn of the crank.

As for the ride planners, one obstacle they provided was a lack of ice at any of the rest stops, on a day which grew increasingly scalding. On the other hand, there was an impromptu rest stop with (warm) drinks left at the side of the road at mile 98; the last ten miles were all mostly downhill; and I was pleased to receive another finisher’s medallion.

The summary for this ride was pretty positive, but again the last 20 miles were quite a slog.

My next century—my fifth of the year and third of the month!—came a week later, at the Pittsburgh Major Taylor Cycling Club’s annual 3-State Century. I’ve only ever done one other three-state ride (MA/RI/CT), and that was years ago. After leaving home in Pittsburgh, we’d go straight west, spend all of three miles in West Virginia before crossing the Ohio River, travel in the state of Ohio for another three miles to the Pennsylvania line, then mostly follow the river upstream back to Pittsburgh.

Ornoth entering West Virginia

Although much of the route was flattish, there were three major climbs, all them coming in the first half of the ride; the ascents were actually much easier for me than the long, high-speed descents that followed each climb!

Although the route was only 93 miles (not even close to a century), my ride to the start and back home rounded me up to 112 miles, which allowed me to surpass 10,000 total miles on the “new” bike. It also fulfilled my goal of doing more centuries in 2016 than the mere four I did last year, which had been a record low.

By far the most salient feature of this ride was the heat. The day began at 70 degrees and climbed well into the upper 90s, and the NWS issued a region-wide heat advisory. New high temperature records were set in five out of six area weather stations, and in Pittsburgh it was the hottest day in four years. Normally I like it warm, but that was a little much. I coped by drinking lots of fluid, then finished the day pouring bottle after bottle of water over myself and stuffing ice into my jersey pockets.

On the other hand, I finished stronger than any of my other long rides this year. I even pulled two guys home over the final 17 miles of the route. For the first time this year, the heat was a bigger challenge than fatigue.

While I’d planned to take a personal rest stop on the way home at the foot of the 300-foot climb up to Squirrel Hill, I opted to press on due to gathering clouds, which developed into a very strong thunderstorm that hit about 40 minutes after I finished.

Although the heat made it difficult, I enjoyed the 3-State Century a lot, and probably finished stronger than any other century this year. It was a good, interesting day in the saddle, and I saw a lot of area roads that I hadn’t tried thus far.

Those constitute my major rides over the past month, but there were also a couple Team Decaf and Performance Bike group rides, plus several recovery rides. And a couple short trips to the LBS to fix the problems I was having with my pedals.

In equipment news, I picked up a cool new jersey and cap that are vaguely ska-oriented, which I’m sure you’ll see later, plus a couple Mondrian-themed cycling caps (dark and light replicas of the old La Vie Claire team kit).

Garmin Edge 820

But the thing that has me really excited is the announcement of the new Garmin Edge 820 cycling GPS unit. My first Edge 800 has served me very well since 2011, but it recently started suffering spontaneous power-offs, and several generations of GPS bike computers have come out since then. Among the features I’d gain with the 820 are: live weather, live cyclist tracking, live group tracking, WiFi downloads, ANT+ FE-C control of indoor trainers, Strava live segments, email and text notifications from my phone, Di2 electronic shifting integration, and third party data fields & apps written for ConnectIQ. The only reason I haven’t bought one already is because I want to wait for other users’ experiences and Ray Maker’s in-depth review to come ou. But you can rest assured that it’s item number one on my wish list.

It was a great month, and I’m looking forward to more new adventures in the waning days of summer.

Pairing deep natural curiosity with the desire for a new programming challenge often produces great results. Such was the case with my recent addition of a Cycling Heatmap page to the biking section of my website.

I’ve always been a map geek, going all the way back to the neighborhood street maps I drew when I first started grammar school. I got my first handheld GPS back in 2000, well before such things were common, and before the government stopped intentionally inserting a random offset in order to make civilian GPS unnecessarily inaccurate.

Naturally, that interest also manifested in my career as a web consultant, where I used the Google Maps API for one client to display the locations of warehouses, delivery trucks, and customers, so that they could optimize their delivery routes.

As a cyclist, when I first saw the Strava Global Cycling Heatmap, I was pretty excited. For the first time—and for any location on the planet—we can see what roads cyclists (as a class) actually prefer to use!

Great data, but it also spurred my curiosity about my own road use. With years and years of cycling GPS files on hand, I have plenty of data; all I had to do was figure out the technical details of extracting it, summarizing it, and displaying it.

Ornoth's Cycling Heatmap

That’s where it got hairy, firstly because my cycling GPS no longer outputs user-friendly, text-based GPX files, but compressed binary files in Garmin’s proprietary FIT file format. It took a while, but I was able to hack Kiyokazu Suto’s Garmin::FIT module and fitdump perl script to get the latitude-longitude points I needed out of Garmin’s obfuscated FIT files.

Then I had to find software to generate a heatmap. That seemed easy enough, but it took several tries to find one that could handle anything more than a minuscule quantity of data. I gave up on Google Maps API Heatmap Layer, because their heatmap layer is limited to a pathetic 1000 data points. I looked at Leaflet, Highcharts, Mapbox… Nothing looked promising.

Finally I went back to Google and discovered that if you pair the Google Maps API with a Google Fusion Table in just the right way, it will accept up to 100,000 data points, which is closer to what I needed. So we gave that a shot. Even though the documentation for the known-inadequate Google Maps API heatmap layer was incestuously interwoven with the possibly-useful Google Maps API Fusion Table heatmap documentation, which caused a lot of unnecessary confusion.

Unfortunately, 100,000 points was only about one month of cycling data, so I had to write a script to further summarize my data before feeding it into a Fusion Table. Basically, I rounded my lat-long values from seven to just three decimal points and threw out consecutive duplicates, which reduced the dataset quite a bit.

It also had a side-effect of cleaning the data up. Since my GPS logs location once per second, points were more densely-packed when I was moving slowly, and more sparse when I was moving quickly. Plot that on a heatmap, and it would look like I rode more often in places where I went slowly! But rounding the lat-long values abstracted all those low-speed duplicate points down to one, which fortuitously made tracks display more evenly no matter what speed I rode at.

Finally I had to load my data into a Fusion Table. In the end, by rounding my data I was able to get 14½ months of rides into 98,870 points, representing all 122 rides I took from July 1 2013 through September 15 2014.

How pleased am I with the resulting map display?

Well, it satiated my curiosity about where I ride, and it also was a fun way to brush up my technical chops in terms of cartographic programming skills. I don’t know if any other cyclists will care or benefit from looking at my usual routes, but it would be neat if that were true.

Overall, I’m happy with the result, but it certainly has some externally-imposed shortcomings, all ultimately traceable back to the fact that I had to squish all my data down into 100,000 points.

Because I had to round off my lat-long values, the tracks I only rode once can be seen when the map is zoomed out, but the points nearly all disappear when you zoom in!

If I had more control over the heatmap’s appearance and color-groupings, I could probably fix that, but because those heatmaps are generated on Google’s server rather than the browser, they have provided virtually no options for customizing its appearance.

The rounding also becomes painfully obvious when you zoom in, as what appear to be linear tracks ultimately separate into evenly-spaced individual dots, just like looking at a halftone print under a magnifying glass. At high resolution, it becomes so painfully ugly that I had to programmatically restrict the user’s ability to zoom in!

Ugh! The tradeoffs and limitations give me the shivers. But at certain zoom levels, the result is pretty usable.

Did I learn anything new about my riding? Not that much, since I’m already pretty familiar with the roads I use.

I already knew that I spent a lot of time in Back Bay, on Mass Ave out to Lexington, doing the Quad loop around Concord and Carlisle, and also heading out Charles River Road to Watertown, or Beacon Street to Weston, and Glezen from there out to Sudbury.

I was pleased to see the presence of some new roads that I’ve added this year: the whole Dover loop, the Mystic Lakes route up to Winchester, and both Trapelo and Concord Ave through Waltham and Lincoln.

Of course, I’m equally amused by some routes that I haven’t done this year, but which appear thanks to the older 2013 data. That would include my former commute down to Quincy, which included climbing Dorchester Heights; hill repeats on Summit Ave in Brookline; and Virginia and Mill Street in Concord, a part of the standard Quad loop that I now usually skip.

I guess the only big, new revelation is that although I live within half a mile of the ocean, I never ride along the north or south shores! To find good seaside riding, I either have to go thirty miles north to Cape Ann, or fifty miles south to Cape Cod!

In addition to last year’s ride data, I would love to incorporate my GPS logs that go back another five years; that would change this map quite a bit. However, the rounding that would be required to jam all that data down to 100k points is so extreme that the map dots no longer correlate with individual streets, so the display winds up being completely worthless.

But for this exercise, I’m pretty happy that I was able to overcome the technical hurdles and produce the reasonably good result you see here, based on a good-sized clump of recent data. It’s a victory and an accomplishment in and of itself!

It’s been a while, but I thought I’d do a quick writeup of the ride I did the day after Thanksgiving, since it was kind of memorable in its own way.

One of the things I wanted to do was test my Garmin Edge 800 GPS cyclocomputer, since it had been acting up since my last big ride, six weeks earlier. I’d given it a complete hard reset, but frustratingly, it wasn’t any better. It’s great when it works, but that’s only about 80 percent of the time. And for $700, I think it’s reasonable to expect better reliability.

Still, with the temperature in the mid-50s, I moseyed out Mass Ave. all the way to Lexington, because I wanted to pick up a Lexington Minuteman newspaper. Johnny H, one of my longtime riding buddies, had posted that he’d seen my photo in it, so I had to check that out firsthand.

After wandering around town a bit, I spotted a handful of cyclists pulling up to a coffee shop, and discovered that one of them was another old friend, Joy. I spoke to her briefly, then stepped inside a CVS and picked up a paper.

Newspaper photo

I came back out and parked myself on a bench with Joy and her friends while I leafed through the paper until I found the photo of me; the same picture that had graced the Pan-Mass Challenge home page for three months filled a quarter of the second page of the sports section. It was the focus of a thank-you message to PMC riders, although I’m still not sure whether it was from the paper, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Jimmy Fund, or the PMC itself!

And if that ad appeared in a local paper in Lexington, it might well have also been placed in other town papers, although I haven’t gotten any information from the inquiries I’ve sent.

I said goodbye to Joy and rode down Waltham Street to Waltham (my first time down that road), and pulled into my riding buddy Jay’s driveway. I called him on my cell to ask whether he was home, and to open his back door for me. Since I hadn’t seen Jay in months, I figured this would be a good time to deliver something I’d been saving for him: a pair of size 12 PMC-branded flip-flops that I’d grabbed for him at PMC headquarters when I was there to pick up this year’s Heavy Hitter premium (a backpack). He was properly surprised and pleased, which was gratifying, and we chatted briefly.

From Waltham I took Linden Street and Waverly Oaks (another road I traveled for the first time) into Belmont, where I stopped at Belmont Wheelworks, arguably the best-stocked bike shop in eastern Mass. I was surprised to find it very quiet on the infamous “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving. I hadn’t brought a shopping list, but I did wind up walking out with two new tires, since my old ones were wearing out, and my preferred tires (Michelin Lithion IIs with blue sidewalls) are hard to find. So that was good, too.

As I approached Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge, I had a brainstorm. I was only a couple blocks from Fastachi, a local nut roastery. Normally I wouldn’t stop, but since I was running errands I’d brought my bike locks, and it was Thanksgiving, so why not? I walked away with a mess of freshly-roasted cashews, hazelnuts, roasted corn, and some New Zealish licorice. Oh yeah, and some chocolate-covered caramels, too!

I hopped back on the bike, but hadn’t gone a quarter mile when I felt the tell-tale squidginess of a flat rear tire. Perfect! I popped the wheel off and removed the inner tube. Out of habit, I did what you’re supposed to do, which is run your hands around the inner surface of the tire to see if you can feel what might have caused the puncture, although usually there’s nothing to find, since I typically get pinch-flats. But this time I discovered an inch-long nail that had gone straight through the tire and into the tube. Glad I bothered to inspect the tire!

I installed my backup tube with the speed that comes from practice, and used my wonderful frame pump to fill it up to 100 PSI before mounting up and lumbering home, my bag filled to bursting with two bike locks, two new tires, a newspaper, a huge bag of roasted nut goodies, and a punctured inner tube.

It hadn’t been a particularly long or fast ride, but even despite the flat it was just a nice day on the bike, which was doubly good after a very discouraging Quad ride the week before.

Jujuly

Jul. 23rd, 2011 02:07 pm

Right now my life consists of work, cycling, fundraising, and occasional sleep, so my periodic updates this time of year tend to cover a lot of ground… like this one, which covers the past month.

July was a memorable month, but not for good reasons. Although I usually spend most of the Fourth of July holiday on the bike, with one of those days comprising a century ride, this year a terrible cold hit me Friday afternoon and kept me housebound the entire holiday weekend. Pure suckage!

The next weekend I had to go up to Maine, and convinced myself that I could get some training in by riding the 70 miles from Portland to Augusta. That ride wound up being really difficult, thanks to my lingering illness, a 25-35 mph headwind that hadn’t been forecast, and a mile-long section of muddy dirt road up and over a big hill in Sabbatus. But at least I managed to get some time in the saddle…

Ornoth's CttC

Which I needed, because the weekend after that was the CRW’s Climb to the Clouds, a very hilly century that goes up Mt. Wachusett, and is a traditional warmup for the Pan-Mass Challenge.

So CttC was just brutal. Combine my reduced training this year with oppressively humid 96-degree blazing sun and the CRW’s extremely limited idea of what constitutes a supported ride, and you can begin to imagine how difficult it was. Thankfully, I can say that my age wasn’t a factor, as my three buddies (all 17+ years younger) also concluded that they never wanted to do that ride again.

The ironic thing is that I spent half the day hammering, thinking I was chasing them, when actually I was ahead of them. Although I let them go ahead after the first 10 miles, they stopped at a water stop I skipped. I was surprised to see them ride past me in Princeton, where I stopped but they did not. So I got back on the bike and chased, unknowingly passing them *again* when they stopped at a convenience store. So I beat them over the mountain, and they only caught up with me after I’d spent 20 minutes at the next water stop, 53 miles in.

And as I predicted last year, the summit road was closed to us for the third year in a row, which was disappointing.

Toward the end of the ride, I was nauseous and unsafely overheated, and kept pouring water over my head to cool off. I stopped at the little Chinese grocery in West Concord and picked up their last two bottles of water, only to discover on gulping it down that it was seltzer! I sipped what my stomach could tolerate and poured the rest over my head and limped to the finish, where I pretty much just collapsed. But not before getting shit from the ride organizers for asking if I could have some ice. I was too destroyed to muster any argument when the guys decided to go home early rather than take the traditional postride dip in Walden Pond.

Ornoth's CttC

Definitely one of my worst days on the bike. There damned well better be some training benefit, after all that suffering!

And to make matters worse, my brand new $700 bike computer / GPS failed to record the quarter of the ride that included Mt. Wachusett and the following descent (GPS data). I had already left its heart rate monitor at home, because it had been malfunctioning. At least Garmin is replacing the HRM strap; hopefully the new one will last longer than the first one.

And then yesterday Boston tied the second hottest temperature ever recorded in the city’s 140 years of keeping records. Thinking I couldn’t get into much trouble in just one hour, I biked home from work in 103°F / 40°C heat. Against a convection oven-like 25 mph headwind, over three sections of stripped/grooved pavement along one of Boston’s biggest and fastest 6-lane arterials, and then stupidly up and over Dorchester Heights, just for fun.

That kind of heat will raise your heart rate 10 bpm no matter what you’re doing, and by the time I was done my heart was pounding and I was feeling very lightheaded. Kinda scary! Hopefully this stretch of intense heat will break and the weather will be more forgiving for the upcoming PMC ride!

And that brings me around to the tiny list of positive things that happened this month. First, Garmin did replace my problem HRM strap, and the new one seems to be functioning well; tho I probably will use it sparingly until PMC weekend.

Second, a question I’d sent in to the RoadBikeRider online magazine was published this week. The question was about how to fit a cooldown, stretching, shower, and recovery meal all into the half hour after stopping that is the optimal window for those activities. You can see the full question and RBR’s response here.

And, finally, the news that really matters: PMC fundraising. Once I finally started getting fundraising letters out, the money came in quite readily. I’ve surpassed the minimum and made the Heavy Hitter level for the sixth year in a row, and have settled at $7,200 for the moment, which is quite satisfactory, although there’ll be additional donations coming in over the next month or two.

Naturally, if you haven’t made your donation yet, please do so here.

And PMC weekend is only two weeks away. I’d normally be excited, but after the difficulties of the Maine ride and CttC and this brutal heat, I’m a little gun-shy about looking forward to riding. It hasn’t been a great year for any of my cycling buddies; just ask Lynda, who canceled her plans to do the epic 745-mile PBP ride; or Paul, who bought a pricey new bike only to have Jay destroy it by driving his truck over it on the way to the 150-mile Harpoon B2B ride that was supposed to be the highlight of his season.

The bad juju is in full force this year.

So we’ll see. There’s two more weekends before the PMC, and I don’t have anything special planned for them. Hopefully there’ll be a couple Quad rides and some hill repeats in there, and then a relaxing, rewarding PMC ride once the calendar turns to August.

Hopefully…

Spring came late this year, but the cycling season has finally begun.

Last weekend was my first long ride and my first Quad ride of the season. Naturally, I overdid it, doing 65 miles, which left me with a splitting headache and strained ligaments behind my right knee. On the other hand, this was the second year in a row when I led the first group of the year over the big “Dinosaur” hill.

I’ve also commuted to the new job in Quincy a couple times, and it seems okay, despite riding along two huge main arteries and through a couple highway interchanges. I’ve been making some tweaks to my route that have helped somewhat. The traffic in the morning is a lot lighter than it is coming home, too. It’s fine for now, but I don’t think I’d like to do the return commute in the dark.

And I’ve been delighted with the huge amount of maintenance I did on the bike this spring, which included lowering the stem, a complete overhaul, new chain and cassette, cables and housing, bar tape, plus new gloves, bib shorts, and helmet. After all that, the Plastic Bullet feels like a brand new bike again, despite having over 16,000 miles on it. Around Memorial Day it is going to surpass the old hybrid and become the bike I’ve ridden the farthest.

And on top of all those other things, the new Garmin Edge 800 GPS cyclocomputer warrants a paragraph of its own. The amount of information it provides is wonderful, although I face a challenge compiling it into the weekly log that I’ve maintained since October 2000. There are certainly kinks to work out, but I am definitely going to get a lot of value out of that particular upgrade.

Other than that, I’m about to kick off a ten-part series of posts about my Pan-Mass Challenge lessons learned, which I hope will be of value to other riders. And I need to start work on this year’s PMC fundraising video, and also send this year’s ride calendar out to my buddies.

Finally, things are happening, both on the road and here in the cycling blog.

A new GPS has been on my wish list for at least five years. My old GPS was a Garmin eTrex that I picked up no less than eight years ago, back before GPS’ could even display maps!

I’ve been holding out for a while, waiting for the next generation of GPS’ to come out. I’ve had my eyes on a couple specific units:

Garmin has had a GPS designed specifically for cycling, but it doesn’t have maps, making it little more than a glorified cyclo-computer. They’re planning on coming out with a mapping unit, the Edge 705, but they just postponed its release into 2008, which is frustrating.

DeLorme, a company based in Maine, has a unit called the PN-20 that maps against aerial photography. That’s cool, but it’s also dog slow, which eliminated it from consideration.

Magellan is coming out with a line of handhelds called Triton, which look really interesting. But I heard rumors that they, too, were going to delay the Triton’s release into 2008. Sigh.

There’s also the Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. The Vista’s been out for a while, but they’ve made incremental improvements in it, including color maps and a much higher-sensitivity antenna. It’s also pretty familiar to me, since it’s the most advanced version of my old eTrex base model. And it has the advantage of already being commercially released.

Garmin eTrex Vista HCx

Well, about the time I heard that the Edge 705 and Triton were being delayed, REI announced a sale on the eTrex Vista where they cut the price by $80. That was enough to get me to jump, so I picked one up on my way back from Maine last weekend.

I used the Vista the next day on a road trip to Connecticut, and again on a 40-mile Thanksgiving day bike ride. Here’s my first impressions…

The unit’s still acceptably small. In fact, it’s a tiny bit smaller than the original eTrex.

The display is quite a bit smaller than the old eTrex, but it has better resolution, and is color, so it’s a net improvement.

The old unit often took quite a long time to locate satellite signals. The new unit is noticeably faster, although it still can take several seconds.

Another annoyance is that the old unit only allowed six characters for waypoint names. The new unit allows about fifteen. Yay.

Naturally, the lack of maps was the biggest shortcoming of my old eTrex. This unit displays color maps, which is a huge improvement.

Still, the unit isn’t very useful without buying a memory card and Garmin’s supplemental map set, which will run you another $150.

My other major complaint about my old unit was that the batteries and electronics weren’t securely seated, so the smallest bump would cause the unit to power off. Not only was that inconvenient and annoying, it also put gaps in my tracklog. In 40 miles of biking Boston’s notoriously rough roads yesterday, the new unit didn’t shut off on me once. The battery compartment is very noticeably a tighter fit than before.

Battery life still seems great. I’ve been running two AAs, and have not had any issues with juice, even when running WAAS and the backlight all the time.

So far I’m pretty pleased with the unit, although I’ve only barely begun to put it to use.

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