Orny's Cycling Journal

The Mon Valley Century is the most cursed ride in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The first time I rode it (2016), the organizers abbreviated the route at 80 miles due to a landslide on Bunola Road. Despite everyone missing a waterstop that the organizers decided to move at the last minute, I went and actually rode the missing 20-mile segment of Bunola Road solo just fine to finish with 100 miles.

The ride wasn’t even held the next two years due to additional reconstruction of Bunola Road.

In 2019, the event returned, finally avoiding Bunola Road completely, and tacking the missing mileage onto the start of the ride, which cuts across quiet and scenic Pennsylvania farmland. However, in true cursed fashion, the organizers didn’t provide GPS directions, large sections of the route were on milled or loose gravel roads, and one rest stop consisted of two empty cooler jugs and a canister of Gatorade powder dumped on the side of the road, unattended and with no water source in sight. Truly PedalPGH levels of negligence!

So perhaps it’s good that the tiny ham radio club that organizes the event didn’t even bother to announce a ride this year (or its cancellation). Over my five summers in Pittsburgh, they've hosted just 1.8 rides, a sparse 36% success rate.

Presuming they had cancelled it due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I was left to simulate the mid-August event on my own on the indoor trainer, as I’ve done with all my other annual cycling events. On the plus side, at home I can count on getting something to eat and drink at the rest stops!

My process should now be as familiar to you as it is to me. I consulted the Zenturizer to find the Zwift routes that most closely matched the 2019 MVC ride’s 102 miles and 5,925 feet of climbing. Out of several options, I chose to undertake seven laps of the 15-mile “Greater London 8” course, which includes the short 450-foot climb of Box Hill.

Outdoor temps that ranged from 73-82º made riding much easier. After dancing away from a couple wheelsuckers, I spent the first half of the ride testing my defective Wahoo TICKR heart rate monitor, determining that it will only work if I’m sitting upright in the saddle in the “no-hands” riding position. If I was in any normal riding position — on the bar tops, brake hoods, drops, or even standing — it would give me obviously erroneous readings… if it gave any readings at all. Time to return that piece of slag and go back to Garmin.

The highlight of the second half of the ride was randomly coming across Herd team member Simon Keeling, who was doing the similar-but-not-identical century-plus PRL route. We exchanged encouraging messages then vectored off on our own again.

My legs started cramping on the last of my seven laps. This was made worse when I had to make an extra climb up the back side of Box Hill to make up some climbing I’d need to properly approximate last year’s MVC ride.

But I limped home to complete my tenth Zentury of 2020. I only realized after a friend’s comment that I’d logged no less than 96 Strava achievements on that ride, 16 of which were PRs!

In terms of lessons learned...

Doing long rides on a weekday is a big improvement, because you don’t have to worry about neighbors trying to sleep in. But if you don’t start until 10am, even a fast century is still gonna kill an entire day.

If you know you’re gonna have to do some extra climbing somewhere along the line, don’t leave it for the end of the ride, when you’re tired and cramping.

And if you want to keep some fruit on hand to munch on, either freeze it beforehand or keep it cool with some ice, because warm fruit just isn’t as palatable.

And finally… I’m getting tired of Zwift’s courses. That’s not surprising, considering I’ve ridden 4,860 miles on them over the past ten months. Zwift hasn’t implemented that many virtual roads to begin with, and it doesn’t help that only a few of them are adequate substitutes for real-world events.

And that’s not a good thing now that I’m at peak season, with three more events to mimic over the next 4-6 weeks. Plus another round of barf-o-tronic FTP tests.

But before that, a bit of rest, please?

I’ve wanted a heart rate monitor (HRM) for many, many years. They’ve been the gold standard for cyclist training tools for a long time, notwithstanding the recent trend toward power meters.

However, they’re somewhat expensive, and I never felt justified in spending the money. Plus I feared it would be like the cadence sensor: useful only for a short period of time, enough to calibrate one’s own internal sense, and extreaneous thereafter.

However, prices have come down, and an HRM would have been handy indeed for my wintertime indoor trainer workouts. So I finally picked up a cheap Sigma Sport PC14 on sale at the Noshbar.

Cheap is the word. Any electrical field will cause the unit to either register a pulse of zero or over 200: a near impossibility for someone my age. So I can’t really trust it to record the max heart rate I hit during any given workout. Unfortunately, your max is what all the training heart rate zones are based off, so I’m fiddling with it to find my true max.

Here’s my initial observations. They’re based on only two days’ worth of use, so they’re highly provisional.

Resting heart rate, taken before getting out of bed in the morning, is a good indicator of general fitness. A sedentary person might have an RHR in the range of 60-80 beats per minute, while a trained cyclist would be closer to 45-55, so lower is usually better. I’ve seen a low of 51 bpm, and a sustained reading of 53, so that’s in line with my expectations. I remember taking my pulse in high school when I was bored and getting resting rates below 48.

Max heart rate is largely a function of age, and the standard formula for estimating it is to subtract your age from 220, but that will then vary based on your fitness level, with higher numbers being better. A 45 year-old’s expected values range from 164 to 186 bpm, and although I predicted I’d max out at 165, I’ve seen readings as high as 171. That’s in line with the base formula, although again that’s preliminary and more testing is required.

Using that as a base, I derived several additional numbers. My aerobic limit is around 120 bpm (70% MHR), and recovery rides should stay below 140 bpm (80% MHR). My lactate threshold should be somewhere between 140 and 155 (80-90% MHR).

The most interesting thing I’ve learned so far is that you can do easy aerobic training or you can do hard, painful interval training, but you derive very little training benefit in the middle ground between them. Below 70% MHR you’re burning mostly fat and can go all day; above 85% MHR you’re burning glycogen and building up lactic acid and need to rest and recover every few minutes; but in that grey area between 80-85% MHR, you’re working way too hard to burn any fat, but not hard enough to exercise your VO2 and ability to buffer and clear lactic acid. So that’s a dead zone you should avoid training in; for me, that area is from about 137-145 bpm. In short: go easy or go hard, but don’t go halfway.

For anyone trying to lose weight, that information is incredibly important. You’re always drilled with the value of exercise— particularly aerobic exercise—in losing weight, but there’s a huge mental trap there. Although aerobic exercise raises your heart rate, it doesn’t raise it enough for it to feel hard. Since most people think “harder is better”, they’ll often push themselves and work out in this middle ground, where they’re working hard, but not all-out. Unfortunately, at that level you’re only burning glycogen, not fat, and you’ll just crave sugar to replenish your blood and liver glucose levels. To lose weight, you have to do gentle exercise for very long periods of time, and it shouldn’t feel very difficult at all.

It’s similar to one of the problems I observe in novice cyclists. They get on a bike and mash down on the pedals at a knee-shattering 60 rpm. They think you have to work hard to make the bike go, or that you’re not exercising unless it’s hard work. It’s counterintuitive to a new rider, but selecting a very light gear that you can turn over easily is not only less effort and better aerobic exercise, but it’s also more efficient, and will save your knees, which harder efforts will damage.

So that’s the report on this year’s new toy. I’ll be curious to get more data from it over time, and particularly to see whether it provides me with useful information that will help me marshal my physical resources during longer rides.