Orny's Cycling Journal

Cyclists come in many flavors: roadies, commuters, mountain bikers, racers. Then within the ranks of roadies, you have sprinters, climbers, all-rounders, endurance riders, and more.

It might sound odd then that after such a long time—exactly 1,000 weeks, in fact—I still struggle to find where I fit in that spectrum.

It’s obvious I’m not a sprinter. My top-end power is perfectly described by the term “pedestrian”.

Does that mean I’m a climber: a grimpeur, as they say? Not if you judge by my build, or my performance in the Dirty Dozen! True climbers are much lighter than my (reasonably scrawny) 77kg, and usually much shorter, too. My best strategy for becoming a climber involves losing 6kg of weight and nine inches of height by cutting my head off at the neck.

But I do drop people on short, steep climbs. Perhaps that makes me a puncheur. Tho to be honest, rolling hills wear me out and leave me more exhausted than any other kind of terrain.

I might be a rouleur, an all-rounder: another word for someone who sucks equally at all elements of the sport. Not exactly a flattering image to have of oneself.

Fifteen years ago, I considered going down the very, very, VERY long road to becoming a randonneur: a long-distance rider. I enjoy spending a day in the saddle as much as anyone, but for a randonneur, 125 miles is the shortest ride they’ll do. Their normal rides run 250, 375, or 750 miles at a time, and sanity (at least my sanity) has its limits!

But enjoying (moderately) long rides is what defines me as a cyclist. The label “endurance cyclist” would fit perfectly, except that an “endurance ride” might be 400 miles for a randonneur, or maybe just 30 miles for a casual rider. That’s so vague that the title “endurance cyclist” is essentially meaningless.

I define an endurance ride—and the type of ride I enjoy—as 100 to 125 miles (200km). The ride that matters to me most is the 100-mile imperial century. That’s what I do, what I enjoy, and how I judge my success. So if I were to give myself a label, it would have to reflect that.

That’s where things have stood for the past twenty years: no real resolution, and no real identity. But last week I was thinking… If the sport didn’t provide me with a category, maybe I should come up with one myself. What word would convey the idea of a person with an affinity for centuries?

Once I thought about it, the answer was pretty obvious: a centurion!

By leveraging the common term for a 100-mile ride, it’s instantly recognizable among cyclists, denoting a long-distance cyclist while removing the ambiguity associated with “endurance riding".

It also has the positive connotations of a warrior—strength, experience, self-discipline, and leadership—which translate equally well to cycling.

So if you ask me what kind of rider I am, I can finally answer you: I’m a centurion!

Thanks to the international cycling community on Zwift, today I learned that the word—in both Danish and Swedish—for the final sprint to the line in a cycling race is…

slutspurt.

Your author has concluded that any further elaboration would be entirely unnecessary.

Despite it being the first big face-to-face confrontation of many leading Tour de France contenders, there isn’t a lot of coverage of the Volta a Catalunya stage race.

So I found myself reading a textual play-by-play commentary that had been Google Translate-d from Catalan to English. Or something approximating English, anyways. Here, for the pilot’s amusement, are some of the more tortured nuggets from the seven days of commentary.

• There is the real solution. 191 runners signed. Tour 2016 begins!
• Take exit 189 runners. Makes the sun to kill.
• Wheel more than 50 km/h all the time because the terrain is favorable. Pilot grouped.
• Everyone wants to get to the break of day. Groups are too large and does not curdle
• It Succi attacks. Pilot very stretched.
• The pilot lying and runs very fast
• Sky debunks the escape. The stage is crazy. No truce.
• The pilot goes very fast and very stretched.
• Trip canceled. Again is living one day fast and nervous
• The pilot wheel very fast and breaks in two. The second is Geraint Thomas (Sky)
• The wind cuts the pilot in two.
• Sky decline to order large group split.
• Sky shoots hard driver only hold 40 units. One that remains is Geraint Thomas
• Tcatevich (Katusha) and Swift (Sky) linked to any race and form a group of 10 units
• The escapees have 3:15 on a pilot relaxing
• The 10 escapees have an advantage of 3:45 over a driver who has been unified
• 4:49 is the difference of the escaped input supplies
• The large group of pulling Cofidis has lost respect 6:00 getaway day.
• He shoots Sky squad for the difference does not leave 12 minutes.
• These three seconds are subsidized.
• Daniel Martin and Alberto Contador have subsidized the intermediate sprint Ager!
• De Gendt, Bouet and Gradek is not the order of the intermediate sprint Banyoles.
• Tinkoff becomes hard to pull of the pack
• Unlike the escapees down to 5:30.
• It is off the hook Tom Dumoulin (Giant) at the start of the Alto de Tosses (1st cat.)
• Duyn (Roompot) first crown High coughs
• The eight escapees are still relevant with intensity
• The pilot crown Bordoi 3:00 Can the four escapees.
• The difference boils down to the 3:00 supplies
• The supplies have fallen, but have risen rapidly without apparent consequences.
• Cofidis pulls the large group that loses 2:12 respect getaway.
• Cofidis, Movistar and Sky pull a driver who has four escapees in less than two minutes.
• The trip was dying. 1:40
• Weening is 50 seconds ahead of the main group, where he shoots the Sky
• Dron (Wanty) and Kiryienka (Sky) enter aa refreshment zone with 10 seconds on the pilot
• Trip canceled. Movistar strip large group with very wet road.
• Of the pack and jump Swift Poel movimient in the Sky
• A group of four men assume the prosecution of Poel

With commentary like that, one could be forgiven for thinking one was watching something other than a bike race!

This is the time of year when cyclists go batshit crazy. When you’ve been locked indoors for five months since your last decent ride and realize that—despite the piles of snow on the ground—your first century of the year is less than 12 weeks away.

In the summer, when long, beautiful rides are plentiful, it’s harder to see, but during the endless New England winters, the parallels between cycling and addiction are painfully obvious.

For me, the symptoms of withdrawal start benignly enough, with occasional visits to ride websites to find the dates of next year’s events. The only clues that something might be out of place are that these visits begin in November, they’re compulsive and increasingly frequent, and they’re followed by angry outbursts when I learn that the new dates *still* haven’t been published yet!!! How am I supposed to make meticulous detailed plans with my buddies if they don’t publish the dates, even though the rides might still be ten months away!?!?

My other symptom is a desperate quest for a substitute for my regular cycling fix. However, as every cyclist knows, the bliss of a long ride has to be experienced directly; it’s not something you can capture in written or spoken words.

Yet trapped indoors by the ice and snow, that’s the best substitute I can think of. So I spend long hours online, trying to find a blog or writer who has been able to distill and eloquently communicate the essence of the ride.

But it’s a futile search that always ends in disappointment; there is simply no substitute for the fusion of man and machine, feeling the wind of one’s passage, and the sense of gliding through life’s amazing skies, rivers, woods, and mountains.

As the cruel weeks and months pass, the quest becomes ever more desperate.

You anxiously await the arrival of your monthly cycling magazines, but many of them also go into hibernation, at best printing a single combined January/February issue at the point when hope is most desperately needed.

You start looking over old YouTube videos of you and your buddies’ rides. Even the really horrible, low-res ones from 2005.

Then you start doing really crazy things, like digging one of your favorite cycling caps out of the closet and wearing it around the house in vain. If you’re lucky, you have enough shame to prevent you from wearing it outside the house…

Or watching cycling-related anime series. For those of you who find yourselves in such desperate straits, there’s Over Drive and Yowamushi Pedal.

And your legs start getting really itchy. That might be because they haven’t been used since September, or it might be because you haven’t shaved them since then. You now have regular-Joe leg hair, and you have to really look to find last year’s tan lines. Is February too early to start shaving them again?

And then comes the final, humiliating, ultimate admission of your addiction: you find yourself thinking longingly about working out on the indoor trainer.

Heaven forbid any of us should ever reach such abject depths of despair!

Time for another mileage update. It took nine and a half years, but this time we’ve arrived at a total of 30 thousand miles, which I surpassed on Thursday’s 48-mile ice cream run.

At this point, reference numbers seem a bit passe, but here are a few.

I bike about 36 percent of the distance an average car owner drives. I’ve maintained that average consistently for the past ten years.

That’s the equivalent of an Atlantic Ocean crossing every year. In 2006 I rode far enough to bike from Boston to Greece (assuming there was a reasonably direct bike path).

Or you could think of it as 30 times around the Moon’s equator (but with much better scenery).

Enough miles to earn free round-trip airfare anywhere in the continental United States (some restrictions may apply).

A few more years and I might make Platinum status. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to settle for free upgrades…

In my last post I promised more details about my pre-PMC reading about training, technique, and nutrition. Well…

Last night I finished reading “The CTS Collection: Training Tips for Cyclists and Triathletes”. CTS stands for Charmichael Training Systems, a prestigious coaching organization founded by Chris Charmichael, a former pro cyclist and the longtime coach of Mister Fancy Lancey Pants. So the book ought to have some good stuff, right?

Well, sorta. The downside is that it’s just a bunch of reprints of old articles he and his coaches previously published in cycling magazines. And having been printed in 2001, all the information is nearly ten years old, which is a long time in the ever-evolving fields of performance sport, training, and nutrition.

Still, I took away a few nuggets that I’d like to preseve. These may only be of interest to myself, but this is still a good place to record them. Some of these derive from the book, some are ideas from other sources like Bicycling Magazine, and others are simply things I’ve had on my own radar for years.

First topic is goalsetting. Set annual, intermediate, and short-term goals, and revisit them often as conditions change. I took a few minutes and looked at my cycling goals for this year, and there weren’t that many. Maybe do a century each month. For the PMC, finish in a PR time below seven hours, and raise enough money to reach Heavy Hitter status and exceed $50,000 lifetime. Finish the year (mid-October) with maybe 3,500 miles, which would put me at 28,000 miles since October 2000. That’s really part of a more vague goal of simply taking full advantage of my summer off from working, which I think is going well!

Second topic contains a bunch of points I aggregated into “lifestyle”. Although I’d like to keep them up throughout the year, they’re most key in the two or three months before a major ride (i.e. now). First, rest a lot and get plenty of sleep. Second, perform my stretching regimen twice daily. Third, continue to trim my diet, which means cutting fats like ice cream and simple sugars like candy, and increasing good stuff like nuts, popcorn, veggies, berries, and breads. Finally, and the thing that’s newest for me this year, learn how to do therapeutic self-massage for post-ride recovery, performing it once or twice daily.

Third are training goals, and these change from month to month and season to season, but right now, I’d like to focus on these. Work on pedaling technique, especially high-speed cadence, one-legged drills, and pedaling full circles with attention on the upstroke. I need to spend more time in the drops in order to become accustomed to the more aerodynamic position. I really need to continue reminding myself to stop hunching my shoulders up, which leads to inevitable neck pain on longer rides. And now that I’ve got ample base miles down, I need to start doing shorter, more intense interval workouts, rather than piling on so many miles that I wind up overtrained. This includes starting to do hill repeats to build up strength and endurance, and mixing it up with the “Hounds of Hell” (the fast group) on my weekly group rides.

The final item is psychology, especially self-talk. I’ve realized that I have a lot of counterproductive internal dialogue, which includes things like how bad I am at rolling hills, that there’s no need to hurry, that neck pain is normal and to be expected on long rides, and all kinds of whining about the conditions of the day. This needs to be eliminated, and supplemented with positive self-talk, because there’s a lot I should be proud of. I’ve got an awesome ride that I’ve nicknamed the Plastic Bullet. Bobby Mac has complimented me often on my form and strength. And yesterday I giggled like someone who should be institutionalized after not just hanging with the Hounds of Hell, but launching a powerful attack at the base of Punkatasset Hill that had them all screaming epithets at me as I zoomed off the front. I even put a little Ethiopian flag on my handlebar stem to remind me of my buddy Jay’s comment back in March that I didn’t have “little Ethiopian girl legs this year”. Remembering that kinda stuff serves me a lot better on the bike than all that negativity.

Oh, and I had one bit of a brainstorm: make some sort of cloth bag to hang around one’s neck that could contain melting ice. I might actually order such a thing from here. That might be very useful on a long, hot century ride.

What a ride! First warm day of the season, so I did 60 miles. In the first day of 72-85° heat. Against a 25-35 MPH wind. Without stopping once. Despite the closure of Lowell Road in Concord after last week's rains washed out a culvert. Despite getting caught up in the road closures around the Boston Marathon. Despite getting caught up in the road closures around the Patriots Day parade in Concord, Lexington, and Arlington. And despite the goddamned birds in Chelmsford, at the hardest point in the ride, whose call sounds remarkably like, "You're beat! You're beat-beat! You're beat! You're beat-beat!"

How many people do you know who have broken spokes on their bike's wheels simply through the sheer strength of their accelleration? Well, now you know one more! I wondered what that sudden metallic spaang! was...