With Pæthos in the shop for a tune, this seems like a good time for a post-op update.

On March 7, I had a metal mesh plug implanted in my heart in order to close a hole between my two atria: a possible cause for my past and potential future strokes. It’s been seven weeks since the operation, so let’s review how my return to fitness has gone… And, of course, the prognosis going forward.

So grand... and living!

So grand... and living!

Phase One of my recovery consisted of 10 days completely off the bike. I had incisions into both of my femoral arteries that needed to fully heal before I could do anything as strenuous as walking, climbing stairs, or having a bowel movement, never mind cycling! I had tenderness and a sizable hematoma in my groin, and heart palpitations that mostly dissipated over time. After a few days I started doing short walks around the neighborhood, working up from 1,500 meters to 3 kilometers, but my athletic Fitness (aka CTL, or Chronic Training Load) dropped from a pre-op 56.6 down to 44.6.

During Phase Two, I got back on the indoor bike trainer. The only constraint my cardiologist had given me was to keep my heart rate below 110 BPM, which was the perfect level for me to keep up with one of Zwift’s “robo pace partners” at 1.5 W/kg: a mild but not sedate pace. I Zwifted for 13 of the next 16 days, steadily increasing duration from 15 minutes to 30, 45, 60, and eventually 90 minutes at a time. Being back on the bike felt great, but I wasn’t riding hard enough or long enough to keep my Fitness from continuing to fall to a low of 33.4. The tenderness ended and my hematoma started to fade, but I still had a few palpitations from time to time.

On April 1, 25 days after my surgery, my cardiologist gave me the green light to gradually resume all normal activities, doing whatever felt right for my body. And just in time, because Austin has been having truly glorious spring weather.

That was my signal to begin eagerly-awaited Phase Three: my return to outdoor riding, while gradually increasing both duration and intensity.

Distance and duration came easily. I started with a couple 90-minute rides, and over two weeks moved up to 2-hour 50 kilometer rides, then 3½-hour 80 kms. So long as I stayed below 90% effort, I could ride all day.

Intensity came more slowly. Between my own innate caution and continuing cardiac palpitations, I wasn’t very eager to push my maximum heart rate. So I avoided hills for a couple weeks before gradually testing myself on those inclines, where I reached ≈150 BPM.

Since I got back on the bike, I’ve ridden 29 of the past 39 days, totaling 770 kilometers, or an average of about 20 km per day. To my delight, my partner has already commented on the return of my “distinctive markings”: her terminology for my stark cyclist’s tan lines.

Aside from the joy of being back outdoors on the bike, seeing my Fitness numbers making upward progress has been really encouraging. Long outdoor rides have been vastly more effective than Zwifting in raising my CTL, which has climbed to a recent (but still tepid) 40.6.

But I’m still a ways from where I need to be for major events or even spirited group rides. And I’ll lose a little Fitness this week, while the bike’s in the shop.

However, all that riding has helped me begin to get clarity about what this summer’s riding might look like. My hope all along was that I could do my third 100 KM Fire Ant Tour in mid-June, and that I’d be able to do a creditable (if shortened) ride for my remote Pan-Mass Challenge in August. At this point, those look reasonably likely.

But if I continue to do well, there’s a chance I might be ready earlier, and could ride the Stampede on the Chisholm Trail, another metric century that takes place in two weeks, or two months post-surgery. That would be extra cool because it’s another local event that I’ve never done before.

It’s delightful being back out on the open road again, and looking forward in anticipation of upcoming rides!

For reasons I’ll explain in a second, improving my diet became a critical consideration following my stroke. But I had lots of questions about the areas where healthy eating directly conflicts with sports nutrition’s best practices for endurance athletes. I decided to get answers from a professional, and this blogpost summarizes what I got out of consulting a nutritionist for the first time in my life.

This is one of those posts where it’s not clear whether it belongs on my general blog or here on my cycling-specific blog. Since I came at this from a cyclist’s perspective, I decided to post it to the latter, so that other cyclists would more readily find it. But most of this is equally relevant to my non-cycling readers.

Where I Started

The statistics say that 25 percent of stroke survivors will have a second stroke. And, according to the hospitalist who was in charge of me during my hospitalization, the greatest determinant of whether you have another stroke is diet. Survivors who didn’t change to a heart-healthy diet had the most readmissions, in contrast to those who took dietary advice to heart.

What did she specifically advocate? This:

  • Reduce inflammation and chances of developing diabetes by cutting intake of simple sugars
  • Reduce cardiac risks by limiting dietary fat intake, especially saturated and trans fats
  • Avoid hypertension by reducing intake of table salt and highly processed foods
  • Maintain healthy blood volume by staying fully hydrated
Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes

That was the first advice I got following my stroke, and – as a Type A personality and someone with an intense fear of stroke – I took her opinions extremely seriously. Even though I’m significantly younger, healthier, and more active than most stroke survivors, improving my diet seemed, at that time, to be a matter of life and death.

However, as an endurance cyclist, two of those strictures are problematic for me. Simple carbs are the preferred and primary fuel for athletes; would I be risking my health by continuing to emphasize them in my diet? And it’s pretty hard to avoid chronic dehydration if you’re riding hard in the Texas sun for a multiple hours every day.

Although I’ve stayed on top of changing dietary recommendations for decades, these contradictory needs convinced me that it would make sense to consult a nutritionist for the first time in my life.

Another factor is that I was very concerned about weight loss. From 2011 through 2022, my body weight stayed in a narrow range, mostly between 76 and 79 kg, averaging out at 77.3. But in the last five months of 2022 I suddenly and inexplicably dropped 6½ kilos (15 lbs). I gained about half of that back, but then lost another 3½ kg in the weeks following my stroke, bringing me down to an adult-era low weight of 71.2 kg (157 lbs). A nutritionist could help me figure out how to stem my ongoing weight loss while simultaneously cutting both carbohydrates and fat out of my diet.

More Medical Advice I Got

I’ve already outlined the alarmist attitude that my hospitalist instilled in me right after my stroke, and where that advice led me.

But I immediately started getting contradictory advice from every other healthcare provider I talked to.

A week after my stroke, I had a followup with my family physician, who told me that nutrition was a long-term concern and not to overdo any drastic changes to my diet. But as a PCP he’s a generalist, so I remained skeptical, while making sure I got a referral to a nutritionist out of him.

A week after that, I had a followup with my neurologist, whose attitude was that nutrition is just about general health and preventing blood clots, which is more of a cardiologist’s domain.

It took another month before a long-awaited meeting with my cardiologist. His attitude was another surprising counterpoint to the hospitalist. He also claimed that diet is purely a long-term concern, saying both “Go eat a pizza if you want,” and “Eating heart-healthy is not the most pleasant thing.”

After all that, I really didn’t know what to think. The obvious consensus was that diet wasn’t the smoking gun that the hospitalist had portrayed. But it was still hard for me to cast aside her staunchly-held opinion, since it was the only obvious thing that I could control.

But maybe my nutritionist would provide a decisive opinion…

My Nutritionist Experience

I’ve never really thought of nutritionists as a highly skilled profession. As I see it, there are two main aspects to the job.

One part is staying up-to-date on the ever-changing “science” – separating genuine dietary knowledge from the deluge of biased pseudo-science – and distilling that down into a form that’s digestible for their uninformed clients.

This would be of some benefit to me. Having paid attention to sports nutrition for 25 years, I’m pretty well-informed. But I’m less up-to-date on heart- and health-related topics, and never had to deal with problematic weight loss. And it’d be nice to get the current scoop on perpetual debates like “Are eggs good or bad?” and “Which is healthier: butter or margarine?”

The other – and possibly larger – aspect to the job is similar to that of a therapist: talking with clients and trying to manage them into growing the self-discipline required to make lasting dietary changes.

As I mentioned above, I’m a Type A; I don’t need external support once I’ve decided to change my behavior. So the coaching aspect of the nutritionist’s job is really of no value to me.

The most valuable and immediate advice she game me was when she confirmed what my other healthcare providers had said: that I didn’t need to approach dietary changes with a crisis response and rigidity, and that no one individual choice is gonna kill you. I didn’t need to eliminate all fats and simple carbs from my diet, after all. I was already living a pretty healthy lifestyle, and the emphasis should be on fitting increasingly beneficial habits into a healthy diet whose results compound over time.

But beyond that high-level advice, after four meetings in five months, I’m still not convinced that a nutritionist brings a ton of expertise and value to the table. My nutritionist mostly just repeated standard advice that variety is most important and that even “bad” foods are okay when taken in moderation.

At the same time, I don’t want to sell her short. I did get some novel, useful information from her that manifested in some dietary changes I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. So let’s take a look at those…

Specific Dietary Recommendations

It’s pointless talking about the changes I’ve made without first reviewing my diet prior to my stroke. After all, I made a number of significant improvements over the years, and those remain a noteworthy part of the overall equation. Here are some positive features of my baseline diet that I’ve observed for some time:

  • Daily multivitamin and psyllium husk fiber supplements
  • Replace full- and low-fat milk with fat-free/skim
  • Virtually eliminate beef intake
  • Never, ever add salt to anything (except corn on the cob)
  • Cook at home; eating out is a rarity
  • Emphasize broccoli as my primary leafy vegetable
  • Replace ice cream with sorbet/sherbet or fruit pops
  • Replace high-fat sauces like alfredo with low-fat tomato sauces like marinara
  • Keep an eye on the ever-changing recommendations regarding eggs, butter vs. oil-based spreads, etc.
  • Reduce or eliminate soft drink intake, replace with fruit juices like OJ, apple cider, lime- and lemonade, and fruit punch
  • No significant intake of caffeine outside of major events and medicinally
  • No alcohol in any form, ever, period

Even after accepting that the hospitalist’s alarmist warning was misguided, I still wanted to make incremental improvements to my diet. Specifically, I wanted to reduce fats, sodium, and simple carbs (beyond my athletic needs). Between my own research and input from my nutritionist and cardiologist, I’ve landed on the following new guidelines:

  • Daily statin prescription to keep cholesterol down, even tho my numbers were never high
  • Daily Omega-3 fatty acid supplements (algae-based rather than fish oil)
  • Whey protein isolate powder supplement
  • Eliminate or curtail high-fat foods, particularly commercially-prepared baked goods, cocoa, frozen pizza, etc.
  • Read labels to select lower-fat chocolate candies, and healthier salty snacks that are baked or use healthier oils like avocado
  • Reduce overall cheese intake, and use 2% milkfat cheese over full-fat
  • Sauté and stir-fry in avocado oil rather than corn or peanut oils (it has a higher smoke point than olive oil)
  • Substitute ground turkey and pork for ground beef
  • Supplement wheat-based pastas with lentil-based
  • Favor lower-sodium soups like corn chowder; at some point start making my own soups
  • Expand meal repertoire by reintroducing or increasing things like:
    • Boiled chicken
    • Oatmeal (with raisins, sunflower seeds, and dried fruits)
    • Baked beans
    • Mashed potato
    • Sweet potato
    • Nuts, especially hazelnuts
    • Apples

Conclusion

Despite having a longstanding interest in sports nutrition, I never bothered consulting a nutritionist until now. I always doubted whether a nutritionist could add any useful information beyond what any self-educated layman could glean from readily-available public sources.

After a 5-month engagement, I mostly stand by that opinion, although it does need to be refined. My nutritionist helped refute the bad advice I got, and provided some suggestions that were truly useful. But those were largely tactical adjustments, rather than significant course changes. So she definitely did add value… just perhaps not as much as I had hoped for from a licensed medical professional.

I’d be temped to conclude that it wasn’t worth the money, but my health insurance covered the entire tab! All it cost me was time, so in that respect I got way more valuable insights than I paid for.

But I’m still skeptical about whether consulting a nutritionist is worth it for most cyclists or your average non-cyclist. If you have a very particular situation, like I did, then perhaps it would be. But if you’re interested enough to have questions about nutrition, you’re probably also motivated enough to find the answers for yourself, rather than pay someone else to do it for you. A nutritionist really isn’t privy to any information that can’t be found elsewhere.

It absolutely does make all kinds of sense for a cyclist to learn the basics of sports nutrition, and there’s no shortage of available material. For myself, my bookshelf includes the fairly lightweight “Bicycling Magazine’s Nutrition for Peak Performance” by Ed Pavelka, and the more comprehensive “Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes” by Monique Ryan. But these days there’s ample other sources, too.

That’s it! Now let’s go eat to ride, and ride to eat!

Friday I had heart surgery. Even though it was via intravenous catheters and I should fully recover, the recuperation period is still gonna blow a hole in my training and fitness. So this is a good time to get you caught up on what I’ve been up for the past two months, and where things go from here.

So far, 2025 has been a little bit of up-and-down, and a little bit of in-and-out. I took a bit of a break when the calendar flipped, and then it was an odd mix of indoor and outdoor riding, mostly dictated by Austin’s variable winter temps.

Riding with the CEO on a PMC Zwift group ride

Pacing the CEO on a PMC Zwift group ride

Video of Austin's Friday Truancy group ride rolling out

Brilliant Texas skies along Walnut Creek trail extension

Brilliant Texas skies along Walnut Creek trail extension

On the indoor side, I’ve logged about 1,000 km on Zwift, focusing primarily on riding a dozen+ new routes, advancing another four XP levels, and participating in eight delightful PMC group rides, which have just finished up for the season.

But knowing that a surgically-induced enforced break was coming, I did my best to ride outdoors as much as the weather would allow. February in Austin began and ended delightfully, allowing me to rack up over 500 real-world kilometers on a dozen rides, including my first two Friday Truancy group rides since my stroke at the start of October.

My final ride before the operation was last Wednesday’s 80 km trip out the Southern Walnut Creek path to Manor, which was my longest ride – indoor or out – since my stroke. It also marked my max Fitness level for the year (a pretty moderate 56 CTL), having finally recovered all the Fitness I’d lost by resting at the start of January.

So that brings us to the beginning of March, and Friday’s heart surgery. If you want all the details, you can read the accompanying post in my general blog, but here I’ll limit myself to the short- and long-term impacts to my riding.

In the short-term, the surgery is going to require some recuperation time, which means time off the bike. It’s really important that the two incisions into major veins in the hips are allowed to close up and fully heal before attempting any kind of exercise. If things go well, this week I’ll start doing some short walks. A week after that I might introduce some low-intensity work on my partner’s elliptical trainer. Then some easy rides on my indoor trainer. But for the next month I have to always keep my heart rate below an extremely mild 100-110 bpm.

I’ll have some post-op testing and a followup with my cardiologist in about three weeks, at which point I hope to get the green light for a gradual return to actual training. Over the next several weeks of minimal exercise, my Fitness is going to plummet, and April and May will be spent trying to get back to last week’s Fitness level.

And what will the rest of the year look like? It’s hard to say until after that followup appointment. I think I can expect a full return to endurance riding, but when and how long that’ll take is unknown. I’m almost certainly not doing the events I’d hoped to do in April: the American Stroke Association’s CycleNation charity spin-bike ride; and the Red Poppy Ride century. But I might be ready for June’s 100k Fire Ant Tour. We’ll see how it goes.

And what about riding remotely for August’s Pan-Mass Challenge? As I said in December’s annual summary post, that’ll remain a complete unknown until May, so I’ll defer my registration until I have more clarity. Hopefully I’ll be in shape to make it a good couple days of riding, to “properly earn” my sponsors’ donations to DFCI, even if perhaps it might fall short of the traditional 300 kilometers.

But I do expect I’ll be able to return to the endurance riding that I love. It’s just a question of when, and how long it’ll take to train back up to the fitness I need to complete such rides.

But until then I guess I’ll take a few weeks of enforced relaxation!

No shit, there I was… lying in the hospital, being told I’d had a stroke, two weeks before this year’s Livestrong Challenge ride.

That was about six weeks ago. For my initial reactions, read this post and this followup in my general blog.

Here, in this post, I’ll talk specifically about the stroke’s implications for my cycling, as well as how it’s gone on the bike over the past month. Then I’ll circle back to my unexpectedly limited participation in Team Kermit’s Livestrong weekend.

Cycling Post-Stroke

When I came home three days after my stroke, I had the following concerns with respect to my cycling career:

  • How much numbness would I have in my left hand, and would there be any loss of control?
  • I’d been warned by the doctors to expect my stamina to be reduced. By how much? Would that affect both my strength and endurance?
  • How monomanically would I have to monitor my blood sugar and hydration, which are critical for both cyclists and stroke survivors?
  • Would I ever regain enough fitness to return to group rides?
  • Would I ever be able to get back to doing long rides? Metric centuries? Imperial centuries?
2024 Tour of Watopia

2024 Tour of Watopia

Having received nothing but encouragement from my medical team, my rehab plan was to start riding on the indoor trainer to learn my new limitations and regain confidence in my health before hopefully returning to the road.

So five days after leaving the hospital and eight days after my stroke, I updated my months-idle Zwift setup and did my first indoor trainer ride. It was a slow 45-minute, 20km effort where I gently ramped my heart rate up from 90 to 150 BPM and back. I wasn’t strong, but the ride was successful.

By chance, my resumption of indoor training coincided with the beginning Zwift’s popular six-week Tour of Watopia event, so I made regular use of those rides to rebuild a little lost fitness and a whole lot of lost confidence. Aside from some concerns about cardiac palpitations, it’s been mostly clear sailing since then, with rides up to 54 KM proving eminently feasible.

Despite doing a bunch of indoor riding, it took a while before I felt comfortable cycling alone, outdoor, away from the safety of home. Between that and my focus on Zwift, I’ve only done one short outdoor ride so far, but that went fine. At this point there’s really nothing stopping me from riding outdoors… up to a certain distance and intensity.

So a month later, do I have answers to my questions?

  • I’ve had zero numbness or loss of control. All’s well there.
  • My endurance actually seems all right. My raw sprint power is off a bit, but that might just be detraining while I was recovering, and I’d rather not push my heart until I’ve talked with my cardiologist.
  • I’m making major changes to my diet, but can still be more relaxed about high-glycemic foods on days that I ride. I really do need to master hydration. There’ll be a post on my experience with a nutritionist at some point in the future.
  • Even before my stroke, I was already off the back on competitive-paced group rides, so I may have to step away from them, or at least temper my expectations. Hopefully I can find some less pacey rides, although that’s been a challenge in Austin.
  • Although I haven’t tested myself, I think I’m still good for a metric century. But imperial centuries were already a big ask for a 60 year old, and they’re only getting harder, especially in the Texas heat! I just don’t know how many centuries I’ve got left in me… if any.

Some of my questions just won’t be answered until next spring, when I’ll have more information and hope to ramp my outdoor training back up again. I still have several upcoming diagnostic tests and followup appointments that could change my plans completely.

As for that event I had planned…

2024 Livestrong Challenge Team kermit

Livestrong Weekend

I registered for October’s 100-mile Livestrong Challenge back in May, not knowing that I’d have a stroke just two weeks before the event. Although I had just started riding my indoor trainer on Zwift, I had not attempted a single outdoor ride before the event. So there was no way I could do the ride.

As usual, my Boston-based PMC and Team Kermit buddies came to town. The Thursday before the event, I drove over to Jewboy Burgers to meet up with Steven, Christophe, and David as they refueled in the middle of their post-arrival shakedown ride.

On Friday I drove in to Mellow Johnny’s bike shop to pick up my ride registration packet, tee shirt, and rider swag. As a member of Team Kermit, I’d been given VIP tag #32, four places down from last year’s #28.

After leaving the shop, I synced up with Paulie and the riders at the start of the regular Friday Truancy group ride. We chatted before they set off, and I learned that local rider Clint is a longtime stroke survivor, which was both a new connection and an encouraging data point at a time when I needed them. After they rolled out to begin their ride, I went home and jumped on Zwift for an hour.

Sunday was Livestrong’s event day. While Team Kermit were out on the course, I started my day with an indoor ride. It was my token “Livestrong Challenge”, although at 32 KM it was the same distance as the event’s shortest route! After a shower and lunch, I drove into town to meet Team Kermit’s full contingent at the finish line. It was a delightful afternoon chatting with familiar PMC buddies as we waited for our two 100-mile riders to reach the finish.

I was, of course, disappointed that I had to cancel doing my own planned 100-mile Livestrong ride – which would have been my 111th imperial century – but this was one of those times when circumstances dictate that you just take the loss gracefully.

Looking Forward

The plan from here is pretty straightforward and definitely gradual.

Despite almost year-round cycling weather here in Austin, I’ll be concentrating mostly on Zwift until spring. First, it’s just safer for me to stay at home, especially as I gradually test myself on increasingly longer “distances”. Plus Zwift’s Tour of Watopia runs through November 19th, and that sweet double XP beckons. And they’ve added a couple dozen new routes for me to knock off. On top of all that, I will be hanging out with my PMC buddies on the weekly Pan-Mass Challenge Zwift group rides, which have also resumed. And I hope Zwift’s usual monthly gran fondo series will run again this winter, as well. So there’s lots of incentives to ride the indoor trainer for a while.

Outdoor rides will be a distant second priority. I’ll need to regain my comfort riding solo, then my confidence in riding longer distances. Whether I return to group rides or longer events won’t be answered until sometime in the spring. But with lingering health questions and cooler weather in the coming months, I’m happy to take my time building back up to that level of fitness. After all, if I were back in Boston – or even Pittsburgh – I wouldn’t be riding outdoors through the winter anyways!

Next spring I’ll have a much better handle on where I’m at both mentally and physically as I recover from an extremely harrowing brush with death. Things seem pretty good at the moment… Though, as I’ve learned, it can all change in any instant.

Last we heard from our hero, he was looking forward to an “almost normal” year. That lasted all of four days.

On January 5th I did a Step Test: the first of three rides that comprise my usual functional threshold power (FTP) testing regime, to determine my baseline fitness level. These are vomit-inducing long-duration maximum intensity efforts. If you’re doing it correctly, you should feel like you’re dying. This one went “well”, producing a respectable FTP of 218 Watts.

Ready to die on that hill

Ready to die on that hill

2022 Tour of Watopia

2022 Tour of Watopia

Buddies on the PMC group ride

Buddies on the PMC group ride

Fineview overlook

Fineview overlook

First Team Decaf group ride of 2022

First Team Decaf group ride of 2022

However, that part about dying? That was just a leetle hyperbolic. I finished that workout with two kinds of chest pain: sharp, painful contractions on my left side that went away after 24 hours, and a dull ache in the center of my chest that remained for a few days.

Having experienced heart palpitations around this time last year as well, I was so concerned that I aborted my other two planned FTP tests and backed off my training frequency, duration, and intensity.

In recent weeks I underwent a coronary CT scan which mostly gave my arteries a clean bill of heath. So I’m gradually adding frequency, duration, and intensity back into my regime to see whether my heart explodes or not.

As you might imagine, my health has been by far the biggest item of note so far this year.

Next on the list would be the power meter pedals I picked up, but I already told you about those in this blogpo.

And that’s followed by my training status, or lack thereof. To give you an idea, during this year’s Tour of Watopia I rode 600 km over 9 stages; compare that to 2021, when I rode 1,350 km and completed 42 stages!

I haven’t entered spring at such a low level of fitness since 2018, before I bought my indoor trainer and when I was demoralized after successfully completing Pittsburgh’s Dirty Dozen. You can, of course, see my minimal 2022 training graphically on my Fitness Charts page.

However I still clocked 460 km in January, 520 in February, and 740 in March, and got out on unseasonably warm days to enjoy five 50-70 km outdoor rides

During that time, I attended every one of the Tuesday night virtual group rides on Zwift organized by the Pan-Mass Challenge. The camaraderie of the shared event and cause combines with the small size of the group to provide a close-knit social environment that I really enjoy. But in the back of my mind I quietly hope that the PMC Zwift ride never becomes so big that it loses its personal feel.

Which is exactly what happened to my previous Zwift virtual cycling club, the Herd. You might remember that I drove to Michigan and rode an IRL century with them back in 2019 (blogpo). Unfortunately, what in 2018 used to be an intimate little group of a few dozen riders now numbers sixteen thousand members, and all the people I knew well have moved on. I sadly just don’t feel any connection to the club anymore, and I’ve almost entirely stopped riding with them.

As for this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge main event, I’ve delayed committing to ride until I get more clarity about my health and what I’m physically able to do. Pittsburgh’s Rough Diamond Century – an event I’ve never done – is scheduled on PMC Saturday, so that seems like a viable way to conduct my own remote PMC ride. But I’m still operating in wait-and-see mode.

Another development was my New Years resolution to go 100 percent metric in all aspects of my life. So far that’s been both successful and painless for me (but not my partner). More details on that in a blogpo on my main blog.

With less time on the bike, I have more time on my hands for other things, which included a few updates to the Zenturizer, a tool I wrote in 2020 to find virtual routes on Zwift that match the distance and climbing on any real-world route. Enhancements included moving the data to a database, supporting event-only routes, adding new routes that Zwift has added, and much more intelligent handling of point-to-point routes that aren’t continual loops.

Still, the main storyline is that 2022 has started poorly, thanks to my chest pains. But we’re finally returning to a normal post-Covid calendar of major events, mostly clumped into the traditional high season: June, July, and August. I’m hopeful that by then I’ll be able to ride them without fear.

For now, outdoor riding season has begun, including weekly Team Decaf group rides, which conveniently occupy the same day and time as the (winter-only) PMC Zwift rides. I’ve got a bit of travel to get thru, but then plan to test my health out during the month of May, to see whether I should attempt the long major events in June, July, and August.

Obsessive-compulsive here has been logging his blood pressure weekly since 2014. That’s enough data points to provide a reliable test for the conventional belief that regular exercise lowers blood pressure.

An online search yields a common assertion that daily exercise can lower one’s blood pressure by 4-9 mmHg, although references are inconsistent about whether that refers to both both systolic and diastolic BP or just systolic. The effect is greater for people with existing high blood pressure than for those with normal readings.

Although I do try to ride in the winter, my volume of exercise is still far greater in the summer months, so the seasons make a logical way to compare periods of high versus low activity.

So I defined the winter as the six months from November through April, and the summer as May through October. Collating all my weekly observations and calculating the averages produced the following results:

My systolic blood pressure was 3.5 mmHg lower during the summer months, when I was more active.

My diastolic blood pressure was 3.9 mmHg lower in the summer.

My resting pulse (heart rate) was 2.1 beats per minute lower in the summer.

These all conform perfectly with conventional expectations. The magnitude of change is on par with going onto a strictly low-fat diet, losing 10-20 pounds of body weight, or taking a prescribed blood pressure medication.

I know, that’s not an especially interesting result. I guess “science is right again” stories just aren’t very newsworthy.

Frequent topics