Orny's Cycling Journal

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

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…

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.

I’ve been logging my weight every week since 2011, and the primitive data always left me with the impression that I put a little weight on in the off-season, then trimmed down to “race weight” during the summer. But I wasn’t really sure…

So I did what any OCPD data junkie would do and made a pivot table to average those six years worth of body weight data and charted the result. Here’s what my average year looks like:

Not wanting to humiliate anyone, rather than disclosing my weight, I’ve labeled my seasonal weight change as pounds above and below my long-term average weight.

Now, what did I learn?

First, it sorta confirmed my hypothesis of seasonally-correlated weight gain and loss. I do gain a little weight in the winter, and lose it in the summer.

However, as the flatness of the curve shows, the range of variance is surprisingly narrow. Leaving aside specious outliers, we’re basically talking about a range of plus-or-minus two pounds from average. So that big seasonal swing usually amounts to a total of just four pounds.

But the thing that most surprised me was that the timing was off.

I expected my weight loss to begin in February, when I typically commit to my training diet, and to start gaining it back in August, after all my major events are done and I take full advantage of being free of those dietary restrictions.

But in reality the transitions occur a couple months later than expected. Even though I start dieting in February, I keep gaining weight until May; and although I end my training diet in August, I keep losing weight until mid-November!

The poor correspondence between dieting and weight confused me for a minute, until I realized that there’s something else that has a better correlation with this data: my cycling.

Due to the weather, I don’t start riding in February; the overwhelming bulk of my riding takes place between late April and the beginning of December. Taking that into account, my seasonal weight change is far more closely correlated with my activity level during the cycling season than with my self-imposed training diet.

Obviously correlation doesn’t imply causation, and I don’t know if the same result would hold for anyone else, but I found that really interesting.

I toatally forgot to mention an important development in my 2016 season summary post! The evolution of my annual rides list!

Every winter, when there’s lots of desire to ride but little-to-no riding happening, one of the things that helps me cope is planning—or is it fantasizing?—about the season ahead: where I’ll ride, how far I’ll ride, and—most importantly—which major events I’ll participate in.

Major events like charity rides and centuries are an easy way to set goals for the year, and to structure your training plan.

Knowing which events you’ll commit to also lets you plan the logistics of making them happen. You not only want to set those dates aside on your calendar, but you might need to reserve transportation or a hotel room, or plan your charity fundraising effort.

Naturally, the dead of winter is an ideal time to make a list of the rides you want to do. Back in Boston, I had no problem making my list, because after fifteen years of riding, I already knew all the big organized rides. But when I moved to Pittsburgh, I first had to discover what rides were available to me.

But that wasn’t very easy. I found numerous organizations with ride calendars, but none of them were very useful. Some clubs had blank calendars that they didn’t maintain. Other clubs listed their own rides, but no one else’s. And surprisingly worst of all were the groups who tried to aggregate every ride known to man into one big munge that was both unreadable and hard to navigate!

When I looked at those sites—especially the aggregate calendars—the contrast with my succinct, regular one-page annual summary was stark. The information was out there, but it needed to be presented in a more reader-friendly way. In short, it was time to put on my information design hat.

The first task of an information designer is to understand what information the end-user needs, because everything else follows from that. In this instance, the intended audience is myself, which made it easy to just interview myself to find out what I really wanted!

Ironically, the criteria for including a ride isn’t very quantifiable. I wanted major rides that were “serious” and “nontrivial”. But what does any of that mean?

One way to define “major” is simply by distance. There are a lot of short rides, but you usually don’t plan your year around them. You could pick an arbitrary minimum length, like 50 miles, but that’s not perfect, because you might still make exceptions for some shorter rides.

Another way is repetition. Obviously, if a ride happens every week, it’s probably not a big deal if you miss any particular one. Whereas you might not want to miss a ride that takes place only once a year. But that’s not great either, because Pittsburgh has lots of little social rides which take place annually that you wouldn’t structure your season around.

Another obvious thing to think about is rides that require pre-registration, or which might fill up or sell out if you don’t reserve a spot early. You’d definitely want to note a ride like that in your calendar.

And anything that’s a significant event, where there will be lots of riders or people you want to see or some other significant reason to be there. But what’s “significant”? Again, it’s subjective.

Ultimately, the criteria I use for including a ride on my list is whether it’s something I—or some other serious rider—would want to plan one’s season around, for whatever reason. Still vague and subjective, but it’s what seems to work for me.

In the past, I’ve usually kept my list of events for the season on a single sheet of paper, either in a chronological list or in a compressed year-at-a-glance calendar, like you see at left.

Last year, while composing my first Pittsburgh-area list, I posted a copy to the BikePGH message board in order to get feedback from other local riders. They pointed out several rides I’d missed, but they also suggested I share it by publishing it online.

So after some updates, I announced my creation of the Annual Rides Calendar, hosted on the BikingPGH wiki.

I’m very pleased with the result. The whole regional cycling calendar is distilled down to the absolute essentials, listing no more than six to eight serious rides per month, max, with links directly to the rides’ websites. It’s easy to scan by date in order to see both what’s coming up soon as well as a whole-season overview, without being cluttered to death with every little weekly ride across every neighborhood in Western Pennsylvania.

This new format calendar was useful last year, and the exercise of making it helped me gain familiarity with the big rides that take place here. Some other local cyclists have praised its usefulness, and I’m very pleased with it.

And now that the new year has begun, I’ve updated the Annual Rides Calendar for 2017!

I know a lot of cyclists here in New England whose idea of paradise is living in a place where one can ride year-round, where training rides and centuries aren’t stopped cold by winter’s ice and snow¹.

Sure, it would be nice to have the choice of riding anytime one wants, but there are also advantages to having a limited riding season.

The easiest benefit to identify is that it provides one’s body a needed break. Training for endurance events is hard work², and it puts a lot of stress on the body. By the end of the year, I’m physically drained and my muscles and joints need a couple months of rest in order to recuperate. By springtime, I’m refreshed and can attack the new season with renewed strength. Without that enforced time-out, I’d gradually lose strength and possibly cause greater damage to my joints as a result of overtraining.

What’s true of the body is also true for the mind: after months spent highly focused and motivated, one’s interest level wanes and one longs for a break. Mentally, I need that time to rest and recuperate just as much as my body does, so that when spring comes I’m eagerly looking forward to the long hours in the saddle and painful all-out efforts that training requires³. Without any break, my desire and motivation would gradually evaporate, and my performance would follow.

I find the same is true of anything I do. Whether it’s cycling, consulting, writing, travel, my meditation practice, or even relationships, I find it difficult to sustain intensely focused interest in something for years at a time without taking some kind of break.

Besides, taking a break from cycling frees up 10-20 hours a week, which I can devote to all the things I’ve been neglecting all summer (like career, writing, travel, my meditation practice, and relationships)!

But hey, why can’t you just leave the bike in the garage for a few weeks? Who says I’m obliged to ride all year ’round just because the weather’s conducive? Actually, that’s a solution that only a non-cyclist would offer.

A cyclist knows how the dynamic works. Most cyclists are competitive⁴. Whether it’s to put the hurt into one’s buddy on a big hill, or whether it’s simply to avoid having him put that hurt on you, no cyclist wants to lose ground (fitness- and performance-wise) to his buddies. Therefore, as long as the weather’s good, there’ll be someone out there doing hill repeats or interval workouts in an effort to get a leg up on the competition. And so long as that’s true, a cyclist trying to take an unforced break will still feel a strong obligation to ride, knowing that his buddies are out there getting stronger than him because they’re out there training⁵.

So although we might dream of a utopian world where it’s always sunny and warm, I’m very happy to live in a region where nature enforces an off-season. That way I don’t have to feel guilty about hanging it up for the winter, knowing that when spring comes I’ll have renewed desire to ride and my body will be ready⁶ for the challenges I’ll undertake.

¹ Yes, one can ride year-round, even in New England. But I’ve never found true winter riding very useful endurance training. YMMV.

² Yes, one can go into an endurance event with limited training, but one must do so with limited expectations. To thrive requires training.

³ Yes, at a certain point one’s training must focus more on intervals than mindless miles, but that’s only after one has a solid number of aerobic base miles, and distance training still has some benefits even after that.

⁴ Yes, most cyclists are competitive, but there are exceptions. They have wives.

⁵ Yes, more training volume isn’t always better. You need adequate rest, too, which a structured training program will provide.

⁶ Hopefully.

I know it’s been a while since I posted here. Truthfully, there’s been absolutely nothing to say, because I haven’t touched a bike since the first week in January. Yeah, I haven’t rode a mile in over four months; that’s the longest I’ve been off the bike since I started keeping records eight years ago.

Why? Work assigned me to a project in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. What’s that you ask? I spent most of the winter on a tropical island and didn’t do any biking? Nope. The roads are too busy, too narrow, and the drivers are insane. Yeah. It’s bad enough that even I won’t ride, and I’ve ridden in traffic through the Interstate 93 tunnel into Boston!

But this week I’ve got three items to tell you about: me, my city, and my bike.

First, me. While in Boston this past weekend, I managed an 8-mile ride, in the rain. I’ll get to the “why” of that in a second, but the first thing I need to say is: Ouch! I rode Beacon Street out to Coolidge, then up and over Summit Ave, across to Western Ave, and back via the Charles River bike path, and I’ve lost any pretense that I’ve retained any of my fitness. After the big hill on Summit Ave, both right and left calves cramped up pretty fierce. So once I get home from St. Thomas, I’m going to have a lot of stratching to do and base miles to ride to regain my prior fitness level, while simultaneously being extra careful to ramp up gradually. Ugh.

Next: my city. The DCR closed the Paul Dudley White (aka Charles River) bike path from the BU Bridge to Western Avenue for resurfacing back in October, and I rode the new surface for the first time this weekend. Basically, it looks like little more than a quick paving job. The surface is nice, but the narrow areas remain narrow, and the enhancements to the path were mostly just the addition of root barriers. I’m grateful for the paving, because it was desperately needed, but I think more could have been done. Still, it’s one of my main routes out of town, so I’m pleased.

Finally, and most importantly: the bike. Back in March I ordered a third bike for my stable: a Bike Friday Pocket Rocket. That’s a custom-built folding bike for travel that’s designed to mimick a traditional road bike. It finally arrived, and that’s why I rode this weekend, despite the rain, the cramps, and the fact that I was only home for a precious couple days.

The Friday came packed in its own suitcase, which turns into a trailer once you’ve got the bike out. I didn’t test the trailer, but it looks like it should work nicely. The only real complaint I have about the whole package is that they shipped me a black suitcase, rather than the blue one I ordered, but it looks like they’re going to rectify that post-haste.

Unpacking the bike was something of an adventure. It wasn’t difficult, but it took a bit of time to get the three-dimensional puzzle assembled and properly adjusted. It’s not designed for quick folding, like you would need for a daily multi-modal commuting bike; instead, it’s intended primarily for airline trips and long vacations, where you can take fifteen minutes to put together a bike that you’ll use on a week-long trip to, say, St. Thomas or Grand Cayman or Las Vegas or Seaside, Oregon.

I managed to get the thing put together in reasonably sort order. Not that there weren’t a couple glitches along the way. The rear wheel seems a little bit out of true, which I’ll have to look at more closely next time I’m home. The brakes needed a bit of adjustment, both the barrel adjuster as well as the left/right balance. And I’m a little annoyed that the seatpost isn’t one that remembers the front/rear angle of the seat, so that’ll require adjustment each time I unpack the bike. But overall, I was able to get the thing out of the suitcase—and, equally importantly, back into it—successfully in a reasonable amount of time.

The ride? I think it’s a little better than one might expect of a bike with 20-inch tires. It did a pretty admirable job of being rideable. The compact crankset has a good gear range, with sufficient granny to get me up Summit Ave with no complaints.

The steering isn’t quite as stable as a road bike, but that’s to be expected, since the 20-inch wheels generate less gyroscopic stability. Similarly, since the back wheel is lighter than the usual 700C, it was pretty easy for me to unload the rear and slip the wheel while climbing on a steep, wet roadway. The smaller wheels are, as you’d expect, more easily diverted by parallel-angled grates and expansion joints, and transmit more road chatter than larger wheels, but the latter effect is dampened by a lot of flex in the stem and seatpost.

I’m not much of a fan of the (split) handlebars. They don’t feel real secure in the stem mount, and the drops don’t feel very natural at all. I’ll have to experiment some more with the angle to find the right compromise between comfort in the drops versus on the hoods.

Oh, and one final thing that’s patently obvious but you might not think about. With no top tube, you can’t lean the bike against your thigh when standing at stops, nor can you grab the top tube to carry the bike down stairs or through doors. Bit awkward, that.

Naturally, I’m also curious about how the bike will feel during longer rides of 50k, 100k, or 200k, but time will have to provide the answer to that question.

But all of that is nit-picking. My overall impression is that the Friday’s a fine bike, and will play the role of a packable travel bike quite well. And I’m only eight miles into what will hopefully be a long and memorable partnership with this bike that will accompany me to all kinds of distant places, and keep me riding and fit on assignments like this recent five-month stint in St. Thomas, where I would never be able to ride if I didn’t bring along the Bike Friday.

Today the Pan-Mass Challenge presented two checks to the Jimmy Fund and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: a $15 million annual contribution, plus an additional $2.5 million to established a PMC Sr. Investigatorship. The PMC is the largest bike-a-thon in the country in terms of raising money and is now responsible for approximately 45 percent of all annual Jimmy Fund revenue. Our 23-year history of giving now stands at over $86.4 million. Read the press release here.

As for myself, I ended up raising a total of $2,600, exceeding last year's donations by exactly $10.

After three weeks, the swelling from my bursitis is starting to show signs of receding, so perhaps I'll be able to get back on the bike in another week or two. This is the longest stretch I've gone without riding since my last bike was stolen more than two years ago.