Orny's Cycling Journal

I was 35 years old when I started my adult cycling career. In those early years, my rapidly-growing cycling fitness more than compensated for any loss of overall fitness that came as I aged.

As the years passed, my cycling fitness reached a stable plateau, while the effects of aging slowly but consistently gained momentum. But I wasn’t worried; throughout my forties I could easily keep up with riders ten years younger.

But when I turned 50, I noticed it took increasingly more effort to keep up with the kids. And now that I’m 60 years old, I have to admit that I’m simply not keeping up with them anymore, and never will again, no matter how hard I train.

So in case you’re on that same career path, here’s a few observations about my experience as an aging cyclist.

It’s easiest to see in the numbers. It wasn’t as linear as the “220 minus age” formula implies, but my max heart rate has dropped significantly over the past 15 years, from 175+ down to 160. And the inevitable loss of muscle mass has been reflected in my FTP and other measurements of power output like sprinting duration and max power.

The media always invokes the idea that we need more recovery time after hard efforts as we age. For me, that manifests mostly in my ability to do repeated bursts of high-intensity effort within a ride. I don’t feel I need more recovery time between rides; if I need more time for anything after a hard ride, it’s for my motivation to recover! And of course the standard prescription for maintaining fitness as we age is to continue doing severely painful intensity workouts. Ugh!

One generalization I can confirm is that as I’ve aged, my sleep cycle has become shorter and less refreshing. Gotta start embracing the nap, although they’ve always left me feeling nauseous afterward.

Another change is that I’m less willing to tolerate bad weather. I’m good with heat, but I’m kind of done thinking that riding in the cold is any fun. Doubly so for rain, and the annoying cleanup routine that follows a wet ride. Yes, it can be done; no, I don’t think it’s worth it anymore.

But once you’re out on the road on a nice day, what does riding “over the hill” feel like? It feels like having one of those days where you’re not performing at your best… every single day! Whether it’s heavy legs or lack of aerobic fitness, it always feels as if there’s something limiting me. There aren’t many of those strong days when you’re at peak fitness and everything comes effortlessly.

Instead of looking forward to hills as a place to attack your group, you begin to fear them as places where you’ll fall behind the group. And they drop you more frequently on those climbs… and on the flats… and on descents. You still participate in group rides, but you wind up isolated and riding by yourself much of the time.

You get discouraged on group rides, because you’re the last person to each rest stop, which means you always get the least rest before the group sets out again, despite being the person who needs recovery the most. So you give up on the group and spend more time doing solo rides.

That’s what it’s like. I’ve had an undeniable drop-off in physiological performance due to aging. But at the same time, psychologically I’m just less willing to tolerate the suffering inherent in high-intensity, maximal efforts. To keep up with other riders, I have to spend more and more of my time riding at my limit, and it’s harder and harder to marshal the motivation to spend long hours riding at that limit.

While I was slowly getting older, I spent 25 amazing years near the front of the pack. Now that I’m 60 years old, that’s simply no longer a possibility. It’s time to set ego aside and get used to being one of the slower riders that other people have to wait for. It’s either that, or ride solo, which is something I’ve always done quite a lot of.

While I may not be the strongest cyclist in the pack any more, I still have the advantage of being significantly healthier than my sedentary age-group peers. And I still have as much passion for cycling as I’ve ever had. The bottom line is that I need to accept my reduced capabilities, adjust my goals to match them, find groups that will tolerate them, and just ride on.

May the road before you be a long, enjoyable one!

I wasn’t planning on repeating last year’s Akron Bike Club “Absolutely Beautiful Country” century. It was a really nice ride, but it’s a two-hour drive from Pittsburgh, which makes for a lot of driving on top of a 100-mile bike ride.

Selfies on the River Styx

Level crossing delay

Sunburned hands

However, having spent much of the first half of this year away from home, I was really under-trained and in desperate need of fitness before all the big summer rides. And with Inna still out of town, there was no one to inconvenience.

But the biggest reason to go was the weather. A week-long heat wave broke on Friday, leaving us with a delightfully temperate weekend. Sunny and less humid, with little wind, it was perfect weather for a long ride, so…

I got up at 3:45am Sunday “morning” and was on the road by 4:30, headed back to the city that gave us the Kent State massacre, Devo, and Chrissie Hynde.

During the drive, I noticed that almost all of Ohio’s roads are straight north-south or straight east-west, with very little variance. It made me wonder why they didn’t just name their cities by map coordinates. So if Cincinnati was called “A12” and Columbus was called “F5”, then you’d know that to get from one to the other you’d have to drive 5 units east and 7 units north. Seems like it would be a lot more efficient in a place like Ohio, since—with no diagonals—that’s just the way the roads work anyways.

Kitting up in the Copley High School parking lot, I discovered a packing mistake: the pair of cycling glove’s I’d brought were both right hands. The guy parked next to me offered to loan me a pair, but I demurred. Going bare-handed wouldn’t be any major discomfort, I thought. No big deal… If anything, it might hide or even out some of my characteristic cyclist’s tan lines.

At ten-to-seven I was in the saddle, dropping lots of riders in a desire to work up some body heat to ward off the morning coolth. Eighteen miles later, I stopped to get a selfie in front of the sign for the village of River Styx. It’s probably not an auspicious thing, crossing the River Styx with 82 miles still to ride…

Speaking of stopping, about 35 miles in I caught up with a couple riders who were stopped at a level crossing while a big freight train rolled by. Fortunately, the end (of the train) was near, and I was only delayed about three minutes.

About one-third done, I was already experiencing some physical difficulties. I was obviously undertrained and not ready for the distance, even on a flattish course like this, and by the end of the day my legs were cramping up. My knees were complaining loudly, thanks to inflammation picked up while on my recent meditation retreat. I was also having difficulty swallowing due to an undiagnosed throat irritation. The day eventually heated up, and on the last, 15-mile segment, I was so blown that I had to stop for a brief roadside rest before finishing.

This was countered by the excellent work done by the organizers at the rest stops. Twelve miles in, riders were offered donuts. At the halfway point, small sandwiches piled high with cold cuts and cheese. At Mile 70, the Dalton Dari-ette offered free ice cream! And all the stops had ice, which for me is always key.

I finally rolled back into the high school at 2:15pm. I had enjoyed the Ohio countryside and the beautiful day, but I was glad the suffering was finally over, and happily looking forward to getting into an air conditioned car for the drive back to Pittsburgh.

Pulling the bike out of the car trunk at home, I noticed that the plastic mounting tab for my Di2 electronic shifting junction box had broken. That’s an annoyance, since I’d just purchased and installed a new mounting bracket for it.

But more troublesome—though less costly—were the implications of spending seven hours in the July sun without gloves. The rest of my body has long-since adapted to sun exposure, such that I didn’t suffer any ill effects of going completely without sunblock; however, my hands have always been shielded by gloves, and the sensitive skin on the back of them isn’t seasoned to strong sunlight and got thoroughly sunburned. Lesson learned!

Nonetheless, I’m glad I went, and (mostly) had a good time. There aren’t many century rides to choose from here in Pittsburgh, and I’m happy to participate in and support those few that remain.

But whether I’m ready and willing to undertake another century happening weekend… We’ll see how well I recover!

Pain. The bicycle is a pain machine.

I really didn’t know much about pain before I climbed back onto a bike in 2000 and started training for my first Pan-Mass Challenge. But the endurance athlete’s mantra of “no pain, no gain” quickly proved its verity beyond question.

It’s a strange thing: training. The whole idea is to push yourself, to stress your body so much that it triggers short-term adaptations to handle the ever-larger challenges you give it.

That is the proverbial house of pain where the athlete lives, learning to value, even to relish it. There’s a very real reason the training videos I spin to are marketed as “The Sufferfest”: riders come to identify pain with improvement.

Group rides are especially notorious, where everyone tries to push everyone else to work harder, go farther and faster. Tim Krabbé sums it up nicely in “The Rider”, his novelization of a typical bike race: “Pain, commonly seen in my circles as a signal to stop doing something, has ceased being that to me ever since [I bought my first bike].” I relate to that like some hard-won, hidden truth. And maybe it is.

From a Buddhist standpoint, I think the bike is a great place to practice with pain, to play with separating the physical experience of pain from the mental reaction that demands that we make it stop. Unless it kills you or does permanent damage, all pain is endurable. Every steep hill you climb, every time you take a pull at the front, every time you go long: those are all opportunities to see just how far you can push your pain threshold, as well as how long you can sustain it.

On my PMC rider page, I wrote, “On the road, riding 200 miles takes stamina, strength of will, and the ability to overcome pain. Those attributes are demanded in much greater quantities from cancer victims and their families.”

Cancer victims are suddenly thrust into this same arena of having to deal with pain, both physical and emotional. It’s something I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.

But in a strange parallel to the training cycle, going through the pain of cancer treatment can make an individual immensely strong, especially emotionally. If you’ve been through chemo, radiation, and a life-threatening disease, your sense of the scale of what you can endure increases exponentially, and the other little trials of daily life seem downright trivial in comparison.

In that sense, cancer is a crucible that teaches people the true value of life and every moment that comprises it. I’ve heard such stories again and again; I just wish that they didn’t come at such a terrible cost.

Yes, cycling can be painful. I have ridden over 26,000 miles, many of them at or near the limit of my endurance. I’ve biked 150 miles in a single 12-hour day in the saddle, climbed the slopes of Mt. Hood, pushed myself to reach 47 miles per hour, and done more hard and/or long training rides than I could count.

But I am truly in awe of the strength, stamina, and resistance to pain that cancer patients young and old demonstrate every day. The temporary “good pain” of cycling seems silly in comparison. Theirs is the true “Sufferfest”, and I can only do this one small thing to bring about a future where such heroics are no longer necessary.

My PMC mantra is this: Through this little pain, hopefully everyone will gain.

Follow this link for my full 2005 Pan-Mass Challenge ride report, including writeup and photos.