Orny's Cycling Journal

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.

Pacing the CEO on a PMC Zwift group ride

Watch on YouTube Video of Austin's Friday Truancy group ride rolling out

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!

It might not be the end of the calendar year, but the cycling season has definitely slipped away from me.

There are no more organized rides on the calendar, and all the roadies have gone stupid about cyclocross season. It’s too cold to enjoy riding in the morning, and if you wait until midday for it to warm up, you don’t have much time to ride before evening sunbeams shine dangerously straight into the eyes of westward-driving motorists.

And if the approach of winter wasn’t enough, my body has once again stepped in to limit my riding, this time in the form of a balky gall bladder. The abdominal pain makes riding uncomfortable, and I shouldn’t do any really long rides while I’m trying to overcome the accompanying weight loss. While my upcoming gall bladder surgery is supposedly a fairly benign procedure, the recovery period will blow a big hole in these precious last weeks before the temperatures plummet and snow flies.

Although to be fair, I’m glad it’s happening now, at the very tail end of the cycling season, rather than smack in the middle of my training.

It’s been a very mixed year overall. I’ve laid down the most miles since 2010, spent some rare time in the saddle with my old riding buddies, and realized some satisfying achievements, including a record nine rides over 100 miles. I’ve also had the time to explore many new routes and ride for pleasure, rather than always focusing on training.

At the same time, there have been some big, painful challenges. Just like my upcoming surgery, my crash back in June (with accompanying concussion and hospital-induced hematoma) also made it medically necessary for me to be off the bike for weeks. And my new bike was out of commission for three months while both front and rear wheels (in separate incidents) needed to be sent back to France for warranty replacement.

2014 has been filled with memorable events, even if half of them were really good and the other half really bad. While I desperately hate to see summer’s warm days go, at the same time I’m getting tired of this year’s lengthy roller coaster ride and am quite ready to close the door on 2014 and its travails.

It’s time to go hibernate!