Orny's Cycling Journal

Six days after I finished my winter training with my first indoor century, I brought the bike outside for my first substantial ride of the year: the Pittsburgh Randonneurs’ 125-mile Sandy Lake 200k brevet.

I had more than the usual nerves leading up to the ride. After all, it would be the longest ride I’ve done in two years, and I was going into it with essentially zero prep. In the past four months, I’ve only done a couple short rides outside, none of which I’d count as “training”.

Honest, I'm stretching!!! #notamidget

For the first time ever, all my winter riding was done indoors, on the trainer, using Zwift. I’d done a lot of that, but would that be sufficient to power me through a 10-hour, 125-mile ride? I was about to find out!

And what better way to put Zwift to the test? The rolling route from North Park to Sandy Lake and back has over 8,000 feet of climbing, making it the second hilliest ride I’ve done since 2009.

It didn’t begin auspiciously. Eight of us set out promptly at 7am in unexpectedly chilly 45-degree weather, and I somehow scraped my calf on my pedal pretty nastily as I first clipped in.

As the miles and hours passed, the sky cleared and the sun slowly warmed the air, and riders started shedding layers of clothing. Although it’s too early in the season for the leaves to be out, it was heartening passing outbursts of forsythia, cherry, dogwood, and magnolia. My legs felt good, but I rationed my strength, knowing I hadn’t done much (i.e. any) training for endurance. After a while, both my knees and my traps complained insistently (the latter are my biggest weakness on long-distance rides).

An undetected tailwind that had helped us ride north became a much more noticeable headwind on the return leg. My strength faded and I remained with slower riders at a casual pace, rather than burn my few remaining matches.

We eventually plodded back to our starting point at 5:10pm. That’s 40 minutes faster than the roughly comparable McConnell’s Mills 200k brevet I did back in 2016. As measured by Strava’s “Relative Effort” metric, it was the fifth hardest ride I’ve done since 2009.

Although this was my second 100-mile ride of 2019, it was my first IRL / outdoor century of the year, after last weekend’s indoor century on the trainer. And discounting that “Zentury”, this was the earliest in the year that I’ve done a 100 mile ride, beating my 2016 brevet by four days. As far as I can figure, it was also my 75th confirmed overall century; there might be others, but records from my early years are incomplete.

It was a satisfying day; I got some sun, hung out with friends, and knocked out my biggest athletic goal for the spring. I’m very pleased at how well it went.

But before I finish, I have to revisit my preparation. I went into this event with the goal of putting my wintertime indoor Zwift training to the test. Was it effective? Was it valuable? Let’s look at that in more detail…

Tan lines starter pack

On the plus side, Zwift is fun; it makes indoor workouts more than tolerable, even attractive. It ensured I started the event with excellent cardiac and aerobic conditioning, with leg strength that was up to long miles and hard climbs, and with touch points (hands and seat) that could tolerate time in the saddle. In terms of building early-season fitness, Zwift was an unqualified, smashing success.

There’s another side of the equation, however. Although I’d done some long efforts on the trainer, other than my grueling indoor “Zentury”, none were more than half the duration of my 200k. While I gained strength and aerobic conditioning, I wasn’t building up the endurance needed for 10-hour rides.

At the same time, all the high-resistance work I put in compromised my joint health, specifically my knees, where I’ve been experiencing pain both on the trainer and during outdoor rides. I’ll keep a close eye on that, so I can ride as long as possible without needing joint replacement surgery and the associated time off the bike.

A much lighter consideration (pun intended) is that indoor training didn’t allow my skin to adjust to the seasonal increase in sun—and specifically UV—exposure. Yeah, I came home with a bit of sunburn, on a five-inch spot just above each knee. For proper springtime training, my Zwifting setup might need a couple sun-lamps!

More seriously, the net-net on Zwift is that it has been a complete success, and I’m pleased that the investment produced the desired and worthwhile improvement.

My previous post, following my Zentury, summarized my winter training and said that I had achieved my two expressed goals for 2019: using Zwift to both get over my 2018 malaise, and to begin spring at a high level of fitness. Sunday’s Sandy Lake 200k brevet was the final proof (the proverbial pudding), and I couldn’t be pleaseder (sic) with the result.

I also couldn’t be pleaseder that I’m now on break, with no major events until the middle of June. I’ll be riding—and might get another century in—but a good training plan includes periodization, wherein peak training is followed by recovery and consolidation before kicking it up another level. Fortunately, I’ve got a few weeks to kick back before the solid block of summertime events line up like dominoes.

But so far—and for the first time in a year and a half—things are looking really good!

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!