All posts by Mike

Another solo ride, but at least full-distance. It’s been a tough month.

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

Last Sunday Kevin and I were supposed to to an easy hill ride, with a few miles. Ride up Old LaHonda then Skyline all the way to 9, down into Los Altos for the usual stop at Peet’s, and back via the foolhills. Didn’t work out as planned; Kevin’s knee was protesting pretty nastily so we cut things short, descending Page Mill and looping back through Portola Valley & Woodside. Under 40 miles just doesn’t cut it for a Sunday ride! But we couldn’t push our luck with his knee. He saw a doctor for it on Tuesday, and a physical therapist, at 7:30am, this morning. 7:30am??? Things are a bit tougher to figure out because he can’t have an MRI done, due to the computer installed on top of his brain. Big magnets aren’t a good idea.

Kevin did ride with me Tuesday morning, but we stayed out of the hills. Feels very very strange doing something other than heading up to Skyline on a Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride. We rode the Loop, including Arastradero, ending up just a mile or so short of the normal distance, but a whole lot less climbing.

Then today, while Kevin was at his PT appointment, it was just me out there. Surprisingly few other cyclists on the road; saw nobody on Skyline or West Old LaHonda. Nice morning as you can see from the video; the fog was further out towards the coast, and dry roads all the way!

Hopefully, with my mom’s brain surgery in the past (having a large meningioma removed, which sounds bad by itself, and add that it’s being removed from a 93 year old…). She’s recovering nicely, and hopefully we can get things back on track at the bike shop now. It just kinda feels like everything began going downwhill after Kevin and I got back from France. Time to reverse that. Time for Kevin to have fewer seizures too; it was 4 today and maybe 7 yesterday.

But this morning, even though riding alone, there was some feeling of normalcy. Heck, at the end of the ride I was even thinking, 9:29am, that’s just 7 minutes off a good time from the fast days way back when. Maybe way way way back when. It really does help having working power meters on the bike, no question.

At least Karen’s cancer seems stable and our November 17th-December 1st vacation is on! Flying into Amsterdam so she can see Anne Frank’s house, then train to Paris for a day, then board a cruise ship where the highlight will be a goat cheese farm and the Rock of Gibraltar. Our 4th cruise, not in as fancy a room as the last two but still pretty darned nice, still an Aft cabin so we can go to sleep with the sound of the ship’s wake through open doors. Looking forward to that! And also looking forward to the TdF route presentation in October. There are some things down the road to work towards. Just have to keep that in mind when things seem a tad bit crazy.

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and then you still don’t know

Personal stuff

Power. Data. Just knowing where you are.

For the past 10 days, I’ve not had accurate power on my bike. The power meter on my right side went out, leaving just the left. My computer isn’t smart enough to figure out that it’s only getting power from just one side and doubling it, approximating (very closely) the total power I’m delivering to the pedals. But no, it shows only the one side. Instead of saying 190 watts, it shows 95. Can I figure it out in my head? Sure. But it also gets downloaded to Strava, to Garmin Connect, and a whole lot of training information, that tells me what shape I’m in, as estimate for VO2 max (which is very important to me, since it shows my relative shape today vs last week vs last year and a sense of where I’m heading tomorrow)… lots of things.

And those “lots of things” can’t be manually reconfigured to account for the fact my power is being recorded at 50% of what it actually is.

You’d think this wouldn’t be a big deal. You’d think I could just enjoy riding my bike, not knowing what power I’m producing, maybe using my heart rate to judge effort. But everything’s connected; the goal is to deliver the most watts with the lowest heart rate… that’s being efficient. And I can’t see that. The goal is to see my VO2 max not decline, if possible. It had been at 46, and now, with the erroneous new data, it’s down to 45. I started blood pressure meds a month ago and wanted to see what affect it was having… before the power went out, things were looking good! Now, I just don’t know.

I should be able to have just as much fun without all the data. Heck there are people who say they finally found real joy in cycling when they ditched even a rudimentary bike computer. They don’t even know how many miles they rode. That’s OK, that’s just not me. I really do enjoy pushing myself and looking at the data. This is a bit like the people who say, why are you so concerned about connectivity when you’re on vacation? You don’t need to use your phone to check up on things. Detach yourself and enjoy a world without distractions! Yeah, right. They don’t get it. Some of us are more stressed when detached than when we’re connected. Could we be retrained? Maybe. It would take a long time and probably not worth the effort for some of us. People are different. I don’t judge the person who rides without a bike computer of any kind… well, not too much. If they want to laugh at me for my dependency on tech, great, what did that laugh, at my expense, really cost me? Nothing.

Fortunately, my experiment riding without power is about over. Speedplay sent me a new set of pedals so my ride home will feel familiar again.