Summer 2021

This seems as good a way as any to kick off this new blog/project, so without further ado:

I’ve been riding and racing bikes, casually, since 2012.

Okay, it might be more fair to say that I’ve been on a bike during a race, because what I was doing was definitely not “racing.” It’s been fun every time, though, and I figured this year I might try to do better. I also thought that I might try writing about it, in an effort to keep myself at the required training and give myself a useful medium for analysis for all things bikes and riding. Whew!

At the end of May 2021, I took stock of my skills and weaknesses. I have full confidence in my bike handling skills because the majority of my riding history has been dedicated to singletrack and I’m no stranger to getting bikes over reasonably rough terrain or in the air. However, my total mileage and power output are abysmal by comparison. It is so much easier to just chill on a mountain bike and do cool stuff, and it’s actually pretty hard to convince yourself to ride hard now so that you can ride even harder in the future. At least, it’s hard for me to convince myself of that.

After the one and only cyclocross race I managed to participate in last year, I kept thinking that if I tried harder I could do better, much better. But like every year, springtime brought confusion over what my cycling goals would be because the shock of warm weather after another harsh, northern winter made any kind of cycling seem fun. “Get Fast” became the theme in June 2021. I figured I could pick up a fancy bike computer, measure my power output, plan things out really well and in great detail or I could just ride my bike, like, really hard.

I opted to ride really hard. It’s not because I don’t believe those other things have value, but that I’d really rather see where they fit in after I’d had plenty of time on the bike and relevant experience to gauge what might be most effective.

I have two reasonably simple goals:

1. Improve my standing for the next cyclocross race
2. Do more miles in one year than I ever have before (a measly 1175 miles, a total from some years ago before I had a career and other such obligations)

I fully intend to do more than one cyclocross event but I’m focused only on the next one with regards to my goal. It feels simpler that way. The only way I’m going to do that is to get faster and that, of course, is the entire point.

It also seems to me that Total Mileage is a pretty good metric. It does miss a lot of nuance, in that if every mile you did was at a relaxed pace and rides took hours, you probably didn’t derive a ton of benefit along the “let’s go faster” axis, but I like numbers that are bigger than other numbers.

Now, I probably should go ride my bike.