Bring On Summer 2025!

So far, 2025 has been the clearly delineated year I expected it to be. Part 1 (“Winter”) was everything up to and including Cheesehead Roubaix on April 26. It was a time of making plans for the cycling season and for other objectives while I primarily used walking to stay healthy–I won’t say fit–as I recovered from my hip replacement surgery. Part 2 was the month of May, almost all of which I spent in Pennsylvania with my mother. I got back to West Bend yesterday afternoon. May featured more cycling, but not as much as I had hoped. Surprisingly bad weather in the Philadelphia suburbs limited me to just 13 rides for a total of 270 miles. I wanted 500.

But May was special even without a big mileage total. I had 29 days with my mother, including Mother’s Day. My sister was visiting from Florida and it was the first Mother’s Day that the three of us were together in more than 30 years! Mom was delighted, to say the least. A few days after my sister returned to Florida, Mom and I went out to dinner with my cousin Shawn and his wife Bev, great people who I don’t get to see often enough. And to celebrate his 60th birthday, I took my friend Richard out to dinner in Maryland, where we agreed to meet because it was halfway between my mother’s house and his home in the Washington DC suburbs. Richard and I have known each other since kindergarten and were inseparable friends in childhood, but now the challenges of geography and the strains of adulthood prevent us from seeing each other frequently. On Friday, my last full day in Pennsylvania, I spent a couple of hours in my childhood hometown, basking in nostalgia. This was all really good stuff. Food for the soul, you could say.

May also was noteworthy because it came with a pay raise and more vacation days. I was renegotiating the terms of my employment contract for several weeks prior to my trip, but things were finalized while I was in Pennsylvania. I will have more to say about those additional vacation days later. They create interesting possibilities for short trips around the Midwest … trips that surely would have a cycling component.

So, that’s the end of Part 2 (“Spring”). It’s time for Part 3 (“Summer”). I expect to be very busy between now and June 19, which, ironically, is the last official full day of Spring 2025. Today I renewed my driver’s license, restocked my house with groceries, and beat my overgrown lawn into submission. I have an appointment with my dentist next Thursday, there are critical household projects to complete ASAP, and tomorrow I will begin a new diet, exercise, and wellness program that I have been researching for weeks. I need to drop weight and I need to fix my sleep. If I can do those things, then I think a lot of other things will fall into place. By July 31 when I meet with my doctor for my annual checkup, I should see measurable results. And much sooner than that, I should start to feel like a cyclist again.

To Protect And To Shred

The City of West Bend publishes an update every Friday that it delivers by email to interested citizens like me. You can sign up for it at this link. It contains information on a wide variety of subjects. In today's edition there was even a bit about mountain biking ...

Rock on!

Out Of Office

Three weeks ago, when I was preparing for my latest trip to Pennsylvania and didn’t want any new complications, my primary laptop freaked out. I’m talking about the laptop I use for my job, so it has to work properly at all times. I was prepared to buy a new laptop off the shelf if I couldn’t apply a fix; there would not have been enough time for a custom order. And fortunately I found that fix. The best explanation of the problem seemed to be that some of my old software was incompatible with the new operating system, Windows 11. By installing a fresh instance of Windows, I was able to get a stable laptop again.

An old version of Microsoft Office is the most likely culprit here. I continue to run it on one of my other laptops, but I will not reinstall it on the primary machine. And this decision has led to a change in my fitness tracking.

On September 1, 2003, I began using an Excel spreadsheet to track my cycling, walking, and strength training efforts. Over many years, it grew to include body weight, body mass index, resting heart rate, blood pressure, and other metrics for health and fitness. In many ways, it grew to be needlessly complex. And now I have abandoned it. Final entry: April 18, 2025.

Sure, I could continue to use a nearly 30-year-old version of Excel on an older laptop, but I was almost happy for an excuse to stop. This year I added a couple of new tools for health and fitness metrics. Combined with the tools I already had, they make me more reliant than ever on Garmin Connect. Someday that could be a bad thing–Garmin has had a couple of noteworthy service interruptions in recent years–but for now I am very satisfied with the new tools.

Just what are those new tools? I mentioned them last July, and earlier this year I took the plunge: I now have Garmin’s scale and blood pressure monitor. They weren’t cheap and it might be hard to argue that they offer more accurate data than the devices they replaced, but their WiFi connectivity and their native compatibility with Garmin Connect were impossible for me to resist. When I take a reading, it shows up instantly on the website, and my Garmin cycling computer and my Garmin sports watch always know my current weight. I may have bought only convenience, but I’m OK with that. I like having everything in one place with no duplication of effort in data entry. And ease of use makes me more likely to be consistent with data collection, which I could not claim to be before.

Back To Baggies (Sometimes)

My first cycling shorts were baggies. Those were the days of riding around town just for a little exercise. I didn’t even think of myself as a cyclist yet; I simply wanted a chamois to provide more comfort than I could get from casual cargo shorts.

Then came my first road bike, and with it came my first Lycra cycling shorts. A little while later, I discovered the benefits of bibs. And bibs will remain my shorts of choice when I’m on the open road, but I’m going back to baggies for some of my easier rides around town or on recreation trails.

I found a killer deal on Endura’s Hummvee II baggies last month. They performed well on today’s maiden voyage, an easy 10 miles. I’m in eastern Pennsylvania once again, visiting my mother and planning to do some longer rec trail rides in this area.

Going back to baggies is something of a psychology hack. I have been one of those guys whose “easy” rides have suffered from intensity creep. Zone 2 isn’t supposed to drift into Zone 3, as mine almost inevitably do. When I do base training on a rec trail this year, I’m going to leave the skin-tight team kit at home. Wearing baggies will signal to my sometimes too competitive brain that such rides are meant to be completed with less intensity. And I’m not just hacking myself; I’m hacking you too. When you see me in baggies, you’ll know I’m out for some fat-burning, mitochondria-building Zone 2 time.