Seven Twelfths

The always affable Jeff Wren was all smiles after today's 13-man group ride in West Bend.

July was good to me. That is often the case. In a typical season, July is the month with the biggest mileage total. The days are long, the afternoon temperature is usually to my liking, and it’s easy to find the motivation to ride outside almost every day. This month I rode 717 miles. It was my first 700-mile month since August 2023, when I rode 711 miles. And 711 miles was a good total, but July was still my biggest month that season: 742 miles. My personal record for miles in one month is 1,020, set in July 2011.

I now have compensated for a rain-soaked May to get back on pace for this year’s mileage goal: 3,161. I have ridden 1,611 miles, year-to-date. That is exactly the number I wanted to hit by this date. (Yes, I made sure to get the last 35 miles I needed today. I would have done “hill repeats” on my driveway to hit that number if it had been necessary.) Here is the schedule I established for myself before the season began, with projected miles in black and actual miles in red:

To reach 3,161 miles, I will need solid but not spectacular output for the next three months. I’m not asking myself to do anything I haven’t done before. And I’m not asking myself to ride outside during the cold weather months. When we come off Daylight Saving Time, I want to be done with outdoor rides until next spring.

All those miles in June and July had a predictably positive effect on my already good health. Since returning from Pennsylvania at the end of May, I have lost 9 pounds. I had a very good blood test last Thursday as a precursor to this morning’s annual physical examination. My doctor had nothing but good things to say about my health and the habits that contribute to it. She recommended only that I keep doing what I’m doing and that I get the pneumonia vaccine this autumn, in keeping with CDC guidelines for people over 50. That’s good advice, but I won’t worry about autumn until autumn. Give me a scorching hot August and watch my fitness continue to improve!

Exploring The Garmin Connect Expeditions

In 2023, Garmin introduced a series of challenges it calls expeditions. Some are hikes and some are climbs. Completing the climbs is a function of walking up lots of stairs. I experimented with stair climbing as a cross-training exercise back in 2010 and occasionally I have revisited it. I no longer have access to an indoor staircase tall enough to suit the workout, but the 32 steps from Chestnut Street up to McLane Elementary School might be good for intervals. Not during the school day of course; I can live with onlookers considering me eccentric but not with them suspecting me of being a pedophile. Repeats at McLane–especially if I were carrying my rucksack–could build both strength and aerobic capacity. My current Garmin watch can’t track stair climbing. Maybe I should upgrade. I kind of have my eye on a model with that capability plus other features that would be nice to have. And let me know if I’m overlooking a set of outdoor steps in West Bend that is longer than McLane’s.

Back to those expeditions … my current Garmin watch can track steps, and completing the hikes is a function of accumulating large numbers of steps over time. I have been progressing through the hikes in ascending order. Earlier today, I completed the Via Transilvanica hike, which Garmin estimates at 1.9 million steps. I started the hike on March 16. Yeah, it took a while! But Via Transilvanica is only the second longest hike on Garmin Connect. I now embark on the big one: the Appalachian Trail, which Garmin estimates at 4.9 million steps. If I get only my minimum standard of 10,000 steps per day, then I won’t finish this challenge until December 1, 2026! So, I’m not going to track this one as carefully as I typically track my fitness goals. I’ll get it when I get it. And no, I don’t delude myself that the accomplishment in any way will match completing the real Appalachian Trail, but I won’t turn down that 8-point Garmin Connect badge.

Garmin doesn’t offer cycling expeditions, though you could easily imagine them. How about global circumnavigation? Ride 24,901 miles to complete a virtual trip around Earth’s equator. For most people, that challenge would take several years. Maybe start with a virtual Tour Divide: only 2,745 miles. Many dedicated cyclists could knock that out in just a few months. Mimic the Grand Tours of the professional peloton. Ride a virtual RAGBRAI. The real world of cycling provides at least as many opportunities for Garmin Connect expeditions as hiking and climbing. Maybe we’ll see them someday.

Blackout!

Am I getting close to fixing my sleep issues?

For the last few years, sleep has been a real problem for me. And when sleep goes bad, lots of other things follow. No one is immune; we all need deep, restorative sleep. Poor sleep messes with our hormones, our ability to recover from exercise, our mental clarity, and more. This year, I’m finally taking meaningful steps to improve my sleep. I’m finally listening to the conventional advice of the many experts who have studied sleep scientifically.

Expert advice includes things like consistent times for going to bed and getting up again. And I try to be consistent, but my overnight work schedule makes it difficult. If I have a medical appointment or shopping or automobile service or any number of other commitments that must be done during normal business hours, then my bedtime can deviate wildly from the norm. It doesn’t help that the norm is something like 9 o’clock in the morning. At any time of year, the sun’s already up and my exposure to it has suppressed my body’s production of melatonin. So, the hormone responsible for sleepiness is getting shut down just when I need it most.

There’s no practical way for me to eliminate all morning sunlight from my home, but I can block it from my bedroom. The sleep experts commonly recommend a completely dark bedroom, and I should have tried this long ago! In early June, I used construction paper and electrical tape to black out my bedroom windows. As you can see from the photo above, this is somewhat unsightly–I’m not the only unattractive thing in that shot–but with the horizontal blinds lowered into place the room looks like its old self.

The difference in the sleep environment is massive! With the door closed, my bedroom is now pitch black.

My Garmin watch reports sleep statistics to Garmin Connect. Like many health stats, these sleep stats are not strictly accurate. I have a very low resting heart rate, so Garmin sometimes credits me for falling asleep sooner than I really did. But if the watch isn’t strictly accurate, then at least we can hope it’s wrong in a consistent, predictable way. It’s the trend that counts. And the trend is good. Garmin tells me that over the last 12 months, my average sleep duration was 5 hours, 23 minutes. That’s obviously not enough, but here’s the important thing: during the last 4 weeks, average duration was 6 hours, 12 minutes. The only real change was the window blackout project. For the price of a few sheets of construction paper and a few feet of electrical tape, I have purchased almost an hour of extra sleep each day.

I don’t want 6:12 to become the new standard. It’s still not enough. So, is magnesium supplementation my next step? There is some evidence that magnesium promotes higher quality sleep. It’s cheap and readily available without a prescription. How about a new comforter, sheets, and pillows? Those are remarkably expensive! But I could be convinced to treat myself. Any investment in better, longer sleep will almost certainly repay me with interest.

95,000 Lifetime Miles

I "created" this AI image in the Pointillist style with exactly 95,000 dots ... I think. Not gonna count 'em. 

For a long time, I targeted 2025 as the season in which I would hit 100,000 lifetime miles. I define “lifetime miles” as miles since I became a serious cyclist. That didn’t happen until 2004. Lifetime–just “lifetime” now, not lifetime miles–goes back to 1965. I thought there would be something poetic in reaching 100,000 miles in the same year that I reached my 60th birthday. But I won’t reach 100,000 miles this year.

Coming up short has nothing to do with the injury that ended my 2024 season. My crash in November probably didn’t cost me more than a couple of hundred miles. The truth is that I had fallen off the pace already. In this post from September 2, I acknowledged that I wasn’t going to reach 100,000 miles on my preferred schedule.

I hit 90,000 lifetime miles on December 24, 2023.

Today, I hit 95,000 lifetime miles. If I reach this year’s mileage goal, 3,161, then next season another 3,160 will get me to 100,000 lifetime miles. I can live with that. It’s still going to be a significant accomplishment.

Changes Coming To Rusco Drive In 2026?

Many riders know Rusco Drive as the location of the southern terminus of the Eisenbahn State Trail. There’s a convenient trailhead that includes parking, a portable toilet, and a bike maintenance station with tools and a tire pump. It’s an important location not merely for trail-only users, but also for roadies who are heading out to or returning from a ride in the country. Sometime in 2026, significant changes could be coming to Rusco Drive, and it’s not clear how they will affect cyclists.

The City of West Bend is considering a plan that would incorporate land south of Rusco Drive for both industrial and residential use. This necessarily would increase motor vehicle traffic in the area. That might not affect trail-only users at all, as they either are driving to the trailhead or are using it as a turnaround point after starting their ride farther north. Roadies likely will see a difference. Having more vehicles on Rusco means more potential conflicts between South Main Street to the west and South River Road to the east. The city seems to be convinced that more traffic on Rusco could be a problem–whether the city is considering the impact specifically on cyclists is doubtful–so, within the city’s plan is the possibility of a new roundabout at Rusco and River.

Drivers hate roundabouts because they fundamentally misunderstand them. All they know is that they now have to slow down where they didn’t have to slow down before. It doesn’t occur to them that the alternative is to stop where they didn’t have to stop before. On River Road today, there’s a roundabout at County Highway NN and a roundabout at Paradise Drive, but no traffic controls in the intervening 2 miles. Rusco Drive is smack in the middle, and traffic on River Road flies through that intersection while traffic on Rusco waits at a two-way stop. A roundabout should make crossing River Road safer and easier for everyone, including cyclists.

It’s important to remember that planning isn’t construction and timelines are just a guess. Bad weather, problems with funding, problems with permits, problems with insurance, problems with staffing … any number of things can cause delays or outright abandonment of a big infrastructure project. I do like this one, though, as I think the prospect of a roundabout at Rusco and River benefits cyclists more than extra traffic on Rusco hurts them.

The Proof Is In The Pedaling

This season I have really embraced the Zone 2 mindset. In a nutshell, that training philosophy tells me to spend most of my ride time at a moderately low level of intensity to maximize fat oxidation and to increase mitochondrial density. Why I need to maximize fat oxidation should be obvious even to the least critical observer, and I dropped 6.2 pounds in June, so the plan seems to be working. Whether I increased mitochondrial density last month is less certain–I suppose I would have needed sophisticated lab tests at the beginning and end of the month to know for sure–but I feel like I must have, because I followed the advice of the experts. And increased mitochondrial density means increased energy capacity at the cellular level. If you could get it from a pill, then you would swallow the whole bottle.

But riding hour after hour in Zone 2 is an ego check. You know you could go faster and sometimes you would like for other people to know that too. The joke is on you, though, if you give in to pride. When you leave Zone 2, even briefly, it takes a while for your body to go back into maximum fat oxidation mode. During that interval, your heart rate says Zone 2 but your muscles say it’s still time to dip into their glycogen stores.

If you follow my workouts on Garmin Connect, then you know I have been doing a lot of slow rides on the Eisenbahn State Trail. Statistically, these rides have been unimpressive: 90 to 120 minutes at 13-14 mph. On Tuesday, when I took my road bike out for the first time this year, it was something of a relief to find that I could ride faster.

A much bigger test came earlier today: the Thursday evening West Bend group ride. I had not done one since last year, and I didn’t know how well I was going to perform. But on familiar roads and in familiar company–there were 10 of us–I did my fastest ride since August 29, 2024. Uncoincidentally, that also was a Thursday evening West Bend group ride. Ego checks are fine, even essential, when the training plan calls for Zone 2. But ego was prominent this evening and I succeeded in not looking like a schmuck. I was grateful for the compliments of friends with whom I had not ridden since before my hip replacement surgery in November. I didn’t need special accommodations; I was just one of the guys, which is exactly what I wanted to be.

So, am I all the way back to pre-injury form? I don’t know, but my trajectory has been a steady upward swing since the beginning of June.

Finally: A Post-Crash Test On The BMC

I rode 26 miles on my BMC today. I felt great and the bike did too. In myself I had some confidence as the ride began, but in the BMC my confidence was well below normal. That’s because I had not ridden the bike since I crashed on it in November. I didn’t really start riding again until I went to Pennsylvania in May, and on that trip I took only my Framed gravel bike. After returning to Wisconsin, I just kept riding the Framed … not because it’s a better bike, but because it’s better suited to the Eisenbahn State Trail, where I have been doing so much Zone 2 training.

But, yeah, today is July 1. It’s the first day of a new month. It’s the first day of the second half of 2025. It feels like a good time to do something different, even if that means returning to something familiar that I just had not done in a while.

Confidence in both man and machine is now high. Today’s ride was, by a comfortable margin, my fastest ride so far this season. Improving fitness accounts for some of that. Choosing a 100% paved route instead of one that includes a gravel trail accounts for some more. But the biggest factor today was the massive efficiency boost of the BMC. The Framed is a good bike, but compared to the BMC it feels like it’s towing something. With today’s shakedown ride completed successfully, there’s more open road riding in my immediate future.