October’s Big Badge Haul

From a cycling perspective, October wasn’t good for much. I spent only 26 hours in the saddle, splitting time between outdoor rides and the smart trainer. That’s down from 40 hours in September. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s weigh-in.

From an overall fitness perspective, however, October wasn’t a complete disaster. I did good work in the home gym, embracing my new strength training program. And I assembled a big collection of Garmin Connect badges:

As you can see, I picked off a couple of the indoor cycling badges that I identified as goals early this month. There will be more of that in November. But right now I’m almost desperate to ride outside again. I haven’t done it since last Wednesday. Remember one week ago today, when it was 80° and life was easy? That seems like a long time ago now. Today I earned Garmin’s 2023 Halloween badge with a wind-blasted walk across the snow. Just Wisconsin’s latest trick, and the closest thing to a “treat” in the forecast is the chance of a 50° day this weekend.

Despite the depressing weather, as November begins I will be pursuing at least 8 more Garmin Connect badges. I’ve said it before: they are small rewards, but sometimes they motivate me just enough to keep me moving when otherwise I wouldn’t bother.

(Last?) Gasp!

Sunny and 80° today? Wow! That’s a record for this date, surpassing the 71° day we had last year. And it’s far better than the 55° average high. Today was our first 70° day since October 5 and our first 80° day since October 3. It was freakishly good. Unfortunately, there’s nothing like it in the forecast. Rain is coming back, we’re dropping into the 40s for the weekend, and next week we’ll have daytime highs in the 30s with freezing temperatures overnight. I was outside on the bike today for 2 hours. I’ll be outside on the bike again tomorrow while the temperatures are still in the 60s. After that, I’m making no promises.

Turning Inward

Today’s 25-mile ride was just my 4th outdoor ride in the last 10 days.

More than a month has passed since my former coworker announced his plans to retire. He worked his last day on September 29 and still has not been replaced, though this week there are signs that someone is in the hiring pipeline. It might take another week or two before the new worker is on the schedule, and in the meantime I will continue to work a lot of extra hours. Overtime has fattened my wallet but has hollowed out my cyclocross season. Grafton and Sun Prairie are no longer in my plans. The state championships are off my calendar too, as I will be in Pennsylvania on November 18. My employer has promised me a few days off, whatever may happen with the new worker, and I arranged those days in a way that ensures I can travel to Mom’s house for another extended stay. I expect to be in PA from November 13 until December 1. That leaves only Kern Park Kross in Milwaukee on November 4 and CamRock & Roll in Cambridge on November 11 as potential races for me. Neither is very realistic. It will take far nicer than average weather to entice me.

Even with my overnight work schedule, which makes the warmest hours of every afternoon available to me, I’m feeling the effects of falling temperatures and waning daylight. Tomorrow will be the last day this year with a 6 p.m. sunset. Two weekends later we will “fall back” out of Daylight Saving Time: sunset on November 5 will be 4:39 p.m. Ouch! If I weren’t chasing a couple of mileage goals, then I would be content to abandon my outdoor season right now.

I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about spending lots of time riding indoors; it’s still kind of a necessary evil. But I do want to get back into the home gym for more structured strength training. Yesterday I began a new routine that adds grip strength exercises to the upper body program I have been following. And I continue to explore my options for a new treadmill, which I think would be a great addition to the home gym. The last year in which treadmill workouts were a significant part of my overall fitness plan was 2013. At that time, my old treadmill was almost ready for the scrapheap and was not much fun to use. A new, feature-rich treadmill would give me an indoor aerobic exercise option other than the smart trainer. It’s still just an idea right now, though, and one on which I will take no action until I return from my upcoming trip to Pennsylvania.

Mom’s house won’t need much to be ready for winter. I’ll do a little landscaping, change the furnace filter, check for drafts around the windows and doors … that sort of thing. When I return to my own home in December, the outdoor cycling season will be done. I will have plenty of time for projects, the biggest of which is to replace the faucets in my bathrooms and kitchen. All four of those have gone bad in one way or another, and I never really liked them anyway.

Starting The 2023-2024 Trainer Season

My cyclocross season might already be over. It is at least on hold. I won’t be at the Oshkosh race tomorrow or at the Trek Cup races next week. I hope to be a spectator for the World Cup races at Trek headquarters on Sunday the 15th, as those races take place in the middle of the afternoon when I’m free. Gone are my ambitions to return to Pennsylvania this month. I had identified four races in the Philadelphia area that I wanted to do, but then my schedule changed when my coworker retired. Now I’m targeting a return to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, but the cyclocross season will be done by then.

Instead of letting the cyclocross bike sit idle for at least the next two weeks, today I hooked it up to my smart trainer. There might be a lot of rain next week, and temperatures are dropping. (Was yesterday the last 70° day and the last 60° day of 2023?) Having an indoor training option seems like a good idea, though outdoor rides will be the priority. Only outdoor rides count toward my mileage goals; I treat indoor rides differently. I expect to restart my Zwift membership when I return from Pennsylvania at the beginning of December. In the meantime, I want to experiment with my Garmin Edge 830’s ability to control my smart trainer. And I want to go after the indoor cycling badges offered by Garmin Connect:

Indoor 10-Mile Ride (1 point)

Indoor 20-Mile Ride (1 point)

Indoor 50K Ride (2 points)

Indoor 50-Mile Ride (4 points)

Indoor 4-Hour Ride (8 points, repeatable)

Garmin Connect doesn’t count Zwift rides toward these badges or any others; it counts only data obtained from a Garmin or Tacx device. So, today I finally earned my Indoor 10-Mile Ride badge, though I have done many rides in excess of that distance on Zwift. Today’s ride was very experimental. I wanted to ensure everything was set up properly before I committed to a longer ride. The Edge 830 did vary the trainer’s resistance as I simulated the first 10 miles of the real-world route I completed yesterday. Now I can move on to more ambitious things.

Today’s trainer ride was my first since March 12 and my first use of my heart rate monitor since July 31. I’m still not sure the HRM is working properly. It failed outright on a couple of occasions in July and, frustrated, I stopped using it. But I really want a working HRM for indoor training. I’ll get a new one if the current one proves unreliable.

2023 Field Of Riches Cross

We don’t get many bike races here in Washington County, so today’s WCA cyclocross race in Richfield was a must-do on my 2023 calendar even though I had to race almost immediately after working all night. Richfield Nature Park is just 15 miles from my house and the weather was perfect. Seriously: it was 20° above normal today. I couldn’t say no.

I doubled-up again, as I have done for each of the 3 WCA events I have attended this season. In my first race of the day, Masters 50+ Cat 4/5, I placed 22nd out of 39. In my second race, Open Cat 4, I was 37th out of 43. In each race I got a sub-par start. I got clipped in right away, but I also got bumped and blocked by other riders in the early moments. The course had too many turns for my taste, and the first one came far too soon after the start. The accordion effect is real and I was on the wrong end of it. On the first lap of each race, I found myself almost stopped behind other riders as they negotiated the turns. Meanwhile, the guys who started from the front row built an early and insurmountable lead. I was good on the straightaways and good enough on the climbs. I lost time in the turns, especially in the first race before the morning dew burned away.

Next on the WCA series schedule is Oshkosh, but I’m not in love with Saturday’s forecast. Wind chill around 40° looks awful from the perspective of today’s sunny, 80° brilliance. And it won’t help that I will be coming off an overnight shift on Friday the 6th. Last Friday was my last night off until my new coworker is ready to work alone, and my new coworker hasn’t even been hired yet! Today’s races may prove to be my final races of 2023. I hope not, but things get a lot harder now. If I’m working until 7:30 on a Saturday morning, then there are several venues I simply cannot reach in time for the Masters 50+ Cat 4/5 race at 9 a.m. Even the Open Cat 4 at 10:30 a.m. could be a challenge. The Open Cat 3/4 at 2:25 p.m. remains an option, but when am I going to sleep? As I write this, it’s almost 6 p.m. and I have been awake since yesterday at 10 p.m. Whether I will get any sleep before tonight’s shift begins at 11 p.m. is a troubling question.

As today began, I needed exactly 800 more miles before the end of the year to reach my goal of 90,000 lifetime miles. Getting them won’t be easy. In the final 3 months of 2022, I rode 669 miles, my highest fourth quarter total since 2018, when I rode 838 miles. So, the goal is possible if the weather is good enough. But even if I reach it, my bigger goal of 100,000 lifetime miles before the end of 2025, the year of my 60th birthday, will be tough. That’s back-to-back 5,000-mile years in 2024 and 2025, and I haven’t had back-to-back 5,000-mile years since 2015-2016.

Pothole Protection Procured

I have been very satisfied with the Swagman XC2 trailer hitch rack I purchased in 2019. It was inexpensive, yet it holds two bikes securely and getting the bikes on and off the rack is quick and easy. Recently, though, I noticed damage to one of the grip arms that ratchet down on the top tube to keep the bike from bouncing out of its cradle. I have no idea how the arm got bent out of shape. The picture above shows the damaged arm on the right and its replacement on the left. Notice the difference in the arcs.

This is how the old arm was engaging with the top tube of my cyclocross bike:

The replacement arm arrived today, and this is how it engages with the top tube:

That’s far more secure. I worried that the angle of the old arm could allow the bike to vibrate out from under it. After tax and shipping, the new arm was $25 and I was happy to pay it. I still have the other arm that came with the rack, and it's in perfect condition. But I do sometimes need to transport two bikes. I need to trust that bike rack to work flawlessly at all times.

2023 Sheboygan County Cycling Classic

Autumn returned to Wisconsin today and I returned to Evergreen Park in Sheboygan for a pair of cyclocross races in the Wisconsin Cycling Association series. It was my first visit to Evergreen Park since September 2015, and the course was at least as bumpy today as it was 8 years ago. It’s a hard place to ride fast. Last weekend at Englewood, my average speed was 12.2 mph in the first race and 12.0 mph in the second. Today I could manage only 10.8 mph in the first race and 10.3 mph in the second, and that wasn’t because I had bad fitness.

I placed 12th out of 36 in the Masters 50+ Cat 4/5 race and 19th out of 31 in the Open Cat 4 race, when I was the last man to finish on the lead lap. And that little fact contributed to my 0.5 mph drop in average speed. The rider ahead of me was out of reach, and there was literally no one who could catch me, as everyone behind me had been pulled off the course by the USA Cycling officials. I conserved energy and took no risks, content at that point just to finish.

I felt some discomfort in my right calf near the end of my second race. I blame the long runs across the sandy beach that flanks the quarry lake at Evergreen Park. My 2022 season ended prematurely due to an injury to my left calf, and historically I have had trouble with both. There was no sensation of the muscle tearing today, so hopefully I will be OK for the races in Richfield next Sunday, October 1. I’m definitely out for tomorrow’s Battle of Waterloo, and I’m probably out for next Saturday’s Badger Prairie CX in Verona.

Days Don’t Come Much Nicer!

Can you believe we hit 80° in West Bend this afternoon? That hadn’t happened since September 6, and I despaired of it happening again before next … June? But it did, and it was an occasion to get outside and celebrate. After back-to-back rest days on Monday and Tuesday, I was full of energy and enthusiasm. My spirits were lifted further by the early completion of yard chores I had been putting off and by a call from my dentist with good news: my bridge came back from the lab a week early, so I will get it this Friday instead of next Friday. That will complete my dental work for 2023, and few things make a person feel as good as being done with dental work!

On the bike today, my objective was to accumulate miles and time in the saddle. I traveled the Eisenbahn State Trail to Eden and back, then tacked on a few miles in West Bend to finish with 50 miles in 3 hours, my longest ride this year. And I probably will re-do that route tomorrow when we might hit 80° again. Friday’s ride will be slow and short in advance of Saturday’s cyclocross races in Sheboygan, where I’m registered for both the Masters 50+ Cat 4/5 and the Open Cat 4.

2023-2024 Hugh Jass Schedule

The Hugh Jass Fat Bike Series has announced its 2023-2024 schedule and West Bend again will host one of the races. Here’s the full schedule, but watch for changes at the series website as the season approaches:

November 11

John Muir Trails, Whitewater

December 9

Trek Headquarters, Waterloo

December 30

Kegel Alpha Trails, Franklin

January 20

Regner Park, West Bend

February 24

Blackhawk Ski Club, Middleton

Sepp Kuss Wins The Vuelta!

Congratulations to Sepp Kuss, winner of the general classification at this year’s Vuelta a España! Kuss is the first American to win a Grand Tour since 2013. It’s a well-deserved victory for a rider known mostly as a domestique who uses his climbing prowess in support of others.