M’aidez!

Somebody help me out with this weather! Crank up your furnaces and throw open your doors. Point a can of hairspray toward the ozone layer and hold down the button until it’s empty. Refuse to accept carbon offset credits … you can do that, right? Do something to speed up this global climate change that, at least to me, appears to hold so much promise for Wisconsin. It’s May 1st, May Day, and it’s 20° below normal. Add the chill of a 20 mph wind and the “feels like” temperature is below the freezing mark. We had snow flurries this morning. Enough!

Despite this poor start, I have high hopes for May. I’m coming into it 6 pounds lighter than I was on May 1, 2022. And I wouldn’t call myself fit, but I have 374 more outdoor miles in my legs than I did last year on this date. April was pretty good to me. As partial proof of that statement, here are the 9 badges I earned last month on Garmin Connect:

Some Garmin Connect badges don’t count for much. On certain holidays, for example, recording any activity of any duration at any level of exertion will meet the criteria. But some badges do offer proof of a real effort. I call your attention to the Highly Improving badge, earned by reaching “an Aerobic Training Effect of 4.0 for an activity.” I did that on April 27, the maiden voyage of my Garmin Edge 830:

Aerobic Training Effect is one of the new metrics the Edge 830 makes available to me. It’s a way to ensure there’s enough intensity in my program to make fitness gains. Doing only easy things is a recipe for being able to do only easy things. On the other hand, performing every workout to exhaustion is also a certain path to failure. Everyone needs to find a balance, and Aerobic Training Effect looks like a good tool. Moving even further toward that balance, the Edge 830 calculates something called Exercise Load:

Each activity carries an Exercise Load score, but the real value of the metric isn’t obvious day-by-day. Some days are supposed to be heavy, others light, so Exercise Load is best used in the aggregate, week-by-week. If you believe in concepts like periodization—e.g., three weeks of load progression followed by one week of recovery before the cycle repeats—then you can target specific Exercise Load scores.

I hope these additional aids will bring real benefits to my training, which for too long has been too imprecise. There have been times when I was great on the bike, or crap on the bike, and I couldn’t tell you why. I’ve said many times that, in general, I ride better as I ride more. But what happens when there’s no time to ride more? I must make better use of the hours that I can devote to training.