My Best Week On The Bike In 2025

Today's familiar route

The first week of September was a disaster. In those seven days, I did only two rides for a total of 57 miles and a total ride time of 3:40. I simply could not motivate myself when the air temperature was barely above 60° and when the wind was making me feel even colder. And yeah, I know I had better “warm up” to the idea of riding in those conditions, because soon they will be the norm. But in the first half of September, they are absolutely not. We should still be hitting mid-70s regularly.

So, imagine my delight with the way this week turned out! This afternoon, West Bend briefly topped 80° for the first time since August 22. I rode every day this week and finished with my first 200-mile week of 2025. I completed 210 miles in 13:27. That’s getting the job done! Almost all of those miles came from the Eisenbahn State Trail, but I didn’t mind. If I had needed variety, then I might have found it easily. There was a group mountain bike ride at Glacial Blue Hills on Tuesday, cyclocross practice at Royal Oaks Park on Wednesday, and a group road ride that left from the Eisenbahn’s Rusco Drive trailhead on Thursday. If you had done all of those and my Eisenbahn group ride on Friday evening, then you would have had four distinctly different ways to enjoy cycling on four consecutive weeknights. Not bad, West Bend!

We’re going to continue to have warm and dry conditions for at least the next few days, so I will continue to push. I really am all about the miles right now; rest days be damned. (I don’t recommend this approach to those of you who are actually training for something. Real gains come only with adequate recovery.) Despite my big totals this week, I still need 658 miles to meet my goal for the year: 3,161. Last year, I had only one 200-mile week: September 9-15. This year, I have a chance for my first back-to-back 200-mile weeks since July 18-24 and July 25-31, 2022. I want to go into October needing as few miles as possible, and I want to leave October thinking only of cross-training workouts and indoor cycling until next spring.

Twilight Zone-2 Ride: 2025 Finale

Meet at the downtown West Bend train depot for a twilight ride on the Eisenbahn State Trail to Campbellsport and back, with a mid-ride snack stop at Kohn’s Filling Station. That’s 28.5 miles and we’ll average 15-16 mph. The ride will start promptly at 6 p.m. Sunset will be at 7:10 p.m., so this ride will finish in the dark. Headlights are required. If you’re a Facebook user, then please click here to visit the event page and indicate whether you plan to participate.

Pedal Moraine To Close At The End Of September

Here’s news I hoped I would never see. Mark Ramsey, owner of Pedal Moraine Cycle and Fitness in West Bend, announced on Facebook this morning that the store will close at the end of this month. This is a big loss for the local cycling community overall, and almost certainly a fatal blow for Team Pedal Moraine, which now must find a new title sponsor or else disband.

When Did 45 Miles Become A “Long” Ride?

I did my longest ride of the year today: 45.00 miles in 2:45:31. That surpassed the 36.16 miles I completed in 2:29:24 back on June 28. Go back to 2010 and my average ride was 33.94 miles. This year I am averaging only 25.71 miles per ride. I used to do centuries and metric centuries. I used to do 200-mile weeks for several weeks consecutively. My biggest week so far this year was 170.23 miles, June 23-29. What’s going on?

Believe it or not, the answer is sleep. I’m sleeping better and longer, which means I’m usually sleeping into afternoon hours that used to be available for cycling. It’s not a bad trade. I feel like my fitness right now is at least equal to my fitness from a year ago, though I have ridden 500 fewer miles.

But I need to make some adjustments, and I need to make them quickly. Summer is fleeing Wisconsin with a swiftness I don’t think I have seen before. By this time next week, I might have to turn on my furnace. Summer, by the way, doesn’t officially end until September 22. That means nothing here. I’m already in long sleeves most of the time and in thermals with increasing frequency. I will be able to outdress the weather for a little while, but there’s not much I can do about waning daylight hours. Today was our last day in 2025 with a 7:30 sunset. We’ll be down to 7:00 on September 16. Almost all of my rides this month have started after 5:30, and that won’t work much longer. I consider 1 hour to be the minimum duration for an outdoor ride; anything less than that is a waste of time. And 90 minutes is probably the sweet spot, so what can I do?

As the days get shorter and colder, my options become more limited. Grabbing my headlight for another trip up the Eisenbahn State Trail is the easiest and safest option – I’m very conscious of the dangers of riding into a setting sun – but riding after sunset won’t be the warmest option. The best thing I can do is to start earlier. I want to wrap up my outdoor season by the end of October, by which time sunset will be earlier than 6:00. That makes 4:00 the most attractive start time, effective immediately. By starting at 4:00, I will hit the warmest hours of the day most of the time, and all route options will remain available to me.

Sleep, though … is it going to take a hit? That depends on how disciplined I am. If I force myself to be in bed by 8:00 each morning, then a 3:00 wakeup time gives me a 7-hour sleep window. During the last four weeks, my average sleep duration was 6:23, so this new schedule might work. I have to try. Doing nothing would just be failing gradually.

The 2025 Royal Oaks CX Practice Series

Photo credit: Mitchell Vincent

Cyclocross practice returns to West Bend this evening and I’m happy that there are people who want to do it and at least one person who wants to lead it, because I’m no longer in charge. I presided over 75 practices:

I hope this year’s series is a great success, but it is time for me to move on to other objectives.

Addicted

At this time last year, I surpassed 30,000 lifetime miles on my 2013 BMC Granfondo GF02, which is still great today after even more time and more miles. However, it is an aging 2x10-speed aluminum bike with rim brakes. That’s not where the industry is today, much less where it will be tomorrow. When things break or wear out, finding replacement parts will only get more challenging and more expensive.

I’m close to 6,000 lifetime miles aboard my 2022 Framed Gravier, a capable bike for a ride on the Eisenbahn State Trail, but not something I would want to ride on the road any more than necessary. It’s heavy and the gearing is all wrong for me. On one hand, I like the simplicity of the single chainring. On the other, I’m usually riding at 40x11 and wishing I had more gears.

You already should have guessed where this is going.

All year long, I was thinking about a new bike that could replace both the BMC and the Framed, simplifying things for me in my most common riding scenarios. After much deliberation, last week I decided the 2025 Scott Addict is the solution.

Scott makes different versions of the Addict. For me, the right choice was the Shimano 105 12-speed mechanical version. I think it’s a better value with less hassle than the Shimano 105 Di2 version; the bikes are identical otherwise. I’m not a fetishist when it comes to bike technology. Electronic shifting is cool, but it comes with its own set of worries and a much higher price tag. Today’s 105 group performs as well as yesterday’s top-of-the-line DURA-ACE group with only a small weight penalty. I’m getting more climbing gears (11-34) than I have with the BMC (11-28), more top-end gearing (50-tooth big ring) than I have with the Framed, and hydraulic disc brakes, an improvement over both the BMC and the Framed. And like all modern road bikes, the Scott has clearance for wider tires. Its stock 32mm tires will be fine on the road and on a gentle gravel trail like the Eisenbahn, where I have been using similar 32mm tires on the Framed for the last three years. The Scott’s stock wheels are surprisingly good and contribute to a noticeably smoother ride. They are only slightly heavier than the wheels on the BMC and they are almost a full pound lighter than the wheels that came with the Framed! They’re even lighter than the custom wheels I ordered to replace the Framed’s stock set.

While Scott began as an American company, it is now headquartered in Switzerland, and its product offerings are known better to the European market. In the US, you can find versions of the Giant Defy and the Trek Domane that are almost identical to my new Addict – carbon frames, Shimano 105 12-speed mechanical drivetrains, unspectacular yet eminently serviceable house brand wheels, saddles, handlebars, etc. – but they don’t come close to the Addict on price. And price is always a consideration. As I was reviewing my options, total cost of ownership was a thought. So was timing. I think we are heading into a period of significantly higher prices driven by new tariffs. Anything coming from overseas – and that’s almost everything in the bike industry – is going to cost more. I didn’t want to wait any longer. You can still find deals on stuff that is already in the US. A lot of companies in a lot of different industries front-loaded their shipments this year to get ahead of the tariffs. But once that stuff is gone, the next wave of stuff will be more expensive.

I don’t plan to part with the BMC. If it is to become only a backup road bike, then it will be a great backup road bike. The Framed, though, is looking for a new purpose. I already have stripped it of its pedals, bottle cages, computer mount, and saddle. (The stock saddle on the Addict was too short for my riding style, and it’s 30 grams heavier.) As a single chainring bike with mechanical disc brakes and plenty of tire clearance, a pair of flat pedals could turn the Framed into an all-season, urban errand runner. Or this could simply be time to find a new owner for it.

On today’s 35-mile shakedown ride, the Addict performed flawlessly. The only thing that would have made it better was a heater. What’s up with our weather? Is this August or October? It would be typical of my luck for me to have purchased a great bike right before the early arrival of a chilly autumn. Give me at least a few more nice weeks, please!

Ups & Downs

Getting more sleep is irrefutably a good thing for my overall health. Today, though, I slept away my chance to get on the bike. By the time I got out of bed, another nasty line of thunderstorms was about to hit West Bend with more rain that we don’t need. I was determined not to let the remainder of the day go to waste, even if I did have to spend it indoors.

Here was an opportunity to use my new Garmin Instinct to track an activity I couldn’t track before: floor climbing. Last week I did a short test of this feature, climbing 20 flights at home. That’s 20 trips from the first floor to the second floor, and back again. Garmin gave me credit for only 18 flights (90%). Today, I went longer: 50 flights. Garmin’s accuracy was even worse, as I was credited with only 43 flights (86%). But I guess it’s close enough. There just isn’t that much elevation change between the two floors of my home. I’ll bet the accuracy is better outdoors. And given that I performed today’s test during a thunderstorm, I suppose there’s a chance that Garmin was thrown off by rapid air pressure changes. Garmin does advise against descending too soon after reaching a higher level, as the tracker may need several seconds to detect a pressure change. Air pressure changes during the storm may have blinded my device to some of the 7 climbs it omitted from my official total.

Today’s effort, while imperfectly measured, was sufficient to earn me a new Garmin Connect badge.

“Virtual Climb - The Narrows” is one of four badges available for floor climbing. It will be the only one I earn at home! If today’s performance is a good indication of the effort required for each of these, then the shortest of the three that remain would take me about three hours and 100 trips up and down my staircase.

No, thanks!

Garmin Instinct 2

I treated myself to a new fitness tracker last Tuesday, one so feature-rich that many more weeks may pass before I discover everything it can do for me. After a fair amount of research, I bought it with some expectations, of course, but I have barely made a beginning with its 66-page owner’s manual.

Anyway, the Garmin Instinct 2 is now my primary wearable, replacing my Garmin Forerunner 35. Although the Forerunner is still functioning perfectly, it is nearly five years old. Health and fitness statistics have become so important to me that I cannot bear the thought of breaking my tracking streaks for any reason, including a technical glitch. So, now I have two devices that can track the metrics I value the most.

Incidentally, both the Instinct and the Forerunner could be used as cycling computers, but I will continue to use my Garmin Edge 830 for those statistics and for navigation, which is much better viewed on the handlebar than on the wrist. If the Edge 830 ever dies, then I can revert to my Edge 500 … until I upgrade again. Yes, I have a little money tied up in Garmin devices. (Can’t forget about the smart bathroom scale or the blood pressure monitor.) I’m living in a Garmin Connect world where each device motivates me to be healthier.

The Forerunner turned me into an avid fitness walker. The Instinct will encourage a wider variety of cross-training activities by measuring things I couldn’t measure before. I’m counting on it to motivate me to spend more time on strength training, which has been very sporadic this year. I fell out of the habit when I was recovering from my hip replacement surgery last winter. And the Instinct’s built-in barometric altimeter will track elevation gain when I do a climbing workout on stairs or hills.

A better fitness tracker will give me not only more features, but also greater accuracy. However, it still won’t give me perfect accuracy. During a short stair climbing workout last Thursday, my new device counted only 18 of the 20 floors I actually climbed. That’s 90 percent, an A- on the report card. And it was way off during a couple of tests on my treadmill. Fortunately, that one is fixable: Garmin has a calibration feature that allows the user to override its measurements with the treadmill’s measurements. The treadmill knows how long its belt is, and it knows how many times that belt went around, so you can trust it for distance and speed. Garmin is really just making a guess based on your self-reported stride length and the number of steps captured by its accelerometer. Using my Forerunner on the treadmill, sometimes I would grab the handrail for several seconds to arrest the accelerometer when I knew my device was getting ahead of the treadmill’s calculations. The Instinct, now calibrated for my treadmill, should be accurate as long as I am using the “Treadmill” function. But for some insane reason, Garmin treats “Treadmill” workouts as running activities only; there is no walking option. After I complete a walk, I will need to change the activity type from running to walking on Garmin Connect. That’s not great. Garmin fares much better outdoors, where walks can be tracked via GPS.

The Instinct and I are still getting to know each other. Its sleep tracking and heart rate monitoring are getting better the more I wear it. So far, so good, I guess. It’s going to be a great tool once I get past a couple of growing pains.

Hi, Maintenance?

If you're wondering what this

did to the Eisenbahn State Trail in Washington County, then I have news! I rode the full length of the Washington County segment today and found only a couple of serious issues. The most serious is the landslide at the Woodford Drive underpass:

Looks like the county maintenance team already came through with heavy equipment to reopen the trail. It's going to need a fresh topping of crushed limestone as soon as possible. The Woodford Drive bridge appears to have been somewhat undercut by the landslide. I don't know whether it can be saved. As a wooden-deck bridge, it's a piece of history. I would be sorry to see a plain steel-and-concrete span in its place.

There's also noticeable erosion where the Moraine Park Technical College connector meets the Eisenbahn, but that's nothing new. The connector was constructed at too steep a pitch. It really should be ripped out and replaced.

I found only one tree toppled by the weekend storm:

Until the county arrives with a chainsaw, you'll find that obstacle between mile markers 4 and 5, just a little south of County Highway H.

The Friday Night Shift

Join me for an easy 28.5-mile, Zone 2 ride (14-15 mph average) on the Eisenbahn State Trail from the downtown West Bend train depot to Campbellsport and back, with a brief mid-ride snack stop at Kohn’s Filling Station. This ride will finish after sunset (8:05), so headlights are required. Please visit the Facebook event page to indicate that you plan to join the ride.

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.

Halftime 2025

No matter how you slice it, my cycling season is off to a slow start.

Today I surpassed my goal of 550 cycling miles in June. This was my first 500-mile month since last September. You now have to go back to last July to find a month with more miles (675). In the week that ended on Sunday, I rode 170 miles in 12 hours, my highest totals this year. Things are trending up for me, and they must continue to trend up: I am far behind my usual pace at the midpoint of the season.

My mileage total, year-to-date, is only 894. When I hit 1,000 later this week, it will be the latest date on which I have reached that target since 2004, my very first season. I didn’t get to 1,000 until September 4 that year.

Here at the midpoint of the season, I have only a few noteworthy fitness accomplishments. Perhaps the most noteworthy is that I have been active every day so far this year. I have always done at least a walk that was purely for fitness. On some days, I have done multiple walks. As the weather has improved, I have done walks and bike rides on the same day. This won’t be a record year for cycling miles–I may even miss my goal of 3,161–but today I set a new personal record for walking miles, 555, with half a year still to come!

Heating Up

Regner Park was a popular place to cool off this afternoon.

Saturday was West Bend’s first 90° day since August 26, 2024. It was an unapologetic, swaggering, “here I am in all my magnificence” summer day fit for hamburgers, ice cream, and listening to the Allman Brothers Band. It was a rare occasion on which my neighbors with swimming pools didn’t look like complete idiots. It was my kind of day: the kind of day that the true Wisconsinites hate to the very bottoms of their souls.

And Saturday was only the beginning of our three-day heat wave. Late on Sunday night, my oldest kid and his cat came to visit, as the air conditioning in their Milwaukee apartment had failed, making sleep impossible. Today was hot and windy again until rain broke the spell in the evening. I rode my bike on each of those days, troubled less by the heat than by the high winds. It never really gets hot here unless there’s a howling wind from the south.

Now, even I admit that 90-something should be hot enough. But if the temperatures are going to reach the mid-90s anyway, then I wouldn’t mind just a little more. We haven’t had a 100° day since July 4, 2012, and I have been sitting on this Garmin Connect goal for too long:

You will notice that I have already earned the companion Frosty badge. No shortage of opportunities there. But it may be a while before we get so close to 100° again. Good weather last week contributed to my most productive week on the bike so far this year: 145 miles in 10:20 of ride time. That’s still not good enough, obviously, but things are moving in the right direction. And my weight is dropping: -5.5 pounds since June 1. An emphasis on Zone 2 riding, better diet, and more productive sleep seems to be working.

Reaching My 2025 Walking Goal

I reached my 2025 walking goal today: 500 miles. I probably should have been more ambitious. My total last year was 554 miles, a personal record. So, with 205 days remaining this year, I need only 55 more miles for a new PR. I might have it by the end of June, especially if we continue to have cool, wet weather that limits my time on the bike. I’m looking forward to riding tomorrow and Wednesday, but when it’s raining and the temperature is struggling just to reach 60° later this week, I’ll be back on the treadmill.

Art Hicks

Matt Reschke photo

Today, the Wisconsin cycling community mourns the loss of Art Hicks, the veteran USA Cycling official whose professionalism and fairness earned him the respect of countless racers at countless races. Art's sporting career also included coaching services for cyclists and triathletes. And he had a connection to Washington County that you might not have known: he was the uncle of Mark Ramsey, owner of Pedal Moraine. We'll miss you, Art!

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.