Strava

Almost a year's worth of Strava

A long, long time ago, back in the days when the only things that were wireless were AM radio stations, bike racers kept training diaries.  Every year around Christmas I'd buy a new one.  They were usually intended for runners, as those were the most readily available.  Occasionally I'd plan ahead enough to order one from Velo-News, and once in a while I'd get the ones Joe Friel was selling.  I'd start the year enthusiastically, determined to log valuable information after each ride -- distance, time, effort level, ride type, terrain, wind, etc.  There were even a few years when I actually managed to do that for almost the whole season.  It was extremely valuable information, and I'd often find myself looking back at prior years to see how my training and racing compared to a particular year during which I raced well.  Usually, however, the consistent half-page diary entries of February would sputter down to a handful of characters by June.  Often, I'd just write down the number of miles I'd ridden and perhaps a note along the lines of "felt terrible" or "cold and rainy." The one thing that I usually managed to salvage, however, was the mileage number.  When I started using a bike computer that was actually reliable enough to survive an entire season, around the late 80s or early 90s, I could at least keep track of my annual mileage without writing it down and adding it up.  By then I had a pretty good feel for what worked and what didn't and keeping up a detailed log seemed redundant. In addition to the many little nuances regarding intensity vs. recovery, a couple of very consistent things emerged from those twenty or twenty-five years of records.  I learned that I don't start to feel like I'm really in shape until late April or May, and only when I have been able to string together a few 250 mile weeks.  I also discovered that in a typical year I consistently, without ever setting it as a goal, logged something very close to 11,000 miles.  These are not remarkable numbers for a mid-level bike racer.  So I went maybe ten years without keeping any sort of daily log, training by feel and prior experience, riding those 11,000 miles over and over again.

So at the end of January of this year, having recently acquired a nice Samsung smartphone, I downloaded Strava and decided to track all of my rides with it.  So far, so good.  So for the first time in a decade or so, I can look back on the season and get some glimpse of how it all went.  The first surprise was finding three months in the early season during which I rode exactly the same number of hours.  Indeed, of the nine full months I've tracked so far, seven had between 48 and 54 hours of training.  I can see where, except for the Tour de Louisiane weekend when I officiated, May and June were very solid months, and I remember going into the Vuelta de Acadiana on the last weekend of June feeling pretty good, at least until I crashed and broke a couple of ribs.  So July suffered a bit for that, and also because I spent three or four weekend days at the velodrome.  August brought a reasonably good race despite having spent much of July at low-intensity because of the broken ribs, but mileage suffered because of another weekend of officiating.  So I started September with some consistent mileage and a few decent races, but never got back to that fitness I'd been approaching way back at the end of May, so I was looking forward to my now-traditional trip to the 6-Gap Century at the end of the month to put a decent bookend on the season. I was feeling pretty good for that, having been careful to allow for some recovery time the week before, and for the first fifty miles I was feeling confident I'd be able to post a good time. Well, we all know how that ended up. I would have been a lot happier if I'd crashed and broken a collarbone *after* the Hogpen climb rather than before it!  So the broken collarbone basically eliminated the entire month of October.  I did a little riding, mostly alone and never really worthy of the term "training," and then spent another week off the bike entirely with travel.  It was the second week of November before I did anything that I would call training, and by then I'd gained weight and lost a lot of fitness, and with no races on the calendar I've already resolved myself to a couple of months of long, slow distance base training.  Even so, it's been great to be able to look back at my training miles with Strava, and would probably be even more enlightening if I had power meter data as well.  It has certainly been a lot easier to maintain than those old training diaries were.  So thanks, Strava!  On the down side, I can clearly see that I'll end the year maybe 800 miles short. Of course I shouldn't be surprised under the circumstances, but still.....