Judged against other years, my 2021 cycling season wasn’t bad. It was a refreshing return to a rough approximation of normality after the Covid-19 pandemic mostly cancelled the 2020 season.

In 2021, I enjoyed my first group rides, first centuries, and first major organized event in two years. I also achieved a new record level of fitness, reached ( Read more... )

This is just a placeholder to direct you to my 2021 Pan-Mass Challenge Ride Report, for the full details of this year's remote "Reimagined" PMC ride, as well as my thoughts and feeling upon completing my 100th ride of 100 miles or more.

As always, my lengthy writeup is supplemented with photos, videos, maps, and GPS logs.


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It really wasn’t anything special, just the regular 25-mile “Team Decaf” Tuesday night group ride out of Highland Park.

At the same time, it was a rare and special event, for several reasons.

Beginning with the most mundane of those reasons: it was the first Team Decaf ride of the year. That’s normally a chance to catch up with riding buddies I ( Read more... )

What a year it was... or wasn’t, actually. What can I say about the 2020 cycling experience?

Having begun the year with lots of indoor training, in January I achieved a new all-time record level of fitness.

But it was all downhill from there. Before the spring outdoor season began, the outbreak of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic caused the ( Read more... )

Unlike other rides which appear here, I post all my Pan-Mass Challenge ride reports as pages on the cycling section of my personal website.

So if you're interested in reading about my 15th PMC - my first as a virtual rider due to the Covid-19 pandemic causing the real-world ride's cancellation - you'll find my writeup, photos, videos, screenshots, ( Read more... )

For the past four years, I’ve ridden the two-day Escape to the Lake MS Ride, which goes from Lake Arthur in Moraine State Park, through rolling Pennsylvania farmland, finally dropping gently to the shore of Lake Erie in at Conneaut Township Park in Ohio. It’s been the first big ride of each summer century season since I moved to Pittsburgh back in ( Read more... )

I biked in Boston for 15 years, doing over 50 centuries in numerous events. To my recollection, in all that time I only ever received two medals as a result. The first was from the Audax Club Parisien for my first 200k brevet; the other was for the 2015 Cape Cod Challenge MS Ride.

Although I rode 14 consecutive Pan-Mass Challenges, the most I ever ( Read more... )

Someone is wrong on the internet… I hate that. And I woke up feeling self-indulgent and ranty, so here’s what we old-schoolers would call a “flame”.

An article appeared in my news feed: “The Health And Fitness Audit: 15 Questions You Must Know in Order to Succeed in Fitness”.

Well, I’ve been an endurance cyclist for twenty years-and an inline ( Read more... )

Two noteworthy rides to report on from this past weekend: the Pittsburgh Randonneurs’ Summer Populaire 100k, and the Akron Bicycle Club’s Absolutely Beautiful Ride century.

I was concerned coming into the weekend, because I’d had a couple slack weeks, thanks to a trip to Cleveland to visit friends and another to Boston, Maine, and New Hampshire ( Read more... )

It might be a tad early to write a retrospective on the 2015 cycling season, but my imminent departure from Boston is a more logical breakpoint than the arbitrary calendar change a month hence.

So, 2015: it was very much a tale of two seasons.

I was on a normal springtime trajectory for the first five months of the year, with training focused on ( Read more... )