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... )

For the past 2½ years, Zwift has done a great job motivating me to ride the indoor trainer. While the social aspect has been rewarding, one of my biggest motivators has been chasing in-game achievements: what the industry terms “gamification”.

But a problem arises when users have been around long enough to check off every achievement, and I ( Read more... )

My first Zentury of 2021 is done. First that, then an update on 2021 so far, and prognosis for the summer.

This was a duplicate of my first ever Zentury, in April 2019: doing a Zwift gran fondo event (100k), then extending that with four laps of (essentially) the Volcano Flat route, finishing at 170km. With this being the final ride in the five- ( Read more... )

One of the most popular ways of measuring a cyclist's performance on flat terrain is functional threshold power, and Zwift provides riders with three different FTP tests. My FTP is generally around 210-230 watts.

But for those of us who aren’t afraid of hills, the best measure of climbing performance is one's time to climb the Alpe du Zwift, the ( 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... )

Summer is behind us, and the 2020 cycling season (such as it was) is ending.

It’s still too early to close the books on 2020, but I can get you caught up on where things stand a couple weeks into Q4.

( Read more... )

This time last year, after riding Pittsburgh’s big populist city bike ride for the fourth time, I wrote: “With iffy support, poor route design, and a registration fee north of $75 that funds a cause I don’t agree with, I probably won’t do this ride again.”

My determination not to have anything to do with this ride was doubled when the organization ( Read more... )

The Mon Valley Century is the most cursed ride in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The first time I rode it (2016), the organizers abbreviated the route at 80 miles due to a landslide on Bunola Road. Despite everyone missing a waterstop that the organizers decided to move at the last minute, I went and actually rode the missing 20-mile segment of Bunola ( Read more... )