Distance: 507.09 km
Elevation Gain: 4,262 m
Time: 24:50:15 h:m:s
Count: 13 Activities
Avg Power: 199 W
Distance: 48.06 km
Elevation Gain: 341 m
Time: 3:28:07 h:m:s
Count: 2 Activities
Avg Power: 124 W
Distance: 425.52 km
Elevation Gain: 6,051 m
Time: 14:00:33 h:m:s
Count: 8 Activities
Avg Power: 159 W
Distance: 55.75 km
Elevation Gain: 808 m
Time: 13:48:11 h:m:s
Count: 6 Activities
it’s been a tough year – after 18 months of working on lots of long steady distance stuff to get the weight down, my direction shifted a little to getting better quality mileage in. By and large, I seemed to get there, with a few exceptions…
Plan was to keep the distance target from 2012 – i.e. 10,000km but wherever possible make that 10,000km of OUTSIDE riding.
Anyway, here goes
Distance – 11,162.36km (6,935 miles)
Time – 20d 19h 23m 46s
Elevation – 92,786m (57.6 miles)
Rides – 240
Longest ride – 135.5km on a cold and windy day in april
Hilliest ride – 1396m on a mentally windy day, riding around what felt like every hill within a 20 mile radius of my home.
2013 was also the year when I revisited something I swore I’d never do again – I rode a couple of 10 mile Time Trials. Nothing “organised”, but on a “proper” course as used by my LBC (local bike club) – 27m 22s on a course that’s best described as a “sporting” rather than a “fast” route was a pleasant surprise – especially on a “normal” roadbike rather than anything low-profile or aero.
As for the goal of actually getting fitter – there’s a slight anomaly in the figures – you’d probably expect the average speed of my rides to have increased, but actually the average speed DROPPED slightly from 2012’s 23.2kph to 2013’s 22.9kph. However, that’s actually partly because the harder sessions of riding meant that I had to ride a greater proportion of very low intensity recovery sessions. In other words, the fast sessions got faster, but the slow sessions got even slower! Probably a better metric of my improvement would be found in the geekier realms of power and FTP numbers. My final FTP test of 2012 had me turning out 182w. By the end of 2013 I’d bumped that to 262w, a pretty staggering 44% improvement!
Missed Logging for a while… Lots of other “real life” crap caught up with me, didn’t ride as much as I’d like, and hadn’t time to do anything much more than upload to strava and eat something before getting immersed in RL crap again.
13th – just a walk, to blow the cobwebs away
17th/18th Bugger All – lazy sod that I am…
Basically, my Washing machine blew up, I spent a couple of days fixing it, and it going wrong again, followed by a day organising a new one, then getting the new one replaced as that one didn’t work either. If you look at the rides, you’ll see they were on the MTB – read “covered in shit from head to toe”, and by the 17/18th I’d basically run out of riding kit, so couldn’t get out if I tried!
Managed to get out for a quick spin today, despite a big-ish one yesterday, and the wind still blowing a hoolie. Fully intended to take it steady, but the wind was having none of that nonsense – and either had me dragging out 300w to keep moving forward when I had a headwind, or had me tear-arsing along when it was behind me.
Strava for today is here
And So to a few stats, at what SHOULD pretty much be the end of the “fast season”…
September’s Stats…
Avg Speed: 23.9 km/h Distance: 1,183.21 km Elevation Gain: 9,623 m Time: 49:25:15 h:m:s Count: 25 Activities Avg Power: 187 W Calories: 29,987 kCals
Year to Date Stats…
Avg Speed: 24.0 km/h Distance: 10,455.86 km Elevation Gain: 93,659 m Time: 436:13:54 h:m:s Count: 215 Activities Avg Power: 181 W Calories: 268,859 kCals
No apologies for this bit of gratuitous showing off… It’s the last day of the year, the bikes away until next year, and all my rides have been logged, recorded, analysed and generally obsessed over far more than is truly healthy to even contemplate.
At the start of the year, I set out to ride a minimum of 5,000km in the year. It’s fair to say I’ve surpassed the targets somewhat.
So, there we are – only goal I’d set for myself that I failed to hit was to get below 17st before Christmas. Sadly, I missed this target by 0.3lb, and after the seasonal excesses I’m probably nearer 10lb over it!
Big catchup time
Ride details coming up:
Pretty much all longer duration rides – seems like I’m at a 25-30 mile average loop now…
Managed to break the frame on my prescription lens riding shades as well – which caused a unplanned extra day off the bike for an eye-test – though as the result was a very positive one – i.e. clean bill of health and a prescription that’s not materially changed in the last 11 years, it was cool.
Also managed to wear my chain beyond all hope, so that’s been swapped as well for a nice spanking new SRAM 991 – might as well spend a few bob on decent quality 9 speed kit, while I’m still running it – the block’s worn now, so I swapped it out for the one on the “trainer wheel”, but I reckon the chainrings are next to go 😦
Starting BMI 38.3 – Closing BMI 36.9 – BMI drop of 1.4 points
Exercise Stats
21 days featured a ride on the bike, for a total of 32h45min,
Average speed 14.8 mph
Miles Rode 483.57 (only 105.30 of which being indoor miles)
Calories Burned 32,306 ( or the equivalent of 9.23lb of fat! – Once again, I’ve been eating some of the calories back. I’ve also amended the calorie burn figures using a couple of handy power calculation plugins in Sportstrack3, which take the existing speed, incline and HR data from the Garmin, add in weather details (i.e. wind speed and direction) and muscle efficiency data factor and come up with a power output. This it then used to provide a more accurate calorie information – one that is substantially lower than the figures calculated by the garmin – hence the greatly reduced burn figure this month.
Did well on the riding front, good mileage, if a little less than the prior month – the cold took it’s toll early doors, but since then I’ve been able to stay mainly on the road and off the trainer, hence the reduced average speed. And – I finally cracked the 20 stone mark. Next goal – 17 stone – or 238lb for the former colonials 107.5kg for the continentals.
Just a quick summary of the riding (such as it was) in August 2011
9th August 2011 – Road Bike
13th August 2011 – Road Bike
14th August 2011 – Road Bike
15th August 2011 – Road Bike
17th August 2011 – Road Bike
18th August 2011 – Road Bike
19th August 2011 – Road Bike Added in extra uphill session – climb to water tower
21st August 2011 – Road Bike
22nd August 2011 – Road Bike – Again, with added Water Tower-eyness.
24th August 2011 – Road Bike
25th August 2011 – Road Bike
27th August 2011 – Road Bike
28th August 2011 – Road Bike
29th August 2011 – Road Bike
31st August 2011 – Road Bike
So – there we have it, pretty much wearing a groove around my local loop, couple of extra hill-climbs in there, just to test out if my knee is feeling any better – note: every time I climbed that hill, I had a a day off the bike the next day… guess it wasn’t quite right
All rides on the road – pretty much too scared to go back on the MTB for risk of getting scratched up legs and a re-occurrence of the Celulitis at this point.
The Shrinking Cyclist 