2024 End of Year Bike Wrap-up
As you'll remember, if you were one of the 3 people to read my post on my first year back on the bike, I spent a lot of time between May 2023 and April 2024 getting in shape and trying to be a fast cyclist. This post is about the rest of 2024 and how the year shaped up for me.
Injury
I spent most of May and June basically off the bike. I thought when I posted my last wrap-up that my knee had been "tweaked" a little, but it turned out to be a pretty bad strain of my patellar tendon. I was getting physical therapy – shout out to Spence at Phoenix PT – for all of that time and doing basically any training was impossible. I did some light work on a trainer, but spent a lot of time strengthening all the little muscles that hold your knee together. It felt a little bit like a waste at the time, but in the months after I would often bobble my knee a little bit in the way that took me out in April, and everything was FINE. Go to PT folks - it's good!
New Bike
In June, Shelley started talking about getting me a bike for my birthday, with the understanding that I would be the one to pick it out. Because I don't have that much experience with bike sizing (and bike sizing is a mess), I spent some time going to new and used bike shops sitting on various sizes of various brands of bikes to get a feel for how I feel on a 58cm from one brand or a medium/large from another or a 22" vintage bike. While I was checking out a $2,000 aluminum Trek Domane at a corporate bike shop in (repugnant), I discovered that they had a $3,500 carbon fiber Emonda on sale for $2,000, and got very excited. I went back the next day and took it for a spin and was quite impressed.
I wrote to a friend of mine who is so enthusiastic about cycling that his username on most platforms ends in “_bikes” and asked what he thought about the Emonda. He said not to buy it because it was an “I’m 50 and was once athletic” bike which, as a person who was about to turn 50 and had never been athletic felt a little pointed! But he also suggested I look for something cooler online, and with some poking around, I found a guy in Pigtown selling a 1995 GT Edge Ti road bike for $800. It was in working order, but the shifting on the 30-year-old Dura-Ace brifters wasn't great and the 12-24 cassette was incompatible with riding around Baltimore.
So I bought the bike.
Say what you will about the components, getting a titanium road bike frame in good condition with a carbon fiber fork for under $3,000 is an offer too good to pass up. I spent the rest of June and early July measuring parts of the bike, researching what components would work with it and sourcing the parts. With the help of Velocipede and Baltimore Bicycles Works, I was able to get a bike fitting, figure out what kind of handlebars to get, and assemble a bike starting with the frame, fork, seat-post and old Shimano 600 rim brakes.
New components include:
- Shimano 105 R7000 bottom bracket, derailleurs, chain, 11-34 cassette, and 170mm 52-36 crankset.
- Zipp Service Course SL 70 XPLR handlebar
- Arundel orange Art Gecko Bar Tape
- Giant SLR 0 55mm Aero wheels (used)
- Vittoria Rubino Pro tires
- Elite orange and black bottle cages
- Fizik Aliante saddle (used)
- Jagwire Pro orange road shifter/brake cables
I'd say it turned out pretty well!
Group Rides
Once I had the bike ready at the end of July, I took it out for some rides and pretty quickly signed up for the Baltimore Bicycling Club. I wanted to go for some longer, faster rides, but didn't know where, and figured that it would be a great opportunity to meet some cool people, learn more about road-riding, and get some great exercise.
And I was right! The folks at BBC have been incredibly helpful and welcoming, and I love going out for rides with them. Most of the rides are in the counties north of Baltimore, but we've gone into Pennsylvania a couple times as well. I started out on a 13mph ride, and told everyone that it was my first time. They had lots of good advice, warning me of steep hills and sketchy turns, but by the end of the ride they told me that I should really be at the 16mph rides, given that I didn't get out of the big ring on the hill they warned me about.
Riding with the fast guys was quite an adventure. I learned that if you want to be in the front group, don't let them get out to far ahead of you, or you'll be chasing until you catch up and then not have the strength to keep up. I got tips on turns and descents, and advice on training of highly variable quality.
Highly recommended!
I did very little structured training of the sort I had been doing from January to April and instead just went on group rides for the rest of the year, with some interval training a handful of times. I definitely got stronger that way, and quickly found out that I'm very fast for my age, and super fast for my experience level — in part because of all the structured training I did to start off the year.
Big Rides
After the qualified success (good time, bad strain) of the Ocean to Bay ride in April, I wanted to do some more century rides. Shelley was still recovering from her knee troubles, so we rode together on the mostly flat Ride to See in Galena, MD the first week in August and I got super frustrated with my Apple Watch which died 101 miles into a 102-mile ride. (A few more frustrating incidents and I bought a Garmin ELEMNT Bolt.) But we had a good time, and we decided to do a few more.
In September I had a pretty insane month for events:
- September 7: Civil War Century - 103 miles, 7,000 ft elevation, time: 6:10
- September 15: Three Creek Century - 100 miles, 4,990 ft elevation, time: 5:53
- September 28: Seagull Century - 106 miles, 371 ft elevation, time: 5:19
For the month I rode 732 miles and burned 39,939 calories on the bike over 45 hours. Pretty good!
In October, Shelley and I had a pretty epic bike ride. Because of some train shenanigans, we drove to Philadelphia, took a train to Pittsburgh, and rode our bikes from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC via Cumberland, MD on the GAP and C&O trails. We totaled 370 miles over 6 days, stayed in a variety of B&Bs of varying quality, ate at a restaurant whose "we are not racist" sign raised a lot of questions, and had a great time. One of the days was way too ambitious and we rode 84 miles on rough gravel with very little access to water and ended up sore and chafed. I lost two water bottles, one that bounced out on the trail, and another that fell into the Potomac right at the end. We're trying to figure out what to do next year!
What's Next
At the end of the year, I'm pretty proud of my accomplishments! In 2024 I:
- went on 348 rides
- rode a total of 6,225 miles
- climbed 208,732 feet
- spent 454 hours riding
- did a 370 mile bike trip
- finished five 100+ mile rides
But with all that riding, the lack of structured training in the second half of the year and the reduced time to ride here at the end has left me feeling less good on the rides. My legs are worse at clearing lactate, my cardio has dropped a bit, and the only things keeping me at the front of the pack are the strength of my legs and my unwillingness to get dropped.
It was a really good year for me on the bike, even with the injury. I’m planning to get back into serious training once the weather improves in a month or so. I’ll cut back to one group ride a week and go back to doing long zone 2 rides, various kinds of intervals, low-cadence drills, and sprints.
Besides just getting faster, I’m hoping to do a Gran Fondo at the end of May in Pennsylvania that’s both a fun ride and a race. I compared last years finishing times with my pace on the Civil War Century, which was longer and with more hills, and I should be able to make the top 10 in my age group, with a little luck.
I'd also like to avoid losing two months of bike riding to injuries, but we'll see!
