Seeking Power

In my last blog post, I talked about aging in relation to my physical performance on the bike and during my walks. Perhaps it's the Virgo in me—the meticulously organized side that tracks meaningless stuff, such as performance—but the numbers don't lie. The stats tell me I've been slowing down for many years, but a big part of my drop-off was due to my arthritic right knee. Now that I have my knee replacement rehab mostly behind me, I'm beginning to turn up the effort on my workouts, and it feels so nice.

Knowing that my days of setting PBs (personal bests) are behind me, and have been for many years, I still know there's a chance my next ride may be one where I put in an effort I haven't seen in years—a solid effort—and that motivates me.

I did that yesterday.

It may seem like a typical ride to most other fit cyclists, but to me it was a breakthrough. After years of struggling to hold 14 mph (22.5 kph) on a gravel ride, I went out yesterday (on a mixed surface route) and averaged 16.6 mph (27 kph) over 31 miles (50 km). I was so pleased with my effort. It's been the first real bright spot in my riding in years.

I came home and told Tammy about my ride, high on endorphins still coursing through my brain. In her usual sweet self, she indulged me as I told her how I did and how I felt.

I have to say that my Favero power-meter pedals and the data they display on my Garmin Edge 840 motivated me to keep pushing. I like to look at their data expressed in watts of force on the pedals per kilogram of body weight, or, as we like to say, w/kg. When I was riding strong on my indoor trainer about seven years ago, I was riding at around 3.4 w/kg. That was decent for a guy in his early 60s. In the years since, I've been nowhere near that number. I've managed a couple of indoor trainer rides in recent weeks at around 2.6 w/kg, but they were an hour or less. I started yesterday's ride at 2.15 w/kg and kept improving in strength over the remainder of the ride, finishing at 2.33 w/kg over an hour and fifty minutes, with an average heart rate of 137 (max 159) bpm. Those are good heart rate numbers for me at my age. Overall, it was a solid ride, and one that gives me confidence that I'm on the right path to regaining bike form.

I don't have a particular goal in mind for where I'd like to get to in terms of pedal power, but if I had to set one, I think 2.75 w/kg is achievable, maybe even 2.9 w/kg. But honestly, just being able to go out and put in decent efforts occasionally is what I'm really after.

I took my drone with me on a ride last weekend. I kept it behind me, only varying its height a little. It worked well. The next ride with it, I'd like to get some other camera angles, maybe even from in front of me, for an entirely different perspective. I'm usually not in my videos; my shadow is sometimes, so this will be new for me.

That's all I've got.