In years past, I have started my annual winter training log debating with the voices in my head about whether I will continue to be a pretend bike racer, but I think this debate is no longer necessary, as it seems the pro-bike voices have won and for the foreseeable future I will continue to obsessively ride what many people dismiss as a toy from their childhood. I am at peace with this decision, and because I have decided to continue on with doing bike, I need to find new goals to challenge me, new windmills to tilt towards…

Therefore I will endeavor to ride more than 10,000 miles before the end of the year. Yes, I know that only inexperienced fools keep track of their miles instead of their hours on the bike, but 10,000 miles is a nice round number and it serves to impress people who don’t ride bikes, and that’s on of the main reason I continue to ride. It’s not like I’m winning anything. 10,000 miles is also a very attainable goal for me, I just have to continue on the path I have followed for the rest of the year and I will have attained my goal. It’s low lying fruit, like Jens Voigt’s hour record attempt, it’s there for the taking.

Math says that to make it to 10,000 miles, I needed to average 192 miles per week for 52 weeks. I took a few weeks off this year in order to be sick and pay for other riders to have a wonderful ride around Iowa, so I’m a bit behind. Currently my yearly mileage is at 7,345 and we’re 40 weeks into the year, so I will have to average about 221 miles per week to make my goal. It looks like I may be setting the 51 minute record instead of the hour record, but stay tuned, it could happen.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also include “ghost miles” in my Strava feed. Ghost miles are those accumulated while riding a trainer. To calculate my ghost miles, I take the average MPH from the most recent outdoor and multiply it by the time spent on my trainer. I then enter these miles manually on Strava. Some may think of this as cheating, but I would suggest anyone that concerned with ghost miles should take a good look at their own lives and consider making some drastic changes. In fact, while I’m talking Strava and ghost miles…

In defense of Strava

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Strava user. I don’t pay for the premium service because the additional services offered aren’t beguiling enough to overcome my innate crabby bike racer frugality. (Complaining about the cost of bike things and expecting to get things for free is an affliction that most bike racers of a certain experience level develop, because they’re totally, like, the same as a pro, and any bike company would be lucky to have them use their stuff because every one looks up to them.) I dutifully upload my data after every ride, and I use this accumulated data to plan my next steps, training-wise—and that’s about it.

If, however, you have been on Strava for more than 6 months and still give any sh*its about KOMs, chances are that you are probably a very damaged and obsessed person. In fact, if you stay on Strava to compete for KOMs, I would propose that you are most likely an imbecile. For the sane, the novelty of competing for KOMs on Strava wears off. In fact, if every KOM on Strava were to disappear tomorrow, I would be hard pressed to notice. For the non-crazed, Strava has morphed into a very useful place to store training data so one can return ten or twenty times a day to see how one’s weekly mileage graph has grown and to compare one’s training volume with each rider that lives within a 25 mile radius—the way God intended it to be used.

But I digress. This log is about my winter training plan, so let’s delve into my plan.

My plan is that there is no real plan. When I want to ride hard, I ride hard, when I want to ride slow, I ride slow. I’m the bike version of Forest Gump’s run across America—motivated by unrecognized forces and largely fictional. I also do not employ a coach, because I am un-coachable—as I stubbornly believe that I have everything about bikes figured out because I have been doing bikes for decades now. I understand that this is obstinate and wrong, but YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! I also know for a fact that good percentage of bike coaches out there are simply bike tramps that wanted to turn riding into their day job.They then turned to their degree in “Not Science” with a minor in “reading stuff on the internet” so they could email the same program to as many people as possible to make a living by relying on the salary of their significant other. If you are a coach reading this, of course I’m not talking about you, you are certainly the exception to this case. Undoubtedly, totally an exception…