The Aging Effect

I love numbers

One of my first memories is being a little blonde, blue eyed choir boy sitting in the Choir Stalls at St Edwards Church in Leek, Staffordshire and, during the sermon, factorizing the hymn numbers and testing them for primality.

So you can imagine how, many years later when I retired and bought a bike, how delighted I was to discover Garmin and be able to amass data streams of every variable imaginable from my rides. Of course, collecting data is one thing, turning that into information and knowledge is quite another.

My last post talked about Virtual Cycling brought on by the fact that my body needed a rest to recover from the stresses of my London 100 adventure. But now, after  two weeks of complete rest,  I thought it time to try and see if my knee ligament had healed. A young whipper snapper ( anyone who is more than 26 years younger than me falls into that category! ) had invited me to go on a slow, sociable ride with him and after I had examined his statistics on Strava it was obvious that he was in need of some serious education in cycling etiquette, namely the NECESSITY to stop at tea and cake shops. So I took it upon  myself to induct him to the Tea Shops of Derbyshire.

As an aside I have noticed that many of the younger generation that I ride with, zoom along, zipping past scores of tea shops without a thought of the calorific delights that lie within. I have decided it is my personal mission to rectify this failing in their lycra clad make up.

The ride itself was only 33km and the pace was a mere 22kph with 287m of climbing. But it was hard work. Indeed it was very hard work and demonstrated to me how just two weeks with zero exercise can cause an OAP's fitness levels to drop off dramatically.

Now it so happens that my companion is also a numbers nerd and has a Garmin Edge 800 like mine and so after the ride was over I thought I would compare his effort expended to my efforts.

Total distance  33.1 km and elevation gained was 287 m

                                          Me                                                         Mr D

Avg Power                        95 watts                                                   94 watts

Cadence                            81 rpm                                                     75 rpm

Avg Heart Rate                 137 bpm                                                  107 bpm

Max Heart Rate                 160 bpm                                                  136 bpm


Now there are many different algorthims for calculating one's Peak Heart Rate before you explode, and the most optimistic one for me gives a value of 169 bpm, so you can see from the above that I was approaching the limit whilst my companion was forever in tick over mode. It did seem to me that this demonstrated the aging effect on one's fitness quite dramatically.

What did surprise ( worry ? ) me though was that I had needed to expend so much effort and so I thought I would compare my performance this time with my Ride of a Lifetime, London 100, which was only a couple of weeks ago.

A breakdown of how my heart performed was interesting.

On the London 100, whilst the journey was obviously much longer, about half of the ride was spent at Moderate Level of effort with the other half at Tempo,  which for me means * race pace * . Only 3% of the time was my heart operating at threshold level and I would need to check but that was probably when climbing Leith Hill.

Compare  this to my Return to the Saddle Ride after 2 weeks complete rest

and you can see that 15% of the time I was operating in Threshold and the majority of the time at Tempo.

No wonder I felt it hard work!

So I have attempted to turn data into information, as for the knowledge gained; does it mean that I should have tried harder at London?

Jewellry for a Mercian

Did I ( or my wife!! )  ever really believe that once I had bought the bike that that would be the end of the expenditure?

Having acquired my new bike it was not long before I realized that I needed a few extras and so I prepared to drop down to the local supermarket to get some stuff.

“STOP!!!! “ shouted one of my cycling friends on the web..
” You can’t just go and buy any old junk for a hand crafted Mercian Vincitore Special. It will ruin the entire look. Accessories for a bike are like cuff-links for a dress shirt . They need to be chosen with care to reflect the personality of the bike.

And so I started doing some research.

Cycling Nutrition is a black hole to me.   I rapidly discovered that going on long rides and taking neither liquid nor food with me led to severe energy loss and numerous aches and pains throughout my musculature. So I decided to buy a water bottle to ensure that at least I had some liquid. On one of my old bikes, which has no bosses on the frame, I just attached the bottle cage to the downtube using a couple of black plastic cable ties, a sort of workable if not elegant solution. I say “ sort of works “ because the bottle does occasionally spontaneously eject itself from the cage when going over a pothole or bump in the road.  I thought for the Vincitore it deserved something better. So I ensured there were two sets of bottle cage bosses built onto the frame and I chose an Elite Custom Race Bottle Cage in a colour which matched the rest of the frame paintwork. This is claimed to be a true design classic and the self adjusting and rubber tensioner grips should hold the bottle in place even over the worst roads that I might encounter. So far, no bottle missile ejections have taken place so it is performing well.

I am no long distance tourer but I do have to transport spares, tools and other stuff. So what to use to carry these things about. The plastic bag strapped to a rack which I have been using just did not seem appropriate. Searching around and talking to others I discovered Carradice. In the early 1930’s Wilf Carradice, frustrated that there were no suitable saddlebags to buy, decided to make one for himself. To his surprise, he was inundated by friends asking him to make more. And so, Carradice of Nelson was born. Even to this day the heart of the company still remains the core range of 100% waterproof cotton duck panniers and saddle bags with leather straps, which have withstood the test of time for over 70 years and are loved and cherished the world over. They are still made by hand in the factory in Nelson and mine was made by Sue.

I am fascinated by numbers.

I always have been.

As a small choir boy I used to pass the time during the service by factorizing the hymn numbers and testing them for primality. And so it was only natural that I would want to record all the data associated with my cycling. Faster, higher, further does not really apply to me but I still wanted to record my achievements/failings and discuss them with my cycling friends on our Tea Shop Tours.
Technology has advanced since those days of my boyhood when one had an odometer attached to the fork which clicked over at every revolution of the wheel. There are a wide variety of devices on the market from wired to wireless and an increasing range of data that can be captured. I chose a Garmin 500 and added on the optional wireless heart rate and combined speed/cadence sensor  which pretty much covered all of the information bases aside from full web access. The data is displayed in up to eight customisable fields per 'page' but now there are a full 41 options to choose from and three instead of two pages on which to spread them out.  
Whilst I transfer all this to my computer using Garmin Connect, and recently I have started to use Strava as well, I still use a spread sheet to keep track of total distances covered and see whether I am on target for my self set yearly mileage.  Defence in depth and a protection should the web services expire.