Umair Yasin

I went for a fun three-hour ride enjoying the return of the sun after the last two days of rain. I warmed up for 20 minutes at home while waiting for the traffic to clear in front of Live Oak High, did a cruise out and back on the Coyote Creek trail to where it is still washed out, and then headed south to San Martin. That was the fun part of the ride. The hard part was doing the 5K TT loop I mapped out the other day on ridewithgps , which turned out to be a tough effort of over 11 minutes: Since I create this Strava segment I’m currently the leader until someone else does it faster. I’m happy with the effort (average HR 139 bpm) but would like to shave some time off. I finished up with some intervals and then a cooldown on the way home. Nice Ride. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/KUe10IE via IFTTT

I’ve been feeling good lately because I’ve been doing well in my age group on some local Strava Koms. But before my head gets too big I thought I’d put things in perspective. First of all, these are all flat routes so don’t really deserve the title “king of the mountains”. King of the flats, or KOFs, maybe? Second, I wanted to see how my times compare against elite athletes in my age group. So I looked up the times in national time trials, put on by the National Senior Games Association in the US, with similar groups keeping us aging athletes challenged around the world. As of 2019, the 10K record in the 70-74 age group was a time of 14:00 minutes, which is an average of about 26.6 mph. If I work really hard at it, I can get my average a bit above 20 mph. That would make me a champion in the 90-94 age group (for which the record is 21:57, or about 17 mph). So to be an elite athlete I’d have to get a lot faster now, or not slow down any for the next 20 years. I still feel pretty good...

Neither my usual Tuesday Group nor the group I occasionally ride with on Sundays has gone out for a few weeks because of all the rain we’ve had. But yesterday we had beautiful sunny skies so I went on a nice outing with the Sunday group. We did a challenging two and a half hours, with climbs both on the East side of town (up Thomas Grade and through the Holiday lake neighborhood) and the West side (up Willow springs then back through Paradise valley on Oak Glen Ave). These folks are faster than me, especially in the hills, so I rode my e-assist bike so I could keep up. Average heart rate 124, max 159. Good workout view from the top of Willow Springs Road from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/2qso8Gp via IFTTT

https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains The title of this post is a variation on “marginal gains”, the concept by which coach Dave Brailsford famously revolutionized British Cycling. It is discussed in various places including the book Atomic Habits , and there is an excerpt here . If you make multiple tiny improvements, say about 1% each, they can add up over time to a substantial gain (like compound interest rates). But I recently figured out that this happened to me in reverse in the last year and a half, multiple minor changes added up to a significant loss of speed on my bike. I noticed this when I did a Strava Segment that lasted just under an hour, at an average speed of 13.2 mph. And then I remembered that I had done a century ride in September of 2021, which was close to seven hours at an average speed of 14.8 mph. So back then I could go all day considerably faster than I could recently go for under an hour. What has changed? I noticed that about a month after the centur...

It has been a week since my injections, so I did a 64-minute ride on my recumbent and threw in some harder riding, including an attempt on a Strava segment, shown in blue on the overall map of my ride below. The segment is “around the Paradise block”, flat and just over 2 km long. The fastest (and only) time for this ride in the 70-74 age group was 8 minutes 23 seconds and I did it in 4:28. More encouraging was that there are several times posted for the 55-64 age group and my time would put me in 2nd place for that group. I’m enjoying these shorter challenges. They don’t take too much out of me, and training for them encourages me to do a couple of reasonable interval sessions per week. Aside from that most of my riding is longer but at a more comfortable and relaxing pace. Google street view at the start. The route just loops in a circle on this La Crosse drive. It is called “around the Paradise block” because it goes past the Paradise valley elementary school. After the S...

I’m keeping my riding easy for a few days until I see how well my injections worked. Today I went locally for an hour on my recumbent, it was nice and relaxing. So far so good on the SI joint, I walk a little more each day pain-free, and today am up to 18 minutes. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/b1OIUgi via IFTTT

www.Amazon.com/books This post was inspired by the book Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser , by Lewis Richmond. Aging can cause us to feel diminished. We can lose physical capacity, infirmities can start creeping in, and our sense of self-worth can decline in retirement if our work had supplied a good deal of the meaning in our lives. But it is not all negative. Some people take the opportunity to re-invent themselves or pursue self-growth through various transformative practices. This is the main theme of this book, which I highly recommend to anyone sensing Father Time peeking over their shoulders. Lewis points out that people can respond to aging in unhelpful ways like worry or denial, and then gives inspiring accounts of those who age more successfully by reacting in positive ways. He is a Buddhist meditation teacher and gives various useful techniques to use this time of our lives for self-growth. He also has overcome serious heal...

I had one last chance to enjoy a sixty-minute ride during our interlude of sunshine yesterday in the morning before my injections (which were scheduled for 12:30). Today I have to keep my activity “normal and nonstrenuous” so am taking a day off from riding. Then more rain will show up this weekend. Nice And Green in the East Foothills And To the West towards El Toro and the Santa Cruz Mountains Beyond The injections went well. I had just enough anesthesia to be unaware of getting stuck. It was odd when they first got me up because my right leg was a little wonky for a few hours. I’m glad my wife was there to drive me home. For the rest of the day I was supposed to stay off my feet, so I owe her some missed chores for the next couple of days. Today I’m in the “normal nonstrenuous” mode, so I’ll try a bit more standing and easy walking aroumd. The point of the injections is to be able to walk for longer periods of time, so I’ll gradually test that over the next few days. The dis...

More on the continuing saga of the injury to my SI joint : I was referred by my doctor to a pain clinic and after evaluation, they decided to give me two injections, one in the lower spinal area in case the pain going down my leg is sciatica, and the other in the SI joint. There is a good probability that this, or a combination of this and continued physical therapy, with clear up my issue completely The injections will be guided by fluoroscopy , which will hopefully mean a more accurate placement of the injection, which is a combination of a corticosteroid and numbing agent. This will all occur this coming Thursday. My wife will drop me off and pick me up after the procedure because I won’t be able to drive myself home. I’m looking forward to this because it’s been frustrating that my symptoms improved with PT but then “plateaued”. It will be nice to be able to walk for more than five minutes without back pain. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/HE4zqeV via IFTTT

The I Care Classis Century ride I signed up for in May has more hills than I normally do on my recumbent, so I thought I’d better get a little practice in. The two most challenging climbs on the route are up Willow springs road, and “Buffalo hill” on McKean road (the latter got his name because one of the landowners next to the road on this hill used to keep a bison in his yard). These are on a convenient loop not far from my house that I completed today in 2 hours and 11 minutes. Willow Springs was especially challenging because my speed dropped to 4 mph in spots as I was spinning in my lowest gear. That’s pretty slow on my recumbent and causes it to get a bit wobbly. But it was a good confidence-builder to know I can readily get up these climbs, if slowly. I have eight weeks of training in which to hopefully get faster. Recumbents are at a disadvantage if the route is hilly because although they are faster on the flats and downhills, they are slower climbers. Note where the uphill...

Since I signed up for the I Care Classic century this May I need to work on extending my long rides. So I went on a four-hour cruise on my recumbent. I went out and back on the Coyote creek trail, but since it is still flooded north of Bailey ave. I detoured around on Malech road, which also allowed me to get in some climbing practice. I intended to go all the way to Hellyer park and back, but found out the trail is also flooded between Blossom Hill road and the park. So I added some local riding after the trail to get to four hours. This was at a pleasant pace and I felt great afterward. But it was a bit slow. I have to get my cruising speed up over the next few weeks or the century ride will take a long time. View from the top of Malech Road, Santa Cruz Mountains in the distance with Loma Prieta to the left The Flood on the way to Hellyer park from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/Uwc3fAF via IFTTT

I’ve been discussing performance-related activities lately, like seeing my times on local routes vs. the “Strava Leaderboard” for my 70-74 age group. But most of my training, probably about 90%, is at a comfortable pace, while only the remaining 10% is higher intensity. This is a typical training week for me lately: “UH” means upper body, hard day, “LH” means lower body, hard day, and E means easy recovery day. “S-” is a short session while “L-” is a longer session. Because of my SI joint injury that I’m still rehabbing, all easy days and all “lower body days” are bike rides. In the future, I’d like to throw some hiking into the mix. Upper body is a warmup on my arm-cycling setup, followed by several stations (chest press, row, shoulder press, pulldown) of both isometric exercise and single-set strength training, and finishing with a cooldown walk with hand weights. Lower-body hard days have longer intervals, shorter intervals, and some on-bike strength training, with the remainder ...

I repeated my effort on the Strava segment I created last week yesterday morning. I did everything I could think of to get a little faster, including pumping my tires up to the max, using stiffer shoes, and making sure I wasn’t wearing anything that would flap in the breeze. But I also made one other change that I think made the most difference: I ate breakfast. The bottom line was that I completed the course in 51 min 30 sec vs. 58 min 43 sec last week. Quite an improvement, which vaulted me to number 2 on the leaderboard for the 70-74 age group on this route. www.strava.com . Segment: Coyote Creek Anderson Visitor to Bailey 101 underpass out and back I was not expecting this much improvement, I thought maybe I’d knock a couple of minutes off. That’s why I think eating breakfast was the biggest change. I’ve discussed previously that I’ve gotten out of the habit of eating breakfast before my morning workouts because this should help acclimatize my body to burn more fat, which ha...

It is very rare that we get a rainstorm when it is cold enough for the snow to come low, but it just happened. The local foothills in the pictures below are less than 1000 feet in elevation. The first few are all close by, taken on a short ride from my home. The rest are from further out on our first sunny day on Wednesday when I could see more of a panorama on the larger hills. This was during a very enjoyable ride on my e-bike. But it is still quite windy even though the rain is done for now. The bike and I struggled to go 12 mph on the way out, but were twice that fast on the way back. Right Around the Corner From my House Looking East From the patio of the restaurant at Cinnabar Hills Golf Course Looking East From the top of Willow Springs Road from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/ECbP6Wt via IFTTT