April was a huge month. I rode my first self-supported century in forever, my weight dropped below 69kg and I can feel and see the difference in my fitness and body. I hope to build on this success in May. I may not get as much distance in, but I plan on continuing working to drop the fat and build strength and endurance. Some long rides and more climbing. I’ll still be working on the garden patio on cycling rest days, working the upper body as well. I can feel an increase in upper body strength too when moving all those wall and cap block around.
The first two rides of the month didn’t happen. Rain, rain and more rain. Just enough to make it quite messy and cold. No sense starting out in the wet. My first ride was barely damp on the 6th. I felt pretty good, so aimed at my usual gran fondo circuit. The harbor loop was shut down for some police activity, so I ended the circuit with the yacht club loop.
For the second ride of the month summer returned. Beautiful blue skies with a headwind here and there. My legs wrecked dead from the day before so nothing big. I wisely decided the big hill was a dumb idea and took the creek trail home.
Another motorcycle on the creek trail and early enough for me to have enough legs to keep pace, so I did.
I’ve now been riding for a while using Cycliq lights/cameras. So far these have not ever successfully sync’d with either the mobile app time and date nor with the desktop app on my Mac. I’ve done full sync’s in all ways suggested by Cycliq with no success. This renders the ability to sync Strava metrics to the video, inoperable. It also corrupts the meta data so the video shows a wrong time and date, rendering that worthless for legal use. These devices were not insignificant investments. In addition the. rear light, the. Fly 6. 3rd generation runs out of power in about three hours of operation. That means that for my use, it is fundamentally useless as camera, light or alarm. I’ve wasted my money. I submitted a support ticket to Cycliq and received what resembles a not so creative or sophisticated AI response. That response repeated that I should perform the actions I cited as not successful in my ticket submission. Yes, prior to submitting the ticket I made several unsuccessful tries. I got nowhere. One can see the inaccurate time stamp at the lower left in the above video showing a day ahead, nearing midnight. I have finally figured this out. I turned on the Fly 12 Sport, opened the mobile app and set the camera to record inside the app for a bit. Then closed the app after disconnecting the camera and the camera shut down. I then checked the file using the desktop app on my Mac to find both the date and time had indeed correctly sync’d automatically. That verifies to me the problem lies in the app settings sync function.
Not a great screen grab above, but it can be seen both the time stamp in the lower left of the desktop app window and my phone match. Finally. I figured out the problem.
The camera needs to be turned on, SD card formatted as an initial act, but otherwise can be ignored or can be formatted. If formatted again, turn everything off and on again. The work flow is as follows:
Turn on camera, open mobile app. Camera will appear as “available” in the app. Select the available camera in the app. A pop-up notification will appear momentarily stating the date and time are sync’d. Disconnect the camera in the app. That camera is ready. Repeat with other cameras if they exist. I would think a better solution in design would be that when the camera is connected to the phone in the app, the camera date and time would be sync’d at that time. But, that isn’t how it works yet. It would also be nice to have. a wireless review of on-camera video available. GoPro does this. The other problem with the Fly 6 3rd generation of poor battery life can’t be fixed. I’m going to try flashing light in place of the constant light. I’ll see how that goes. The way to see battery charge state is in the mobile app. I don’t know how checking this state in the app affects the sync. More testing to come.
I finally managed to successfully sync the date and time two different times now using the mobile app. Syncing. the Strava to a clip is a bit fiddly, but can be done after a good bit of fiddling.
I ended the first full week of May and exceeded my 400km weekly goal, by a couple of kilometers. A Mother’s Day morning group ride was nice. We had a large group. The expected headwind for the return leg back up the coast didn’t bother me too much. I made a point to not go crazy with the tailwind on the way down, knowing I’d want that energy available for the way back.
I woke early for the group ride day and got out on the bike early. It was going to be a hot day, though the day prior had been hotter. It was warm enough at 7am to wear full summer kit and not be chilled. In fact, I was reminded of how warm the day was going to get.
I am starting off the next full week of May with a proper rest day. The heat from the day before post ride activities took a huge toll. I got back home in time to strip off my kit and quickly go under the shower. I was able to cool myself a good bit with. the shower, but needed a lot more hydration. A point that would become more and more apparent as the long hot lunch in the sun bore out. I had iced tea and salad, but this was over more than a few hours thanks to the lack of staffing at the chosen lunch spot as well as the extra load of patrons thanks to the holiday and first warm to hot beach weekend of the season. At any rate, we walked the beach trail home or as far as we cold thanks to the bluff collapse and resulting railway repair work still underway. It was a good weeks riding. My 100km loop is feeling easy these days. On Sunday’s group ride, I rode with the wind at the back or off the back of the rear group as sweep and this allowed me to drift well back, then spin up to the group again from a hundred meters or more with short bursts of power. I found I was doing these mostly in zone 2. I need to do a proper road FTP test as a baseline then repeat the test each month. Mostly as a better gage of progress, then use the result as direction for weekly riding. This will be a lighter weeks riding due to some responsibilities, so a good week to focus on workouts over distance.
Did my first weekday morning group ride called a training ride with the group out of Tustin. Lots of fun and really challenged me to up my solo training. Riding with old, former racers who are fit, strong and fast was great fun. Big work as well. I was playing around bridging from what developed as the slower group and the fast half dozen up ahead. I kept letting the gap grow as I repeated this personal big effort mini-workouts. It was fun to be able to catch, until I I didn’t. I let the gap get too large into the wind and I could not get there. I was very close to full gas and not closing the gap, so I backed off. Saved by left turn and red light. I made sure not to let the gap get too large again. A very flat route so it catered to the big fast guys over somebody without the big power and more of a climber like me. No real time to get photos as we were not hanging about much. Oddly, not huge power numbers from me, but that is the result of having a group to hide in and recover. I am happy. I was smart enough to listen to my body, working just enough to find shelter and not trying too hard too long. Short ride as well at around 35 miles, so a very high average speed for me. I’ve got two more group rides this week on the weekend. Saturday is to be the Oceanside – Coronado metric century then Sunday is the La Pata climb route with a donut at the end. Friday I’ll do a mellow ride because there will be wind and a couple of good sized hills on Saturday.
I ended the week with 425 kilometers thanks to weekend club rides. The metric from Oceanside to Coronado was a great group of cyclists that made for a fun day out on our bicycles. In the above photo, Max is photobombing. We had a blast. The skies began spitting rain the moment I lifted my bicycle off the rack at the rear of the car. My heart rate monitor battery died sometime between when I was getting ready. at home and checked it was connected to the Wahoo and when I pushed start for the ride. We never really got any rain. Just some sprinkles and a lot of wind. That was Saturday for a metric century and return to Oceanside on the Coaster train. Even a ferry ride from Coronado back to San Diego and the short pedal to Santa Fe station. Bicycles and trains go together like coffee and a scone. Sunday was planned to be a climbing day. And given the start point was JD Flannel Donuts in San Juan Capistrano, I could ride there. I managed to overdress. No Tux, just arm and leg warmers and a gilet and neck buff. A bit much for what became a warmer day within fifteen minutes. I pulled the buff off at Doheny, and the gilet followed at JD Flannel. Thanks to tired legs a flat route was invented and we were off. Soon to be split up and lost. A little bit. Not, so much lost as misplaced splits. We got it together, it being us. And finished the ride with donuts and coffees. After we finished up our treats, I headed for home, back into head winds.
We’re into another heatwave this week. The Join app is telling me a 90 minute tops recovery ride. I signed up for this, so I guess I’ll pay attention. But, I have rides planned for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In fact Join has me resting through Thursday. That is hard to process. But, part of training is listening to the coach. I’ll do some easy cafe’ rides and work on getting this Yoga stretching into my daily routine. I managed to almost hit 90 minutes, 98, but 78% in zone 1. I resisted chasing down a few folks going quicker to gain that recovery. It was easy to resist going at the stump I have to remove under the patio. project too. Far too warm out front when I got home. After some lunch and some fiddling around I’m feeling quite good. No stiff or soreness outside the usual sore back. My back is sore no matter what I do or don’t do. Part of why I’m going to get at that yoga stretching routine. Need to get on that. Clearly this workout coaching will impact my mileage count.
After I got settled after the above ride, I went through the Join channel post ride yoga stretching session. Perfect for me.
Got another close pass, this time from a dealer plated Rolls Royce drophead.
The Friday group ride was a small group of five. Four of us set off from the meet-up park to meet up with our fifth a ways down the trail. I had downloaded the route so I took up position as hanging out off the back most of the time, except when I wanted to go work hard into a wind.
Only a little over two hours riding and I didn’t take any scenery photos. The sky was overcast until I was well on my way home in the car. The ride did get me past 1,000km for the month so far. I’m pretty happy with my fitness. My weight loss has slowed a good bit, but I expected that as I have got near my old racing weight. My goal for the month is to push my distance total past 6,000km. I’m on track t pull that off. By how much will be the question. I ended the week with a Sunday group ride. OCW &. OCSR Aliso Creek Loop to/from the donut shop.
The week totals were down a little with my barely paying attention to the Join Cycling app rest days and workouts to 263km. I’m feeling stronger and getting quicker bit by bit. Part of the higher pace in the rides last week is down to riding with fast people coupled with shorter, flatter rides.
I did my first ride of the. last week of the month as my first structured workout with a workout from Join Cycling. It took me a bit to get the file to export to my Wahoo Element Bolt, but the old unlink/re-link trick worked. Which of course loaded all the copies I’d exported, but never appeared. The file I picked to use was HR focused so harder to deal with on the screen with. old eyes. It was a 4×5 minute power effort, low rpm of around 60. I think about. zone 2 for me HR-wise. Power was in the 200w region I think for the most part. It will be easier to deal with the power-focused workout, which I’ll try next.
The workout went well, and didn’t hurt. Again, if I’d used a power-focused file I think I’d have been able to better follow what I was supposed to be doing and when for the last set of five full gas seated sprint intervals. These were maybe 15 seconds in duration so getting my heart rate up that quickly was never going to work.
We have another heat wave beginning and they are predicting nearly 80°F here by the weekend. Today. I wasn’t uncomfortable with my version of cool weather kit, base layer plus leg and arm warmers. I did pull the sleeves off at the park where I turned around.
For the. last day of the month, I tore off a gran fondo. My usual route. I’d contemplated a longer route, but with the heat I decided to duck into the shaded descent back down to Aliso and Woods canyon along Aliso Creek trail. Quite cool and nice upon returning to the ocean from the inland portion of the loop. I saw 35°C at Aliso and Woods Canyon visitor center.
Felt good to be back on a longer ride. Those 2 hour training interval sessions are dull.
Totals for the month:
Distance: 1,397km
Climbing: 8,800m
Time: 58hours, 32 minutes
Along The Way 