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Text of the page (random words):
n from the left under the heading weekly min is how many minutes of riding i completed each week these are color coded in yellow for those weeks were i met the goal of 300 or more minutes a week of riding in green where i met the medical communities lesser goal of 150 to 299 minutes a week and white where i failed to meet even that lesser goal over these 23 weeks i failed to meet the 300 minute goal for the first week had a two week run of successes followed by two weeks of failure followed by three weeks of successes followed by one week of failure followed by a long run extending to the bottom of the figure that being the 25 week run referred to above how much does it matter if i fail to reach 300 miles for one week my best guess is not at all it might even be beneficial to take a week off now and then the coach whose advice i follow coach john hughes recommends doing just that why then am i pushing these long continuous runs the value of these runs is psychological rather than physiological once i miss a week the spell is broken and i am more likely to miss future weeks more weeks than coach hughes would consider wise i think that if i had a plan for taking off a week now and then this might not be true but i don t for me it has always been either an unnecessarily strict adherence to a 300 minute minimum or long periods of suboptimal cycling what causes me to break a run to fail to reach 300 minutes of cycling for a week there is a long list of reasons here are a few of the most common ones illness conflicts e g out of town trips rain feeling tired feeling discouraged not feeling the joy of cycling that week i tried to arrange these causes from the most to the least justified i absolutely should not be cycling when i am ill i can try to work around conflicts but if i am out of town with no access to a bicycle for a week there is no room for rearrangement i feel no shame for not going outside for a bike ride when it is raining i am much too old to risk falling on slippery roads in that case i can ride indoors on my trainer but i have previously confessed because i find the trainer so boring there is only so far i can use my willpower to push me to complete long trainer rides though i will have more to say about that below and being tired can be good reason for skipping a ride or even a week of riding however i have found that being tired and feeling tired are not always the same thing similarly feeling discouraged can feel like being tired and being tired can feel like being discouraged the way i deal with this confusion is when i am unsure to start a ride that has options for returning early when i am feeling tired but i am not actually tired usually i start feeling better after a few minutes on the road what kind of pathetic reason for not cycling is not feeling the joy pathetic it may be but if it keeps me from riding i have to deal with it to do that i have been varying where i ride and varying the bikes i ride this helped a lot at first but over the past year this novelty has worn off a bit and i am afraid i am going to come up with something new to keep motivated normally i try to post on the first day of the month or shortly thereafter this post is going up near the end of the month this is another symptom of the same demotivation that is affecting my cycling is this the end to my blogging to my cycling i definitely plan to have a post devoted to those topics however as a possible step in that direction this will be my blog post for both october and november i am skipping one of my monthly blog posts peace posted by zombie cyclist at 4 17 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday september 1 2025 perverse incentives the current version of my weekly training log goodhart s law states that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure a business owner might want to know how productive her nail factory is to measure that she determines how many nails the factory produces in a day to please their boss the managers of the factory increase their nail count by producing only very small nails unfortunately these nails are useless making the measure into the goal ends up defeating the purpose of the factory quantitating progress is an activity not limited to nail factories it is something that is part of many different human activities for example cyclists do all the time me very much included as evidenced by the figure at the top of this post we have a variety of measures for assessing our progress miles ridden vo2max maximum power and all the rest what is so insidious is how seductive these measures can be even when we know we should use them with care for the purposes of this post i d like to consider the case where i am not training for some specific event but rather riding for its health benefits how best should i accomplish this is it even possible in a recent post i reviewed a scientific publication that argued that there are no health benefits to exercise that is a bit of an overstatement of what the authors actually wrote and in any case i would not reverse all my beliefs about the health benefits of exercise based on any single publication that said i do think this paper is a good reminder that we don t have nearly as much firm knowledge about the benefits of exercise as we wish we did given that necessary skepticism what should i do for one thing i think i should act based on the weight of the evidence the consensus of the medical community rather than some philosophical standard of absolute proof based on a very large number of studies carried out over several decades the consensus of the medical community has been that individuals should participate in at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise a week and that ideally twice that there is also a growing consensus that although 300 minutes of exercise is optimal most of the health benefits come from the first 150 minutes according to this i should worry much more about doing some cycling consistently than hitting that arbitrary 300 minute goal and yet i am who i am and i always want to know how i am doing whatever that means i collect all kinds of training statistics e g measures and not only do i want to know how i am doing i am happier if i am doing better so i try to make these statistics look good that is how my measures become targets the above process led my recent obsession with mi yr miles ridden during the past year as recorded in the third column from the right of my weekly training log shown at the top of this post how did this particular number end up in my weekly training log it was not in the last version of that log that i posted about back in 2021 it comes from a recommendation from coach john hughes the coach that i follow specifically his riding for health training plans that i blogged about in 2022 he suggested four different training plans depending on the athlete s cycling history and one measure of that history was miles ridden per year which plan hughes recommends is based on a point system and an athlete gets one point if they ride less than 3 000 miles per year two points for 3 000 to 3 500 miles a year and three points if they ride more than 3 500 miles per year in that 2022 post i pointed out problems with that measure but it got stuck in my brain nonetheless and thus i included it in my training log while i was training for group metric century rides i didn t pay all that much attention to that measure but now that i am no longer participating in those rides i am looking for some kind of goal that goal became miles per year because the ups and downs of my health over the past several years i have gone above and below that 3 000 mile goal in 2023 i feel below that goal as a result of problems with my back and in 2024 my training for metric century rides and my birthday ride brought me back above it as i searched for meaning after the birthday ride not allowing myself to fall back below that 3 000 miles per year goal became an obsession the miles per year measure could be tracked on a daily basis but a training plan doesn t have much meaning day by day i would argue that the smallest unit of a training plan that makes any sense is a week and so i only calculate miles per year once a week a weird property of this measure is that it depends on the riding i am doing this week but it also depends on the riding i did a year and a week ago each week i get credit for the new miles i ride that week but i also lose credit for those miles which are now more than a year old as a result i found it easy to stay above 3 000 miles per week at first but as i started approaching the time of year when a year ago i was training first for the art of survival metric century and then for my birthday ride the miles that would fall off the back each week got larger and larger and so it got harder and harder to stay above the magic number of 3 000 miles so at long last i can explain why my goal of staying above 3 000 miles per year was a perverse incentive now that i am riding for health it makes no sense to overtrain today to make up for training that i failed to do six months or a year ago that s one problem the other is that as is well known miles is a flawed measure for how much cycling an athlete has done it is flawed because 20 miles in the mountains represents much more exercise than 20 miles on flat roads so as i was struggling to stay above 3 000 miles per year it became tempting to favor flat rides over hilly rides to do so would be perverse let me now turn to a less extreme example my goal of riding for 300 minutes per week because this is such a well established goal of the medical community it is much less problematic than the hughes goal of 3 000 miles per year and yet it still needs to be used carefully there are many factors i have to consider as i plan my weekly ride schedule how i feel what other tasks i need to accomplish etc imagine i come up with a schedule that fits how tired a feel involves rides that increase my enthusiasm and give me time to accomplish some important tasks but adds up to 298 minutes of riding now imagine i could change my schedule to make it add up to 307 minutes of riding but only by giving up some of these benefits obviously the 298 minute schedule is the correct choice but because it doesn t actually meet the arbitrary goal of 300 minutes i confess i am often tempted by the 307 minute schedule realistically how much of a problem do these perverse incentive create in my experience not as much as might be feared let s consider the example of the hughes goal of 3 000 miles a year as perverse as this incentive might have been in theory i think it was helpful in practice and therein lies a tale that tale starts with a question what is a person to do to prevent a measure from becoming a goal or at least to minimize the harmful effects of that my true goal was to bicycle enough to stay healthy therefore what i had to avoid was to allow my attempt to stay above 3 000 miles per year to push me into unhealthy or demotivating behavior but if i could use that measure as a motivator towards my true goal health i might beat the devil so to speak to violate goodhart s law without suffering the consequences the key reality that made this possible is that the worst thing i could have done for my health was to get discouraged and to stop cycling entirely for health it probably doesn t matter if i ride hills or flats just so long as my heart rate remains above what the medical community calls light effort and stays within moderate or vigorous range something that i find easy to do even on a flat ride a counter example where this is an issue is my rides on my trainer as it happens deciding between a flat ride and a hilly ride is not so important from a health perspective what is terribly important is not skipping a ride altogether something i find very tempting when i am discouraged and in that case looking at my progress as measured by miles per year encourages me to do something a flat ride a hilly ride so long as it is not an easy trainer ride both of which benefit my true goal of better health posted by zombie cyclist at 12 15 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday august 1 2025 whither my alpine ride rides on one of my four alpine routes have been of tremendous importance to me since my move to california in 2017 in my second post after moving to california i identified a 23 mile long ride near my new home a ride i called the alpine ride within a month i had identified an extension i could ride when i felt like going longer the 34 mile long alpine cañada ride when i moved from san carlos to nearby emerald hills i was able to continue on two almost identical routes that differed only in being a mile shorter i accumulated hundreds of rides on these four routes as a result of this accumulation of data i was inspired to use my speed over these routes as a measure of my cycling ability a metric known as form and did a statistical analysis to show that was justified recently however i have stopped riding those routes why did i abandon them is my abandonment permanent does it matter that i have abandoned them what does it even mean to say that i have abandoned them in response to that final question the bar graph above shows the number of alpine rides rides over one of the four above routes i have ridden during each month since i move to california in 2017 there is a lot of month to month variation including the occasional month with no alpine rides but overlying that is a larger trend starting in august of 2022 there is a fairly steady decline in the number of my alpine rides until february of 2023 when there were none it is not until september that there are some alpine rides again then another four more months with no alpine rides then an eight month return to those rides and finally and most recently i haven t ridden on an alpine route since october of 2024 nine months and counting why did i stop riding on the alpine routes my reasons fall into two general categories some months i didn t ride my alpine rides because i wasn t riding at all or was only doing very easy rides on my trainer this is not so much an abandonment of the alpine route as it is an abandonment of cycling and for the purposes of this post i am less interested in those months other months i was riding but on routes other than the alpine routes and it is those months that i want to focus on here at the same time the number of my rides on alpine routes started going down in august of 2022 the number of my rides on another similar route the cañada route started going up as i noted in an earlier post the cañada route is prettier and has less traffic than the alpine routes which is why i switched so why does this matter i found a new route that i liked better than the alpine ro...