2010 Season Summary

This was a varied and action-packed year of cycling. I lost a bike, bought a bike, crashed once, did a bunch of racing, did a bunch of new rides, helped organize several rides, and managed to hit many (but not all) of my annual goals.

I went into the year looking for fairly stable mileage relative to 2009 (4,135 miles in 2009). I didn't really want to spend too much more time on the bike, but I wanted to make better use of the available time and try to improve my performance. I set my mileage goal at 4,200 miles, mainly just looking for any increase over 2009, but increased my goal for average speed substantially, from 16.46 mph in 2009 to a goal of 17.0 mph this year. This year, I also began differentiating between "performance" rides, which includes all training and high-effort group rides, and "recreational" rides, where fitness isn't the primary goal. With no baseline for guidance, I set the target for performance rides at 17.7 mph.

My plans took a hit in early March when my two-year-old road bike, locked up in front of Amherst Town Hall while I was in a meeting, was stolen. Fortunately, the folks at Laughing Dog in Amherst were able to hook me up with a replacement fairly quickly, and I was back on the road within a couple weeks, after doing the first NCC time trial of the season on my old ten-speed with knobby tires.

Within the first few weeks on the new bike, I had my first (and only) crash of the year, a two-rider pileup avoiding a turning car in Northampton. Fortunately both riders and both bikes emerged intact, and it was probably a useful experience overall, because it renewed my understanding of the importance of trying to predict driver behavior. My last crash, in 2008, which totalled my bike, also involved an oncoming car abruptly turning left in front of me, so clearly there's a pattern here...

Prior to this year, my only racing experience was in club races, but this year I did my first organized races, including hillclimbs up Whiteface Mountain in Lake Placid, NY, the Kancamagus Highway in Conway, NH, and Mt. Greylock in North Adams, MA; my first road race (the NCC Tour of the Hilltowns); and a white-knuckled training criterium in Montague. I did lousy in all of these, but the experiences were great, and I'm looking forward to more in 2011.

I did a bunch of long rides this year - I had a goal of three centuries, and I ended up doing nine, including six rides over 110 miles and two over 120. Three of the long rides stand out as particularly memorable:

• On Memorial Day weekend, the NCC elite racing team scheduled a three-day series of training rides, and generously invited club members to come along and ride with the big guns. I showed up on Saturday and hung in for about 30 miles before getting dropped and finishing the ride on my own. A glutton for punishment, I came back on Monday determined to last a bit longer, which I managed to do, with a lot of help from the team. We rolled for 115 miles at a ridiculous pace over what felt like every hill in western Massachusetts. At one point I got worried when I saw a sign showing we were heading west into Pittsfield when we were already eighty miles into the ride. Todd Holland later characterized the ride as a "death march", which is pretty accurate, but it was a great day, and the team did a terrific job of welcoming club members along on the ride.



Bissell Covered Bridge on the D2R2

• I've been dancing around the Deerfield Dirt Road Randonee (D2R2) for a couple years, but this year I decided to bite the bullet and go for it. This is an epic 115 mile ride on the hidden network of dirt roads that criss-crosses western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. Registration was already closed by the time I made up my mind, but I managed to squeeze into one of the slots that the organizers opened at the last minute. I was sorely unequipped for the ride, on my old steel ten-speed. The fat tires helped a lot, but the huge gears did not, and I spent the day struggling up ridiculous hills with a cadence that felt like around 20 rpm. I didn't stand a chance on the famous 25% grade on loose dirt on Archambo Road, and had to dismount about halfway up, but I managed to barely clean the rest of the hills. I was in tough shape by the end of the day after 9 1/2 hours on the bike, but I managed to finish the whole course, including the lovely five-mile "corn maze" loop through Old Deerfield at the end. It was the toughest day I've ever had on the bike; I'm already signed up for next year.



At the Greylock summit

• One of my goals for the year was to climb Mt. Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts. I knew I was going to do this during the NCC's Greylock hillclimb race on September 11, but I wanted some advance scouting, and for a couple years, I've been tempted by the idea of doing a long out-and-back ride to climb the mountain. The weekend before the race, I organized an early-morning group ride from Northampton to do the climb. I wasn't sure if anyone would show up, but we ended up with six die-hard riders willing to give it a try. It was a long ride across the Berkshires just to get to the mountain, into the teeth of a stiff northwest wind, followed by a steep, hour-long climb to the summit. The high-speed descent on the south side of the mountain was a blast, but the long slog homeward on Rt. 9 was tough. I finished up with about 125 miles for the day, the longest ride I had ever done.

Other highlights for the year included:

• Todd Holland's pair of "Spring Classics", the Ronde van Pelhaammeren and the Cushman-Roubaix. The rides are brutal, but Tafi's writeups make it all worthwhile.
• Jeremy Powers' Grand Fundo, a 65-mile tour of some of the hidden gems of our local back roads.
• Cycling the barrier islands and local roads around Ocean City, NJ.
• The COVAC Century, with Paul the taskmaster pushing an exhausted group to cover 103 miles in 4:59:48. The average for the century portion was 20.6 mph, my fastest ride ever, and I ended up with 129 miles, my longest ride ever.

Also, it was only a short ride, but my single best ride of the year was probably my lap on the Champs-Élysées on a rented Velib' in December.

Off the bike, I became much more involved with the Northampton Cycling Club this year, joining the board of directors in January and taking over as club treasurer in the spring. I also helped organize several club events, including the Tour of the Hilltowns, the Greylock hillclimb, and the BikeFest Century, giving me a new appreciation for how much time and effort goes into organizing these events. Hats off to Peter Crowley, Mike McCusker, and Mike Hempstead, the primary organizers of the Hilltowns, Greylock, and BikeFest events, respectively.

I've always had a strong interest in data tracking and performance analysis, which I pursued this year through a couple of web-based projects. I made substantial enhancements to the ride-logging and analysis tools on this site, with a goal of eventually being able to offer these as a service to other riders. I've been doing ride logging and climb analysis on my PC for several years, but this year I automated many of those processes, and integrated them into this site, so now my ride logs, ride maps and the status of my annual goals are all automatically updated based on the data from my bike computer. I also substantially enhanced my climb analysis tools, which automatically record and track the times for several dozen hillclimbs and other intervals I ride frequently. Just for fun, I also enhanced the rotating photo banner system that I built for other sites, and uploaded a bunch of my cycling photos for use here on this site.

In another project, I built an online results system for the NCC's Tuesday night time-trial and hillclimb race series. I've been tracking this with spreadsheets for a couple years, but this year I ported this system to the web to create a site that anyone can use to view race results, series standings, course records, and other historical information. The system now includes almost 1,000 individual results in over 80 races across the last four years. The Tuesday night series, organized by the NCC's David Goodwin, was highly successful this year, with a record number of 367 riders participating in 22 events. David introduced a new time trial course this year on River Road in Deerfield, and we saw a new course record on the long time trial course in Hatfield by Jeremy Durrin. The overall series was won for the fourth consecutive year by Todd Roberts, with Damien Callahan and Zak Page finishing on the podium.

I ended up finishing the year with 4,545 miles, which is a fair amount more than I had been hoping for. I barely missed both of my speed goals, finishing with 16.94 mph overall, and 17.52 mph on performance rides. For the overall speed, I ended up doing quite a bit more dirt-road riding than I've ever done in the past (Todd's two dirt-road rides, the Grand Fundo, and the D2R2), which slowed the speed down quite a bit, but still, a goal is a goal, and I fell a bit short. I did better on my goal for new mileage — I was shooting for 150 miles on roads I hadn't ridden before, and I ended up with over 300 (map on the right, click for more details). Long stretches of new roads on Jeremy's Grand Fundo, Todd's spring rides, and the trek out to Greylock helped a lot with this one. I ended up hitting 14 out of my 23 goals, which I think strikes a pretty good balance between setting realistic goals and including some that you have to stretch for.

I'm just getting started on my goals for 2011, but they'll probably look similar to this year - similar overall mileage, with faster times both overall and on individual intervals. I'll probably look at setting my interval goals about 3% to 5% faster than my best times from this year. I'm looking for a way to provide incentives for indoor and outdoor training during the winter months, and I'm definitely going to get rid of that damn Connecticut state line goal, which has been plaguing me for a couple of years now. I'd also like to do more racing next year, especially the hillclimbs in the BUMPS series — I'd like to get to the Equinox climb I missed this year, and maybe also Mount Washington.

Hope to see you out on the road in 2011!