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Endurance Biking 2025-26

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It’s been a while since my last attempt at documenting physical activity; really fell short in hiking that year (and subsequent years) in favor of a couple other hobbies.

Trying again!

This time I’m attempting to get back into cycling, and to push it further (and farther) than I have before. Prior to now, my longest ride was a metric century (100 km, 62 mi), the Scenic Schuyklkill Century in 2010. I finished but I grinded way too hard (wrong gear ratios) and really hurt my knee.

Return to distance biking was prompted by a few things:

  1. Got laid off and used my leftover FSA funds on a Wattbike Proton
  2. A friend did a century
  3. Rowing is hard
  4. Wanted to catch up on movies
  5. Sent the aforementioned friend a link to the Seattle-to-Portland double century (“hey look at this ridiculous thing”) and he was really into the idea of coming to WA for it. (Initially the one-day version, but we’ve since downgraded to two days.)

So that’s the plan: do the Seattle-to-Portland ride next July, probably with a few other big rides, like the Flying Wheels Century before, and the Tour de Whatcom 100-mile route after (only a week after, yikes). I’m hoping that I can build a base that lets me get outdoors and ride 50 miles on any given weekend whenever I feel like it; the summers here are really amazing and I haven’t taken full advantage of them.

But I’m building that base with indoor cycling. I’ve tried a few apps, first the Wattbike Hub app, then Zwift, then Trainerroad, and now just back to manually controlling power in erg mode in Wattbike Hub. I’ve dipped very hesitant toes into day-to-day LLM use, and in this case used Claude as a shortcut to create a week-by-week training plan aimed at completing 200 miles in a weekend by July. (Outputting both as a CSV and an ICS to put in my Google Calendar was pretty convenient.) Good distillation of fueling/nutrition but still need to confirm a lot of that.

Since getting the bike in July I’ve done 43:21 of riding (estimated 599 miles). If I can stick with this plan then by next July I’ll have almost an additional 400 hours of riding and over 5000 miles logged, real and estimated.

Follow me on Strava to see if I’m able to do it!

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