Cycling year 2021 in review

In the 2021 training plan I had planned 3 weeks of more increasingly harder training weeks followed by a rest week. Looks like I was pretty good in making sure I got my recovery week. In respect to the harder weeks, at some point I was not able to make the targets. This was because it got too hard and required too much time to reach the goals. Reasons are that besides the increasing effort within the 4 week cycle, every cycle also got harder. And since I got fitter my FTP which is the basis for TSS got higher. So a TSS of 200 with an FTP of 270 is less effort than an TSS of 200 with an FTP 280. So I decided to no longer increase the TSS workloads per week anymore and just let the increased FTP make the effort harder. There were some weeks I did not make the target as a result of injury. I fell of a ladder in April and bruised some ribs and Labor day weekend crashed with my fat bike which resulted in more bruised ribs.

According to Veloviewer I rode 5,585 miles in 480hrs and climbed 402,123ft the equivalent of climbing up Mt Everest 13 times.

My longest ride this year was 105 mile and the ride with the most climbing was the Graveleur ride in Vermont with 12,075ft of climbing.

My focus on running this year was on maintenance and were in 2020 I had run every week at least once, this year's rib injuries forced me to taken a couple of breaks.

Strava had my distance and elevation a little higher than Veloviewer (based on Strava), my guess Veloviewer was just counting cycling data where Strava counted all activities. I rode 1000+ miles more than in 2020.

My biggest riding month was October probably due to my trip in Holland where I rode 375miles in one week.

The ride with the most elevation was the Kingdom Graveleur ride in Burke Vermont with 12,075ft elevation in 99.9 miles. The longest ride was the D2R2 mystery ride with a distance of 105 miles and a still not too shabby 11,970ft of climbing.

In 2021 most of the cyclocross race events were back, after a year of canceled races due to Covid. I raced 13 races in total with only 1 podium (2nd place in the Secret Quirrel fat bike race). I missed 3 races due to injures: Quad cross, Minutemen and Shedd park. There were 3 races where I had an opportunity to podium but mechanicals (dropped chain) Ice Weasels, early crash (Keene) and blow ups (Putney) got in the way. My best races were the 2 Northampton races: no mechanicals, smooth riding and super fit. But competition was really good. Point wise it was a bad year, I dropped from 370-ish to 398 ouch.

Here the whole year on Veloviewer's wheel. Most of the rides around Conway, followed by Burke Vermont. Also some rides near Boston and various cross races in MA and NH.