2020 was one for the ages. It's safe to say nobody had the year they expected, though I've been super impressed at all the ways folks found to challenge themselves in quarantine. A lot of fitness goals were smashed, including some of my own, and I've heard it joked that we had enough time to both get into and back out of shape. Because my whole world is a sea of numbers and metrics, I thought I'd look at the data to see if that held true for me.
At first blush, it appears to be true:
This chart represents fitness (purple), freshness (orange), and fatigue (yellow) based on dark magic calculations of stress scores for activities, heart-rate values, power numbers, weight, and voodoo to plot "fitness" over time. However they come at the data, Strava seems to generally agree:
I came into 2020 with much lower fitness numbers than I would have liked because of late-2019 business travel and a crash in December 2019 in which I broke yet another rib. Following the purple fitness line into the year, it stayed pretty flat as I continued to try fitting activities around business travel. And then came March. And from March to early July my numbers rose faster than literally ever before. Along with the rest of the nation, I was working from home, and my lack of commute, combined with the lengthening daylight, put more time at my disposal to ride:
Crack-of-dawn outdoor rides, sunset chases, or the occasional webinar-on-the-trainer became my opportunities to go. And go, I did. And while I'd eschewed virtual racing for a few months, 2 series came together in relatively quick succession that pulled me back into competitive sessions on Zwift: Thursday night team time trials and Saturday morning races with the folks I couldn't see outside. Now I wasn't just riding: I was *training* with a purpose.
But with that purpose came a loss in some of the fun and a re-focus on metrics, something I had really wanted to forgo in 2020. Zwift (my preferred--only--platform for e-racing) races tend to be somewhere in the 1-hour-or-less range, so it's tempting to train to 1 hour efforts. When people talk about being "indoor specialists", that's kinda the underlying statement: they're amazing for 1 hour, but get 'em outside for a 30+ mile ride and they'll fall apart. My principal goal for 2020 had been to stop being an indoor specialist, a goal solidified by my complete and utter collapse in the closing miles of the only 2020 outdoor race I got to do, and about which I've already blogged considerably.
So it's pretty hard to focus on training to a specific series while also trying not to fall into the trap of training for its exact requirements, and that, in turn, meant some other elements of my riding kinda fell off a bit. Commuting wasn't really a thing until mid-July, so the Fuji barely moved off the rack in the first half of the year, and has only recently been pressed into service for outdoor rides to reduce the inconvenience of pulling the race bike off the trainer. Yeah: it's that bad.
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| Literally the only time the Fuji got less use was 2016, and I bought it in mid-October that year! |
But while the Fuji may have seen under 1000 miles of use for the first time in 4 years, the Blue (my primary race bike) got put through the wringer.
All told, my 2011 Blue Axino was used for 5989 miles in 2020, exceeding its previous record by over 1300, though 3900 of those miles were on the trainer.
Speaking of the trainer, I turned 4066 miles in 186 hours, both records by a landslide (over 1200 miles than ever before, with just shy of 50 hours more than ever), and trainer time in Zwift's majestic mountain ranges allowed me to accumulate over 365K' of climbing, a record by 62K'.
But some bikes simply do not go on the trainer. My cyclocross and mountain bikes do not do trainer miles, and they, like the Fuji, largely hung on the wall through the early lockdown times, although both ultimately exceeded their usage time and distance from both 2018 and 2019.
The TT bike was the saddest story of the bunch, having been ridden just 12 times, 2 of those rides being on the trainer. The mileage for that bike was only a shadow of its use in 2018 & 2019, and it remained the most expensive bike in the stable by rides and days owned. Because yep: I track all of that, too.
The TT bike continues to tell a fascinating story, too, even through its lack of use. It seems to need servicing just about every single time it comes off the rack, but so far that servicing has been handled with bulk cable purchases, so while it's constantly down for repairs, those repairs don't really cost a lot (as seen in yellow, above), whereas the road bikes are comparatively maintenance nightmares.
And those nightmares were compounded by the availability of replacement parts. The Fuji puked an Easton R4 freehub, which in any other year would just be a $80 charge on Amazon and 10 minutes of work, but this year meant scrounging for another set of wheels to use on it. Good thing the climbing wheels weren't busy, but I'd rather not subject those to the harsh needs of commuting. Then I tried to move another set of Easton wheels from one bike to another to re-balance the load, and even though that wheelset was ONLY 4 years old, the parts necessary for the conversion were all discontinued. Not just discontinued, but completely unavailable, even on eBay.
But 2020 was also the first year I ever stuck to my budget for bike stuff, in spite of buying new wheels for the 'cross bike, a new 'cross bike for Alastair, and enough stuff to cobble together a 2nd trainer setup so Alastair and I could race on Zwift side-by-side in the garage. Aside from those costs, I had no tire purchases, only a couple of tubes, a whole mess of chains, and a couple sets of cables. Once the lockdowns started, and it became clear the Blue would get all the attention, I kept things hyper simple, buying just a handful of additional bike upgrades all year: a shorter crankset for the mountain bike (LOVE LOVE LOVE) that was on deep clearance, and new Time ATAC XC8 pedals for both the mountain bike and cyclocross bike, which in turn allowed me to move my old SPD pedals to Alastair's off-road stable.
So the moneys were lower, the trainer was up, the racing was basically indoor or non-existent, but in spite of it, I still had my 2nd best mileage & time year ever, my best elevation year ever, my biggest training load by leaps & bounds. I managed to burn just over 288,000 calories and compete in 47 races.
But did I gain or lose fitness? The charts at the top seem to indicate I did, but Garmin's largely un-scientific VO2 Max calculations tend to disagree, putting me back at 60 in December after a year spent mostly at 59:
That 282W measurement was from a climb of the virtual Mont Ventoux, a climb that took just over 75 minutes without letting up, so while it's a measured value, it's probably not a theoretical limit for a 60-minute effort.
So in spite of the dip in "fitness", I've gained back my pre-2020 VO2 Max, and my FTP seems to be stable or possibly slightly higher, but that FTP graph above also shows an interesting thing at the 2h mark, a thing that happened just yesterday in 2021: a 13W or 5% increase in my maximum 2-hour power. That's a huge gain for un-structured training, and I'll take it, as it implies I'll be better prepared for a return to outdoor racing...as long as I don't have to sprint, because that's way off from 2019. Like let's not even talk about it kind of bad (-13% @ 15 seconds... oof).
And while the hours on the bike and the corresponding "fitness" numbers have tapered, I've been fortunate to keep my weight pretty stable throughout the year, again with a slight corresponding increase in the back half:
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