Mathew Kiang (.com)Yes, with one "t".

· 5 min read

My biking in 2023 vs 2022

Following up on my previous blogpost about my biking, here’s a quick update on how my biking went last year. My goals were flipped from last year — 2,500 miles outdoors (vs 1,500 miles outdoors last year) and 1,500 indoors (vs 2,500 miles indoors last year) and 100,000 feet of total elevation gain.

As you can see, I didn’t quite make either distance goal. I had a fairly bad bike crash in February that kept me off serious riding for about 8 weeks and any riding at all for 4 weeks. That said, I crushed my elevation goal and actually got to check off two really tough segments I’ve always wanted to complete: (1) Friends of Twin Peaks which is up and down Twin Peaks six different ways and (2) Hawk Hill 8x which is exactly what it sounds like, up and down Hawk Hill 8 times in a row.

Three stacked panels sharing a Jan-to-Dec axis, comparing 2023 in bold lines against 2022 in pale ones. The legend gives Outdoors (2,376 vs 1,552) in blue and Peloton (1,237 vs 2,506) in red, and a grey band spanning late January to early March is labelled Bike crash. Top panel, cumulative distance in miles, 0 to 2,500: the 2023 outdoor line is flat across the grey band, then climbs steadily to 2,376 by year end, finishing well above 2022's 1,552; the 2023 Peloton line ends at 1,237, less than half of 2022's 2,506. Middle panel, distance per ride: mostly 10 to 30 mile rides with almost nothing inside the grey band, a few outdoor rides of 70 to 90 miles, and one past 120 in late October. Bottom panel, cumulative elevation gain in feet: 2023 tracks below 2022 until about September, then crosses above and ends near 110,000 feet against 2022's 84,000.

Despite not actually reaching either distance goal, I think it was a pretty good year. In addition to more climbing than last year (and finishing those two bucket list segments), I also attempted (and and completed) the Festive 500, which is a tradition where people ride 500km (310 miles) between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. The distance itself isn’t terrible at around 40-ish miles a day but it’s during a time with generally unpleasant weather and lots of social events. I wanted to try to make it extra spicy by seeing if I could do all in five consecutive days (childcare constraints) and only doing laps around the 0.68 mile long Golden Gate Park Polo Fields bike track. In some respects, doing it around the polo fields is easier — there are no lights, no car traffic, no hills, no pedestrians, etc. But because it is flat, there is also basically no coasting — if you’re out there, you are pedaling the entire time.

Here’s a plot of all my polo field laps, by day (color) compared to my non-Festive-500 polo field laps (black) by average speed (x-axis) and power (y-axis):

A scatter plot of power in watts, about 90 to 400, against speed in miles per hour, about 15 to 26. Dot size is average heart rate on a legend of 140, 160 and 180 bpm. The Ride day legend gives a colour for each of Festive 500 Day 1 through Day 5, plus grey for Other days, and each group has its own fitted curve with a confidence band. The grey Other-days points reach much further right and higher — up to 26 mph and nearly 400 watts — while all five Festive 500 days cluster tightly between about 15 and 21 mph at 100 to 250 watts. The coloured curves sit below and left of the grey one throughout.

Most of the time, when I ride the polo fields, I do 2-10 laps at a time and it’s part of a different ride so I can spend a lot more energy (y-axis) which results in a faster average speed (x-axis). During the Festive 500 days, I was doing between 50-125 laps and was trying to be more conservative with my energy expenditure to make sure I made it through all five days.

A scatter plot of speed in miles per hour, about 14.5 to 22, against Festive 500 lap number, 0 to about 460, with a dashed reference line at 20 mph. Each of the five days is a different colour in sequence, with a fitted curve and confidence band per day: green for the first roughly 50 laps, orange to about 155, blue to about 285, pink to about 410, and yellow-green for the last 50. The blue day is the slowest, its curve bottoming near 16.5 mph, and the final yellow-green day is the fastest, rising above the 20 mph line at the end. A narrow panel on the right shows the density of non-Festive-500 lap speeds, a single peak just above 20 mph — faster than almost every Festive 500 lap.

Above is the average speed (y-axis) of each lap (x-axis) across all five days (color). I mostly hung around the 17mph average, but you can clearly see on Day 5 when I realized I was being too conservative with my energy and had way too much gas left in the tank so I ramped up my speed. Days 3 and 4 were rainy and windy and generally pretty terrible and Day 1 I started off hot and then realized I wouldn’t be able to do that for another 456 laps so slowed down at the end.

Anyways, no moral of the story here. Missed my goals but they seemed pretty reasonably set so hopefully will get them this year.