2024 Resolutions
1- Get a Gravel Bike ( yuck )
What’s a gravel bike? It’s a cross between a mountain and road bike. You use it on trails and in bad / muddy condition. It’s designed as an adventure bike that you also get to clean all the time! Cool!
I made the mistake of buying a cross bike last summer while my road bike was being repaired. I hated it and thought it was the same as gravel bikes, but they’re different enough that it might matter. Gravel bikes have higher clearance, wider tires and easier gearing. They are more meant for adventuring whereas cross bikes are designed almost uniquely for one thing: Doing cross bike races.
This sucked balls and wasn’t fun at all so I sold it.
Gravel is super popular here and a lot of guys are doing epic rides so I’ll try it out! Might do a big road trip up to Alaska this summer as well and take only the gravel bike as lots of big climbs and epic unpaved roads in Canada, including Canada’s #1 climb, McBride Peak, in Northern BC.
2- Get that CAT 1 w/kg
For those who don’t know cycling: Output on the bike is measured in watts and the metric that matters most is watts per kilo, especially for longer distances and steep hills. So how much power you can put on the pedal divided by how much you weigh.
Cycling is also roughly divided into categories that have roughly corresponding w/kg power profiles. The lowest category is Cat5 and the highest is World Tour Pro. This is roughly what you should be able to do to be in these categories ( at least according to strava sauce ).
With last year’s resolution achieved, but with me being heavier, I still only stand at that very lower end of Cat 1. So fresh, on a hill, on a good day, I can do 5 w/kg for 20 minutes.
What does this mean? It means I mostly get dropped from A races in Zwift and would get shelled from a Cat1 race in real life. This is “barely hanging on” power in a category where almost everyone can do 5 w/kg for 20 minutes and where many can do that for an hour.
How hard is it to get to each of these?
Cat 5 - Just starting to train: If you’re not super overweight and you’ve been training for a year at least just riding your bike a couple hours a week relatively hard you can easily get there. We’re probably talking about the bottom 50% of trained cyclists. I was there on my first ever 20 minute test after 1 summer of riding. You could reasonably get to this level within a year with basically no athletic background.
Cat 4 - A year of training: You’ll easily get there if you get down to 15-20% body fat range and just ride your bike around a good amount with some efforts and group rides. I was there after 1.5 years of riding, including indoor interval training 3 hours a week in the winter.
Cat 3 - Club rider: This is a harder plateau to reach, you can get stuck here if you don’t start to train with purpose. You’ll need to be relatively lean, you’ve probably done some amount of actual training and races. I was here after 2 years of training/riding.
Cat 2 - Fit to race: Sort of the same thing as cat3 but with more hours and more intervals or years of experience. We’re getting into the top 15% of trained cyclists. I reached this level after about 2.5 years. You could do decent in cat 4-5 races, hang in cat 2-3 but probably get demolished in 1. You should probably be racing A on Zwift but expect to still suck.
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Cat 1 - Strong amateur : Unless you have an athletic background or great genetics, you need several years of training to reach this level. You likely need to be under 15% body fat and train 10+ hours a week with intensity. This is the top 10%. I can’t consistently output cat 1 power currently, still stuck in upper cat2. You should be able to podium cat 4-5 races, do well in cat 2-3 and at least hang in cat 1. On Zwift you’re racing A and likely able to hang until the end and make actual moves.
UCI Pro - Strong racer: Now you need to be naturally skinny or <10% body fat or both. Unless you have godly genetics or take lots of drugs, you’re never reaching this level without putting in 10-20 hours a week of structured training for 3-5 years. You’re getting to the point where natural talent is a factor and having other goals like “biceps” starts to make it impossible to reach this level. We’re in the <1% of trained cyclists. Most people could get to this level naturally (no drugs) if they really just dedicated their life to it. You should be racing cat1 if you’re this strong and if you have good racing skills, even podium a pro/1 race. On Zwift you’re in A and likely always one of the stronger guys in any open race.
World Tour - Paid to bike: This is likely less than 1000 people worldwide. You very likely need the genetics ( or drugs ) to get there. You’re training with purpose for probably 20+ hours a week. You’re under 10% body fat and in the 18-40 age range. Cycling is basically your life.
My Goal :
Realistic: Get into the middle range of Cat 1 for 20 mins ( 5.3 w/kg )
Very optimistic: Get into the bottom range of UCI pro for 20 mins ( 5.5 w/kg )
Why? I enjoy climbing hills which is basically 100% about w/kg over long periods ( usually an hour ). I also enjoy racing on Zwift and now that I’m in the highest category ( A ) they won’t let me race anything else and I just don’t have the power to do anything but hang on for dear life against fields with usually 20-30 stronger guys than me. There’s also a Zwift Racing League with actual teams and very strong riders ( many at UCI pro level ) and I’d like to be able to participate and do something other than getting dropped.
The Numbers: As I’m writing this it’s just after the holiday food Armageddon and I’m a bloated 162 pounds. To reach 5.3 at this weight would be 390 watts which for a 5’9 guy is VERY optimistic. 5.5 would be 405 watts. For reference I can maybe do that for like 6 minutes right now. There’s no way in hell I can reach these goals without dropping weight. I’m going to target 149-150 pounds, which I think is doable. At 150 pounds if I just keep my 365watts I did this year, I’m at my goal. If I can increase that to 380, I’m at my optimistic goal.
The Plan: I have to come up with an actual training plan later. For now I’m off the bike for a week and currently fasting for 2 days. My rough plan will be to drop the weight first and then increase my power to hopefully reach my goal by September 2024. I’ve found it’s simply impossible at this point to drop weight at the same time as I increase fitness.
3- Adopt some Blueprint habits from Bryan Johnson
Who the hell is that? Basically a tech guy who sold his company for hundreds of millions and started dedicating his life to what he calls the Blueprint Protocol with the one and only goal being to research how to reverse/slow/stop ageing.
He spends about 2 million dollars on this every year but shares all his results and protocols for free.
Is it working?
Ok he doesn’t look 20 but that guy’s ripped and he assures us his nighttime erections and plentiful and long-lasting. The main thing about ageing is that it’s very hard to reverse the damage it causes to your body and that goes for poor life habits as well. He’s only just started this lifestyle so we’ll have to see what he looks like in 10-20 years or what someone would look like at 40 if they started this at 18.
I’ll write a longer protocol article on this later when I decide all the things I can do but why not just adopt better habits in general anyway? He’s doing all the hard and expensive part of researching it for me!
4 - Sell some Portraits and do live in-Person ones
I started drawing a lot more portraits in 2023. Portrait drawing is kind of the holy grail of art. It impresses people the most and it’s also just really hard to get right because the human brain is extremely sensitive to defects in faces. Hardest is attractive women. This is where the slightest mistakes will be the most obvious.
Harder still are portraits of someone who’s moving around or at a café. The typical way portraits are done is by tracing a photo or using a grid and then going over that paint-by-numbers style. Youtubers take 5-20 hours to do these portraits. Their results are amazing but they are slooooooooooow. At some point you have to ask yourself why you are spending 20 hours basically slowly tracing a photograph.
My goals are to draw good portraits of people in live settings ( like a bar / cafe ) and also to draw people from photos and sell that on marketplace or maybe Etsy, just for fun. Ideally being able to develop a faster style that still looks great.
This youtuber is a good example of something nice that you can do faster and that isn’t just you spending 100 hours making a photorealistic drawing of…. a photograph.
I haven’t seen anyone manage this on an unsuspecting person out in public either. I’ll probably cheat and just take a pic with my phone like a creeper.
5- Travel
Extending last year’s plan to travel by plane, decided to go to the Canary Islands this year. Tenerife is where a lot of pro cyclists train. All these islands are basically a huge volcano with lots of pristine roads. I will use this time in Feb-March as base training for cycling, so 25-30 hour weeks at low intensity, aka tourism speed. I feel kind of dumb paying rent here while living abroad for 2 months but I have the money so whatever.
Then I may or may not take a 1 month summer road trip through the Rockies and up to Alaska, taking the gravel bike along. I have to research how likely it is that I’ll die by bear.
6- 12 More Dates
Went on about 12 dates in 4-5 months last summer before quitting so I’ll do one more round and then probably just call it for Vancouver Island. You can only hear vague “I don’t feel a spark” excuses so many times before you don’t want to do that shit anymore. I love my family here but at this point they are definitely the only reason I still live on Vancouver Island, at least until the real estate market crashes ( it won’t ).
The dating scene in the west has become quite bleak with an increasing number of people being single. Essentially nobody is willing to settle and what… some people… think they are entitled to is … let’s just say.. statistically optimistic, especially compared to the effort…. some people…. are putting in.
Well anyway, we’ll see how it goes.
7- Finish IMDB Top250…. again
The internet movie database keeps a chart of the “best” movies as voted by reviewers. I watched the entire list already back in 2015. There’s new additions, so I’ll just finish it again since I have lots of time to train indoors.
8- Hike in Strathcona
This is the hiking paradise of Vancouver Island. Just never been there. Usually more for multi-day serious backpacking hikes which I might not be down for but I’ll at least do ONE hike by summer’s end
It’s a 4 hour drive to get there so it’s just a hassle to plan a full-day hike.
Thinking of this one, King’s Peak, which is… pretty legit at 1800m of climbing. That’s much higher than anything I climbed this year. It also seems well traveled and safe.
9- Do a handstand
I mean. How hard can it be?
Thanks for stopping by, wish me luck on 2024 resolutions and I wish you luck on yours! Remember what Albert Einstein always said : “If you quit, you deserve to die.”
