Fighting Stage 4

I love cycling, there is a sense of freedom and childlike exhilaration from riding your bike, although I am a real coward on the downhills. So cycling was always going to be part of my fitness arsenal in the fight against cancer.

Let me start first though, with a debunking. After being diagnosed with my Stage 4, incurable, aggressive prostate cancer, we decided to get various things checked, including our moles. During my mole mapping, I was confidently told that I had got prostate cancer because I was a cyclist.

First of all, to be told something you did categorically caused something that is likely to deny you seeing your children grow up is a thoughtlessly cruel thing. To peddle (pun intended) baseless accusations about something undertaken that is inherently good for your health, is idiotic and dangerous.

It is also totally wrong. Even parking the fact that keen cyclist does not equate to being someone who gets time to cycle half as much as he needs, there is simply no evidence to support this wild assertion – beyond one discredited survey – provide detail.

So, that shows that it is worth cycling and can be included in my challenge.

I was tempted to make it my only challenge, but variety provides interest.

So, how am I going to measure my progress and determine how I rank? Nerdy stats warning ahead.

Zwift

We’re coming into winter but even through the Summer I maintained my Zwift subscription. Zwift is an indoor training app that translates power data from a turbo trainer to a computer so that your avatar can take part in virtual bike rides, including races against absolute strangers.

I used to race on Zwift but took a step back. Now, it seems like the perfect way to inject some adrenaline into my training and enable me to work towards “Above Average”.

Zwift gives riders a “Racing Score” based on the events you ride on Zwift. This equates to a category between A to E which restricts the races you can take part in – the idea being that racers of equivalent standing race each other. No point me being in a race with Sir Chris Hoy . . . Yet.

I figure that to count myself as an above average rider I need to be competing in the Category C races, finishing in the top half and potentially pushing for Category B.

Looking at some recent races on Zwift Powerhttps://uk.zwift.com/, to achieve that I’m going to have to hit some significant power maintaining 3.2-3.6 wkg over the course of a race. This means a functional threshold power (FTP) of around 290-330.

I did a race a couple of weekends ago, when I thought I would bounce out of radiotherapy. I took part in Category E and I came second! I maintained about 2.5 wkg over a 22 minute race with an FTP of 229. I feel a bit bad for the others in E because I think I now need to be racing Cat D.

Now I need to pack on another 30-50% power. The recovery from radiotherapy seems to have taken longer than hoped and I have another PSA test on Wednesday so can’t ride for 48 hours (it may lead to a temporary increase in the PSA result which I think gave rise to the erroneous belief that it could cause cancer, but sex also leads to a temporary PSA increase, but no-one has jumped on the idea that men shouldn’t have sex. Well, Cancer experts haven’t anyway…). But I’m keen to recover now and start hitting the riding hard for the Winter.

Let’s see how that goes!