The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I would at least hem and haw about this a little. One thing that stood out to me when I came to cycling from other sports was that being a bit of a princess about fit and contact points paid off on long efforts.
Another thing that stood out to me as a new rider was the need to fuel more, and more frequently, than I had hitherto experienced. Even dabbling in endurance training, it's easy to underrate this if most of your efforts are under an hour.
Two quite different points occur to me here:
-You probably have some free-to-cheap speed from drivetrain friction (clean, freshly lubed, straight chainline), rolling resistance (faster tires, potentially higher or lower tire pressure), and aero (no baggy clothes, postural changes if compatible with comfort).
-Being on The Motte, I imagine you'd appreciate the rigor of measuring and possibly setting goals with power and work rather than distance. (Even back before power meters were widely available, the pro move was to measure training in hours and/or total elevation gained rather than miles.). I'll go so far as to suggest that a good power meter, a dumb trainer, and whatever bike you have anyway is a more useful training loadout than a smart trainer or smart bike with less-applicable and perhaps less-accurate power metering. Favero's pedal-based systems are quite well-regarded, the MX series uses a user-friendly cleat system, and they generally have a decent Black Friday sale. Lots of stuff on the used market too.
I've actually been pleasantly surprised how little irritation I had after 50 miles, I wasn't super comfortable by the end but bib shorts+moisturizer+new comfortable seat worked pretty well, and I was fine the next day. I'll definitely take your advice to keep looking for room to optimize though!
What I'm talking about it more, the first hour I was singing along to my music choices, the second and third hours I was listening to Darryl Cooper give me the other side on Adolf Hitler and fascinated, and then the last hour I kept looking for a podcast to hold my attention.
If I get a chance to ride my neighborhood on a nice day, I basically want to just work on hills, because I suck at them to a degree I find embarrassing, and getting better at them will open up more rides around my home. Oddly, given the autism, I hate overly complicated metrics in workouts. I nearly always gravitate towards simplicity and effort over metrics. Lifting I'm either doing some variation of OLAD or Bulgarian styles, or I'm doing a Smolov style focus on one lift. Climbing and BJJ I just go out and do it. I think cycling has appealed to me for a similar reason, that at least to start all I needed to do was roll out of my driveway and I'd be at the bottom of a hill and need to make my way back.
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