OrnothLand
If you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth…
220517 Decaf: West End
Be A Refuge

Major milestones don’t come as frequently after 18 years of meditation practice, but this month provided a big one in my burgeoning role as a teacher: my first time having the honor of offering the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts.
Taking the Refuges & Precepts is the most fundamental Buddhist ceremony, and is frequently offered at meditation retreats.
The Three Refuges are a public statement of confidence in the historical Buddha as a regular human who came to a profound and useful understanding of how the human mind works; the Dhamma, or teachings he gave based on that understanding; and the Sangha, the community of like-minded practitioners. It’s helpful for meditators to relate to these vows as more descriptive of how one feels and where they are currently at in their practice, »more
Up-To-Date Fitness Charts
This is a sticky post. It’s probably not my most recent posting; if you’re looking for that, simply scroll down to the next entry.
I pinned this post to the top of my cycling blog because the following charts are automatically updated after every bike ride (both outdoors and on the indoor trainer). So you can easily find this entry, which always shows my up-to-date Fitness numbers.
By “Fitness”, I’m specifically referring to my Chronic Training Load (or CTL), which is an exponentially weighted average of my Training Stress (TSS) over the preceding six weeks. You can learn more in this video, this web page, or this book.
So without further ado, here are my up-to-the-minute Fitness charts.
The first chart depicts my Fitness level over the current calendar year. Any red dots that appear re »more
220513 Sewickley the 13th
220512 Mudslinger
220511 Guys Run Old Mill
220510 Decaf: Ridge
220509 Neighbor Hoodie
220505 Flatless Beltane
220504 LBS For Brakes
220503 PMC Orphans
220502 Triple Flat DNF
220430 Braddock Hills
220419 PMC Orphans
Heart of Glass

Last we heard from our hero, he was looking forward to an “almost normal” year. That lasted all of four days.
On January 5th I did a Step Test: the first of three rides that comprise my usual functional threshold power (FTP) testing regime, to determine my baseline fitness level. These are vomit-inducing long-duration maximum intensity efforts. If you’re doing it correctly, you should feel like you’re dying. This one went “well”, producing a respectable FTP of 218 Watts.
However, that part about dying? That was just a leetle hyperbolic. I finished that workout with two kinds of chest pain: sharp, painful contractions on my left side that went away after 24 hours, and a dull ache in the center of my chest that remained for a few days.
Having experienced heart palpitations around this t »more
2022-04-18
220415 Wind GAP
220413 Hoodie 20
220412 First Decaf of '22!
220410 2h15m w/Diesel Brony
Pedal to the Medal

Measuring power is the gold standard of performance management on the bike. I’ve waited years for the industry to provide a pedal-based power meter that is accurate, uses mountain bike-style SPD cleats, is reasonably easy to use, and “affordable”.
In 2018 I bought a Wahoo Kickr Core indoor trainer, which allowed me to finally measure my power output over the winter. But when I took the bike off the trainer for the summer, I had to give up measuring power, and go back to estimating power (and thus fitness and fatigue) indirectly based on heart rate data.
However, after over a decade of waiting, last month I opened my wallet and acquired a set of Garmin Rally XC200 power meter pedals. Here’s some background and insight into how it’s been for me so far…
Why pedal-based? These days, you »more
Metrics of Success

Say an alien civilization conquered Earth and forced us to use their measurements, outlawing familiar units like the mile, degree, pound, and gallon. Imagine how disruptive that would be!
Akshually, not very disruptive at all, based on my experience. This year I decided it was finally time to drop those long-outdated “imperial” units and resolved to go full-time 100% metric only.
Why? Well, as an international sport, cycling and bicycles are primarily metric in nature. In any field where measurements matter, metric is used… even in the United States. By law, metric became the preferred measurement system in the U.S. back in 1975, and we’ve had sixty years to get used to the idea of using modern, standardized, universally-recognized units. Our quaint idiosyncratic measurements have becom »more
220405 Orphaned PMC Group Ride
220405 Warn Up
Site News: Dreamwidth move
Replaced article feed and links to reflect moving my blogs to Dreamwidth from Russia-based LiveJournal.
Posted Sat Mar 12th 2022