← Blog/July 16, 2026 · 2 min read
Five Miles and a Bridge
Not every training day is a structured workout. Sometimes it's a full day of commuting, meetings, and a night ride home under the Bay Bridge.
The day
Today was not a training day in the traditional sense. It was a life day that happened to involve a bike.
I rode into work this morning. Attended my quarterly BPAC meeting, which is the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, city-level work that actually matters for making streets safer for people on bikes. Met a friend in Oakland in the afternoon. Then, around 10:30 at night, I rode home.
Total distance logged on the final segment: 4.63 miles. About 20 miles across the whole day. Seventy feet of elevation. Average power of 77 watts, which is well below anything that builds fitness, but that was never the point.
Why I'm posting this
I've been sharing my training numbers as I build toward TheBayRide on August 29th. My FTP is sitting at 216W right now, down from a peak of 295W in 2022. A lot of the work I need to do is structured and hard. But some of it looks like today.
Riding to a meeting instead of driving. Choosing the bike when it would've been easier not to. That's not nothing.
The night ride home was the best part. The Bay Bridge lit up. Light traffic. The city quiet in a way it never is during the day. That's the thing about riding the Bay, even on a random Wednesday night, you get moments that remind you why the loop we do in August means something.
The actual numbers
- Distance (final leg): 4.63 mi
- Moving time: 20 min
- Elevation: 70 ft
- Avg power: 77W
- Total day estimate: ~20 miles
What this is and isn't
This doesn't move my FTP. It doesn't build my aerobic base in any meaningful way. But it kept me on the bike on a day that was already full. That matters for consistency, and consistency is the only thing that actually works when you're training while also running an event, a startup, and a household.
TheBayRide is 135 miles around the Bay. Most people who sign up aren't sure they can do it. What gets them there isn't one heroic training ride. It's the accumulation of days, including days like this one.
Next post will have harder numbers. Tonight I'll take the bridge.
From the ride
Ride the Bay with us
The Bay Ride is a charity bike ride around the Bay Area. 135 miles all the way around, or a 35-mile option from SF to Oakland.
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