New year cycling PRs are the only resolution I make. The work calendar shifts. The build schedule shifts. The bike does not. Every January I write down three measurable targets, ride them through the year, and check the boxes in December. That is the routine that keeps me on the road.
I am writing this from my desk on a January morning, with the cycling stats from last year already on my homepage at chadeverettharris.com: 33,243 miles since 2023, 773 rides, 607,747 feet of elevation, 1,668 hours in the saddle, 20.9 Mt. Everests on a Pinarello with Shadow trotting alongside on dirt-road days. The new year cycling PRs framework lives inside those numbers. None of them showed up by accident.
What new year cycling PRs actually mean to me
A PR is a personal record. The “new year” part is just where the calendar resets. New year cycling PRs are not about a single peak day. They are about the cumulative shape of the year — what I rode, where I rode it, and whether the rides got faster or harder under the same conditions. I am not chasing a podium. I am chasing the version of me from last year.
The framework I use is simple. Three measurable targets. One that lives in volume, one that lives in fitness, one that lives in terrain. They all have to be honest. They all have to be checkable on Strava. They all have to fit inside the work life that pays for the bike in the first place.
Why the rides are the metric, not the resolution
Resolutions break in the third week of January. Rides do not. Rides are calendared, geo-tagged, and uploaded automatically. By February the resolution is forgotten. The rides are not — they are right there in the feed, with mile counts and average power. The new year cycling PRs framework relies on that. Make the system do the remembering for you, then show up.
That is also why I do not rely on motivation. Motivation is a Tuesday-night decision. The bike is on the wall by Sunday. If I have to choose between a long ride and a meeting, the meeting is what gets moved. Or the ride happens at 4:30 a.m. Either way, I rode anyway.
The three measurable targets that anchor new year cycling PRs
My new year cycling PRs always reduce to three numbers. Volume, fitness, terrain. Cumulative miles, FTP, and one local segment that I treat as the year-end exam. Each one points at a different part of the rider, so the year cannot pass with one strong leg and two atrophied ones.
Volume: cumulative miles is where new year cycling PRs start
Volume is the cleanest signal. Either I rode the miles or I did not. The Strava year-in-review tells me what I did last year, and the new year cycling PRs framework adds a meaningful but realistic margin. For me that has been about 10 percent year over year. Some years it is less. Some years the work calendar wins. The number is honest either way.
Cumulative miles also tracks discipline more than fitness. You can ride 8,000 miles a year on a slow average and still beat your peers who ride 4,000 fast miles. Volume is what compounds, especially on the days the legs do not feel sharp. New year cycling PRs reward people who keep getting on the bike.
Fitness: FTP is the second leg of new year cycling PRs
FTP — functional threshold power — is the second target. It is the watts you can hold for an hour. It moves only if you train it. New year cycling PRs that include an FTP target have to include the work that raises FTP: structured intervals, sweet-spot blocks, the occasional brutal 2×20.
I do not pretend to coach myself on this. FasCat handles the structured side. I am an investor in CoachCat AI as part of the FasCat ecosystem, but the actual training plan is theirs. New year cycling PRs that include an FTP target need a coach or a coaching tool. I have built and ridden enough to know the gap between self-coached and coached is real.
Terrain: one local segment closes the new year cycling PRs loop
The third target is a local segment. One climb. One time-trial stretch. One repeatable section. Same wheels, same wind window, same time of day if you can manage it. The new year cycling PRs framework needs a fixed comparison point that is not the calendar — it is the dirt, the asphalt, the trees you pass on the same line every time.
Pick a segment that is hard enough to hurt but short enough to repeat. For me that has been the 4-mile climb closest to the house. Last year I knocked 38 seconds off it. That is what the year of training was for, and it is the only number that gets me out of bed in November.
How I actually build the year of new year cycling PRs
Setting the targets is the easy part. The year is what you do every week. Here is the cadence that has worked for me, year after year, even through the building chapters of the career when the work tried to swallow the bike whole.
January through March: base, base, base
Long, steady, low-intensity miles. The work that does not look impressive on Strava but pays in March. New year cycling PRs do not get set in March. They get set in March, however, by the rides that built the engine. If you skip base, the spring intervals are paper.
Three to five rides a week, mostly endurance, one tempo day, one long ride on the weekend. The Pinarello stays in the small ring more than I want it to. Shadow comes along on the dirt-road days. The Insta360 X5 captures whatever the morning gave me. None of it is glamorous.
April through June: structured intensity
Sweet-spot intervals, threshold work, race-pace efforts. This is where FTP moves. New year cycling PRs that depend on a fitness PR are made or broken in this block. If the work is consistent through May, June feels good. If May is patchy, June hurts.
I leave one full rest day every week. If the work is hot, I stack the rest. The bike is a multiplier; rest is the floor. Skip the rest, the multiplier goes negative. That is the lesson I learned the hard way the year I tried to ride through a Whinstone build cycle without stepping off the gas.
July through September: race the segment, ride the long ride
The segment gets attempted in earnest. Conditions change weekly. New year cycling PRs need patience here — most segment attempts fail, the wind is wrong, the legs are heavy, the camera battery dies. The point is to keep showing up. Eventually the day shows up too.
Long rides also get longer. Once a month, a 100-plus-mile day. Twice a year, an everesting attempt or a comparable big ride. Those rides are how the volume target gets met without the body falling apart in October.
October through December: protect the year
The temptation in fall is to chase a few extra miles to round up the totals. New year cycling PRs do not need that. Better to ride consistently, recover well, and finish the year clean. The big ride numbers come from the boring middle, not the rushed end.
The year ends quietly. Last December I logged 412 miles in three weeks of mostly easy rides. That was enough to finish the year strong without burning the next year before it started. New year cycling PRs only stick if the rider is still standing in January.
What new year cycling PRs taught me about the building work
There is a reason cycling and the building chapters of my career have always run together. Both reward the same instinct: show up, do the work, do not skip the boring part. New year cycling PRs are the same kind of long-arc commitment as building a 700-megawatt site or an AI Factory campus. You do not get there by sprinting. You get there by riding.
Most of my best business decisions over the last fifteen years got made on the bike. The bike is where the calendar quiets down enough to think. New year cycling PRs are partly an excuse to spend more time in that quiet. The faster splits are nice. The thinking is what the year is actually for.
Two things the bike does that the office does not
Two things the bike does that the office does not. First, it forces a feedback loop with no audience. Either the climb went faster or it did not. There is no narrative trick to dress it up. New year cycling PRs are honest in a way that work goals rarely are. Second, the bike makes you negotiate with your body. The body negotiates back. That is good practice for negotiating with anything else.
Tools and gear that show up in every new year cycling PRs cycle
I am not a gearhead. I do not chase marginal gains. But there are a few things on the bike every season that earn their keep. New year cycling PRs do not require expensive equipment, but they do require equipment that does not get in the way.
- Pinarello — the frame I have ridden longest. The fit is everything; the brand is downstream.
- Insta360 X5 — bar-mounted on long rides; lets me revisit the road later from any angle.
- Strava — the year-end review is the source of truth for new year cycling PRs.
- FasCat / CoachCat AI — the structured plan that moves FTP. (I am an investor; the coaching is theirs.)
- Shadow — not gear, but the dog runs the dirt-road portions and shows up in the year-end totals more than people think.
Why the bike does not need to be the most expensive on the ride
Half the riders I respect are on bikes that cost half what mine did. The other half are on bikes that cost twice what mine did. New year cycling PRs do not care about MSRP. They care whether you ride. The bike that earns the year is the bike you actually take out, in any weather, on a Tuesday morning at 5:30. That bike can cost $1,500 or $15,000.
A 2026 example: the new year cycling PRs I am chasing this year
Specifics, since the framework is only useful with concrete numbers. This year my new year cycling PRs are:
- Volume: 12,000 miles. Up from last year’s 11,200. About a 7 percent margin, accounting for a heavier work calendar around the Savrn AI Factory milestones.
- Fitness: FTP 285 watts (currently 268). The block runs April through June with FasCat structured plans.
- Terrain: the local 4-mile climb. Last year’s PR was 14:42. This year’s target is 14:00 flat.
I will check back in December. New year cycling PRs at this site are public-facing on purpose. If I miss them, the homepage stats will reflect it. If I hit them, the homepage stats will reflect that too. Either way, the bike is the honest part of the year.
Where new year cycling PRs fit on chadeverettharris.com
Cycling content lives at /dispatches/ for the ride logs and at the homepage for the canonical year-to-date stats. The current numbers are always pulled from the homepage; this post is a framework piece, not a stat-tracking piece.
For everything else — the AI infrastructure work, the Whinstone press archive, the Savrn AI Factory framing — start at /story/. The bike and the build run together. New year cycling PRs are the cycling-side artifact of that pairing.
Updated: 2026-05-10