The Floyd Landis Controversy

I have to confess that I was a little dismayed when I read about Landis' A sample testing positive after stage 17 of the Tour de France. Part of my dismay I think was due to how the headlines and lead couple sentences read.

cyclingnews.com:
"UCI Reports One Tour Positive: The UCI has announced that there was one case of an "adverse analytical finding following an anti-doping test carried out at the Tour de France 2006." That means that one rider has had his A sample test positive for a banned substance." {note: of course this isn't what the result means at all.}

velonews.com:
"UCI says Tour 'A' Test Comes up Positive: Anti-doping tests conducted during the recently completed 93rd Tour de France have turned up an "adverse analytical finding," the UCI confirmed Wednesday."

More dismay came from the reactions of those who are part of this great sport, most of whom seemed to have decided that whoever the rider was, they are guilty.

" "It's a catastrophe, a real disaster," said Quickstep manager Patrick Lefévère. "We have to wait for the result of the counter-analysis, but most of the times it is the same as the first test. Some will never learn; these sorts of people kill the sport of cycling. They refused to let Astana start in the Tour - now, it's time that the UCI reconsider Phonak. Eight or nine positives in three years - that can't be coincidence anymore." (Sporza)"

"Erik Breukink, Rabobank team director: "It's a black time for cycling; this is dramatic. The Tour started badly, and now we can erase the winner, too. Was he that desperate after stage 16? It resembles an everything-or-nothing move. Actually, it doesn't surprise me that he got caught after stage 17. His ride to Morzine was exceptional." (Sporza)"

" German Udo Bölts, who used to be Jan Ullrich's domestique at Team Telekom, is afraid that the sport is facing his biggest challenge yet. "Cycling had the noose around its neck and the Landis case pulled it tight," he told Cyclingnews."

And so on. Granted there were comments that showed restraint and indicated that we won't know anything until the 'B' sample is tested, but it seemed that the most prevalent feeling was "He's guilty, and my how it makes thigns look bad for the rest of us."

When you start actually looking at what the test showed and what it actually means, all of the above seems to be very premature at best. There is a great article on the testing for testosterone to be found here.

More interesting information can be found here.

Basically it amounts to the fact that the testing protocol used in this particular case isn't a very good one as far as actually showing that someone has used steroids or other artificial versions of testosterone. When you combine that with the fact that using artificial testosterone at that point in the race would have been meaningless as far as performance goes, and the fact that Landis had been tested several times before that stage and two times after that stage and apparently none of them showed positive, I think the likelihood of Landis actually having used a banned substance is pretty slim.

Chances are, though I hope I am wrong, the 'B' sample will come back positive (especially if they use the same test and not the more expensive and accurate one), after which he will appeal to CAS and get the ruling overturned after showing his normal T/E ratio is higher than the testing limit or that there is a natural physiological reason for the high reading (ie the thyroid problem he is being medicated for). But that will be months down the road and the damage will have been done to his reputation.

Return of PowerTap

I was very, very, very, very pleased when my PowerTap unit came back from Wisconsin on Tuesday. Of course, it was after my ride, but still, it came back. I wasted no time in putting a tire and cassette back onto it and putting it back on the bike so it would be all set for Wednesday's ride.

I confess I was a little concerned about the numbers I would see when I got back out on the road with it. Even though I hadn't had any troubles or odd readings with it when I first got it, I wondered if maybe the torque sensor had been bad all along so that what I thought were accurate readings weren't really so accurate. Well, that fear was soon allayed when I saw the familiar numbers right in the range I expected to see them in.

One thing I was definitely looking forward to doing was checking actual normalized power against what my estimate would have been based on using the formulas with average HR that I had come up with while the PT was in the shop. I've gotten two rides in since I got the PT back and the results of the comparison make me fairly confident that the TSS scores I was using the estimated normalized power to generate were pretty accurate. On Wednesday's ride, my HR averaged 131bpm which, using the best of the four formulas I've set up, gives an estimated NPower of 245W. My actual NPower for that ride was 256W, so the estimate was a bit low, but not all that bad, about 4-5%. On my Thursday ride, my average HR was 135bpm, giving me an estimate of 256W NPower, compared to an actual NPower of 243W. So again, about a 4-5% difference, this time in the other direction. So while the formulas I was using are not entirely accurate, I think they are likely close enough to use as a way of judging TSS to keep tabs on training load.

Thursday's ride was sort of painful actually. I totally misjudged how much fluid to take in and as a result I bonked pretty hard at the base of the major climb of the day. It was in the mid 80's and quite humid and as a result I was sweating profusely. I felt pretty good until I got to the bottom of the climb, about 2.5 hours/45 miles into the ride. I was putting out my usual average endurance range wattage, around 221W average. For the next 20 minutes/5.5 miles I only averaged ~160W, and that included going up a 1.5mile long 6-7% hill. I was able to stop at a mini-mart and get some fluid and sugars into me and that seemed to get me going again, at least enough to get me home at a reasonable pace. After the refueling stop, I covered 6.5 miles in 26 minutes and averaged 218W, so right back up where I was for most of the ride.

I've also been concerned lately that I may be getting a bit overtrained. My body weight and composition has been pretty odd lately, jumping around quite a bit. While part of this could be due to changes in diet, as I'm finding it a challenge to stay disciplined in that area lately, having a number of shifts in body weight of more than a pound, especially when it is an upward jump of 2 lbs, is a little disconcerting. Also, I've been looking at my ATL and CTL figures and am starting to feel that they are getting higher than is really good for me. Even including yesterday's day off the bike completely, my ATL is right at 140. This is the equivalent of doing a 1:24:00 time trial every day for the past 10 days. My CTL is at 111, which is equivalent to doing 1:07:00 time trials every day for the past 45 days. Well, they may not be exactly equivalent but those are the consistent efforts that would give the same scores.

So given the relatively high values I'm seeing in ATL and CTL and given the oddity of my body weight changes and inability to maintain the eating style I've followed for the last year makes me wonder if I'm putting too much stress on my body from training. Luckily, I'm almost at the end of a training block and going in to a recovery week which will be followed by a peaking period before my main goal event of the year, a 137 mile single day ride. That is roughly equivalent to the longer stages of the Tour de France this year, being about 221 km. Granted, I won't be completing it in the 5:36:14 that Robbie McEwen took to finish stage 2 (223km), but my goal is to make it in under 8 hours of rolling time.

Over the next couple of weeks I should be able to cut my TSS back a fair bit and hopefully that will take care of my feeling like I'm edging into overtraining territory. In fact, today I'm supposed to be doing cruising intervals (or OverUnders if you prefer), but I think I'm just going to do an endurance ride and try to keep a moderate pace. Luckily it is not so hot or humid today, near as I can tell from inside anyway.

Another record ride and some messing around with the idea of the TM

Today was pretty much perfect weather for a nice long bike ride. Sunny, warm but not too warm, and low humidity. It was actually a little chilly when I set out this morning, so much so that I had on leg warmers, arm warmers and my wind vest. In fact, it was only 61 degrees when I started, although it did get up to 88 by the end of my ride, giving me an average temperature of 78. Compare this to my last long ride on 7/3, when the temperature averaged 82 with a max of 90 and min of 70, and much higher humidty.

My plan for the day was to do about 6 hours of rolling time, hopefully covering 108 miles or so. I had selected for a route one that would cover a good portion of my goal ride coming up in about a month. This would give me a good chance to see what the terrain would be like, at least over the first 30 miles and the last 50. The last 50 are pretty tough actually, with what I would call a Cat 3 (maybe even Cat 2 considering it is close to the end of the day) climb, being about 12km (7miles or so) and averaging 3.2% with a max gradient of 13.3%. So not bad for starting after 82 miles of riding.

I really didn't figure I would have much problems finishing the loop I had planned in the time I had allowed. My main goal was to work on my climbing, trying to keep my speed up and stay relaxed during the longer climbs, and to take in enough energy so I wouldn't bonk before the end of the ride.

For the climbing goal, once I was warmed up, I generally tried to keep in the middle chainring on the climbs without letting my HR get too high. I would rest my hands on the bar tops letting my fingers touch in what the Silva Mind Control Method calls the three-finger technique. It is something I have been working on off the bike as part of my almost daily meditations. I have basically programmed myself to relax and slow my mind down when I touch my fingers together in a specific way. I decided to try it on the bike during the climbs to help keep my body relaxed, letting me put more energy into my legs. It seemed to work really well when I remembered to use it, which actually was most of the time. Not only was I able to maintain a nice steady rhythm with a relatively high cadence (80+ on the climbs), but my breathing actually stayed under control even when it was getting up to zone 4 and nearing zone 5a. While today wasn't a day when I trying to go as fast as possible, I still was able to maintain a 13.7mph average on the long Cat 3 (or 2) climb I mentioned above. I can remember when my average would have been well below that, maybe even as low as 11mph.

On the nutrition side of things, I knew I simply had to eat and drink more than I had on my last two long rides when I bonked. I started out with 60 oz of sports drink, 20 oz of water and 3 powerbars. I planned on stopping somewhere in the middle of the ride to refuel, probably in Stowe. I basically drank as often as I felt like or every 5 minutes, whichever was more, and ate 1/2 a powerbar every 30 minutes. My initial food and drink actually lasted me 3.5 hours, until I got to Montpelier and stopped at the shop where I had bought my bike last year. I figured I could get gels and stuff there, which I did [3 gels and a Clif bar], but I wasn't able to get anything to drink, so I had to stop outside of town at a mini-mart where I got 2 quarts of Gatorade, a coke and a packet of skittles candy. I drank the coke while I took a short break and ate some of the skittles and one of the gels. Actually, I had taken one of the gels back at the cycling shop. Once I was back on the road, I again tried to keep to the same drinking and feeding schedule (ie drinking every 5 minutes, eating every 30) for the rest of the ride. This worked pretty well I think as I never did feel like I had run out of energy. In fact, on the last 1.66 miles of the ride, which is a 4% climb, I was able to keep in my middle chainring and maintain an average speed of 11.4mph, giving me a time of just about 9 minutes, one of my best times for this part of my route, despite the nearly 6 hours of saddle time at that point.

The only jarring part of the ride was when my rear tire caught a piece of crushed stone on a descent during the last hour of the ride, flatting.

Now I need to plan my long ride for next week, which I'm hoping to cover 120 miles in roughly 7 hours. This should put me in good shape for my goal ride in a month.

This week I've also been trying to play around with the ideas talked about in Andrew Coggan's posts about the TM on the Wattage list. He had given a link to where someone who is beta testing it has posted his season so far, and from it I got some idea of how it works. Well, at least how I think it works. It looks like you compare a 10 day average of your TSS scores to a 45 day average, and the difference is you Training Stress Balance. When your long term average (CTL) is higher than your short term average (ATL) your TSB is positive, and vice versa. Supposedly, when you have a very positive TSB it is an indication that you are peaking and should have good results in events. I'm not sure I have that worked out exactly right, but it will be interesting to follow over time to see how it correlates. I'm looking forward to when you can actually download the TM from cyclingpeaks.com and have the actual tool to help control your training intensity. In the graph, the white bars show when my TSB is negative while the green ones show when it is positive. The first 'green' section occured just after my recovery week towards the end of June and my highest TSB was the day before my first century ride, during which I more than achieved the goals I had set. Hopefully when my next goal date arrives, the peaking process will give me a high TSB (maybe even higher than my most recent high of 20), which will hopefully mean I can achieve my goals for that ride as well.

7/10: Setting a new LTHR

Sometimes you just need to change your plans on the fly. I had thought about doing another 100 mile ride today, but the weather forecast was sounding all that positive. Well, at least not enough so I felt comfortable in going any great distance from home for fear of being caught in a thunderstorm. So I thought I might do 6 or 7 laps of one of my training routes that is nearby the house and still get the 100 miles in. Well, after one lap, the idea of doing 5 more of the same thing wasn't too appealing, so I changed my plans, moving on to another, longer route, to add on some miles. I was still thinking 100 mile day though. As I approached a turning point in this second route, I decided I wouldn't go for the 100 mile day, but instead do a spontaneous 30 minute TT. This proved to have a rather surprising result. I had been riding for about 2:40 at the point where I started the TT, so I definitely was well warmed up. Over the 30 minutes of the TT I averaged 158bpm HR and 21.1 mph. What I wouldn't have given to have my PT to have seen what my power output was for this ride. Now from what I understand, if you take the last 20 minutes of a 30 minute TT, the average HR you have is a good approximation of your LTHR. In this case, my average HR in the last 20 minutes of the TT was 160bpm. This is 9bpm higher than what I had been using as my LTHR, based on my highest average HR to that point. This is a pretty big jump, especially when you consider that now my 5c zone is 170+bpm. I don't think I've seen my HR above 170 in a year, since I first started riding. So I may need to drop my LTHR some, or just ignore it once I get the PT back. At any rate, I was very surprised that my HR was that high throughout the TT. IN fact, it continued to rise throughout the TT, even though I tried to keep it down around what I thought was my LTHR before this test.

I also did some figuring with my previous data, trying to come up with a way to estimate my average normalized power based on my HR. I need this so I have some reasonable numbers to put in to WKO+ when I do manual workout entries since I don't have a PT to download each day now. So I created a new chart showing average normalized power and average HR for each of my workouts. I took this data into Excel and using trendlines tried to find a formula that had the best approximation (r^2 value) to the data. Oddly enough the two best formulas I found, each with an R^2 of about .84 were:

NPow=2.4573*AvgHR - 76.987
and
NPow=.1389*(AvgHR^1.5335)

Now I know this isn't terribly accurate and HR can fluctuate for a variety of factors, but it does provide a bit confirmation in my data. My best estimate of LT power is 294W, which was done with 151bpm HR. When I look up this HR on a table I made to estimate power, the first formula gives me 282W and the second gives me 304W. If you average them together you get 293W, pretty danged close to the actual value. So, I think it is probably close enough to compute TSS values for my workouts until my PT comes back.

7/4: There is no joy in Danville, PowerTap has broken down

Well, today was sort of a bummer day. I was doing a recovery ride, resting up after my first real century yesterday, when I noticed my PT was giving some rather odd readings. How odd you may ask? Well how about showing ~2000W while coasting? Not a good thing. I did some testing and it looked like something was definitely going on with the torque sensor in the hub itself since the torque test mode was showing a neutral reading from the hub of 200+ when it should only be around 128 or so. It was high enough so that the computer offset couldn't actually offset it. I called Saris and confirmed that it was indeed a problem with the hub and the wheel would need to be returned to them for repair. So I packed it up and shipped it out. Guess that means I'll be back to going by HR for awhile until the wheel comes back. Ah well, at least the hub is still covered by warantee so all I have to pay is shipping to get it to them.

7/3: First Real Century

Well, I suppose I need to get caught up on my posts a bit. July 3rd saw my longest ride of the year, at that point anyway, being 101.1 miles covered in 5:38:57. The course was relatively flat, being less than 1% average gradient over the whole trip. There were a number of climbs however, averaging 3% gradient. My HAC4 software gives me some interesting data. One of the pieces it can give is how fast you gain elevation. On this ride, I averaged 5' per minute on the climbs. It also tracks how many climbs of greater than 50m are done during the course of the ride. On this ride there were 3 climbs that met that criteria.

On this ride I again 'bonked' a bit about 10 miles from the end of the ride. Once that happened, I was only able to maintain about 60% or less of my FT power output for any length of time. Definitely need to figure out the right nutrition/hydration strategy to overcome this if I am going to succed in my main goal ride of the year, an ~134 mile ride completed in 8 hours or less of rolling time.

Signs of Improvement

Taking a page from dude.abides, now that I have a couple months, or nearly so, of data from my PowerTap, I thought I would take a look at all the data and see if there has been any real improvement in my power output. Now granted, some of any improvement to be found could simply be the fact that I'm more consistent and more aware of what I'm doing and not necessarily all actual physical improvement. I think if there is improvement though, a good share of it is real, not an artifact of simply having the tools to measure the performance more accurately.

I decided to use 20 minute power as the data to really look at as it is a decently long time period but one that is short enough that I always get data for it on each of my rides, which is not the case for longer durations, especially those beyond 30 minutes.

When I save and display my data in CyclingPeaks, I use both normalized and average power. I have mean maximal graphs for both, and when I am looking at power information over the last 28 days, I use average power for intervals of less than 20 minutes and normalized power for intervals of 20 minutes or more. Given the fact that almost all of my rides are on hilly terrain, I think the normalized power gives a better picture of what I could do if given flat terrain.

So I exported the data into Excel and created a graph to show lines for normalized 20 minute power (the solid blue line), average 20 minute power (the solid pink line) as well as trend lines for each (dashed lines of the respective colors). I think this graph shows a couple interesting things. First off, there has been definite improvement in the nearly 2 months since I got my PowerTap. The trend line for my average power has gone from ~202W in early May to ~242W as of today, an improvement of 19.8% over May's figures. On normalized power, it has undergone a similar improvement, from ~222W to ~262W or an 18% improvement. It is also interesting to note that the gap between the trendlines has stayed pretty consistent, at approximatley 20W. It will be interesting to see if both trendlines continue to increase at similar rates, which to my mind would reinforce the usefulness of using normalized power.

Let's Talk about Intensity

Thursday and Friday this week saw me move into a somewhat different phase of my training. While I have been working on muscular endurance for the most part lately, my schedule now has me working on my power and anaerobic endurance, things I probably like least to work on, which probably indicates I need to work on it the most.

Thursday's workout were something called 'Crit Sprints' which I guess are suposed to mimic the repeated intense accelerations seen during a criterium race. My workout called for 3 sets of 3 sprints, 25 seconds in duration at my CP1 power (510W). The description says to do each sprint, recover until your heart rate gets back down to zone 2, then go again. After the third sprint in each set, you get 5 minutes recovery time. I didn't really get the hang of what I was doing until the second set, when I realized that the whole point was to go and go again without sufficient recovery time. These were extremely hard intervals that I felt definitely into the next day. This workout, which only lasted 1:12:00 had an IF of .875.

That was nothing compared to Friday's shortened workout. The whole workout was supposed to be 7-9 90 second anaerobic hill repeats where the first minute is done at CP6 power (340W) and then the last 30 seconds is an attack done standing at CP1 power (510W). THen I was supposed to go into 20 minutes at FTP (294W). By the end of the seventh interval, my legs were pretty well done and I'm not sure I could have done another 2 intervals even if I hadn't heard thunder off in the distance, signalling it was time to head for home. Since the hill I was doing the repeats on was fairly close to home, I was only able to get in 6 minutes at FTP. This workout was likely the hardest in terms of IF that I have done yet, partly due to the fact that there wasn't much length to it. This came in at an IF of .994, but only 80 TSS since it was only about 50 minutes in duration.

It did however produce an interesting power distribution graph. Note that there is a pretty large percentage of time where I was putting out 0 power, coasting back down the hill. In spite of that , I still put on around 293W of normalized power.

Even those these types of intervals are things that make me a bit uncomfortable, I know they are things I need to do to make me a better cyclists. And while I don't race currently, this is the sort of thing that can likely make the difference between a podium finish and not placing. Dang it. :)

Mid-Season Confidence Builder

Way back in January when I got started with CTS, I came up with three goals for my riding season this year. The first was to repeat my longest ride from last year, but improve the time significantly. The second was to complete a century ride, well actually 91 miles was the distance according to my mapping software, in less than 5:21:00. My last goal was to ride to Burlington (nearly anyway) and back in a single day, a round trip of roughly 134 miles.

My first goal I achieved everything I wanted, finishing the 65 miles in under my 3:41:00 goal time, but not quite my 3:30:00 stretch goal time, and I was able to keep to my pacing plan. Tuesday the 27^th I attempted my second goal, a 91 mile round trip from Lancaster, NH to Beecher Falls which is located on the Canadian border and back. Below is a table showing what my goals were for this ride and what my actual results were.

Goal Category	Goal	Actual
Distance	91 miles	93.284 miles
Rolling Time	5:21:00	4:56:45
Total Time	8:00:00	5:24:09
Weight	173 lbs	171 lbs

As you can see, I achieved all the aspects I had for this goal ride. In fact, if I had only traveled the 91 miles planned, it would have taken me only ~4:48:53, some 32 minutes faster than my planned time. If I had traveled a full 100 miles at my average speed it would have taken me 5:17:27, still inside my goal time but at a full 9 miles longer distance. Some of this success in meeting my goal I put down to the fact that I had never done a century ride before I set this mid-season goal, so I perhaps over-estimated its difficulty. This is really apparent by how much resting time I had allowed myself, a full 2.5 hours. As it was, if I had not had a mechanical issue early on in the ride, I would have only taken about 10 minutes total in two rest stops.

When I started out, I had a pretty solid plan for my pacing, based on having ridden a good share of this route 10 days before. I planned on sticking to my CP240 power, which is right around 220W for most of the ride, avoiding anything above CP60 (FTP) power on the climbs. In the last 20 miles or so I planned on still keeping to the 220W on the flats, but going after the hills, going at my CP6 (340W) on the longer climbs and CP1 (510W) on the shorter climbs (less than 30 seconds or so).

For the first 46.5 miles, I was dead on my pacing, averaging 223W and 21.1 mph. The only real ‘excitement’ in the first half of the ride was flatting my rear tire after only about 10 miles. This brought up a real quandary as I did not have a second spare tube and I had to decide whether to continue with the plan or to cut the ride short. I decided to continue on and hope for the best. As it turned out, I had no further mechanical issues.

Once I turned around and headed back south, I hit the real challenge of the ride, a wicked head wind. Even though the course is slightly downhill as you go south, my speed really suffered. Over this last 46.5 miles, my average speed dropped to 17.1mph, which under the circumstances I’m happy with. My average power dropped to 211W, but that was due more to my misjudging my pacing than anything else. Following my plan, once I got to the last 20 miles or so, I went on the attack on the rolling hills between Bloomfield and Lancaster. Over this section, which has most of the climbing involved on this ride, I had my average speed up to 18.9 mph and 232W. As a better comparison, covering this same terrain going north, I averaged 227W and 20.1mph, which indicates the effect of the wind as I was putting out more watts but seeing less speed, even though most of this section is tree lined and the wind didn’t have quite the same impact as on the open sections that were flatter. The problem came when I bonked about 9 miles out from the end of the ride and could no longer even maintain my CP240 power. They say that when you bonk you can only go at about 60% intensity and my experience during this ride supports that. From where I figure I bonked, I was only able to maintain 170w average power, or 57.8% of my FTP. Try as I might, I just couldn’t lift the power for any length of time, even on what climbs there were left in the ride. Luckily there weren’t many of those and the course was basically flat, maybe a little downhill over this last 9 miles, so I was able to average 16.3mph.

It is interesting to compare this ride’s power output with that of the group ride I did 10 days ago covering much of the same terrain. Below is a graph of my Mean Maximal power for both rides. On that group ride I couldn’t decide whether it was a hard ride or not. Looking at the graph, you can see that while from about 30 seconds to 22 minutes, I had a higher maximal power line than this ride, on either side of that I was putting out more wattage. Also, on the group ride I had an IF .744 while on this ride I had one of .76, so the century was slightly harder and about an hour and a half longer.

So in the end, I was very happy with my results, having achieved all the goals I had set for myself, and surpassed them. I also learned that I do not yet have the ability to do hard attacks for more than 40 minutes after riding for 4 hours at a constant challenging pace. Some day I’ll have to revisit this course and ride with much the same plan, except hold my attacks for the last 10 miles and see if I can hold the nearly 250W that I had for normalized power during the time I was doing the attacks on the hills. Would be interesting to see what affect, if any, that has on my overall time and average speed. This also gives me food for thought on pacing for my goal ride, which will take a couple hours longer over a route that has much more climbing. I’m thinking I’ll definitely not want to do much attacking on that ride, at least not until I’m only 10 miles from home.