Still Going Strong

Well, I'm still going strong (relatively speaking), and am about half way through my 3rd week of training. I've got a pretty good routine down now. Mondays and Thursdays I do longer rides over a route that is a bit easier than my out and back (just a little bit easier though), and I do some FastPedal intervals on the flatter part of it.

On Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays I pretty much do my out and back route, though I had to change that a bit this week as they are doing paving on a section of that. The new route is again a bit easier but I can get my time in without too much loss in intensity.

My goal for this week is to put in a total of 6 hours in the saddle. The first week of training it was 5 hours, last week was 5.5, so I'm on track as far as increasing by 10% per week. Next week is a recovery week so I'll likely drop back down to 4.5-5 hours, then go back up the next week.

My plan is to only increase up to about 10 hours per week max. I don't want to go quite as whole hog on cycling as I did last year and burn out again. Ten hours per week should be plenty, especially if I add intensity rather than duration to keep the training load inching up. I don't plan on doing as many 4,5,6+ hour rides this year, focusing rather on something along the lines of 3 hours as my longest rides. Hopefully by the end of the season I'll be fast enough to do one of my longer loops from last year in that time (or a tad longer).

Time will tell.

Regards.

The Dangers of Chasing

I'm not talking here about chasing down the leaders in a bike race as that can be a good thing.

The chasing I'm talking about here is the chasing of goals. A good example of what I mean is what can happen if you are cycle training without a powermeter but do have a heart rate monitor and are doing high intensity intervals. Since HR lags effort by a fair amount, you generally go out too hard in order to get your HR quickly into the zone you want and then have to ease up as your HR zooms up and out of the desired range. Quite often you'll ease up too much and your HR drops down out of the desired range and you end up repeating the cycle. On longer intervals you will likely eventually get zeroed in, but on short intervals you can just bounce around and not really get the workout you are trying for. The key is to learn what the right effort feels like and build up to it, rather than chase the number on the monitor.

I'm dealing with a similar "chasing" problem in my weight loss goal. Even though I said yesterday that I don't care too much about day to day weight, it does on some level bother me when it goes up or even just doesn't go down on consecutive days, which is what has happened the past 2 days. I now need to fight the urge to cut calories even more (I'm already working at -1000 calories per day [give or take]) even though another couple hundred per day wouldn't have that big an impact. But the urge is there since my logical brain says "well, if we didn't lose we must be eating too much, so eat less". If I give in and "chase" my weight, then I'm almost certain to lose too fast and cause other problems down the line.

Training today went well. I rode the same route as Monday, but managed it a bit faster, about 30 seconds over 74 minutes. Would have been even better if I hadn't had to walk my bike for about 30 seconds to keep it between me and a couple dogs who came out to bark at me. They didn't come out into the road, thankfully, but they did get my adrenalin going. Of course, it was on a climb where at this point they would have caught me easy.

Regards.

Rest Day Reflections

The other day I mentioned that I don't generally get too worked up about day to day weight changes. I do track them, but I don't worry too much about them...unless and until they start to go up continuously.

What I do look at is weekly trends. I actually will average out my weight for a calendar week and that is the figure that I use to get an idea of how much I've actually lost so far. CyclingPeaks WKO does a similar thing I believe when you graph out average weight on a weekly training graph.

Today is a good example of why I do this. Yesterday I weighed in at 236.4lbs, I rode for 50 minutes (which was according to design) burning 552C (according to my PowerTap). I did my usual Tuesday stuff, and in fact was a bit more active as I did some cleaning and laundry as well. According to BeNutrifit, I consumed ~2152C while burning a total of 3317C, for a balance of -1165 or about .3 lbs worth (assuming a pound is 3500C).

When I checked the scale this morning (and I weigh myself at roughly the same time each day), it read 237lbs. So rather than losing the .3 lbs you would expect given the calorie balance, I actually gained .6 lbs.

So, did I cheat and not enter stuff into BeNutriFit? Nope, everything I ate went into it.
Did I goof on portions and what not? Its possible, but not likely enough so that I'd be 3200C off.

It gets even more confusing when you look at last week for comparison. Last Tuesday I rode the same amount, consumed nearly the same amount of calories (2062C), burned nearly the same amount of calories (3296C) and had a calorie balance of ~1234C. However, I showed a weight loss on Wednesday morning of 1.2 lbs (240.8 to 239.6).

So two days, nearly the same numbers but one showed a big weight loss and another showed a substantial weight gain. So obviously there is something affecting day to day weight that isn't the food you eat. It could be how much fluid you drank, which I don't (but probably should) track, or it could be something else that I can't even think of.

The weekly averages though take care of these seemingly random ups and downs and give a better measure of my weight control efforts, and so far this is looking positive.

Week 1: 242.9
Week 2: 239.7 (loss of 3.2lbs, which is a bit higher than I'm shooting for)
Week 3: 236.7 (loss of 3 lbs so far, though there are still 4 days left in the week so this might change up or down, and again is a bit higher than my 2lbs per week goal, but this early on I'll take it)

Regards.

Longest Ride of the Season (so far)

Today is Monday, and for me that means long ride day. Monday's I don't have to go to work in the evenings, so I use it for my long rides so that if something happens and I get stranded I won't miss work.

Granted, these days it doesn't make all that much difference since I don't go very far from home yet, but last year, long days were often 100 or more miles so getting stuff halfway would be a real problem if I had to be back for work.

The route I took today is one of my favorite loops. It is just over 16 miles, so for now it makes a good "long" ride and when I'm in shape and lighter it makes a good recovery ride. Since it is a loop, I can take it two ways. The way I took today has a long gently rising slope for most of the first half (well, after a 2 mile descent to the flats), then climbs fairly steadily for the next 5 miles, then has a half mile to a mile flat, then goes into up/down until I get home (the last 4 miles or so). There are a couple steep climbs, but they are relatively short and the long climb is pretty moderate.

If you reverse the loop, you get a different feel altogether. You start off in the hilly up/down terrain, with a 5 - 6 minute climb of about 6%. You get out of the up/down stuff after about 6 miles and then you start a fairly gradual descent or flat for the next 8 miles or so. There are a couple steeper drops in parts. Once you get to the end of the flat, you go back to a long climb of about 2 miles. It starts off going up over what we call Banzai Bridge, which has a steep section of about 12%. Luckily it is short, but it still can hurt. Then it is fairly steady climb until about a half mile from my house where you get two more steeper sections. If you are in a car, this steady part will seem flat, but you definitely know it isn't when you are pedaling it. Even when I was in shape in the early part of last year I didn't like doing this section as it always seemed hard. It wasn't until towards the end of the season that it actually seemed easy.

So this was my route today and gave me my longest ride of the season. I had actually done this route earlier in the year (3/13) when I had tried to get back on the bike, but that was on my mountain bike, which in many ways is much easier (lower gearing). Took longer too.

So a lot of things to feel positive about today:
Longest Ride of the season both in distance and time.
Fastest average speed of the season, though I think this is more because of terrain than anything else.
Highest 5 sec power ever (about 8% better than last year in fact)
And, I've lost 5.8lbs since last Monday. I generally don't follow date to date weight loss, but I'll go into that tomorrow. For today, I'm just happy that I've lost nearly 6 lbs. That is about 2.4% decrease in body weight from where I started. That's not sustainable by any means, but it is a nice start.

Regards.

Recovery Day (5/6)

Didn't get a chance to post this yesterday.

Was a recovery day today. Given where I live and my current fitness level, I can't do a recovery ride on the road if I don't want to drive my bike somewhere to start off. I did that some last year, but I always found it strange to drive somewhere to start biking.

Anyway, I did my 30 minute recovery ride on the trainer. Set it up outside and did 30 minutes trying to stay just in the active recovery zones. I was 100% in the recovery zones for both power (ok, did 9 seconds in endurance zone) and HR, which means I was taking it almost absurdly easy, which is what I've read you are supposed to do. Power output averaged 110W and my HR average was 108bpm, so pretty low.

I did work up a sweat though, and I tried to keep a higher cadence to smooth my pedal stroke out. I was also able to see my reflection in a window so I could see what my pedal stroke looked like and that helped (I think) me to smooth things out.

Since I started back cycling this week, I also started tracking what I eat. This is sort of an obsessive thing to do in a way, but I think I have a better chance of success losing the weight I want to lose if I can see approximately what my calorie balance is each day. I say approximate because it will never be 100% and I'm likely underestimating calories burned since I don't put in everything I do, just the major stuff (work and exercise).

I use a great (at least I think it is) program to track this stuff. It is called BeNutriFit, and it has a ton of features I really like. You can set up multiple users, customize target percentages for carbohydrates, protein and fats (which if you've read Chris Carmichael's book on sports nutrition, can be important), determine your RMR, calories burned for activities and look at numerous reports. You can add new activities if you want and, the thing I love about it, can set up new foods. Not just new food items you get at the store, but you can actually input a recipe, tell the program how many servings it makes and it will tell you the nutrition information for each serving.

This program really lets me get a handle on things an allows me to plan out my meals and snacks while still keeping a handle on my total calorie intake. Really though, for me, losing weight and gaining weight are relatively easy. Takes effort, but isn't that difficult. The hard part is keeping weight at a healthy level.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with that this time around.

Regards.

Week One Complete

Well, not quite. I still have a recovery ride to do tomorrow to actually complete the first week of training since I got turned back on to cycling.

It has been a mixed week. In some ways it is discouraging to struggle on the road now when the same performance would have been an easy recovery ride a year ago. Heck, actually, my recovery rides were generally faster. Looking at my last year's data, I find a recovery ride at the end of July where I had the following data:

Entire workout (155 watts):
Duration: 1:10:16
Work: 647 kJ
TSS: 35.5 (intensity factor 0.553)
Norm Power: 170
VI: 1.1
Distance: 15.954 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 528 155 watts
Heart rate: 68 121 103 bpm
Cadence: 29 215 96 rpm
Speed: 0 35.6 13.6 mph
Pace 1:41 0:00 4:25 min/mi
Hub Torque: 0 385 99 lb-in
Crank Torque: 0 1185 148 lb-in

Compare that to today's ride:
Duration: 49:45
Work: 562 kJ
TSS: 74 (intensity factor 0.949)
Norm Power: 219
VI: 1.15
Distance: 10.4 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 1088 190 watts
Heart rate: 88 155 136 bpm
Cadence: 29 170 75 rpm
Speed: 0 38.8 12.5 mph
Pace 1:33 0:00 4:48 min/mi
Hub Torque: 0 611 150 lb-in
Crank Torque: 0 950 219 lb-in

So, I went further, faster and with less power output less than a year ago than I did today. What a difference 64lbs can make.

But, all is not doom and gloom. On the "moral" side, just the fact that I'm back to riding consistently is a victory, even if my overall performance is way down. Even the performance side isn't all on the worse side, as the graph below illustrates.

The solid yellow line is mean maximal power for this season while the dashed line is for last year. The vertical black line is just to mark off where the two lines cross. So in durations less than 7 seconds, my max power output is actually higher this year than last. This is just raw power, not watts per kilogram of weight, but still, it is better than last year.

I still have a long ways to go, but at least I feel I've made a start.

Regards.

The Number's Trap

Was another windy training day today, with the wind again being 16-26mph from the NW. I tried a little different route today, the intent being to keep duration roughly the same as yesterday but cut a bit on the intensity. I really don't want to get overtrained again.

My plan didn't work so well however, as my 34 minutes outbound took me almost 36 minutes to come back rather than the 22-23 I expected. Well, planned I should say. Problem was, part of the outbound route was an extended downhill section which I of course had to climb back up to get home. By the last climb of the day (the steepest, of course), my legs were definitely feeling it.

On the plus side though (actually it was all plus side, but still), I did get my longest ride in, 1h 9min, and my longest distance, 14.5 miles, fastest average speed, 12.4mph. I also decided that the data I've been seeing would put my threshold power higher, so I've bumped it from 220W to 231W. Some of the data seems to indicate it should be higher still, but I don't think the number of samples I have are enough to warrant that big a jump (to around 260W). It'd be nice if it were true, but I know I can't sustain that yet.

And this leads me to the title of this post, the number's trap, or rather, the trap that numbers can be if you get too focused on them. There are likely any number of traps that numbers can place in ones cycling path, but the one I'm thinking of is when "success" appears to stop. By this I mean the things that I'm currently concerned with: weight loss, threshold power, personal best power at various durations, average speed and so on.

Here at the beginning, most of these things will be steadily showing improvement with weight going down, power and speed going up. The trap in getting caught up in this is what happens when they stop. With weight loss a goal, how do you react when you don't lose weight or perhaps gain back some? How do you deal with your power/speed plateauing or decreasing?

I know last year I had to deal with these, and I don't think I was really prepared to. When my weight didn't keep dropping when I felt I "needed/wanted" to be lighter I got a sense of "why bother". By that time I was edging into overtraining when didn't help matters any. Also, when you are losing lots of weight, you get constant reinforcement about "what a good boy you are". Once you've lost the weight and people are used to that, you don't get those compliments any more.

So I think that is something I need to start thinking about now, here at the beginning. I need to realize that "success" is eventually going to be just to keep going and not give up, and to realize that just because I think I should be a certain weight or be able to go a certain speed or whatever the number is, it doesn't mean that I should. There will come a point where further "improvement" will have a cost greater than the rewards of achieving it. Knowing when you get to that point should be an important part of any training plan.

Regards.

Windy Day

Once again it was windy today. Maybe a bit more than it was on Tuesday. To make matters worse (better?), the wind was generally west-ish, which is the direction I head out each day which is also generally uphill. Oh well, that will just make me stronger.

The wind did slow me down a bit compared to Tuesday's ride, but I still went 3 minutes longer on the outbound leg, which is my plan, and ended up going about 7% further distance wise, so not too bad.

I'm finding that for awhile I think my biggest limiter is going to be upper body fitness. In some ways I feel my rides more in my hands, arms and shoulders than I do in my legs. So I may need to start doing some upper body strength work to help out there.

Don't get me wrong, the legs get aching, especially on Dole Hill (1 mile long, 5.4% average gradient, 8.6% max) or the sharp steep climb just into Danville (.76 miles long, average gradient of 3.6% with a max of 8.3%). Coming back there is a steeper climb, but by then I'm heading east so I have a bit of the wind helping (.6miles, 4.6% average gradient, 12% max).

That is the sort of terrain we have around here. A climbs which make it tough for an out of shape (relatively speaking) cyclist to take it easy and build endurance miles, but too short to really do climbing workouts effectively on. So outbound today I averaged 1.3% grade with a 10% max while after turning around and heading back I had a -1.3% grade (naturally) but still had a 12% max gradient climb. So no escaping it.

On the bright side, I once read that if you live in a hilly area you don't really need to worry about interval training as the terrain will take care of that for you. That is sort of my plan for now until I take some weight off and get some endurance back. Just ride a bit further every day (about 10% longer on the outbound leg) and let the terrain dictate the effort. In today's ride for example I had 10 "intervals" where I was 90% or higher than my threshold power for a minute or more. The average was 1:50 in the interval with an average of 2:00 rest between them (rest being that my power dropped below 90% of threshold, which isn't really resting in all cases).

Regards.

Rest Day

Today is a rest day, so no riding.

This is sometimes the hardest part of cycling, at least for me. I get so into wanting to ride, that if I didn't know better, I'd ride every day. In fact, when I started 2 years ago, I think for awhile I did ride every day.

The furthest back I have training logs for is August 1, 2005. I was using a program called Biker Gold which I have since lost the key for, having had a computer issue since I got it. Luckily I had moved most of the data over to a spreadsheet I had built based on Chris Carmichael's training diary. In that week I rode every day, totaling 8 hours of riding time and a whopping 92.7 miles. It wasn't until the Aug 21st that I show my first rest day. Assuming that I hadn't taken one in July, which is a good bet, that was nearly 7 weeks of riding 7 days a week. I do show a couple recovery days where I didn't ride much, but I was on the bike every day. And the next week I was back to 7 days straight.

I think I know better now, and my plan is to ride 6 days (one of them a recovery day) and have one rest day. Because of my work schedule, Wednesday is the best choice for a rest day and Sunday is my recovery day. As I don't work on Monday's they are usually the days I take my "long" rides, although for awhile they won't be any different (or at least not very different) from my other days.

Looking back at this old data has proven sort of interesting. I am definitely stronger today than I was back then, even being overweight and out of shape. I know the routes I rode back then are the same I'm riding now, and even though I'm 21 lbs heavier than I was in the week of August 1st 2005, I'm riding roughly .6 mph faster. Some of that difference is probably the bike, but I'd like to think not all of it is. Also, that August 1st week, I had been riding longer and longer for 3 to 4 weeks, and was riding as long as 2 hours (ok, 1:52, but still) and routinely over an hour. I haven't done a ride over an hour this time around yet as I don't feel I have the stamina for it. Hopefully by the end of this week that will change (maybe even tomorrow), but it will take a few weeks before I think I'll be ready for a 2 hour ride, even at the pace I've been going. Well, at the speed. The power output isn't really all that bad with Np being around 220W on my last ride. Granted, thats about 30W less than my average rides toward the end of last season, but all things considered, not too bad.

Also got a box of stuff from Bike Nashbar today. Over the weekend I ordered some spare tubes, tires and some (unfortunately) larger cycling clothes. Hopefully I won't need to larger stuff for very long, but I wanted to have more than 1 set of bib shorts that fit. Will have to try them out tomorrow.

A little further every day

The road to my "recovery" continues. I've been trying to be a little careful in how I'm doing things this year, as I don't want to push too hard and go overboard and get burned out, but I want to push hard enough to see benefits from the training.

The area where I live is fairly hilly with hardly a flat spot for miles. The hills aren't particularly long (generally less than a mile) or particularly steep (6-7% max for most of them, with a couple exceptions), but at my current fitness level they are enough to push me way above what I figure my threshold power is.

Right now my "training plan" is just to increase the outbound leg of my ride (which at this point is generally uphill), letting the return leg take care of itself. So every couple of days (actually, after a rest or recovery day) I'll increase the outbound leg by around 10%. So over the last week it went from 25 minutes, to 28 minutes to 31 minutes today. It generally works out that it will take me 2/3 of the outbound time to get back home, so my ride times have been ~40 minutes, 45 minutes and today was 51 minutes. These may not sound like long rides, but for a 240 lb 42 year old, they mark a good start.

One thing that is different this year from when I started riding two years ago is that I'm on a road bike (as compared to a 2x as heavy mountain bike) with a PowerTap power meter. So right from the start I'll have downloadable information on power, speed, and heart rate. When I started two years ago, I didn't have any of that. In fact, I rode the first couple of weeks without even a heart rate monitor. Over time I got a HR monitor then a cycling computer which were valuable though they didn't allow for downloads. Then last winter I bought a HAC4 cycling computer which is downloadable, and even tracked elevation. So now I could see what my HR did at certain points in the ride and what the profile looked like. Almost a year ago I got my PowerTap wheel and I love it. It is easy to get caught up in the numbers and forget the fun, which I'm definitely prone to do, but it is very nice to have an objective view of whether or not you are improving.

Unfortunately my HAC4 has since died, but I can live without the course profiles, especially since, if I'm really curious, I have most of the local rides on file so I can just take a look.

So for now, I'm doing well on my goals: ride a bit more each week and watch what I eat. Last week I cut out the candy bars and cinnamon rolls that had become a habit over the winter. This week I'm trying to cut out chips, another thing I'm prone to overdo on. Its been fairly easy so far, and I'm hoping it will continue. I'm hoping to lose a couple pounds per week for awhile, but I don't want to go too much faster than that (though it'd be nice to be rid of the weight) to avoid killing my performance.