Patrick's Fitness

Food combining as Paleo?

2011-09-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago, I found myself extremely overweight, at about 310 pounds. I had just moved back from Arizona and I was huge. I happened to come across a book titled "Food Combining For Health: Get Fit Eating Foods that Don't Fight" by Doris Grant and Jene Joice. This was the first time I had come across the idea of food combining, but it wouldn't be the last.

The premise seemed pretty straight forward. As the doctor, William Hay, who came up with this particular system wrote about 100 years ago, one should "eat only those things intended as food for man, in their natural state and only in the amount necessary for present need." So this cut out pretty much all processed foods, extra sugar and so forth.

The basics are simply that you do not eat concentrated carbohydrates with concentrated proteins in the same meal and meals of different character should be spaced out by about 4 hours or more. The book provided 3 columns of foods. You could eat column 1 and column 2 in the same meal or column 2 and column 3 in the same meal, but not column 1 and 3. So pretty easy.

The way I applied this system evolved into something of a routine that worked something like this:

"Breakfast" (usually around 11:00am)-
2 medium/small baked potatoes with heavy cream and butter in the skins
an ear of corn with butter
green beans
1 or 2 slices of whole wheat bread with butter
banana with raisins, sliced almonds and heavy cream

"Lunch" (around 4 or 5:00pm) -
1/3 lb of ground beef with cheddar cheese and ketchup
winter squash
garden peas
parsnips
maybe an apple or an orange

"Dinner" (around 9:00pm after work)
Large bowl of fruit - a whole grapefruit, an orange, an apple and about 5 ounces of grapes.

I plugged this typical day into FitDay and it gave me this:

Calories 2205
Grams Calories %-Cals
Fat 90.6 801 36
Carbohydrate 311.3 1160 53
Dietary Fiber 44
Protein 65.2 243 11
(Just a note that is is pretty close to the macro nutrient ratio for the Kitavan diet. A little low on carb and high on fat, but close.)

I pretty much always ate the fruit as my last meal of the day, but the other two meals tended to flip back and forth as to their character. This was because I would cook enough for "lunch" to have for "breakfast" the next day. So I'd cook 4 baked potatoes for example, eat 2 for "lunch" and the other two chopped up and cooked with onions in a pan with butter for "breakfast" the next day. In looking at the timing I was also doing something of an intermittent fast everyday, with 14 or so hours between "dinner" and "breakfast."

In looking at this from the perspective of my current lowish-carb paleo, I'm pretty horrified by the amount of carbs I was eating, not to mention the grains. Though because they are limited to one meal a day, I was eating quite a bit less of those than most folks would be. Most of the carbs were vegetables, fruit and potatoes. I didn't do anything to restrict seed oils or dairy and didn't eat a lot of fish, so my omega 3 to 6 ratio was probably pretty bad.

What were the results of eating like this? Believe it or not, over the course of 9 months I lost over 130 pounds, averaging half a pound per day during that time. I don't recall having any great hunger during this time either. I do recall periodic cheats, typically of ginger ale and potato chips eaten in the evening after a carbohydrate "lunch". All in all I felt great, was relatively fit from losing the weight and doing 30 minutes of tai chi like exercises everyday. (Well, I didn't start off at 30 minutes, more like 5, but I built up to it.) I recall becoming fairly active during that time.

I don't know what led to the rapid weight loss.
Was it the separating of concentrated proteins and starches?
Was it getting rid of added sugar and processed foods?
Was it limiting grain consumption?
Some mix of all of these?

Looking back on this has led me to wonder what the effect would be if you tackled food combining from a paleo-ish perspective. Get rid of the grains and seed oils and potato skins. Eat more fish for the omega 3 ratio fats. Eat more grass fed meat and or omega 3 rich eggs.

Frankly I am a little scared to even contemplate it at this point, but it does provide some interesting food for thought.

Updated My Progress Page

2011-08-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

I've updated my progress page with my latest numbers and photos. I'm still very pleased with how things are working doing the unweighed and unmeasured lowish carb paleo approach. I am pretty much just eating when I'm hungry and only as much as I want at the time. It can be a little tricky to do that when you have to prepare food to eat at work since you have to guess how hungry you will actually be. Sometimes I am pretty close, other times not so much.

Been eating a bit more fruit these last couple of weeks since it is blackberry season and I can get all I want from the bushes outside my house. Usually it is less than a cup per day, though a couple of days I've eaten a couple of cups.

I've also been mulling a couple ideas for longer blog posts which I'll hopefully get out soon.

For my workouts, I'm into the second week of the "Power Block" for "You Are Your Own Gym" plan of body weight exercises. I'm really liking the program so far. Even the lower body stuff can be challenging even though my legs are quite strong, especially compared to the rest of me. For upper body, my body weight definitely is providing enough of a challenge, and the movements are adaptable to increase or decrease the load as needed. To an extent at least.

Next week starts the 4 week Undulating block where each day I'll be doing a different style of workout for each body part. So one week might be Ladders (muscular endurance) for upper body push, Interval sets (strength) for lower body, Super sets (power) for upper body pull and tabatas for core. The next week everything might shift one. In addition there will be a 5th workout day which will be stappers which are 20 minute blocks of doing as many rounds of a lower body exercise, upper body pull and an upper body push, with as little rest as possible. Should be interesting once I get to it.

Quick Update

2011-07-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

So I have just about completed the first two weeks of doing unweighed and unmeasured paleo and I was kind of curious how I was doing. I had hidden away the scale and not used it for 2 weeks, which has been sort or liberating.

I was a little nervous because I had stopped weighing everything and only had a general record of how much I was eating. I just ate until I was full when I was hungry. This has usually been 3 times per day, but sometimes 4. Some days I have felt hungry and I've eaten more as a result.

I was pleased when the scale showed 202.6lbs, which is down 4 since the 1st, or 2 lbs per week. So for now I don't need to do anything different I think, as it seems to be working fine.

I've also finished my first week of the basic program from "You Are Your Own Gym". The program is pretty challenging, especially for my upper body days. My legs are fairly strong so the lower body days are easier in comparison. For upper body I hit a limit where I will fail and have to go back down the ladder, and sometimes back up and down and up and down. For my legs though, I haven't hit a top of the ladder yet. The workout is challenging, just I am strong enough to keep going and increasing reps.

It will be interesting to see how it goes in weeks 3 and 4 when it is interval sets where you should hit muscle failure in one of the 3 sets for each exercise. I may end up needing to add weight to see that happen in the lower body.

Unweighed Unmeasured Paleo

2011-07-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

So I've completed my fist week going with an unweighed and unmeasured approach to my diet. Just keeping to paleo choices (wild caught fish, grass fed beef, pastured pork and veggies) as much as possible. I do still eat some amount of chicken and grain fed beef and pork, but as much as I can I am shifting towards the better choices.

It is quite a change for me in a lot of ways. A little nerve wracking and a little freeing as well. I am not getting caught up in how many calories, or how much protein or anything like that, at least not specifically. I just try to have a good amount of meat at each meal and eat when I'm hungry. Some days that is 3 times, other days it is 4, but I try not to get too worried about it. I feel that at this point after being pretty low carb for over 2 months, my body is maybe a bit more in tune with what I need (or rather I am more in tune with my body) so that if I am feeling hungry (that ache in the pit of the stomach feeling) then I probably do need to eat something.

Couple other changes I've started. At the same time I started the new eating strategy, I also put away my scale. Haven't stepped on it in over a week. My goal is to only drag it out the first of each month when I do my progress photos. I feel like I really need to get away from using the scale to quantify my results. Each week I do try on the next size smaller of my clothes to see how close I am getting to being able to wear them. This week I was able to pull out a pair of shorts I have not been able to wear for several years, so I know progress is being made.

On exercise, I've changed things yet again, hopefully for the last time for a good long while. Came across the book "You are Your Own Gym" by Mark Lauren, which appears to be a nicely periodized program using just body weight exercises or using equipment you can find in your house (box of books or a backpack for example). I really like the variety of exercises and the progressive nature or the programs. The book contains for programs ranging from basic to pretty advanced. Each program has 4 phases: Muscular endurance, strength, power and undulating periodization. The exercises and how you group them change from phase to phase which should keep the programs challenging and interesting. I've committed myself to at least doing the 10 week basic program and we'll see how that goes.

Ah, almost forgot. Also started taking some Gotu Kola each day (2 450mg capsules, one in the morning and one in the evening) after coming across a comment about it on the Robb Wolf forums. It is supposed to help with collagen production and restoring elasticity to skin, among other things. Hopefully this will help the loose skin I have from weight loss to snap back so it isn't hanging around. Literally.

Also, tested my blood pressure the other day. It is basically the same as a month ago, with a reading of 119/67 compared to 121/66 last month. Not much difference I'd say.

The past week

2011-07-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

So this week I've been listening to a ton of Robb Wolf podcasts, which I find very fun and informative. I especially like that his take on most things (other than gluten) is a try it and see type view. His view is once you have a baseline of cutting out all the problematic stuff (grains, legumes and most dairy) and are eating a lowish carb diet from whole foods, then you can start "tweaking" things to suit your situation. I find this a very cool approach.
This week I also worked out my own strength training routine with two workouts to alternate between. This week I did each one time, though next week I think I will do 3 workouts a week and just alternate back and forth. I am using body weight and the few dumbbells and kettle bell that I have, so on some movements I am almost certainly not getting enough stress to build a lot of strength, especially for my legs. For upper body stuff, I definitely weigh enough and am untrained enough for that to be good for awhile.
This current routine I am focusing mostly on upper body strength, so where I can I choose the variation of body weight exercise that limits me to 3 to 6 reps per set. For those exercises I do what reps I can for 5 or 6 sets, resting for about 2 minutes between sets.
My two workouts are:
Workout A
Elevated push ups (feet on a chair, hands on Perfect Push up handles) - 6 sets of ~5 reps
Lunge with Rotation with 20lb dumbbell - 2 sets of 15 reps
Bent over rows with 30lb dumbbells - 3 sets of 10 reps
Single leg Romanian dead lift with 30lb dumbbells - 3 sets of 10 reps
Front and side planks

Workout B
Inverted press (feet on chair but butt high and hands close to the chair so it is almost like doing a handstand push up but easier) 5 sets of ~4 reps
Goblet squats with 53lb kettle bell - 2 sets of 15 reps
Pull ups - 5 sets of 3 reps (one leg assisting as little as possible to get out the 3 reps per set)
Dumbbell dead lift - 2 sets of 15 reps
Mountain Climbers for 1 minute

Both workouts take about 30 minutes.

Food wise I been doing mostly the same, though trying to slowly ramp up the carbs a little and add more protein as per Robb Wolf's recommendation of 1g protein per pound of body weight. This has upped my calories a bit, though I am dropping the fat a little now. My calories are about 120 per day higher (more or less) but that is all from increased protein (40g more per day on average) so I'm not worried about that.

All in all things are going well and I feel like I'm making progress.

Tasty Pork Roast

2011-06-26T19:22:00.001-07:00

Today I cooked up one of my favorite foods, pork roast. It is relatively inexpensive, tastes great and provides lots of good protein. Since I'm trying to up my protein a bit these days, which is surprisingly hard, this last is a good thing.
This time I used a pork loin roast of about 4 lbs (bone in), but in the past I've used the even less expensive shoulder or butt roasts. The secret to the roast is brining. Brining is simply soaking the meat in a salt water solution for a few hours. Most brines I've seen call for sugar, but since I'm avoiding sugar like the plague, for a long time I've just used salt. Kosher salt specifically.
To make the brine I use 1 quart of water (more or less) and 1/4 cup of salt (more or less) for each pound of meat. Today that resulted in about 1 gallon of water and 1 cup of kosher salt. Just dissolve the salt in the water and add the meat and stash in the refridgerator for about 1 hour (more or less) per pound of meat. You can go longer, but I've read not to go more than 8 hours. You can some herbs or fruit juices or sliced apple if you want, this is supposed to draw the flavors into the meat, but I've never noticed much effect from that.
Once you've brined the meat, you will want to drain it and dry it off to help make sure you get nice crispy outside. You can also add some spices at this point. Today I added a BBQ flavored rub I made from a recipe in the new Atkins book which is quite nice. Put the roast on a wire rack on a baking sheet.
Preheat your oven to 500 degrees and once it is hot put the roast in and set a timer for 30 minutes. This first bit of cooking is to get a nice crispy outside, which is especially tasty if you have used some sort of spices. Once the timer goes off, turn down the oven to 350 degrees and continue cooking until the internal temperature of the roast is about 150 degrees. For a 4 pound roast, this takes around an hour.
Once the roast has reached the desired temperature, remove from the oven and cover with foil to let it "rest" for 5 or 10 minutes. I can never seem to wait that long but it is supposed to help keep all the juices from running out of the meat when you cut into it.
You can also cook whole roaster chickens using this same method. I've found both chicken and pork come out very juicy and tasty this way, even poorer cuts of pork like the shoulder or butt roasts.

Trip to the Farmer's Market

2011-06-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a long time since I visited the Farmer's Market here in St. Johnsbury, and I'd never been since I'd started eating a low carb/paleo (off and on at least) last year.
I expected that things would tend to be more expensive than regular "store bought" food, and by and large I was right. However, I was somewhat surprised to find things like grass-fed ground beef that were not all that much more expensive than store bought. Warden Farms was selling grass fed meats, though the pork did use some organic grain feed and really the prices were not that bad for some cuts. There were several options at around $5 per pound or less. The ground beef was $4.50 per pound (unfortunately they were out) while the ground beef in patties was $5.25. Not quite sure why the extra cost for the patties, but I bought some anyway. I compare this to the $9 per pound that I paid for ground bison last night at the local grocery store and pretty much decided I'll start going to the Farmer's Market earlier on Saturdays to see what meat there is before I buy stuff at the grocery store. I don't think I'll start buying eggs at the market since they are almost twice as expensive as the omega-3 eggs I've been buying at the grocery store. I can't see doubling the amount I spend on eggs each week when my budget is limited. I do like the idea of getting twice as much grass fed meat each week though for roughly the same amount of money.
Stuff had been pretty well cleared out by the time I got there, less than 15 minutes before the market closed, so hopefully if I go earlier there will be more selection. Not sure if there is a lot of benefit buying the locally grown stuff for vegetables depending on the cost, plus right now it is mostly greens and they appear to be quite a bit more expensive than at the grocery store. We'll see how prices go as the season goes on. I'll likely be able to get good deals on summer squash and zucchini later on as those tend to produce a ton.

This Past Week

2011-06-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

So this week has pretty much been business as usual as far as diet and exercise go. I have been listening to a ton of Robb Wolf's podcast this week as well. I highly recommend this if you are looking for good information on eating a lowish carb paleo/primal diet and exercise.
I have been working on increasing the amount of carbs as I think this will help me keep on track beyond the 2 to 3 months where I usually have issues. It is pretty difficult though with only eating things like broccoli, green beans and the like. So I've added in small amounts (~60g) of things like beets and parsnips. So far this seems to be going well.
I experimented yesterday with eating 4 meals to try and get more protein in my diet. Robb Wolf has been recommending shooting for 1g per lb of body weight for protein and I've been getting about 130g per day which is like .6g/lb. What I found was that hunger has a lot to do with routine. Meaning if you are used to eating at a given time, you tend to get hungry at that time. I'd read that on leangains.com before but had never really experienced that. Even though I had eaten at noon, I started getting hungry at around 2 or 3pm which was my more normal eating time. Decided it was a better choice to just add a bit more protein to each meal to get the level up.
For exercise, I've been doing one round of the Spartacus workout 2 days and 1 day of more strength body weight stuff (push ups, body weight rows and Bulgarian split squats). I'm thinking to be changing things (again) based on things from Robb's podcast in regards to what is best for leaning out. His advice is pretty similar to what Mark Sisson has in his book, mainly 2 days of strength, 1 day of sprinting and the rest of the days just being active. So I think I will be using a short guide in this month's issue of Men's Health to design my own workout based on what equipment I have on hand. The remaining 5 days I'll wing it. Doing stuff in a pretty unstructured stuff and mix it up, though I'll likely ride my bike a couple days a week.
I definitely feel like I'm still making progress and was able to wear 36" jeans today, which was totally impossible a few weeks ago. They are little snug but not uncomfortable.

At last...

2011-06-16T14:17:00.001-07:00

http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Science/Low-fat-diets-could-increase-heart-disease-risk-say-nutrition-experts

It is about time.

So true...

2011-06-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

http://everydaypaleo.com/2011/06/12/attention-scale-addicts/

Came across this link today and it rang very true for me. I am definitely a scale addict, checking my weight every morning. In a way, this might be good as it keeps me focused on eating right, but sometimes (often) it is the thing that discourages me the most. Even when I am doing everything "right", keeping carbs and calories low enough to burn fat, the scale doesn't move. Or moves up!

So I am going to try and NOT use the scale for awhile and just eat right (according to plan) and do what I do for exercise and take my progress pictures once a month and measurements every couple of weeks. Between that and just being aware of how my clothes are fitting, that should be enough to keep me going forward.

Adding some exercise

2011-06-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

This week I've been adding back in exercise, well more structured exercise, to my routine. A couple of things in "The Paleo Solution" I liked the sound of prompted me to make this change. Rob's suggestion is to basically mix things up over the course of the week combining strength training on some days, intervals on others and some light exercise on still others. I like this variety.

He also suggests for people just getting started or back into exercising to use a circuit training method for the strength training and gradually reduce the rest time between exercises until there is basically no rest between them. At that point you can start adding more rounds to the circuit. This seems a nice way to ease back into more regular exercise.

A year ago my main exercise routine, and one I really liked once I got used to it, was the "Spartacus" workout from Men's Health. This is a tough circuit of 10 exercises:

Goblet Squat
Mountain Climber
Dumbbell swing
T-Pushup
Split Jump
Bent-Over Dumbbell Rows
Dumbbell Side-Lunge
Push-up Position Row
Dumbbell Lunge and Rotation
Dumbbell Push Press

You are supposed to do each exercise for 1 minute, take 15 seconds between exercises (mainly to get ready to do the next one). You rest for 2 minutes between each round and the goal is to do 3 rounds total.

A year ago I was doing some of these movements with 30lb dumbbells and the others with 20lb dumbbells. In starting back on them I am only using 10lb dumbbells, though I'm feeling like I can move the weight up to 20lbs for some of the movements. Also I am only doing one round with (currently) 50 seconds between each exercise. Following Rob's idea, I'm reducing the time between exercises at 10 second increments (will change to 5 once I'm at 30 seconds). Once I'm at 15 second intervals, I'll add a second round and then maybe a third, hopefully increasing weight as a go along.

That covers my strength training, for now at least.

For my intervals, I am using cycling. There is a perfect little hill for this near my house. Currently it is the perfect distance away as it gives me 5 or 6 minutes to warm up before I get to it for the first interval. The hill itself is long enough, again currently, so I can do 45 seconds flat out at a power level well above my threshold. It is long enough that it should stay effective for awhile as I get stronger/faster and can maintain the pace longer.

For my light exercise I am using something called the Marrow Washing Classic from the book "Scholar Warrior" by Deng Ming Dao. I found this book quite a number of years ago, almost 20 now. The Marrow Washing Classic is a set of exercises that are tai-chi like, though more energetic. Since I am trying to keep the workout light, I am only doing the first half of the movements as the later half work the legs fairly hard and both my strength and intervals work my legs hard already. As I improve in my fitness, I may do the whole set again.

I know that some books recommend taking a somewhat "how do you feel" approach to exercising, I'm feeling right now like I need a definite structure. It is something like Dr. Eades says about listening to your body. If you listen to your body when you are first switching to a low carb or paleo type diet, you are in big trouble.

So my current routine:
Monday & Thursday - Strength training (Spartacus workout)
Tuesday & Friday - Intervals (Bike hill sprints)
Wednesday & Saturday - Light exercise (Marrow washing classic)
Sunday - Rest. Well, not really rest as there is generally something that needs doing around the yard or house.

Artificial Sweeteners, Fruit and Blood Sugar

2011-06-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

I have been reading for awhile the idea that artificial sweeteners can be problematic when trying to reduce body fat. It seems to be mostly anecdotal evidence, as some studies show using these sweeteners increases hunger, while others show it has no effect. At least no effect when taken during a meal (i.e. drinking a diet Coke with your lunch). The studies that show an increase in hunger have generally been those where the sweetener is given without accompanying calories. The anecdotal evidence seems to be that in some cases when people give up the artificial sweeteners, they start (or resume) weight loss. There are also some concerns that some (all?) artificial sweeteners my have side effects, especially when used while low carbing.

So I've been cutting back on my use of these things. Right now I pretty much only get some from sugarless gum that I bought last week, and my hope is once that is gone I won't buy any more. My goal is to stop using them to curb my desire for excessively sweet things. We'll see how that goes, but I've definitely noticed a change in my tastes in just this last week.

I've been eating a little bit of fruit the last few days and I'm not quite sure how I am adapting to it. I feel a little more hunger during the day which is not a good sign, and weight loss has stalled. There are some possible confounders though, as I haven't slept as much lately, being up until after 1am, which I know from the past affects the scale readings in the morning. There has also been a radical change in temperature over the last couple of days going from the upper 80s/low 90s on Wed and Thur to in the 60s this weekend. That could also have an impact.

I've been checking my glucose levels the last few days as well. Usually I am just checking my fasting level when I first wake up and then my level 1 hour after breakfast. The first day I also checked before and after each meal. On that day I saw the familiar pattern that I had seen 8 months ago, which is that my glucose level was usually progressively higher as the day went on, though almost always below 100 for 1 hour postprandial. This time around, my levels are running a bit higher with fasting levels being about 10% higher, around 81, which is still good. I am not sure why the readings are even that much higher than last October, though it could be that my exercise pattern is quite different now than it was then. Still, my levels are good, with the highest I've seen which was 1 hour after a dinner meal at 102 (+/- the error level of the meter).

One interesting thing is that it appears that the small amount of fruit causes a much larger jump in glucose levels than a roughly equal amount of carbs from vegetable sources. In the few days I've been checking, I had 2 days when I was consuming about 40g of blackberries or raspberries with 15g of heavy cream along with bacon and eggs for breakfast. This gave about 4-5g of effective carbs. On those days my glucose jumped about 12-14 points between pre meal and 1 hour post meal. Today I had ground beef cooked with a bit of coconut oil as well as some salsa, 3oz of cauliflower and two dill pickle spears, which gives about 6g of effective carbs. Today, my glucose level dropped 2 points between pre meal and post meal readings.

Now a lot of that could be just variations in the meter, as it is a fairly inexpensive one (though the strips are not, at least to me.) I am inclined to believe that on days when I'm not getting good sleep, even that much fruit may be an issue, at least for now. I will periodically try again with the fruit, but for now I am backing off from it and see how I feel compared to the last few days.

I've also started reading Rob Wolf's "The Paleo Solution" which is a pretty good read. I especially like the, rather quick, walkthrough he gives about digestion and what happens in different feeding states. That was information that I kind-of knew already but it was good to have it restated in a different and accesible way. In general, though I have not finished the book yet, it appears (not surprisingly I think) similar to Mark Sisson's "The Primal Blueprint". I haven't got to specific recommendations for carb levels and the like, but so far they track pretty well.

Paleolithic Diet

2011-06-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

Thought I would pass this along, not to mention keep it easily findable by me. I don't quite follow Paleo, though it is close. Actually at this point my diet is very close, though much lower in carbs than most Paleos would recommend. I particularly like the history part of the graphic. Lots of good information in a small space for sure.

Learn more about the Paleo Diet

Some numbers

2011-06-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

Decided today to start tracking some additional data.

Last fall when I was doing low carb for the second time, I picked up a blood glucose meter just to get an idea of what some meals did for me and where my fasting glucose level was in the mornings. My fasting levels during the time I was checking (which wasn't all that long as the test strips are a little expensive) were always below 80 and often below 70. I didn't have any feelings of great hunger at that time (it was often a couple of hours after I took the readings when I finally had breakfast) I would frequently train in that state with no great problems. My post-prandial glucose levels rarely got as high as 100, and that would usually happen only at the end of the day, which makes sense.

So I've bought another batch of test strips and I will start taking my fasting glucose levels and maybe some before and after readings for some meals. Not sure how many of those I'll do as I only have 50 (well, 47 left) test strips and they are $40 a batch, so a little pricey to buy for curiosity's sake right now.

I will also start periodically checking my blood pressure. I am thinking every other week will suffice. Since I was in the drugstore buying Vitamin D3 and the test strips, I used the machine there to check my blood pressure. Here are the results:

It is important to prepare

2011-06-09T16:42:00.001-07:00

Since in the next couple of days I will be working through 2 meal times each day, I thought it a good idea to start preparing meals to take with me as it will be difficult to leave work to buy anything.
Also, it is less expensive, usually, to buy groceries and cook rather than buy one or two meals each day.
I will have the fish seen here one meal each day and hamburgers the other meals. I will also have some veggies in the form of broccoli and cauliflower. Luckily, I don't mind eating the same thing several days in a row.
The fish and the burgers were all cooked with a little coconut oil and the vegies were steamed. I will likely use Kerrygold butter on the vegetables and some homemade blue cheese dressing on the burgers and some of the veggies.
I will also take some almonds and walnuts with me just in case I get hungry in the middle of the afternoon. It doesn't often happen these days, but better nuts than candy bars.

Adding back some fruit

2011-06-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

Since I got a gift card from Amazon for my birthday yesterday, I bought a couple books for my Kindle. One I already had in "real" book form, "Good Calories Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes. The other was one I hadn't read before, "The New Atkins for a New You" by Dr. Eric Westman, Dr. Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek.

I don't think I will find anything terribly new in this book that I haven't found in other books or online, but I'm hoping there will be some twist in the presentation that will help me make it through transitioning to maintenance as I get closer to my goal weight. I know that I need (probably) to try to slowly increase my carb intake and variety of foods, which is a scary proposition for me.

One thing in the Atkins book I have found so far is the "carb ladder" which I will try to use. In fact I have by adding back in some berries to my diet. I like the fact that the book gives pretty good instructions on how to go about testing new foods to see how my body reacts to them. So I started small today by adding a small portion of blackberries (grown in my backyard and frozen last summer) with some heavy cream to my breakfast. Usually I don't have any added carbs (other than those in the eggs), so adding even a few is a change.

I don't think I'll up my overall carb level for now, just swapping around the sources. My average since I started eating low carb again has been around 17g of net carbs per day, within a range of 6g to 34g. I will probably stay in this range, maybe a tad higher, but just trying out new foods.

The trick for me is going to be finding a good balance so that after 2 or 3 months I don't find myself face down in the candy counter at work, which is basically what has happened the first two times I tried low carb.

Interesting Animal Study

2011-06-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

Came across an interesting study on the Nutrition and Metabolism Society website that offers yet more support for restricting carbohydrate intake when trying to lose weight and or build muscle. You can find the complete study here.

While studies in rats do not necessarily mean that the same principles will hold true exactly in other animals, such as humans, it does give some food for thought.

Basically the study compared to groups of normal adult male rats were fed either a high carb/low protein diet or a high protein/moderate carb diet (could be low carb depending on your definition I suppose.
Adult, male rats were fed either a high carbohydrate (CHO) diet (60% of energy from carbohydrates, 12% protein, 28% fat; n = 30) or a high protein (PRO) diet (35% carbohydrate, 35% protein, 30% fat; n = 30).

While I understand some of the technical discussion, much of it is over my head at this point as I'm not familiar with all the terms yet. The part I understand is that the two diets caused different forms of GLUT4 release after eating. GLUT4 is a protein that transports glucose into either muscle or fat cells, and is only found in those types of cells. According to Wikipedia:

At the cell surface, GLUT4 permits the facilitated diffusion of circulating glucose down its concentration gradient into muscle and fat cells.

The high protein diet caused a higher release of GLUT4 in muscle cells at lower insulin levels, reflecting better insulin sensitivity. This would tend to cause more glucose to be transported into the muscle cells to be used for energy rather than to the fat cells for storage. The reverse happens with the high carb diet, which produces much higher insulin levels and a preference to store extra glucose in the fat cells. The report says this is consistent with other findings and suggests "that animals chronically consuming a CHO diet will preferentially rely on adipose to dispose of excess glucose after a high carbohydrate meal."

Two other biological markers are mentioned.

One set ERK1/2, which when elevated is usually a marker of cell division and growth is much higher in both fat and muscle tissue (more so in fat) after a high carb meal. With a protein meal there is some rise in the level of this marker in muscle cells but a marked decrease in fat cells. Taken together with the GLUT4 levels mentioned above it means that with a high carb meal, fat cells tend to get more of the glucose from the meal and the fat cells may have a tendency to grow and divide, allowing for even more storage.

The other marker mentioned is p70S6k, which generally indicates greater protein turnover in muscle cells and greater energy production. A carb meal has little or no impact on this marker while a protein meal, not surprisingly, increases it dramatically.

The authors conclude:

Animals chronically consuming the CHO diet produced greater metabolic signaling in adipose tissue to handle excess glucose and blunted signaling in skeletal muscle consistent with interpretation of insulin resistance. Conversely, animals consuming the PRO diet produced greater metabolic signaling in skeletal muscle with little signaling in adipose. While these data suggest that consuming an increased CHO:PRO diet may have detrimental effects on insulin sensitivity, the long-term significance of these metabolic differences warrants further investigation.

So what exactly am I doing now?

2011-06-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

In the past, I've tried a bunch of different ways to lose and maintain weight. In all honesty, I've had good luck with a number of them, and I'll talk about them in some future posts.

Right now though, I am using carbohydrate restriction. I've used this method in the past with good success, though like all ways of eating, there can be issues with how to deal with maintenance and what to do if you "fall off" the plan. I have read a fair amount about low carb diets, with books such as "TNT Diet: Targeted Nutrition Tactics" by Jeff Volek, PhD RD and Adam Campbell, "Good Calories Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes and "Protein Power" by Drs Michael and Mary Dan Eades being added to my library.

The nice thing with low carb diets for me is that it pretty much eliminates, at least initially (for the first few months) the desire for high carb foods. Given that I work I sit right next to, and I mean literally, the things that tempt me the most: Snickers, Kit Kats, M&Ms and the like, this removal (or suppression) of desire for these foods is a big factor. Another is that it is extremely good at controlling appetite. When I have tried losing weight just by "eating less and moving more", it often took conscious effort to keep my calories to whatever level the plan recommended. With low carb, that doesn't seem to be an issue.

While I used to plan out my day's eating ahead of time to make sure I got my numbers in the right place, I now usually just make note of what I'm eating and input those numbers into FitDay at night so I have a record of it. So I just eat what I feel like eating (just keeping low carb in mind) and let the numbers fall where they may.

The graph below is the result of this for the last month or so. The blue line is a rolling 7 day average of calories taken in as best I can determine. I used the rolling average just to smooth things out a bit and get a sense of an average intake. So over the first 5 weeks or so of eating this way my intake of calories has dropped about 18%, without my planning on it or feeling hungry, because if I feel hungry, I eat something.

You may be wondering what I do for exercise. Up until now, this time around it hasn't been much. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes of tai chi like exercises and the very occasional bike ride of between 30 and 45 minutes, most often riding to and from work. So not a heck of a lot. I've long felt, and my recent reading has backed up, that intense exercise can often be counterproductive when trying to lose weight. This is because you quite often simply "work up an appetite" and sooner or later will consume more calories to compensate for what you've burned off. I think it is a much better idea to get accustomed to whatever you are doing to correct your diet and then add exercise once your body has adapted.

For example with myself and low carb, I would guess that this time it took me about a month to become adapted fully to the diet. That is when you see the rather sudden drop in my daily calories in the graph which tells me my body is taking more from my fat stores so my body isn't craving as much energy from food sources.

So I've now started to add back in some strength training exercises, primarily body weight movements. I really like "The Five Essential Movements" from Mark's Daily Apple (a great blog in my opinion for health and fitness). While I don't think exercise is particularly helpful in an of itself for weight loss or maintenance, I do think it is needed for what Mark calls "LGN" or looking good naked, and who doesn't want that? I am starting slow because I haven't done a lot of strength training in about six months. I am also including a protein shake before and after the workout as per the "TNT Diet" to help get the most results out of the workouts.

Typical Breakfast

2011-06-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Breakfast, no matter what time I eat it, is fairly consistent these days:
Eggs and bacon
Today's is pretty typical with 55g of bacon (still wobbly as Dr. Eades might say) and 3 eggs cooked in the fat that rendered out of the bacon. It is probably impossible to know what the calorie count is for this because of the bacon. The 55g here is 5 slices of Hormel Black Label bacon. According to the package, 2 slices cooked are 15g, so 5 slices should only be 37g, not 55. Is all the extra just fat that didn't render out or is some water that remains in the meat? Hard to say. When I track in Fit Day, I definitely go by weight not by servings though.
I also take some supplements with my breakfast. I take a multi-vitamin as well as extra magnesium and potassium to balance out the losses from being on a low carbohydrate diet. I sometimes take other supplements such as green tea extract, extra vitamin D3, vitamin K2 and Alpha Lipoic Acid.

Dusting off the blog

2011-06-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

A lot has been happening since I last posted here. Can it really be three years?
Back when I was writing before, I was trying to get back into cycling after completely burning out after a year of, in hindsight, really overdoing it on the bike. To go from a 2.5 mile ride to 130+ miles in just over a year was pretty demanding physically and mentally and I was feeling the strain a month or so before my big ride. That was when I noticed my diet was starting to get out of control, at least as far as quality goes, though my training kept increasing.
After my goal ride, I didn't have as much desire to ride but I had gotten used to the amount I could eat. Definitely a recipe for disaster, especially if you have addictive behavior tendencies like I do. So the weight gain was predictable.
Not sure how high my weight got over the but it was on the high side of 230 for certain. I've been in the process of losing (and sometimes gaining back) over the last couple of years. I think (hope) writing on this blog again will help keep me focused on what I am doing this time around to make it a long term (permanent) change rather than just "dieting".
So what will I be talking about on this blog? I hope to include the following:

My progress, or lack there of.
My routine: what I'm eating and doing
Interesting information I find in my own reading that I think other folks will find of use. This will likely include looking back at other ways/means I've used in losing weight.

Getting Tired of All the Rain

2008-08-07T09:29:00.001-07:00

This has got to be about the wettest summer I can remember. Apparently in the month of July we got about 9 inches of rain, compared to a normal level of around 3 inches. The trend has continued into August as well. So far this month we've received 3.5 inches of rain compared to an average of .8 inches.

All this water from the sky has played havok with my riding. I haven't missed many days because of it, though more than I'd like, but I have had to do shorter rides than I'd planned and or gotten wet in the process.

I really don't mind the getting wet part of the whole thing. I've got a good light weight rain jacket for cycling (a nice high visibility yellow one), tights and boot covers so I'm pretty well protected. The part I don't much care for is the short descent out of town on my way home from work. The pavement is a little rough and when it is wet and rainy at night, the contrast of the pavement is basically nil so it is very hard to see cracks and holes before I'm right on top of them. Add to that cars that don't dim their lights as they come up on me from the front and it makes it ... interesting ... to get out of town. Once I start the climb home its not bad at all since my speed is down and it gives me more time to react to the road condition and there isn't as much traffic. But the .8 miles to get to that point keep me on my toes.

Flat Tire and Fastest Commute

2008-07-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

Well, it finally stopped raining, mostly anyway, and I was eager to get back on the bike after two enforced days off.

On Friday I decided to do the North Danville loop, giving me ~19 miles total for the day once I made it back home. When I got to Danville I had picked up a piece of glass and flatted my rear tire. That gave me the opportunity to practice my tire changing skills while sitting on the side of the road. Luckily I'd extra time so I wasn't late for work.

Flatting made me realize I had no spare tires, so if I cut up one badly I'd be stuck until I could replace it. As I'd been wanting to get a new set of shorts and a jersey, I decided to go ahead and place and order with Bike Nashbar, my usual source for cycling stuff. I've used Performance Bike as well, but for some reason I like Nashbar better. So I have 2 tires, 2 tubes, bib shorts, a jersey (matching colors of course), base layer t-shirt and chain cleaning fluid that should come on Wednesday.

Yesterday I headed out early planning on riding the same route to work. I was only about 1.5 miles out when I realized I'd forgotten my wallet so had to turn back to the house. I didn't feel like doing the extra distance I'd get if I went back and did my planned route, so I went straight to town and then tacked on distance out the North Danville road to get to the milage I wanted (about 15.5 miles on the outbound leg). This took me out to North Danville Village, where I turned around. I pushed relatively hard and by the time I returned home after work I managed to average the commute at 14.4 mph, which I'm pretty certain is my best time on the commuter bike.

Rest Week

2008-07-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

The weather has conspired to give me a rest week apparently.

After a decent morning on Monday when I got in my long ride of the season (so far), the rest of the week has been pretty rainy. I did manage to do my commute yesterday though the return trip was in a pretty steady rain by the time I got home.

Today and tomorrow are supposed to be rainy, with as much as an inch of rain or more expected over the next day or so, with chances of thunderstorms mixed in. Not good conditions for riding.

It is just as well though. In looking back on my entries in FitDay, the online nutrition tracking program I'm using, I see that I've just completed a third build week (time and distance increasing from week to week) so I'm due a week with lower volume. While I'm not training as seriously as I was a couple years ago, I think it is a good idea for everyone who is taking part in regular strenuous exercise to work in easier days in amongst the harder ones and easier weeks every 2 or 3 weeks. This allows your body to recover and rebuild and that is where the real gains in strength come.

Here are my numbers for the past three weeks:
Ending Mileage Time Avg Speed
7/7 71.7 miles 5:42 12.6 mph
7/14 77.5 miles 6:09 12.6 mph
7/21 98 miles 7:08 13.74 mph

I think the main difference in speed between the first two weeks and the third is that in the third week, half the mileage was done on my road bike where I averaged better than 14.5 mph.

The increase in distance/time between the first and second week is pretty close to the recommended max of 10%, but I sort of went overboard on the third week, increasing distance by 26% and time by 16%. The time one is a bit more indicative of extra effort, so it isn't that far off, but definitely time for an easier week. Hopefully weather will improve over the weekend so I can get in about 50 miles total for the week.

I don't imagine I'll go too much over 100 miles a week this summer, as I'm trying hard to avoid going overboard this time around. So 100 miles a week sounds good and I can work on increasing intensity rather than distance to keep fitness going up.

Interesting Website

2008-07-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'd been poking around into my old links page and came across a site that has some really good tools for the numbers oriented cyclists.

The site is called Analytic Cycling, and has tools for calculating just about any number you'd want to come up with in cycling. Things like determining the change in speed you would see if your weight (or that of you cycle) changed, how a change in power would affect speed and much more.

One use that is particularly valuable for me is the tool for figuring power given speed. As I have two bikes, one of which has a power meter and one that doesn't, it can be hard to figure out how hard I had worked on a particular ride. The tool on this site alone can get you part of the way, but it can be difficult to use if you don't know the gradient of the ride, which you probably don't unless you have a GPS cyclocomputer or something like the HAC4 which can track changes in elevation.

By riding the route on the bike with the power meter, you can use the tool to determine the gradient overall for the ride, and then use this value in the same too when riding the non-power meter equipped bike to determine how much average power it took to maintain that speed. You may need to change values for rolling resistance since the tires are different sizes and you might have a different riding position (between my road bike and my commuter bike there is a vast difference in position). This won't be 100% accurate but is certainly better than nothing.

Longest Ride of the Season (so far)

2008-07-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

My schedule for riding has sort of been messed up this past week due to some pretty bad thunderstorms on Friday. In a way, this was a blessing as it shifted my rest day to Friday, giving me Monday's as a day to do a longer ride than I'm able to on days when I have to go to work.

So with that in mind, I planned on doing my longest ride of the season today, an old favorite, the Danville-Peacham-Barnet loop. I was put in mind of doing this loop when I was looking at an old cycling log from 3 years ago and I saw that my first ride on this loop (though in the opposite direction) was after a couple months of riding. That is about how long I've been riding this year so it seemed like a good time to make the ride.

Now, 3 years ago when I first did this ride it took me 2:23 to complete the 31 miles. In looking at my blog entries I see I had last done this loop 2 years ago in a sort of race simulation, covering the same route in 1:34. Today was something in the middle, covering the route in 2:08. So I'm right where I've felt I was....getting into decent shape. When I did the ride in 1:34 I was 59 lbs lighter than I am now, which accounts for some of the difference in time. I was also putting out an average of 81 watts more back then (192W today vs 273W 2 years ago).

In looking at some of the best power output for both rides, I find that the short duration power is quite close, but as the durations get longer the difference in power output maintained gets larger. That seems to me to be a case of endurance. I've got the strength to push the power out, but not the endurance to keep up the pressure for extended periods of time. Endurance will come.

Another interesting thing from today's ride is how important it is to drink enough fluids while riding. This has often been a trouble spot for me, as I never seem to be able to keep up with my fluid loss. Today was a good example of that. I drank 2 full bottles of sports drink during the ride, which is about average for me on a 2 hour ride. That is about 40 oz of fluid. When I got home I got on the scale and found that I had lost a further 3 lbs. So I was only replacing about half of the fluid I was losing from sweat. Hard to believe I sweated out more than a gallon, almost 2 gallons of fluid on this ride.

A Fitness Check

2008-07-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Well, even though I haven't been posting much here, I have continued to ride pretty much every day. While I'm not going overboard as I did in 2006, I am slowly increasing my time and distance from week to week as I can given that my rides are also my commutes to work which restricts my time and ability to do longer rides.

Last week I covered about 80 miles in six days. I've settled into a good rhythm that goes something like:
Monday - rest day
Tuesday/Friday - moderate day (strong effort, not all out, moderate distance 10-15 miles)
Wednesday/Saturday - long day (moderate effort, longer distances 19-25 miles)
Thursday/Sundays - recovery days (light to moderate effort, short distance 6.5 miles)

I don't plan on adding too much more time to my rides, though the distance may increase as my weight goes down and my speed goes up. Since I started tracking it on 4/20, I've lost 36 lbs, or about 3 lbs per week. That is a bit high, but not too much so.

I did end up buying a new bike that better suits my commuting, a Trek 7.2 FX hybrid. I ordered it from East Burke Sports. The mainly carry mountain bikes, but are a Trek dealer and can order anything, so I ordered one from them the day after my birthday and it had arrived and was ready for me the next week. It has taken a little getting used to since the geometry and fit is a bit different from either my mountain bike or my Trek road bike, but it has worked out well for me. I've added a headlight, taillight and a rack with a pack on it to carry my change of clothes. All this adds a bit of weight to it, but that doesn't put it much heavier than my mountain bike which has a steel frame.

Today though I decided to ride the "distance" part of my trip (as opposed to the pure "commute" portion) on my road bike. It sort of bothers me having $1500+ worth of bike that just sits around (bike + Power Tap). The distance portion of the ride is the North Danville loop that is a staple for me (though it used to be for recovery days a couple years ago) and is 16 miles in length. Last week I did this loop on the new hybrid and it took me 1 hour and 15 minutes to make the loop.

The road bike made a big difference, between its lighter weight, lower rolling resistance and better aerodynamic position for me. I was able to complete the loop in 1 hour and 5 minutes or about 15% better time. Another factor in the better time is likely that with the power meter I was better able to judge when to shift and move to a different gear to keep a constant effort. On the flats I felt pretty comfortable around 210 watts so I worked at shifting to a harder gear when I dropped below 200 watts and to an easier one when I was moving over 240 or so. On climbs I just tried to not blow up even though the power was often 400+ watts.

So, all in all I don't feel I'm in too bad shape. My power output isn't all that far off from my endurance pace a few years back, though my top end is definitely lower as is my stamina. Once my weight is down further, my speed will go up and I will be able to go further in the same amount of time. I have about 60 lbs to go (more or less) which at my current rate should take 20 to 30 weeks, so by the end of the year I should be where I want to be, though I should be down to a good level by the end of September (a good level being 210-215 or there abouts).

Recovery

2008-05-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

Been awhile since I posted, but I've been keeping up with my riding and have gotten a handle on my nutrition as well.

As of this morning I've lost 9.6lbs in 3 weeks, which is pretty good. It actually hasn't been all that difficult once the decision was made to do it. Its funny how cycling provided the impetus to make the change. Well, maybe not that strange, seeing how every pound I have to push/pull up over Banzai Bridge (the steep part of the ride home, thankfully not very long but hits about 11%) adds that little extra hurt to the effort.

Last week was recovery week (I'm doing a 2 week on 1 week recovery system) and this posed a problem. Since riding isn't just training at this point, but also transportation, it made it very difficult to actually cut back very much. The most stressful part of the ride, both going to and coming from work, couldn't be avoided. What I ended up doing was walking a couple days and one day I got to borrow a car for the commute. Walking, while still exercise, is much less stressful than cycling so provided some recovery while still getting me to work.

A related issue is how I can increase the training effort as I'm pretty restricted to where I have to end up each day. What I've started to do is ride west for a bit before heading east to get to work. This will let me add time in controlled increments each week that I'm building. My initial goal, which I likely won't get to for a couple of months, is to take the North Danville Loop as my outbound leg of the commute. This would give me a ride of about 19 miles total between both legs. That would be around 1.25 to 1.5 hours total, which is about what I'm shooting for, with maybe the occaisional longer ride.

Lastly, I found that half a mile makes a huge difference in how I feel at the end of my ride. For the first few weeks, I'd go straight home on the return leg. The problem with that is it put me climbing the last .3 miles and coming to a stop. I felt like toast doing that. I decided this week to continue up the road to the top of the hill then come back, giving me a bit of light spinning before a last little climb up the driveway. It is amazing how fresh I feel after that, well at least compared to when I don't tack on that extra distance.

Until next time, keep riding.

Here I Go Again

2008-04-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

I haven't even looked at this blog since my last post. Hardly seems like a year has gone by since then. Especially as I seem to be right back at the beginning again.

I wasn't able to sustain cycling last year and I spent most of the last year doing pretty much nothing as far as physical activity goes. Played a lot of World of Warcraft, but not much in the way of exercise. With predictable results.

At the end of February I chose to park my car and start walking to and from work. The exercise would do me good and with gasoline prices rising, would save me money (well, sort of). The distance to work is 2.7 miles, give or take a tenth, and is primarily downhill on the way in and uphill on the way back. The first day I walked it, it took me 55 minutes to walk in and 59 minutes to walk back, which wasn't too bad. After a month or so I had it down to 49 minutes each way.

The whole time I was looking forward to when there would be no ice and snow so I could start riding instead. The first day I felt I could ride in to work I felt like my heart would burst. Even with my mountain bike which, while heavy, is geared much lower than my road bike and is better suited for night time riding with the wider tires, it was harder than I remembered to make it up the hill into town. Luckily I realized I was way out of condition so I'd arranged to have a ride home.

Now that the weather is generally good, I've been riding every day in both directions. I'm pretty proud of the fact that despite my weight and lack of fitness I have not had to stop and push the bike at all. Even coming up over the short and steep (12% grade max) Banzai bridge, the long gradual climb after that and the steeper quarter mile right at the end.

On the 21st I stepped on the scale for the first time in a year and was chagrined to find that I had put on more weight than I had thought. I figured I was around 245 to 250, but the scale on Monday evening read 272.2. That pretty much decided me that I had to keep on with what I knew worked from two years ago.

Over the last week I've felt like the "spirit of cycling" has come back to me, and part of that is eating right to get the best results. I've started using FitDay.com, a site I had visited quite awhile back but hadn't really used much as I had a stand alone program that did much the same thing. Now that I don't have that program available, FitDay will work just as well, and I can access it from any computer I have access to.

Now it is just a matter of letting the old habits become the new habits and keep going. I like the feeling of cycling, even when it is sort of painful on the climbs. I know it will get better as time goes on, but sometimes its hard to believe where I was two years ago and where I am now and all the work I threw away. Not totally, as I have some small amount of fitness left deep inside (I couldn't do 5.4+ miles a day if I didn't. When I first started cycling 3 years ago I could only do 2.5 miles and be wiped out. Though the longer distance I do now is in 2 chunks of 2.7 miles.) but also the knowledge of nutrition and training principles that I didn't have when I started.

Time will tell how things go.

Still Going Strong

2007-05-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

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)

2007-05-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

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)

2007-05-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

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.

The Long Road Back

2007-04-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing you probably never want to do, it is to have to start over (more or less) in cycling.

I can remember pretty vividly when I first started to get serious about riding. It was about a month after my 40th birthday, and I was watching the 2005 Tour de France on OLN. I had bought a used mountain bike earlier in the year, thinking I might ride to work and maybe lose some weight (I was round 240lbs at the time), but I didn't. Not until I started really watching the Tour and seeing Lance race. So I started riding. My first ride was ~2.25 miles and it took me 15 minutes to do it and I was totally wiped out afterwards.

Doesn't sound like much, does it? I kept at it though. Every couple of days I'd go a bit further and maybe a bit faster. By October I was able to ride 62 miles in just over 4 hours. By this time I had picked up a magnetic trainer and a Trek 1200 road bike and had dropped about 30lbs. I loved cycling and, being a somewhat obsessive person, I cycled a lot. In January 2006 I signed up with the lowest level membership with Carmichael Training Systems, and trained hard right through the winter. Putting 10+ hours a week on the trainer wasn't unusual. It was a fairly mild winter so I was able to ride outdoors as well quite a bit, despite not having the right gear for it.

In May I bought a PowerTap, intending to get really serious about this biking thing. I had set my goals for the year. The first was to repeat my longest ride of last year, but to cut about 30 minutes off the time, and my big goal was to ride 132 miles in a single day. Pretty big plans for a guy who was able to last 15 minutes and 2.25 miles just a year before.

For my first goal ride, I did well. 65 miles in 3:35, averaging 18.1 mph and my weight was down to 170.6. This is a very hilly course, so I was quite happy.

By the time my next goal ride came around, I was in great shape, but looking back I can see the signs that I was starting to lose it. Up to the recovery week prior to the goal ride, I worked up to about 250-300 miles per week, doing a century each week for the 3 weeks leading up to it. The goal ride itself, I more than achieved my targets. 132 miles in 7:22 of rolling time (9:10 if you count rest stops and mechanical stops (had 2 flats and a broken water bottle cage during the ride). According to PowerTap, I averaged 17.9 mph, 204W and burned 5300 calories. When you take into account that I was solo and had been riding for under 14 months, I think thats pretty good.

After meeting my goal, though, things really started falling apart. My weight on the day of my goal ride was 178, so up almost 8 lbs in the 3 months since my first goal ride, despite having been increasing my training road right along. So something was going on that wasn't quite right. I know I wasn't eating right in the weeks leading up to my goal, and I continued to not eat right after my goal was past.

I figure now I was pretty much overtrained by the time of my main goal ride, and once I didn't have the goal to keep me going, I slowly stopped. By the end of September my training time and intensity was way down and by the end of the year it had stopped. I had just lost the drive to get on the bike and, being the semi-compulsive person I am (where it usually is all or nothing), since it wasn't all it was nothing.

A couple times this winter I did try to get back into it, but it didn't seem to last. I should mention that in spite of not riding any more, I was taking in calories as if I was, with the predictable results.

Now though, I think I've gotten back into the groove. Books were the key to this. The first was Chris Carmichael's new book, "5 Essentials for a Winning Life: The Nutrition, Fitness, and Life Plan for Discovering the Champion Within"

While there wasn't a terribly lot of "new" information in this for me, having read his other books, it did give a bit of perspective for me. The perspective of someone who had been fit, but lost focus on it and all of a sudden found themselves out of shape. Its focus on shorter workouts and watching what you fuel yourself with were what got me the most, so I decided I'd try his program, with a bit of variation. I still love cycling, so instead of just walking as the gook describes, I decided I'd do 3 days of cycling and 2 days of walking a week. This would let me cycle and get some variety in the mix which would also help maintain bone strength.

The second book, which I just got this past weekend is by Mike Magnuson, "Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180". This book is about a guy, Mike actually, who finds himself at middle age, fat (255lbs), drinking too much (more than a couple nights a week til the wee small hours) and smoking 2 packs or more a day. In a very humorous way he tells how getting back on his bike (which he always loved) was the first step in his plan to recreate himself. Even the fact that he went overboard with his training and diet (was riding 2+ hours 6 days a week while consuming less than 1800 calories) and pushed himself til he was overtrained was inspiring to me as I could see myself in what he was doing. He succeeded though, and got down to less than 180lbs and completed, and finished well, in a number of challenging cycling events.

Its funny how things work sometimes. With me, I can feel when a real change of direction happens, and I feel that way now. I feel like I've got that drive to be on the bike again, even to the point of going out in less than ideal conditions and when the conditions get worse (thunderstorm moves in) I just head home and set the bike up on the trainer to finish my ride. The fact that I'm carrying 36% more weight than at the time of my main goal last year (~41% more than my lowest last year) and that my threshold power is only about 70% of what it was last year (220W vs 310W) is a little embarassing, but compared to where I started 2 years ago, I'm doing well. My ride today was 9.5 miles in 45 minutes, so 4 times as far and about 30% faster than my first ride way back then.

It will be a long road back to get where I was at my peak, but I'm confident that I'll make it, now that I've made that corner.

Take care.

Back on the Trainer Again

2006-10-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it is getting to be that time of year again. The time of year when the bike goes on the trainer and the real sweating begins. Well, it seems like the real sweating begins anyway. I always feel like I'm sweating tons more when I do hard workouts indoors, which I probably do.

I've been reading and seeing a lot about the new thing in indoor trainers these days, the computer controlled ones that you can pop a DVD in and have it control the tension on the trainer and allow you to watch the images moving as if you were on the course moving at whatever speed you are going on the trainer. It is something I think would be neat to have for the winter time as it would definitely make things a lot more interesting.

I realized yesterday that since I have a PowerTap, I can sort of do the same thing, albeit without the images. I can simply go back ot my recorded power data and work up a workout routine based on any of those rides. So that is what I did for today. A simple 1 hour ride that outdoors covers just over 16 miles and has about 1600' of climbing. I went through the power file and took 5 minute intervals and noted the average power for each one. I then used those values as my target for the efforts on the trainer. Because I was taking an average over a fairly long period of time, I figured the NP value for the ride would be lower, but the overall average should be close.

In fact, what I found in regards to power, was just that. In the outdoor ride on 9/10, my average power was 240W with an NP of 281W. Today's ride on the trainer yielded 236W average power and an NP of 246W. So average power was pretty close and NP was pretty far apart, reflecting the lack of short really hard efforts I think. This becomes more apparent when you look at a comparison graph of power distribution for the two rides. The blue line is for the outdoor ride while the pink is for today's indoor ride. Note that the indoor ride basically has no "shoulders" but rather rises pretty sharply in the center part of the graph. In contrast, the outdoor ride has less time spent in the center portion, but more in the "shoulders", areas corresponding to active recovery and super-threshold efforts. Oddly enough, in the area of 180W-200W and from 300W -320W, the time spent was pretty close in both rides (5 min and 2 minutes respectively). This seems to indicate that it is those super hard efforts that really drive a high NP value, even when there is significanlty more time spent at lower power levels (12 minutes in Active recovery outdoors compared to only 6 minutes indoors).

So, as can be seen in this next graph, which is power distribution by zones rather than values, it is pretty easy to see that when compared to the outdoor ride, the indoor one had power values forced more towards the center, as would be expected since there is no coasting and no going (inadvertantly most times) well above FT power on climbs.

The real suprise (well, sort of) came when I compared graphes of HR distribution by zones. As you can, in the case of HR, everything is shifted to the right, or to higher zones. In the outdoor ride, ~45 minutes (79%) was spent in zones 1-3, 60.8% being in zones 1-2. Today's indoor ride was pretty different, showing only ~32 minutes (51.4%) in zones 1-3 (27.7% in zones 1-2). This is pretty significant, and is even more so when you look at time spent above Tempo levels (zone 3). Outdoors only ~12 minutes was spent in those zones as compared to ~28 today, 233% more time spent at threshold or above.

When you compare HR with Power it is easy to see that something is going on that seems to make, at least today, training indoors more taxing on the body than outdoors when average power is kept nearly the same (only 4W difference or 1.7%). I pondered this for a bit and then remembered something I read fairly recently in regards to Floyd Landis and his stage 17 victory at the Tour de France. The relevent quote is:

The fact of the matter is for these athletes, heat dissipation is one of the most important factors determining performance. Either blood is used to cool them or used to deliver oxygen. The cooler the body, the more blood is available for producing power.

This seems to indicate that when training indoors, where ventillation is almost certainly going to be less than you find outdoors, thus making it harder for the body to keep cool from by sweating (or pouring water on yourself), you will have less blood available to deliver oxygen to your working muscles due to the extra needed to keep the body cool. This would naturally result in a higher HR for the same amount of power (in this case avg. HR was 11bpm higher (145 vs 134)), and would like increase the PE of the ride as well.

It will be interesting to see over the course of the winter if this relationship stays relatively constant, and if so, what effect going by the power meter instead of HR monitor will have on my performance next year once I'm back on the road with the PowerTap.

Transition and Looking Back

2006-09-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

Now that my main goal for the season was successfully completed, I've moved into a week of transition, with no real structure to my training, just getting out and riding how I feel most every day for an hour or so. I figured this easy time would be a good time to take another look back at my season, at least as far back as I have PowerTap data for.

The graph to the left shows the percentage of my training time spent above any given power level. So the left hand side of the graph is all 100% as you have to spend 100% of your time at or above 0 watts. You will note that there is no data line for July. This is because my PowerTap was being repaired and I trained without it for nearly the entire month, so there isn't any good data to look at as far as actual power goes.

The first thing you'll notice on the graph is that the lines, in general, shift up and to the right as the season went along. This shows I was spending a higher percentage of my training time going harder than the previous month. Part of this shift is due to my estimate of my LT power increasing over this time period. When I first got the PowerTap in May, I estimated my LT at 280W. In June the estimate was up to 290W and by the time I did a good solid TT in August, the estimate was up to 310W. Each increase would have forced me to spend more time at higher intensities as my interval work was based off them.

If you looked at a graph of my absolute time above power levels, you would see a similar shift. Using my FT power levels as examples:

	280W		290W		310W
May	10.5%	290 min.	8.5%	234 min.	5.7%	155 min.
June	15%	497 min.	12.9%	426 min.	9%	304 min.
August	19.5%	596 min.	16.3%	508 min.	11.4%	354 min.

In each case, I roughly doubled the amount (both as a percentage of total time and as absolute total time) I spent above the respective power levels, indicating I could go harder longer as the season progressed. The increase from June to August is particular striking when you realize that I trained 4 fewer hours in August than in June. Total training times I recorded for this season were: May - 41 hours, June - 51 hours, July - 62 hours, August - 47 hours. It is interesting to note that I spent around 11.5% of my training time each month (+/- 1% or so) at or above LT.

So now that I am nearly at the end of my transition week, I need to start focusing on my next round of training. To be honest, I'm at something of a loss in deciding what to do since I don't have all that much time before training will be moving indoors for the winter. I'm not sure I can, or even want to really, maintain the same intensity levels through the winter as I have this summer. For most of the summer I've been holding my CTL in the mid to upper 90's and I'm not sure how I'll be able to keep a big portion of that through the winter. While I can probably go with generally higher intensity workouts that are up to a couple hours long, I'm fairly sure I'm going to lose some endurance over the winter. Hopefully we'll have times when I can get out on the mountain bike and get some longer rides in.

Goals for next year, I think I've got plenty of them:

Complete a century in less than 5 hours
Enter my first road race
Do a solo 'stage race' tour around Vermont (roughly 550 miles in 7 or 8 days

After my success this season, I'm pretty confident I can achive all these goals and hopefully more.

Main Season Goal Ride

2006-08-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Power-Tap
Temp: 64 avg (54min)
Climbing: 5535' (rating .6)

This was my main goal for this year, completeing 132 (originally 137) mile ride across state and back in a single day. I reworked the route to avoid going through Essex Junction because of the built up nature of the town and the fact that they were having funerals for a school shooting. The new route was 5 miles shorter, so I adjusted my goal from 8 hours of rolling time to 7:42.

As far as planning goes, as I hadn't ridden this route before, although I had ridden parts of it, I couldn't have the detailed ride plan I did for my first goal ride back in May, when I had different sections of the ride planned out with appropriate power/effort levels. So I could only come up with some general guidelines. Mainly I knew I needed to conserve energy as much as possible, so I came up with a few rules:

Coast on the descents as much as possible.
Shoot for around 220W when on the flats.
Stay under LT (310W) as much as possible, even on climbs.

Left the house just before 8am and had my first 'excitement' 5 minutes later when I was chased by a big black dog. Was tough to sprint in the smallest chainring and luckily he gave up after 18 seconds or so. Did accelerate from 10.4mph to 24.5 in that time though, averaging 486W.

The next couple hours were pretty routine, keeping a steady pace. I had decided that given the length of the ride I would conserve as much energy as I could, so on the long descents I would tuck down and coast as much as possible. I spent neary half an hour not producing any power, which I think was pretty good.

Just before I reached Morrisville (around 1:50) it started to mist/rain which continued for pretty much the next hour. Sometimes the rain was heavier, sometimes it went back to just a mist, but it was consistently falling. My new rain jacket did a great job though.

Next excitement came at the 3:13 mark when I had the first of my two flat tires. It took me about 19 minutes to change out the tire and get it pumped up as much as my little mini pump would allow, which is only to around 80psi. Seventeen minutes later I had my second flat, which I think was directly caused by not being able to get the tire fully inflated. So another 30 minutes spent changing the tire, patching the tube and checking in with home. While inflating the new tire with the @#$^#$ mini pump, I managed to break of the tip of the valve stem, which needless to say made me nervous as I continued on with the ride. I decided at that point that when I got to Montpelier I would stop at the bike shop and get some new tubes and have them change the tire for me (easier for them in the shop than me on the side of the road). I also decided I would get one of those CO2 cartridge inflation things since they can get the tire to the full 120psi I like to use.

I stopped in a little town called Richmond for my refueling at around 4:39 and refilled my camelback and got some peanuts and a soda. Ended up not drink the soda right away and stuck it in my pack for later. Got turned around in Richmond and took awhile to find the right road out of town. I had just gotten going when I noticed one of my water bottles at an odd angle. Turned out I had broken the water bottle cage on the seat tube, so I had to stop and put one of the bottles into the webbing of my camelback. Yet another reason to stop at the bike shop.

Ride was uneventful over the next 1:30 minutes until I got to Montpelier and the bike shop. The guys in the shop were great, giving me information about the CO2 inflators, giving me a good deal on tubes and re-lubing my chain for me. I was feeling much more confident when I got back on the road.

Took my last rest stop, though the ride was full of unplanned ones, about 15 minutes later. By this time my legs were pretty well cooked and I needed to relieve my bladder, so I found a good spot where I could lean my bike up against the guard rail, do my business and then sit down and drink my soda and eat something. After a 10 minute stop, I was feeling a bit better about getting under way.

The next hour or so went pretty well actually, and I averaged power output just about where I wanted to be for the ride, around 215W, or the upper middle of my endurance range (170-235w). The last 45 minutes or so I definitely had hit the wall and was down to only averaging 180W, and this with some pretty significant climbs. Even though I had bonked, I was pleased that my power output was higher than earlier in the season when I experienced the same thing. In my first century ride back on 6/27, after I bonked I only averaged 170W(181Np). Today I averaged 182W (218Np), so a pretty significant increase I think. Granted, terrain was different an played a factor, but still.

During the ride I did not eat or drink enough. Well, maybe I ate enough but not enough fluids. I ate 4 powerbars, 1 package of clif energy gel square things, and a small bag of peanuts. I drank 3 bottles of sports drink, 2 quarts of gatorade and about half a bottle of water and 1 can of soda, or about 148 oz total of fluid, or 20 oz per hour of riding time. While this is normally what I drink, my weight was down nearly 7 lbs (4%) by the end of the ride. This undoubtedly contributed to the suffering towards the end of the ride. I even had the start of a cramp in my right leg, but I was able to shake it out before it got too bad.

Made it home in 7:22:41 of rolling time, beating my revised goal by 20 minutes. During the ride I didn't feel like I was going hard/fast enough to meet my goal, but I kept using a Silva technique and saying "cancel, cancel, I'll make my goal time" or words similar to those. In looking back over the previous couple weeks I think I made some mistakes in peaking and nutrition that impacted me to some extent. Nutrition being the worst offender. I think that if I had stuck to my regular eating plan and not basically chucked it, especially the last couple of days, my performance might have been even better. Still, I'm happy that I achieved my goal, and with how I was able to follow the general rules I had set for myself. In the graph, note how few spikes there are above the second horizontal yellow line indicating my FT power and how many there are down to the bottom, indicating no power being produced. Also notice how by and large, my power output is right around the lower horizontal yellow line, which is 204W, my average for the day.

A Hard Ride is a Good Ride

2006-08-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

My training schedule for Thursday called for a race simulation. This is sort of problematic for me as I don't race, and my main goal event is a long distance (200+km) solo ride. However, my understanding of the peaking process is this is a time to work on speed and do hard efforts but lower volume. With that in mind, I decided to repeat a workout I had last done back in June. (The profile at the left was generated from a ride done in May, so ignore the speed data at the bottom.)

The ride is approximately 30 miles (PowerTap gave 30.8 and 30.04 as mileage for the two rides) and at one time was my 'long' ride. In fact, looking back at what data I have from last year, I see that the first time I did this ride was on August 25, 2005. This was about 2 months after I had started riding more or less seriously. On that day it took me 2:23:18 to complete the ride and my average heart rate was 133. The route covers 2100' of climbing, so is definitely not a flat ride.

The workout I was planning on doing is one where you climb strongly (around LT power) on the longer hills and sprint up the shorter ones (around CP1, or in my case 550W give or take). When I did this workout in June I set my best power levels for up to one hour and got a new LT power level. I also completed the ride in 1:38:23, or 45 minutes faster than it had taken me the first time I did this ride last year. It was that ride in June that gave me a new training goal, which is to make this ride in 1:30:00 or less, or average 20mph or faster. I thought it would be a pretty big stretch, but after seeing my finishing time I thought maybe I could achieve it by the end of this year.

As I got into the ride this time around I found I wasn't sprinting up the shorter hills like I had planned, but I was going at a CP6 pace (around 340W) up the longer hills. When not climbing I was trying to maintain around 270W, though I was generally around 280W I think. Looking at the graph, you can see not too many spots where I was up around 500W. The two bold yellow horizontal lines mark off my LT power (310W) and where I was trying to be for the non-climbing part of the ride (270W). I felt I was pretty consistent at staying near this level until the end of the ride when fatigue and the fact that the last 4 miles is mostly descents with a couple sharp climbs. This made it hard to keep power consistent at any particular level, especially as at times the descents were quite steep. The bold blue horizontal line indicates 20mph and the red one indicates my LTHR of 157 bpm. These are there to make it easier to get a sense of what the thinner lines of those colors represent.

The ride this time took me 1:34:13, or 0:04:10 faster than in June, or roughly 4.3% improvement in 2 months, which is not too bad. One interesting thing I found in comparing the two rides is that in June, my best 30 minutes came from roughly 0:52:00 to 1:22:00, or pretty late in the ride. Yesterday's ride had the best 30 minutes from roughly 0:10:00 to 0:40:00, or at the start of the ride. In comparing the best time period that was the best in June with my performance yesterday, the power output was almost exactly the same being 277W yesterday compared to 278W in June. So while I faded a little over the ride yesterday, my 'faded' power is still as good as my best was 2 months ago.

Finally, the ride yesterday gave me a new best 60 minute power level, which also means my PowerProfile is updated. CyclingPeaks uses average 60 minute power to calculate the FT w/kg measure on the power profile chart, which is a little odd considering they suggest taking the last 20 minutes of a 30 minute TT to calculate your FT, but at any rate, this effort yesterday pushed my FT profile up there so I'm definitely happy with the progress I've been making. The drop in most areas (all?) last month is because the PowerTap was gone for servicing so I had no way to estimate the shorter duration power.

Peaking

2006-08-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

As luck would have it, CyclingPeaks came out with its new build of WKO+ which includes the Performance Manager at the same time I am attempting to peak for my main goal ride of this year, a 137 mile single day trip across Vermont and back.

While it is going to take some time to really figure out how to best use the Performance Manager, it is obviously a great tool for looking back at past data and getting a sense for how your training is working, or not as the case may be. So with that in mind, I've taken a look at my own Performance Manager Chart and made some observations.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the blue line, which represents my Chronic Training Load (CTL), which can be viewed as 'fitness' has steadily increased over time. While there isn't the recommended 6 months of data to go by, I think my estimate for starting TSS/day is pretty accurate, if anything maybe a bit low. At anyrate, the graph clearly shows that my fitness has been improving steadily over the last several months. No big jumps, but nice stead progression.

The jagged pink line represents my Acute Training Load(ATL), which is a short term measure of how hard you are training. Not only has this trended higher in general over time, but the peaks are higher as well. If you put a trendline in for this data, it shows a rise in ATL from ~70 to nearly 120 over the time period covered by the graph., or about a 70% increase. ATL can be considered an inverse measure of 'freshness' or a direct measure of 'fatigue', meaning the higher your ATL the more fatigued, or less fresh, you are apt to be.

The green horizontal line across the graph highlights the 0 value for Training Stress Balance (TSB). TSB is used as an indicator of form and in general is the difference between the CTL and ATL. So the goal for peaking is to have a high (relatively speaking) CTL while having a low (relatively) ATL, indicating you have good fitness but you are fresh.

I've marked the graph with some circles that represent the few periods when I've had positive TSB. The first, marked 1 on the chart, took place just after I got my PowerTap so the data probably isn't terribly accurate, but it does correspond to my first goal ride of the year. I more than achieved the goals I had set for that ride, which indicates that I was probably in good form for that ride.

The red circle marked 2 took place in mid July, but I didn't have any goal rides during that period, so it is hard to tell if I was on 'form' then. It was just after a rest week and during a period in time when I was re-organizing my training schedule. You'll also note the light blue band covering the graph in this time period. That indicates the time when my PowerTap was sent in for servicing for a bad torque sensor. The TSS scores I entered for these workouts were based on my formulas for power based on average HR, so may not be entirely accurate, but are close.

The red circles marked '3' on the graph are the most recent time when I had a positive TSB. You may have noticed there are two thin lines on the graph. The upper one, red, indicates my 10 best 1 minute power efforts. The lower black one represents my 10 best 20 minute power. Note that during the period marked with the red circles labeled '3' have 3 of my top 10 twenty minute power efforts (including my best effort of 310W), and my 2 best 1 minute efforts of 516W and 545W. This definitely shows that I had decent form even though my TSB was barely positive, around 3 or so. Makes me wonder how I would do if I had a more strongly positive value.

So now that I have looked back and seen that this TSB stuff is a decent indicator of when I was on form the trick becomes to use it to project into the future with it. How do I take this information and use it to fine tune my training plan to make sure that I'm peaking when I need to be peaking? Striking the balance between lowering your ATL so you are fresher needs to be carefully balanced so that you don't lose too much CTL/fitness. It will be interesting to see how or if it helps me over the next couple weeks as I continue to peak for my long ride.

New Version of CyclingPeaks WKO+

2006-08-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

CyclingPeaks just announced a new verison of its WKO+ software, now version 2.1. This update, which is free to those who have purchased version 2.0, contains the Performance Manager which is intended to help you in reaching that mysterious state of being 'in form' at the time of your goal events. For more information about the Performance Manager, click here.

Very Interesting Article

2006-08-10T05:58:00.000-07:00

Came across this article on velonews.com this morning that I thought I'd share in case some folks hadn't seen it. The "Legally Speaking" column is a favorite of mine, so I was very pleased to see the author take a look at the anti-doping rules that are in place for cycling. To my unlearned mind, it seems to me the issues it points out are some pretty big problems that cycling has to face in the fight against doping. Not to mention providing Floyd Landis all sorts of opportunities for his defense.

You can find the article here.

Some More Signs of Progress

2006-08-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

Today I was scheduled for a 2.5 hour endurance pace ride, which I have plenty of route options for. I picked one that gives me a fair bit of climbing and takes me over the biggest hill in the area, well the biggest I've ridden yet anyway, with the idea of maybe setting a new personal best for 5 and 6 minute efforts.

As has been my routine lately, I've tried to do all my climbs in my middle (42t) chainring and for the most part keeping cadence at 80rpm or higher. This gives me about a 10mph speed up most hills, though some of the steeper ones I go slower than that and with pretty high power numbers (400+W) which I can't sustain for very long, yet. I think this has resulted in a lot of the gains I've seen in the past month since I've been doing it, as I'm much more able to keep turning a bit bigger gear for quite awhile before getting too fatigued. This has helped me increase my overall average speed on my rides, even the long (4+ hour) ones. Or maybe especially the long ones.

So with that goal in mind and my route selected, I was very pleased with my results. I set new personal bests for 30 second, 1 minute, 5 minute and 6 minute critical or peak power. Combined with my TT results from Sunday, I've set a number of personal bests this week. Pretty much everything from 30 seconds to 30 minutes has a new high value. The only exception is 2 minute PP, which I missed a new high by 3 watts (2 watts short of tying it).

Duration	Best This Week	Previous Best	Previous Best set on
30 second	627	620	6/20/2006
1 minute	516	510	6/20/2006
2 minute	394	396	6/20/2006
5 minute	357	347	6/1/2006
6 minute	356	344	6/1/2006
10 minute	330	308*	7/10/2006
12 minute	326	308*	7/10/2006
20 minute	310	308*	7/10/2006
30 minute	308	308*	7/10/2006

* Indicates this was estimated power based on average HR, not entirely accurate.

One interesting thing about the value of 308W shown as previous best power for 10, 12, 20 and 30 minutes (set on 7/10). This was arrived at using the formula I came up with for estimating Np based on average HR. So aside from being an estimate, it as an estimate of normalized power where everything in the bests for this week is straight average power. The interesting part, at least for me is this: On 7/10 I did what I considered to be a very strong TT effort on the same course I did on Sunday. Breaking down the workout to separate out the TT effort, I saw that I had an average HR of 157 bpm for the 30 minute effort. As I've mentioned several times in previous entries, I've come up with several formulas for estimating power, and they seem to be pretty accurate, at least for rides less than 3 hours or so. Once you get beyond that cardiac drift really comes into play and power figures should be adjusted downward as much as 10-15% to correct for this. Up to rides of 2-3 hours though, the formulas are remarkably accurate. Of the 4 formulas I look at, one of the best r^2 value (i.e. fits the data best) is:

NPower = (2.4573 * Avg HR) - 76.987

So plugging in the average HR of 157 for my TT effort on 7/10, I get 308.8W, which is what I entered as a manual entry into CyclingPeaks to get my TSS score for the workout. I didn't update my FT with that value though since it was only an estimate and I wasn't sure what the power value would actually have been. So you can imagine my surprise when I did my TT on Sunday and got an average power reading of 308W (310Np). Now my HR average was a couple bpm less on Sunday than on the 10th, but this does seem to reinforce the value of my power estimate formulas for times when I don't have my PT working for whatever reason. Granted, these probably have to be adjusted from time to time as I get stronger as I'll be able to push more wattage for the same HR, but it is good to know I can at least get in the ballpark power wise this way.

Some Definite Progress, I Think

2006-08-07T06:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Sunday the 6th, was scheduled to be a field test day for me, something I don't really look forward to very much in general. This week though, I was actually sort of looking forward to doing this as I felt I could set a new personal best for FT Power. My last test was done on 7/10, but since the PowerTap at that time was in Wisconsin, I didn't get any power numbers, but I did increase my FTHR by a substantial (too much I think) amount from 151bpm to 160bpm. So since I had my PT back, I was interested in seeing if there was any sort of power improvement to go along with the HR increase.

The route I've found myself using for my TT tests is definitely not a flat out and back course. It is hilly, with a long descent, two 90 degree turns and a couple good climbs thrown in. Not to mention an intersection that can be a bit tricky. At some point I'm going to try this course in reverse which would get rid of the intersection but then I don't think it would be long enough from where I'd have to start to avoid a similar intersection but this time coming at it from a steep descent. I've included the profile of my TT route to the left.

I did about an hour warm up, including a 12 minute hard effort after which I cooled down for 20 minutes before starting my TT. To be honest, the 12 minute hard effort was an aborted TT that I was going much to hard on and couldn't maintain the pace. As it turned out, it did give a pretty decent CTS type Field Test though (see graph). I covered a 3 mile section in 7'14.7", averaging 339W, 156bpm HR, and 101 rpm cadence. Accorording to Chris Carmichael's "Ultimate Ride", this would give me a SteadyState power (equivalent to FT) of 305W.

So after this warm-up, when I wasn't sure I could do a good TT, I decided to try anyway. Once I got into a good rhythm it was hard, but doable, to keep a steady effort, at least most of the way. As you can see from the second graph here, towards the end of the TT the effort became a bit less steady, but still pretty strong. In fact, looking a bit deeper I found that my average power over 10 minute intervals increased as the TT went on. In the first 10 minutes I averaged 301W, the second 10 minutes I averaged 308W and in the final 10 minutes I averaged 313W. This actually corresponds pretty well with the changes in terrain. The first 10 minutes covers the initial climb and the steepest part of the descent. The second 10 minutes covers the more or less level terrain in the middle while the last 10 minutes covers the final 4% average grade climb to the finish. The part that gets me is that I was able to maintain the 301W average through the descent.

So overall I am very happy with my performance in this test. I increased my FT power from 294W (set back in June) to 310W (average power for the last 20 minutes of the test), which is pretty close to the 305W I would have had if I used my warm-up hard effort as a CTS Field Test. I also set new personal bests for my CP10 and CP12 power, not surprising since my aborted TT that served as my warm-up was 12 minutes. And I now have a pretty good routine for future tests.

FInal Long Training Ride

2006-08-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

This summer, my main goal has been to get ready for a 137 mile ride across the state of Vermont and back in a single day. To that end, I've been trying to increase the time and distance of my long rides to get somewhere near the 8 hours I have set as a goal for the rolling time of this ride.

My long rides really got going back at the end of June when I completed a 93 miler and continued on throughout July when I completed rides of 101, 107 and 108 miles. The last two were in back to back weeks where my mileage hit new highs both times (275 miles in one week and 279 miles in the next).

This has given me a whole new level of respect for pro riders who recover from 100 mile rides overnight it seems. By the time I got to the end of the 108 mile ride (which was actually supposed to be about 10 miles longer but I just couldn't do it), I was pretty well cooked. I don't think I bonked really, just that the accumulated fatigue of the two weeks of hard training caught up with me. A good illustration of this is my TSB chart. At the right side of the graph you'll see an arrow pointing to the spot on the chart the corresponds to my latest (and longest) long ride. Note that the TSB is very negative leading up to this ride, having been -20 or less the previous 5 days. This indicates, at least to me, that I was putting in training rides that were generally quite a bit above my established base, hence leading to increasing fatigue.

Compare this to the previous long ride of 107 miles. For that ride, my TSB had been generally positive for the week leading up to it, except for a small negative blip two days prior. On that ride, while my speed was slightly slower than the most recent ride (probably due to terrain differences), I felt strong through the entire ride, no bonking or extreme feelings of soreness or fatigue. This gives me good hope for my goal ride, assuming I can manage to peak correctly and go into the ride with a bunch of green on my TSB chart.

The Floyd Landis Controversy

2006-07-29T06:34:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-02T12:15:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

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.

A day of climbs

2006-06-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

First off, a great article on Pezcycling.com today. I think it is likel something that every cyclist who is even half-serious about training contends with at one time or another.

With my first Century ride coming up on Monday, if the weather co-operates, I've been trying to get some quality rides in but not overtaxing myself too much. Today was originally supposed to be a 1 hour endurance ride but the forecast for tomorrow is not looking all that good so I swapped my 1 hour ride today with my 2 hour ride tomorrow. Plus, I just felt like going for a longer ride.

So today I went on an ecclectic route, pretty much riding wherever I felt like going, which took me some places I hadn't ever been before and some I hadn't been this year. The route ended up with a number of significant climbs (>4% grade) with one really steep climb (average over 11%). None of these climbs were particularly long, the longest being 1.8 miles or 10 minutes. They did give me a total of nearly 2500' of climbing over the course of the 41.78 miles covered today. A summary of the climbs is below.

Climb	Length	Avg. Gradient	Altitude Change
Mountain View Farm	1.07 miles	5.6%	315'
Lily Pond Road	.7 miles	5.0%	197'
Severance Hill	1.29 miles	4.4%	318'
South Main Street	.47 miles	4.5%	108'
Crow Hill	.35 miles	12.9%	220'
Home	1.8 miles	4.2%	387'

Note that the climb listed as Home in the table above is the climb I do every day that I come home from the east, and cover almost every time I commute to work on my bike. I say almost as last night I came back up over Crow Hill, which actually continues on beyond what is shown here to become a 1.6 mile climb averaging 6.6% and rising 567'.

Now I have two light days, a 1 hour endurance and 1 hour recovery ride, in the next two days before I go for my Century. I'm not terribly concerned about finishing the century as I've done 80+ mile rides already. It is more a question of how fast I can do the ride, especially given the relatively flat profile of this particular course. (See a profile of a big chunk of the course in my post for Saturday 6/17.)

Testing, 1-2-3, Testing

2006-06-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

After two recovery days there shall be testing. Not to mention lots of rain, thunder and lightening.

Sunday and Monday were a pretty rare pair of back to back recovery days. Sunday was an hour and forty-five minutes and Monday was just over an hour. Sometimes the hardest thing is to go slow. On both days, my average HR was at or below 100, and average power was well below my active recovery ceiling of 160W. So pretty easy days just tooling around. The only 'challenging' part was the heat, it being around 90 for both rides.

Today, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do on the bike. It sort of depended on the weather and how I felt. I actually left the house thinking I'd do my one 'long' ride of two hours today, but ended up doing my testing ride instead. As it turned out, that was the right decision to make.

After warming up for about 10 minutes, I came to the first 'test', Dole Hill. I wanted to do this at a higher intensity than I normally do, and averaged around 380W for the 3 minute effort. I continued on my merry way and did some more shorter duration tests, covering Critical Power for .2 minutes (12 seconds) and 1 minute and PeakPower for 5 sec, 10 sec, 20 sec, 30 sec, 1 min and 2 min. It was a very successful day for testing. In the table below, I've listed the intervals I tested, my best power for them (prior to today's tests), my goals for those intervals and lastly my results for today. Today's results that are highlighted in yellow indicate a new personal best. In all but one case, these personal bests were also above the goal levels I had sest for myself.

Interval	Previous Best	Goal Power	Today's Result
CP .2	770w	800w	823w
CP 1	485w	500w	510w
5 sec PP	931w	1000w	1022
10 sec PP	829w	900w	971w
20 sec PP	654w	700w	641w
30 sec PP	573w	600w	620w
1 min PP	485w	500w	510w
2 min PP	383w	400w	396w

After completing my testing, I headed back for home, and just barely not in time. About 7 miles from home I started getting a few sprinkles, but nothing too bad, but looking off to the north and north west I could see some pretty dark clouds coming in and I occaisionally thought I heard thunder rumbling in the distance. So I picked up the pace, trying to outrun the coming storm. It caught me as I was coming up over Dole Hill, just a mile or two from home. Big fat drops of water started coming down pretty heavily, so I pulled in at a local campground to wait it out. I was stuck there for about 30 minutes while a pretty serious thunderstorm passed through the area. It rained incredibly hard and there were lightening strikes just across the road from the campground, close enough so that I could only count to 1 between the flash and the bang. Finally though, the rain passed and I was able to go the rest of the way home.

Saturday 6/17 - A hard workout, or was it?

2006-06-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

Today's ride was a definite first for me. My first relatively fast paced group ride and my first time working in a pace line. And I rode a route that is about as flat as you can get around here.

I had emailed the list for the local cycling group to see if anyone was getting together a ride for Saturday that would fit in with the 3 hour I had scheduled. I got a reply about a ride forming in Lancaster that would probably suit me. So I traveled the 30 miles over there and took part in a ride that was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

The terrain of the ride was rolling to nearly flat. We did an out and back, of which the first 25 miles or so was rolling then the next 12 or so was nearly flat. Overall, the ride averaged just .2% grade, about as low as I've ever been on, with only 1500' of climbing in 73.17 miles. If that isn't the flatest bit of riding I've done, its pretty danged close. The central 15 miles, so about the last 7.5 miles of the outbound leg and the first 7.5 of the return, averaged 0% grade. This is the route I'm planning my first century on next week, so this was a nice taste and gives me a good idea of what sort of pacing I can do.

The group part of the ride was a lot of fun. The main point of the ride was as a training ride for one lady who is getting ready for a ride for cancer coming up in a month or so and the pace was around 18 mph. We pretty much all stayed together for the first 42 minutes and I hung out at the back, just mainly watching how the group moved and working on gettin more comfortable riding close to other folks. I found over the course of the ride that I still have a lot of work to do in this regard as I kept losing contact when I was the tail rider and had to work harder to get back in the draft.

After about 42 minutes a few of us took off and picked up the pace and for the next 30 minutes I averaged 21.1mph. We stopped at a little store in a town called Bloomfield and regrouped before moving on. That was the one thing I didn't really like about the ride, although it made it more social. The stopping. We stopped 3 times during the ride. I'm more used to just riding straight on with no real stops. But as I said, the stops did make the ride more social which was, for me any way, part of the point.

After the first stop, we had a stretch of about 40 minutes where we averaged 19.8mph. Then we had another stop. Coming back from this second stop to the third stop, in the same place as our first, took about the same amount of time (40 minutes) and we averaged nearly the same speed. This was coming back into a bit of a headwind, but five of us also worked on forming a paceline trying to keep a 20mph pace, which we pretty nearly did. This was the fun new thing for me, as I'd never had a chance to do this before. I learned a lot during this first bit of pacelining. One, I need to look back more when I'm pulling as a couple of times I pulled too hard up a hill and dropped everyone and didn't notice til I was 100 yards ahead. The other big thing is that I need to work on slipping back into the end of the line after my pull. I was often losing contact with the end of the line and would have to work harder to catch up. It wasn't so bad when I had someone behind me, but when I was the tail I seemed to lose focus more or something.

After our last stop, the most experienced guy in the group that was doing the paceline said he wanted to pick up the pace on the last 25 miles, to something around 23 mph or so. The one woman who had been in the paceline earlier didn't join back up as she said she didn't want to slow us down. Once we got warmed back up, the four of us took off and formed our paceline. I tried to keep in mind what our leader, Jim, told me, which was to take just 1 to 2 minute pulls and try and keep the same pace as when I took over the pull. I think I did pretty well in this when I was taking my pulls. I would still lose contact sometimes when I dropped back and was at the tail, but I got better at that as the paceline went on. This hard paceline section lasted about 54 minutes and while we averaged just .2% grade, there were some relatively short climbs maxing out at 8%. Our average speed was 21.8mph.

For the entire 73 mile ride, I averaged 19.7 mph, my highest average speed to date. It will be interesting to see how I do on this same route when I do my century in a week. Given the power output's I maintained, more on that below, I think I should be able to keep about the same average speed even without the paceline to help me. My power output will have to be more constant than it was on this ride, but is well within my abilities to do that.

So, after the ride was over I started trying to decide, was this a hard ride or wasn't it. In some ways it felt pretty hard. Maybe because of the less than steady pace, or just from the nerves of having to match pace with other people riding so close. It was hard to tell based on how my legs felt as I had after all done two days of intervals in the previous two days, a third day of intervals within the past 4 and add into that 2 longer rides totalling 129 miles in the two days before that. So if my legs were a bit sore after this ride, and they were a bit, it probably wasn't all due to this particular ride, but rather to the 700 or so in TSS score I had accumlated prior to this.

I was still undecided when I got home and downloaded from the PowerTap to get the 'real' story. A picture is worth a 1000 words they say, so this graph of my power output by training zone tells the tale. Nearly 46% of the riding time, or 1 hour 41 minutes, was spent in the active recovery power zone (<164W), and nearly 22% was spent in the endurance zone (165W-222W). So more than 2/3 of the ride was spent in relatively easy zones. In terms of average power, I only averaged 176W, some 20W less than on the 5 hour ride I did on Monday and nearly 100W less than I averaged on my hilly ride on Thursday (granted that was just over 98 minutes). Even normalized power, which I would have expected to be higher given all the surging, was less than it was on Monday. So in terms of power output, this really was an 'easy' ride. Even by heart rate, this wasn't a particularly difficult ride, with 60% of the time being in zones 1 or 2 (Friel zones) or endurance and recovery, with the bulk of that time being in recovery.

Fluidity in Training or Where were these legs on Monday?

2006-06-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

Fluidity is a good word. Like water, sometimes we need to flow around obstacles and take the paths that open up for us. That is how I've felt about my training this week.

Early in the week, my legs were pretty dead feeling. Well, maybe not dead, but you know, tired, stiff, heavy, no snap. I thought at the time that maybe I was putting too much intensity into my training week, with a TSS score last week of 813 or something like that (I don't have CP on the computer I'm doing this post on to double check). If that was the case, I wanted to ease up rather than risk becoming overtrained and getting myself into difficulties that a few rest days wouldn't get me out of.

So, like water, I found a different path and decided to remove one of my BT workouts, the one that has the least apparent impact on my goal event of a 200km solo ride, namely anaerobic endurance. As the week went on however, my legs felt really good. Yesterday's ride was a good example of that and this morning to my surprise my legs were not sore at all. So, again like water, I changed my course and added back in the BT workout instead of doing the easier endurance ride.

Today's workout had two parts, Hill Anaerobic Endurance intervals and a threshold workout. The hill anaerobic endurance part took the form of 5 intervals of 3 minutes each with 3 minutes rest at an intensity about 120% of threshold. The threshold workout took the form of a 20 minute interval at my CP60 level, which is 273W (Just a bit under my 294W FTP because my CP levels are set from average power and my FTP is set by normalized power. This is sort of a moot point for today as we will see.), in an aero position, which for me means down on the drops.

For the hill anaerobic portion, I went out to Dole Hill, same as I did for part of this workout last week. It is perfect for these. It is a 5% grade hill (workout description calls for a climb 4-6%) and it takes me a bit longer than 3 minutes to climb at the intensity prescribed, 330W-360W in this case. Last week, when I started out on the trainer, I died after 3 intervals but was able to do two more when I finally got outside. This week I did all five intervals on the hill with good solid results. Average power for each of the intervals was: 356, 352, 353, 354, and 359. Note that the last interval was the strongest and they are all pretty consistent. Also, the difference between normalized and average power was well below 1%, in most cases just 1 watt difference with just one case of 2 watts difference. So that tells me that not only were the intervals consistent one to another, they were pretty steady within the interval as well.

After I completed the last interval, I moved on to one of my regular routes, figuring I could get the 20 minute threshold workout in on that. I began the interval when I got to the top of climb and tried my best to stay within the CP60 range, or roughly 260 to 290W. I figured this would be a challenge if for no other reason than there is a lot of descending on this particular route (averages about -3.5%, although the last two thirds of the route is more flat, maybe <-1% grade). Also, there is a sharp 90 degree corner in the middle of the route, plus an intersection where you have to cross a four lane highway to continue. I had hoped that the 20 minutes would be up before I got to the intersection, but they weren't. It was a little hard to keep from going well over the 290W top end of my range. Quite often when I glanced down I was at 300W+ and I would have to ease up a bit to get back down in my range. I have to say it was quite a rush going 40+ mph and putting out 300W of power. Made me feel like I was almost racing. Needless to say my power dropped at the 90 degree corner and again at the intersection, when I still had 5 minutes to go. By the end of the 20 minutes I had actually gone past the turn I'd need to take to go home and was part way into town. For the 20 minute interval, I averaged 280W at 90RPM and 27mph. As I mentioned above, the fact I was using averaged power to set the range for the interval and my FTP was set using normalized power was a moot point today as the low end of the range if I used my FTP rather than my averaged CP60 value would have been 279, so either way I was within the right range, if just barely.

Tomorrow I have a 3 hour endurance ride, which is my final 'hard' ride before moving into a recovery week.

An Inspired Ride

2006-06-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

All I can figure is that I was inspired by reading dude.abides blog for yesterday about how he apparently found his peak and set all sorts of personal bests on his recent training ride.

So on today's training ride I was feeling pretty good, having come off a rest day. The workout, which was the same as last Friday's, was to ride a rolling course and climb longer hills at around 300W and to attack out of the saddle on shorter hills at around 500+W. Since the workout description doesn't specify how hard to go when you aren't climbing a hill, I decided I'd try to go at my CP60 power level (the best I've averaged for an hour), which is 245W. I've never tried to push the pace for longer durations, so my CP values for anything above CP8 are probably a bit on the low side. So much so that I tend to use my FTP for CP30 rather than whatever my best average is.

The day was nearly perfect, sunny and in the mid 70's temperature wise. The only drawback was that it was quite breezy, which became really apparently once I turned west and north on the loop and was running into the wind. Just by judging the ride duration as I passed specific points on this loop, I knew I was doing really well. So well that I began to think I just might be able to average 20 mph on this route, which I had never done before. Heck I'd never averaged 20mph on any of my routes. Given the length of the route, 30.88 miles, I'd need to finish in 1:32:38 to make this goal. This is on a route with 2000' of climbing, so definitely not flat.

As it turned out, I didn't quite make this on the fly goal, finishing the ride in 1:38:23 or just under 6 minutes off the pace I would have needed for the 20mph goal. I did however set a number of personal bests:

Best average speed, any route: 18.8 mph
New FTP (based on 60 min normalized power): 294 W
Best CP30: 279W (294W normalized)
Best CP60: 273W (294W normalized)
Best CP90: 268W (I don't have the normalized value for this off hand)
Best Time on Loop: 1:38:23

So, all in all, a pretty positive day on the bike. I definitely feel that I've made tons of progress in the 11 months I've been riding more or less seriously. I can still vividly remember my first ride last summer when I decided, for whatever reason, to start riding. It was 3 miles, took me over 12 minutes, and left me totally spent. Today, 30 miles is no big deal and on today's ride I actually felt that I might have been able to go a bit harder, but I kept the pace I was trying for which is probably more important in the long run. I've come to realize that, especially on longer rides, keeping to steady pacing is the best way to go faster in the long run.

Rest Day Ponderings

2006-06-15T06:07:00.000-07:00

Wednesdays are my usual rest days, a day off the bike. In some ways I 'resent' having to take a day off the bike, but I've come to realize that quite often I need to take a day off the bike. This week especially when I've been questioning how my legs have felt and whether I should ease up on my training by taking an interval day out of my week. My legs actually have felt pretty good today, so maybe I'll keep all my intervals in this week as I have a recovery week next week. Then my first century.

So while I was resting, at work no less :) , I did some pondering. Having come into cycling originally as a way to just get some exercise and lose weight, I often obsess about how many calories I'm consuming and burning. I've been using a piece of software called BeNutriFit to track this information and this year I've also started using an Excel spreadsheet so I can fine tune my diet plan.

In the spreadsheet I take the information from BeNutriFit and pair it up with my daily and 7-day moving average weight. I find using the 7-day moving average is better than actual daily weight as there can be some pretty wide swings (several pounds) because of hydration levels. For example, I almost always see a half pound or more increase in weight after a rest day due mainly to drinking a lot of water but not having the increased sweat from my workouts. So the average smooths things out and generally keeps me from freaking out when a day or two shows an uptick in weight.

This allows me to fine tune my calorie consumption based on what my weight is actually doing. So if I see that during a week I've eaten X calories and my weight has gone down one pound, I can estimate that I could have eaten an additional 500 calories per day (3500 calories per pound) if I wanted my weight to stay steady. This is not a perfect system as there is likely some error in my estimates of calories consumed and burned, but assuming the errors in the system are consistent, I can get pretty close to knowing how many calories I'm actually burning compared to my programs estimates.

So I have data for my calories balance going back nearly a year now (first entry in BeNutriFit is July 9th 2005), with my spreadsheet going back to the first of this year. I wondered if I could start to make any generalizations about my calories such as my basic calorie requirement and how much for each hour of training I do. Since I want to get values for both base daily calorie requirements and the requirments for training, I came up with the following formula for a weeks calories:
7x + Ty = C + (Wc)
Where x is the base daily calorie requirement, T is training hours, y is calories per hour of training, C is estimated calories consumed and Wc is the adjustment for change in weight. So if in a given week I trained for 10 hours, consumed 20,000 calories and my weight stayed the same, then we'd have the following formula:
7x + 10y = 20,000
This by itself doesn't really help much as the single formula doesn't allow me to isolate either x or y, but if I have multiple equations this can be done. So that is what I did. I compared overlapping pairs of weekly information and averaged out the results. What I came up with is fairly surprising in some ways.

Base calorie requirements: 2100 calories
Calories per hour of training: 1000 calories

The surprising part of this is the 1000 calories per training hour. BeNutriFit shows that cycling at a speed of 16-19 mph as burning 920 calories per hour, with slower speeds burning less than this. So my estimate seems a bit high, but as it also includes the extra activity level associated with getting the bike ready and so on it isn't that far off. If I plug these values in for my total training time for this year, I should get something pretty close to my estimated calorie burned total and if so, that would be a sort of verification. So lets see what I get:

Training Weeks: 23
Total training hours: 252.73

Using the values and formulas above we get:
((23*7)*2100) + (252.73*1000) = forecast calories burned = 338,100 + 252,730 = 590,830 forecast calories burned.

According to my data, my calories burned for this period, adjusted for the 12.2 lbs I lost during the period, was 592,312 or a variance of 1482 calories over 23 weeks, or 64 per week or 9 calories per day. I'd call that fairly accurate. I'll have to see how it holds up as I move foreward, and maybe I'll look back at my older data and see how it holds up there.

New Longest Ride, Same Sore Legs

2006-06-12T19:44:00.000-07:00

Well, as to be expected on a Monday, I achieved a new 'longest' ride, though I didn't quite achieve the goals I had in mind when I started the ride. Over the past 3 hard weeks (there was one recovery week in there), I've been trying to increase the duration and length of my long rides by 10%. On May 27th, my long ride came on a Satuday and was 71 miles in 3:51. One June 5th, after a rest week, it was 82 miles in 4:40, an increase of 15% in distance and 21% in time, quite a bit more than I had planned. This weekI did 83.5 miles in 4:50, an increase of 2% in distance and 3% in time, quite a bit less than I had planned. I was hoping for 5 hours and 90 miles. Taken all together though, the picture isn't quite as bad, a 17.6% increase in distance and 25.5% in time this week over the ride on the 27th. That is pretty close to the 20% I would expect with 10% increase per week (ok, 21% actually).

My legs were still feeling pretty tired and a bit sore from the past week, and in the first hour of the ride I was sure I'd have to take it a lot easier on this ride. By around the 2 hour mark though my legs were feeling much better and I had some really good long efforts as far into the ride as 3:30 and maybe a bit longer. I'm still thinking I am going to remove one of the BT workouts to let up on the intensity a bit so that I'm not risking over training. Hopefully that will help me stay a bit fresher for these longer rides. We'll see how I feel later in the week though.

In comparing the past three long rides, I noticed that there has been a decrease in average speed in each of the rides. Now, part of the decrease is due to the increased amount of climbing in the past two rides. The ride on the 5/27 only had 2818' of climbing, while last week had 4150' and this week had 4446'. I figured there had to be a bit more too it than that so I dug a bit deeper into the data. The power information I didn't think would account for the difference. Below is a graph of mean maximal power for the three rides:

There is not much to choose from between these rides. There is a total difference of 16W in overall average power, and some of that difference is undoubtedly due to the longer duration of the last two rides. I think the decrease in power does indicate some fatigue building up though, which I'm hoping the changing of my routine will help with. So I did some more looking. I noticed that on the graph for the 27th's ride, the left side of the graph was much lower than the other two lines, showing that there were no huge above threshold efforts on that ride, which had the highest average speed. So thinking that might be a key, I did a search in each of the data sets for periods 10 seconds or longer where I was above threshold. I was thinking, wrongly it turns out, that this was the definition of a match. [A match is actually defined, roughly, as being a period of a minute or more when you exceed your threshold by 20% or more.] At any rate, I still think the data I came across was instructive. In the ride on the 27th, I had only 6 periods of 10 seconds or longer where I was above threshold, and I had the fastest average speed. Last week I had 16 periods that fit the criteria and I saw a 1 mph decrease (from 18.5 to 17.5) in average speed. This week I had a whopping 43 periods that fit my requirements and my average speed was down another .4 mph from last week. So I think it is a workable assumption that on longer rides of 3:30+ in duration, lots of above threshold efforts at my current level of fitness hurt overall performance rather than help it. So I need to try and keep those efforts to a minimum in order to see the best results. I guess that makes sense...you stay within your limits as much as possible and you can finish strongly.

Wet Windy Day

2006-06-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

Well, it was drier today than yesterday, but you can't really call it dry. I was scheduled for a 3 hour ride, mainly endurance effort with a bit harder on the climbs. My legs felt a little tired so I mainly kept to just the endurance effort and kept the climbs a little easier than prescribed. After the first couple of miles I ran into a pretty steady rain shower that I rode through for about the next 10 miles. Once I'd climbed up and over one of the big climbs on today's ride, the hill I use for climbing repeat sort of things, I was out of the rain and the pavement was dry. It stayed dry for most of the rest of the ride until I started up the last big climb when it started showering on me off and on.

And the wind started to blow pretty good. It is an odd sensation to feel your front wheel being pushed by a 20+ mph crosswind. It almost felt like someone was grabbing the wheel and trying to turn it. The wind wasn't steady, which made it worse as I would adjust to the heavy wind and then it'd ease up and I'd tend to swerve a bit into the wind. One thing about it, I definitely got some experience in riding in less than ideal conditions.

As I noted above, my legs felt pretty tired today so I took it a bit easier than planned. In looking at my data for the past week, I noted that my TSS score for the week was around 830, about 80 points higher than my last heavy week. I'm thinking that it is maybe a bit too much intensity as this is only the first week in my 3 week block and I'm already tired. So I think I'll need to adjust my schedule, taking out one of the interval days and replacing it with a 90 minute endurance ride instead. Something not quite a recovery ride, but not a hard day. I'm not sure at this point how I will do on my 5 hour ride tomorrow, but I can bet my legs will definitely be tired.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

2006-06-11T06:04:00.000-07:00

Well, the weather didn't co-operate at all yesterday, Saturday, so I had to do some switching around of my schedule. I suppose I could have just done my 3 hour ride on the trainer rather than switch my recovery ride to Saturday and my 3 hour ride to Sunday, but I have hopes that the weather will be at least marginally better on Sunday.

It is sort of interesting how challenging 1:40 can be on the trainer as opposed to outdoors. It could be that I'm just still fatigued from the harder workouts this week, and I'm sure that is part of the answer. But I think that the very steady nature of trainer recovery rides plays a part too. On this particular ride, my average power and my normalized power were a mere 1 watt apart, which indicates to me a pretty danged steady effort with no real changes in pace. Perhaps the changes in pace are what make it seem easier on the road, and maybe I need to try and replicate that on the trainer next time. Plus it is just mentally tougher to put time in on the trainer, especially after getting used to getting outside to ride.

At any rate, I took it really easy for my recovery ride. I had read an interesting post by either Hunter Allen or Andrew Coggan, I forget which, on the Wattage forum on TopicA where he said that on his recovery rides he goes extremely easy, so I did the same. I averaged 124W, giving me an intensity factor of only .43, which is pretty close to the lowest I have had since I got the PowerTap and have been able to see it.

The easy day did give me a chance to play around with some of the data I've accumulated in the past month or so. Below is a graph of my peak normalized power for 60 minute and 20 minute periods over the past 28 days, with trendlines for each (the dashed lines). I'm not sure how much the upward slope of both data sets has to do with improved fitness and how much is just a result of starting in on harder intervals, but in any case it is nice to see the appearance of improvement.

How many climbs in a 31 mile ride?

2006-06-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

Today's workout was something a little different, at least for me. The description of the workout reads: "BT: On a course with long & short hills. On long climbs stay in the saddle at CP12. Attack very short hills at CP1. "

So what does this mean? Well, in my case it means that longer climbs I need to go around 310W or thereabouts and for short climbs it is more of a sprint at around 500W. Now, the description doesn't say how long is long and how short is very short, so I went with my own judgement, which was:
Very short climb- a rise which takes less than 30 seconds to climb
Long climb- a rise which takes more than 30 seconds to climb
I'm not sure this is what the workout really means, but that is how I did it, with some very interesting results. First off, this workout gave me my highest normalized power for rides over an hour, coming in at 260W, for an IF (intensity factor) of .89, equal to my previous highest intensity. I also achieved my personal best time on the training loop I did it on, finishing in 1:44 a 31 mile loop with 2000' of climing. It also gave me a rather...odd...power distribution graph.Note the rather large amount of time spent above 280W and the smaller but still noticeable bump above 400W. Definitely not my usual distribution shape.

As I mentioned above, I divided the two types of climbs basically to those shorter or longer than 30 seconds. This is pretty arbitrary but it worked out fine I think. Once I had downloaded my PowerTap into CyclingPeaks, I did a FastFind for the two types of intervals and came up with some surprising numbers that answer the question the title of this post asks, how many climbs in 31 miles? The answer is 46, 26 short climbs and 20 long climbs. To put this in a bit of perspective, with 46 climbs, some pretty minor as I used pretty much any upturn in the road for the short ones, I was doing some sort of climbing every 2 minutes and 8 seconds on average. Pretty typical of Vermont terrain I think, at least of the parts I generally ride.

The short climbs averaged 14 seconds in duration at a power output of 540W, definitely higher than what I was supposed to be shooting for. The graph below shows the average power and duration of each of the short climbs. There is also a trend line showing that I was definitely losing energy as the ride went on. The two yellow lines mark the bounds of the actual range I was supposed to be working in, which I obviously didn't fit in to :)

The longer climbs averaged 1 minute in duration (the longest being 2 minutes) at a power of 342W, again higher than I was supposed to be shooting for. Again, the graph below shows the duration and average power for each of the longer climbs, with a trend line and zone boundaries as above. Note that the trendline in this case moves upward. I think most of the movement is due to the 500W or so effort that was greater than 30 seconds and so got included with the longer climbs. I think the trend would still be upward, note the increasing distance of the green line to the top yellow one, but not as strongly so without the odd entry.

Not sure what tomorrow will bring since the weather is supposed to be not so good. Leastways that is how I intepret 100% chance of rain. I'll likely swap my Saturday and Sunday workouts since I think Sunday will give a bit more of a chance to get my three hour ride in.

Two by Two Means Sore Legs

2006-06-08T19:50:00.000-07:00

Well, today was a little strange on the bike. My training schedule called for two different specific workouts. The first was 4 or 5 three minute intervals at my CP6 power level, which is about 344W, while climbing a 4-6% grade hill with three minutes rest between intervals. After these were completed my schedule called for 20 minutes at CP60, which for me is 245W.

Since my non-biking schedule was even stranger than my workout schedule, I had to get up at the, for me, virtually unheard of hour of 6am. I got up and had a Powerbar Harvest for a quick breakfast and started getting ready for my ride. Unfortunately the forecast was calling for something like an 80% chance of showers and the road was wet, even though it wasn't actually raining at the time. So onto the trainer went the bike. I did my warm-up and then raised the front wheel of the bike to simulate the climbing position and started on my intervals. They hurt. They hurt so much that by 2:30 of the third interval I couldn't do any more. So after a bit of a cool down I lowered the front wheel and moved on to the 20 minute at CP60. This was painful too, but not as much as the CP6 intervals.

By the time I finished the 20 minutes I noticed the road didn't look wet any more so I decided I was going to get the last 30 minutes of my ride outdoors, so I grabbed my vest and helmet and off I went. Since I was out on the road now, I decided I would try and get my final two CP6 intervals in on the hill I had planned on using if the weather had co-operated in the first place. I did two solid intervals and discovered that this hill, Dole Hill, is exactly the right size for me to do this workout on currently. It took me exactly 3 minutes to do this climb at the prescribed power level.

After finishing the two intervals I took it easy going home. On one flat section I worked on riding no handed. I almost always do this at one particular place on the ride home when I'm coming from the west. Today I was able to actually put 200W of power into my pedaling while going around a nice gentle bend in the road.

Drank 2 bottles of sports drink during the workout.

Average power for the CP6 intervals - 341W (Target range: 327 - 361)
Average power for the CP60 interval - 248W (Target range: 234 - 257)

So right on target I think.

ClimbingRepeats + MuscleTension = Hill Cruise Intervals

2006-06-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

A nice tough day coming on the heels of my long ride yesterday. The assigned workout is called "Hill Cruise Intervals" and they seem to me to be a cross between ClimbingRepeats and MuscleTension. The intensity of the workout (power level), duration and terrain of the workout are pretty close to those of ClimbingRepeats. The cadence however is more like MuscleTension as the cadence is deliberately lower, between 60 and 70rpm (compared to 50 to 60 for MT).

So anyway, I drove out to the one place I've found so far where I can do these, Hurlburt Hill. It is a nice 1.25 mile long hill averaging 5-6% gradient with some sections a tad steeper and one part that is only a couple percent grade. I did the first interval coming up the west side of the hill which isn't quite as long and I don't think is as even or as steep. While I was able to keep the same power level, ~300W, the duration was only 0:03:45. Once I had cruised down the other side I started the 'serious' intervals. People probably thought I was a little crazy going up and down this hill over and over. I did a total of four 'serious' intervals plus the shorter initial one, giving me 0:31:31 of 'working' time at that intensity level. The remainder of the 1:27:00 workout was recovery/warm up/cool down time. I don't have any previous data of a comparable workout to look at, but my average power was 305W for all the work intervals. I guess this could compare to the Shifting Cruise Intervals I did on May 23rd, where I averaged 299W. Not quite the same but close.

It is sort of odd doing these much shorter but more intense workouts. I'm so used to doing 2 hour + workouts with my intervals in those, that these shorter workouts almost make me think I'm slacking off or something. Of course, then I get to my 4 hour+ workouts on Mondays or my 3 hour workouts on Saturday and realize I'm just spreading my 15 hours a week a bit differently to accomplish my goals.

Oh the wonderful (?) pain

2006-06-05T19:23:00.000-07:00

(Picture to the left is a poor image of the view up Route 122 towards Sheffield Heights, the ~900' ridge that I went over today.)

Oddly enough, my boss was talking the other day about the first thing to learn about cycling is that it is all about enduring pain. His wife had made a comment that cycling is the only sport where the pain starts when you first begin riding and never really ends. I don't know as I agree with the 'all about' part, but dealing with pain and suffering is probably a big part of improving as a cyclist. When you push against your limits in order to move beyond them, you body suffers and your mind really needs to take over to keep you going.

This was brought home today during my long ride of the week. I'm currently training for a roughly 200km (134mile) ride towards the end of August. Since I'm figuring on this taking about 8 hours of rolling time, I'm working on increasing my long rides to somewhere near that duration over the next few training blocks. Since my long ride prior to my recovery week was about 4 hours, I planned on a ride that I figured would take me 4.5 hours, about a 12% increase. That is a bit more than the 10% they reccomend, but not by much. I'm 'stealing' the time from my higher intensity workouts as endurance is more important to my event. So my overall training time probably isn't increasing all that much.

So the route I planned worked out to 81.5 miles on my mapping software (the PowerTap measured it at 81.81, so pretty close) and took me 4 hours and 40 minutes. My goal for this ride was to maintain an average power (well, normalized) in my CP180 range. This would be quite a challenge as that is my best power for a 3 hour period and I was going to try and maintain that for over 4.5 hours. I did pretty well actually (see my power distribution chart above), coming in just under my goal range (or in it if you go by normalized power). My speed was a bit lower than I had planned on, 17.5 mph compared to 18mph, but given the amount of climbing involved in this route (4150'), which is about 1400' more than my previous longest ride from the 27th. (see route profile to the left)

Somewhere around 3 to 3.5 hours into the ride my legs were definitely hurting. It became more and more difficult to maintain the power level I wanted to keep with for the ride. It didn't help any when I had to sprint to avoid a swooping peregrine falcon after climbing a 1 mile, 3.5% climb. Going to 127% threshold power for 35 seconds after 4 hours in the saddle was an additional level of pain. Well, it was painful after it ended. While doing it, it didn't really hurt that much, but when I eased up I quickly became aware of the pain.

When I made it home, my legs were definitely tight and sore, and I was definitely ready to get cleaned up, eat and get off my legs and relax. Now I get to think ahead to next week's ride when I'm shooting for 5 hours and around 90 miles. More wonderful pain.

Looking back on my recovery week

2006-06-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I made it through another recovery week. While there are times when I'm definitely ready for recovery weeks (weeks where the amount of time I spend on the bike and the effort is generally lower), they make me nervous. One of the things I originally got into cycling for was to lose weight, and I have done a good job with that. Having been heavy though, and not all that long ago, I have somewhat of a fear of putting weight back on. So when I go from riding 15 hours a week to 9 hours a week as I do in recovery weeks, I become very unsure of balancing my calorie intake to what I'm burning through exercise. This week though I must have done pretty well as my average weight this week was the same as last week. I've actually been within a pound one way or another for the last two months.

Any way. I sort of didn't quite follow the spirit of a recovery week. Started out alright, following the workout plan as assigned. The 'trouble' came on Thursday when I was primarily supposed to be doing Endurance Miles with some corner sprints. I ended up doing a couple extended threshold+ efforts.

Lesson Learned: Do not do hard threshold+ efforts two days before you are supposed to do a 30 minute Time Trial.

Needless to say, having not learned this lesson ahead of time, my schedule 30 minute TT on Saturday did not go so well. Between not having recovered from the hard efforts on Thursday and likely starting out too hard, I didn't make it through 30 minutes and the time I managed had a lower average power than the efforts done on Thursday.

Recovery days are nice

2006-06-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

Nice and easy recovery rides are a good thing once in awhile. Today's weather was perfect, mostly sunny, comfortably warm and just a bit of a breeze. Kept my pace nice and easy so that my heart rate stayed below 118 bpm (max was 116 today). Sometimes it is hard to go this slow, but I kept in mind that I have a 30 minute time trial tomorrow and that helped keep my urge to go for it in check.

The main focus of this ride was to keep a comfortably high cadence (above 90 or so for me) and work on pedalling technique. I think I did a pretty good job at both. About 1/3 of the ride was at 95+ cadence, and given the number of climbs on the ride that is pretty good.

I still have my commute to do later on, but since this is a recovery day I'll try to stay in a recovery mode for it as well. Then a good night's sleep and really nail my time trial tomorrow.

Interesting article

2006-06-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

Came across a link to this article on the Wattage list on Topica. Since Neuromuscular power is one of my weak points according to my power profiling it is something I'm definitely going to consider trying to incorporate into my training in the future.

The article is titled "Sprinting for Success" by Adam Hodges Myerson.

Went a bit overboard

2006-06-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those workouts where you are supposed to do one specific task and otherwise take it easy but instead you do the task and then do a couple other intense things too. That was my workout today...and in a recovery week no less.

Started out the day doing a strength workout, which I'm still getting used to as I haven't spent much time doing strength work off the bike this year. Once I got out on the road I started off behaving, staying in zones 1 and 2. Then I got to Dole Hill, the first big hill on my route. Instead of taking it easy, I went after it. Not flat out, but pretty hard. Normalized power for the 0:03:46 climb was 372W.

Then I continued on and did my corner sprints that I was assigned. I think in some ways these were meant to be akin to the short PowerIntervals I would be assigned before a field test with CTS. Something to get the legs open before the test. Anyway, did the corner sprints averaging 749 W going into the corners and 741W coming out. Having a flat tire in the midst of the intervals didn't help matters any. :(

I rode easy for about 10 minutes, filling in the required time. Once I had turned around and was heading back up the long gradual climb, I decided to really hit it and see if I could do sort of an 8 minute FT. Did a good job I think, at least my numbers were right in line with what I have been using. I ran out of steam after about 6.5 minutes so not a true test, but had some good numbers. For the 8 minutes prior to when I ended the test I averaged 329W, while in the 6.5 minutes where I was really hammering I averaged 343W. Going with the 329W and using CTS protocols, that would give me a LT of 296W. If I went with the 343W it would be 308W or so. As I've been using 292W, I feel like I've been pretty close by using the value from my latest ClimbingRepeats.

After this I took it pretty easy, even on my commute to and from work later on. Now I need to try and behave on my recovery ride tomorrow, and my commute, so I'll be fresh for my TT on Saturday.

Recovery Day

2006-05-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it is recovery day again, and in a recovery week no less. So it is a good time to look back and to look ahead I think.

Looking back, I feel that I've made some real progress this spring. I've completed my first goal ride, beating my weight and time goals for the effort. I've also completed my longest, by mileage, ride ever and set my new personal best average speed for a ride over 1 hour in length. Then I went out on a different route and upped my best average speed to 18.7 mph, so I'm going further and faster than last year by a wide margin. For example, on the same course as my first goal ride, this year's speed was 2.1 mph faster than last year. Granted, I was 35 lbs heavier at the time, but that is still a great improvement in speed I think. And now I've done rides, over different routes, at nearly .5 mph faster still and over a longer distance.

Today I discovered something new that is offered by TrainingPeaks.com. You can setup your workout information so that other folks can look at some of the data and notes for the training rides you enter information about. So I went ahead and set that up. You can find that information here. I don't know as many folks will have cause to look at it, but it is there if you want to.

In looking ahead today, I realized that my training plan wasn't necessarily giving me the long rides I needed to build endurance for my 134 mile goal ride for late August. I posted on the TrainingPeaks forums asking if I should continue to build my longest ride of the week by 10% or so and 'steal' the time from the other rides, trying to keep somewhere near my hours per week. I was told that was definitely the way to go, so I've gone in and redone my schedule for the next couple months. That is another nice thing about TrainingPeaks. You can go in and schedule workouts as far in advance in the year as you'd like and then go back and change things if your fitness or goals change. At any rate, I adjusted my schedule so I'm adding the 10% or so to my long rides and decreased the duration on some of the other rides that are higher intensity workouts. I may have to do a fewer number of intervals to make the workouts fit, but if I run a bit over I'm not too worried. I'll be over on the scheduled time just from doing the commuting I'm hoping to do this summer. That could be as much as 3 hours per week. Anyway, here is a graph of what my training hours are for the next couple of months. The blue line is my long ride of the week while the pink line is weekly training hours. This pink line also includes roughly one hour per week of strength training.

Now of course I need to figure out some new training routes to match up with the new longer duration rides so I can avoid doing multiple laps of my current routes.

Recovery Ride? Endurance Ride? Somewhere in between?

2006-05-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

Today's ride is described like this: "Ride in 1-2 zone, mostly 1 zone. Flat course. Low effort--light on pedals. Comfortably high rpm. "

Zone 1 is recovery, zone 2 is endurance, so I guess this ride is somewhere in between, maybe leaning more towards recovery since it says 'mostly 1 zone'. So I went out and did my North Danville loop, which used to be a much longer duration ride for me last year. Last year it took me nearly 1.5 hours to do the loop, this year it is less than 1 hour. In fact, even on a recovery ride like today I was fast enough that I needed to add on a loop out on a dirt road (an old training route when I first started riding again and could only manage a couple of miles [2.8 to be exact]) near my house. The ride was interupted for a bit when I apparently picked up a small very thin piece of wire that worked through the tire and popped the tube. I changed the tube and continued on my way and finished the ride in almost exactly the 1:11 of rolling time the workout called for.

Today was also a day for a commute to work, or another chance to get some time on the bike. I'm trying to keep my commutes to the same standards as my daily workouts, so the commute I tried to keep in zones 1 and 2, mostly zone 2. This is a little more challenging on commute because of the short time period (less than 30 minutes generally for both trips) and the fact that 2 miles of the return trip is an average 4% grade with peak of 12%. But, according to my HAC4, I kept my HR to an average of 104 with a max of 128, the average being in zone 1 and the max being in zone 2. In fact, 0:19:34 was spent in zone 1 with only 0:06:11 in zone 2, so not too bad really.

Tomorrow is a rest day which I'm looking forward to actually. One of my goals this week is to get as much recovery time as I can so I can do well on my TT on Saturday. It will be my first test since switching coaching systems and I probably need to get my more accurate ranges set. That is sort of one of the downsides of TrainingPeaks is that I have TT tests every 3 weeks, but on the other hand they are not the 'super threshold' ones the CTS has. At least that is my feeling before actually doing one. Since the tests are 4 times the length of the CTS ones, you really have to watch the pacing and find a level you can sustain. With the CTS ones it always seemed like it was 'go as hard as you can as fast as you can'. I just never seemed to get into that level of effort. It may be that its just because I have a power meter now and can see the actual effort I'm putting out and will be able to better pace myself.

My plan for right now is to start out the first 5 minutes getting going and working up to a level about 5% above what I've been using as my threshold power (292W). Then the next 20 minutes I want to try and hold 320 W, give or take, maybe a bit higher so that the inevitable downhills won't kill my average too much. The last 5 minutes I wan to try and work my power up say 10 W per minute until the last 30 - 60 seconds when I'll try to go all out and sprint to a finish. That's the plan anyway. We'll see how it works out on Saturday.

Memorial Day Ride

2006-05-30T19:44:00.000-07:00

The image to the left is my Mean Maximal Power graph for my ride on Memorial Day. The description of it is the same as my ride from Saturday, except for the duration:
"Group ride. Sit-in today. No hard, sustained pulls. Mostly CP60-CP180. Avoid power harder than CP30. "

Since I didn't have a group to ride with, I just went out and tried to keep to the power ranges suggested. I think I did a pretty good job at it actually. Only one thing kept me from having a higher value on the right hand side of the graph. During the ride I caught up with one of the folks from the cycling group I ride with when I am able to get time off from work to ride with them. I rode with him for about 20 minutes at a lower pace than I had been going. I figured the experience of riding around another person outweighed the little time I lost out on at a bit higher intensity.

The course I rode is actually about the flatest course I have around here, with an average gradient of only .2% with a maximum climb of around 14%. Compare this to my ride on Saturday which had an average gradient of .7% with a max of 10%, or with my Barnet loop course which averages 1.4% with a max of 11.2%. Anyway, for here it is a flat course. Unfortunately much of it goes through villages, making it difficult to use for TT and tests.

Even with the 20 minutes (about 16% of the ride time) at the slower pace, I still had my fastest average speed of 18.7mph. I think next time I do this workout on this route I could average 19mph or higher. Someday I hope to average 20mph+ on a ride of more than 1 hour.

At any rate, as you can see from the graph, power was pretty consistent at the longer durations. Not quite sure why I have the levels dropping down regularly on the left side of the graph, but it is sort of cool to look at.

One thing I'm finding with these 'group' rides is that it is quite challenging, not to mention hard work, to maintain a more or less level power output through varied terrain and to keep pushing that level of power for extended periods. I definitely feel like I'm working on my muscular endurance which I think is something that has been holding me back.

Recovery Ride

2006-05-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

Well, one thing about riding with a young riding partner. You definitely take it easy on your recovery days. This is me and Sammy (I'm in the blue shirt) at the turn around point on our ride this morning. To underscore how easy we were taking it, my average power for the ride was all of 70 watts and my HR never got out of my recovery zone (highest HR was 108, a good 9 bpm below my Recovery ceiling). In a way that is pretty pleasing to me since the ride has 1000' of climbing in it, one about .7 miles long averaging 5% or so. Used to be going up that hill at 5-6mph would push my HR up as high as I'd want it to go (higher than I really wanted it to truth be told) and now I can do the same hill at the same speed with a HR 50bpm lower. I guess that is progress.

He is still very new to cycling so we don't generally go very far or very fast. Today was our longest ride together at 14 miles in 1:40:00 of rolling time. This is pretty typical of our rides as far as speed goes actually. We generally go out on Sunday's to ride and in fact this was the first Sunday when it was sunny and warm. Average temperature for the ride according to my HAC4 was 80 degrees and it felt pretty humid, but when we were moving it was nice.

Really a gorgeous day to be out on the bike. I almost wish that I was doing a longer ride today but thats not how my schedule is set up. I've got a recovery week coming up, with the long ride supposedly tomorrow. Hopefully the weather will co-operate but if not I'll switch the ride to Tuesday which looks to be better weather.

Longest Ride of the Year (so far)

2006-05-27T19:02:00.000-07:00

Today my schedule called for a 4 hour ride. The description was for a group ride but with no hard pulls and to keep generally in the CP60-CP180 range. Since to get the range you take +/- 5% from the value you have for that range, I had a target for the day of 209 to 257W. I also needed to avoid going above the CP30 range which has a top end of 306W.

I sort of figured it would be a tough ride to maintain that wattage range for the entire ride given it was scheduled for an hour longer than the duration of the lower end of the scheduled range. I was right.

I decided I needed a new route as nothing I had done so far would give me quite the mileage I figured I would need. I guessed I'd need something in the 65+ mile range, preferably a loop since I don't much care for out and backs if I can avoid them, which isn't often enough. I settled on extending a previous loop I've done for 3:30 rides which is 61 miles. Looking at the map I saw I could go to the next town further north and add about 10 miles to the loop, which would be just about perfect. I hadn't ridden most of the route so I wasn't sure what to expect but I was confident I could handle whatever was there. The image above is the profile of the route. As can be seen, there are no real long steep climbs, but a fair number of gentle rises with maybe some steeper sections that didn't affect the average gradient too much. I think the steepest was around 4% over any distance and of course that came towards the end of the ride. The total climbing for this route was just under 3000', so not flat by any means.

I discovered that you cannot always trust the weather radar. I checked the forecast and radar before heading out and there was no mention of rain and there was no green stuff on the radar image. So needless to say I was a little surprised to get pretty well rained on for 30 minutes to an hour in the middle portion of the ride. Luckily I had brought my wind vest and arm warmers. The vest I had actually put on shortly after heading out as it was damp and the wind chill made it fairly cool. I stopped once the rain started coming down to put the arm warmers on and to work out a covering for the PowerTap computer since I really didn't want that to come to harm from the wet conditions. The temperature dropped considerably during the rain shower, from the 70's to the mid 50's. Luckily it stopped raining and the temperature went back up after I made the turn to head back south. The sun even came back out eventually and I had to push down the arm warmers and unzip the vest a bit.

I have to say I was generally very pleased with how this ride turned out. I averaged 211W for the 3:51:00 or so it took me to run the 71.55 mile route. Just inside my range, but inside it none the less. I set a new max for my CP90, 229W. I'm not sure if I could have pushed much harder for the duration of the ride, but I know now that I can push a consistent pace even when my legs are hurting.

Power output was pretty consistent too. The first half of the ride I averaged 216W while in the second half I averaged 208W. Also, in looking at the CP values for various lengths of time, they are generally in a 10% range. Best 6 minutes was 250W, 12 minutes was 239W, 30 minutes was 236W, 60 minutes was 231W. So pretty danged consistent I think.

This ride also gave me my best average speed, this year for certain and I'm pretty sure its my best ever for a ride over an hour. I averaged 18.6 mph over the four hours of the ride. One interesting thing is that my average speed was better in the second half of the ride, being about 2 mph faster than the first half. I guess the extra descents more than balanced out the somewhat steeper climbs. I'm really looking forward to when my average speed for a comparable route is up over 20 mph. That will happen sometime this summer I think.

This ride and power output gave me a TSS of 230 or so (I don't have CyclingPeaks in front of me to double check) so I'm glad I have a recovery ride tomorrow. Then I move into a recovery week with my first 30 minute TT. Still trying to decide what route to use, though I've narrowed it down to two I think. Either the North Danville Loop which I've considered doing as a TT route or perhaps the relatively flat section in todays ride located around the 45 mile mark of the ride. It actually has about a .5% grade on average but I was still able to crank out some watts on the descent so that might be my best bet for an out and back route.

Short Hill Climbs

2006-05-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

Another great day for biking. Sunny, just a tad humid but temperatures were comfortable. My scheduled workout was something sort of new. It called for a series of short, 1 to 2 minute, hill climbs. The target power was in the 350W range and the cadence was to be 50-55. So pretty similar to MuscleTensions with CTS but much shorter in duration.

One thing I liked about this workout was that it is designed so you just do the climbs at the prescribed intensity and cadence as you come to the hills, so you don't have to find a hill long enough to do 10-15 minute intervals. While the area I live is hilly, they are all relatively short. It took me quite awhile to find one that I thought I could do 10 minute ClimbingRepeats on and even that turned out to be 3 minutes too short. On the down side, the description doesn't give a specific number to do, just "a series of 1 to 2 minute hills". I ended up doing 5 of them and averaged right in the range I was supposed to be in. I compare these to the last MuscleTension workout I did on the trainer, and think I got at least as good a workout despite only getting about 1/5 the time of the intervals. The last MT intervals I did I only averaged about 210W, which was all I could get from my trainer at that cadence, even with the resistance as high as it could go and the gearing as hard as possible.

At any rate, I really felt this workout in my legs. I tried to keep in mind the correct form and bring all the muscles in my legs to bear, with sort of mixed results. I think the quads got the brunt of it, but the hip flexors and glutes got some at least.

I did one of my 'usual' routes, a 30.66 mile one, and I got my best time on it, 1hr and 44min which is about 5 minutes faster than my previous best and something like 30 minutes faster than the first time I did it last year. Not bad for a relatively short course. Someday I'll have to try doing this loop, along with some others, at a race pace just to see how fast I can finish it.

I know I definitely want to do the North Danville Loop, 16 miles, as a time trial someday just for fun. Odd sense of fun maybe, but it'd be fun to see how hard I could push myself. I wonder if I could actually maintain my LTP for the full time it would take. It would likely be considerably less than an hour since I do it in less time than that now without going full out. Hmm, maybe I'll use that as my 30 min TT test next week.

Anyway, my notes for today:

Another nice day for a ride. Comfortably warm and a bit humid maybe. Rode a bit earlier today as the forecast was calling for thunderstorms this afternoon. Rode the Danville-Peacham-Barnet loop.

Did five repeats of the hill climbs described in the workout description. Was shooting for about 350 watts and a cadence of right around 50. For the five intervals I did, I averaged overall a 53 rpm cadence and 346 watts, so right on target. Really felt it in my thighs, more so that I did the last set of MT I did on the trainer where I only averaged around 220 watts.

Having a real hill definitely makes a difference. Did these five intervals on the hills from Dole Hill til the one leading up into Peacham. I can still feel the effort in my legs now 30 minutes after the ride ended.

Drank 1 bottle of sports drink and a bottle of water and ate a powerbar harvest. Did pretty well eating a dinking regularly. I find eating is easier to some extent than drinking so I may rethink my calorie intake in that light and split my drink between sports drink and water and take more powerbars or other solid food.

Had the peregrine falcon swoop down on me as I passed their nest going over Barnet Mountain. Overall I think I did a good job today, keep my pace right about where it was supposed to be. Workout called for generally cp90-cp180 which with the numbers I have in place now would be something like 209W - 239W. My average power for the day was 216, so right in the range. I'm pretty sure this is my best time for this route.

Corner Sprints

2006-05-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

Today was a simply gorgeous day to be out on the bike. Sun was shinging and it was in the mid-70's with just a bit of a breeze. Today's workout was something new from the TrainingPeaks plan, something I'll call corner sprints. To do them you basically sprint into and out of a corner, going hard about 4 seconds on either end, more or less. It is considered a 'SpeedSkill' drill, which is definitely something I need to work on.

Especially as I may have a chance to do some training criteriums later this summer. On the group ride on Tuesday, John mentioned that someone in the bike shop where I bought my new shoes is trying to organize a training criterium series on Sunday afternoons. I need to call this person, John called him "Big Ring" Bob, and get the information. I have to say that I'm a bit nervous about the idea of doing criteriums, but it should be some fun if I can work up the nerve to actually enter one.

Anyway, back to today's ride. I managed to set a new 5 sec current peak power high of 931 watts. My short term goal for this is 1000W which I don't know if that is good bad or otherwise, but it is progress. Only other interesting thing that stands out from my ride is having a flock of geese hiss at me from the side of the road as I went by them. For a moment I was worried They were going to come out after me, but they just sat there and hissed. Also did a bike commute to work tonight which was fun. Its actually not taking me all that much longer to do the round trip by bike than it does by car, and every time I do the bike commute it saves me about $1.00 in gas. I'm thinking I'll rearrange my grocery shopping schedule to do that on Wednesday which is the one day I have to use the car since I have so much stuff I take to work with me. That way I could, weather permitting, ride the bike the other 5 days I work.

So here are my notes from both my afternoon training ride and my commute:

Training Ride:

Gorgeous day for a ride. Started out with arm warmers and wind vest as it was quite windy and only in the mid sixties. By the time I was less than 10 minutes out, I had stuffed the vest in my pocket and pushed the arm warmers down. A little breezy with SW winds gusting to 10 mph or so.

Did my corner sprints in Danville at the spot I found the other day. First attempt I pulled right out of the rightside clip, so the numbers there aren't the best, 622W in and 565W out. I did three more sets that were pretty consitent. They had the following average watts:
In Out
820 858
842 931
822 790
760 810
I could maybe have done a couple more, but I was uncertain how many 'several' is and I felt like I was losing power on the last one, though looking at the numbers I hadn't lost that much.

After finishing the intervals I rode out Rte 2 to Walden and turned around and came back. Tried to keep power right around 220 on the return trip. Did Walden to West Danville down on the drops.

Hit my highest speed ever on the bike today, 47mph coming down out of Danville. Pretty exhillirating.

Interesting note, on the way to Walden I was hissed at by a flock of geese sitting along the side of the road. I thought for a moment they were going to jump out at me. I understand their bites can be painful.

Commute:
Pushed pretty hard on the commute, both out and back. Total time was my best for the commute so far. The last two times I have data for, on May 11 and 9th the times were 24:25 and 28:11. Was a little chilly coming home, with the temp around 57. Should have put my vest on but didn't think I'd need it.

Tuesday is Twice the Fun

2006-05-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

This entry is for Tuesday, May 23rd.

Double the workout, double your fun!

This was my first day following a new training program from TrainingPeaks. The workout was realtively short, but intense. The name on TP for it is "Shifting Cruise Intervals", but I've seen the same workout called "OverUnders" in other places. I did this workout in the early afternoon then went home and rested as I had my second ever group ride that evening.

So, my notes for the 'main' workout today:
After replacing the tire on the rear wheel I headed out for todays first ride.

Rode the North Danville Loop, repeating the flat from Rte 2 to North Danville twice to get the intervals in. Forgot to use the aero position (down on the drops for me) in the first couple intervals, but the last 3 were down. Was a good solid workout I though.

I'm still having to 'guestimate' on power ranges for this sort of thing but I think I got it pretty close judging from the results. The last interval was within a couple of percent on average power compared to the third interval, so I probably could have done another interval but as it was it worked out well on time and I got the time in the intervals that was assigned, between 30 and 40 minutes.

Some of the intervals ended up going longer than the 8 minutes in the description but I was losing track of how many ups and downs I'd done. Something to work on. Also didn't drink enough sports drink, only about 1 bottle for the 1.5 hr ride and only ate half the powerbar. I still find it hard to eat and drink properly when doing intervals. Had one odd spike in power up to like 1400 watts which is probably not accurate so I edited it out.

Odd thing just happened as I was working on my notes. Heard a loud bang from downstairs. Apparently I had pinched the tube in the rear tire when I replaced the tire this morning and it finally popped. Its got a 4" split in it so no way to patch that.

My average power for each of the intervals was 300W with the intervals lasting an average of 8 minutes. This would put me roughly at 290 for the 'under' part and 320 for the 'over' part, which is just what I was shooting for. Total time in the intervals was about 33'.

Notes for the group ride:
Well, this was quite a bit harder than I was planning on, but fun. Only 3 folks showed up, including me, so was a fair amount of work for each of us even though we didn't nail it the entire time. Normalized power was 223W which is about my average for a solo endurance ride. Tried to keep my pulls fairly even but given the terrain up over Severance Hill, this was difficult. Should have downloaded the file to a seperate day so I could upload it, but maybe I can do that anyway using different software since CP put the group ride and the workout this afternoon together.

Anyway, still not totally comfortable with riding close enough to get the full effect of the draft of the rider(s) in front of me, but I felt like I made progress. I would slip out of the draft to slow down some rather than always use the brakes, and this seemed to work pretty well most of the time. Need to work on my pacing though when I taking a pull since I'm not sure its terribly even and I have a tendency to go too hard especially on the hills.

Had a lot of fun though.

Averaged only 164W during the ride but had a peak of 692W during the steep climb. CP said my normalized power was 237W or so, which indicates I was working pretty hard during parts of the ride I guess.

Changing Coaching Systems

2006-05-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

Well, sometimes I guess you just need a change.

I have been working with Carmichael Training Systems for about six months now and there are parts of the service they offer that I really like, such as the support that can be found in their forums. There are parts that, as a 'Classic' package member, I have become disillusioned with I guess is the best way to put it.

After completing my first 'goal ride', I wanted to make sure that my upcoming schedules were geared towards my new event, which is a 200km solo ride, so I sent an email to CTS member services. The response I got was that essentially there was no 'goal type' to be reset as training plans are generated solely based on your sport. This is sort of disappointing to me, especially given the $39 per month charge for the service. The reason for the disappointment is that if this is the case then the training program generated for someone doing a century is the same as someone training for a 60 mile road race is the same as someone training for a 40km time trial is the same as someone training for a criterium. While there are some things that are common to all of these events, namely the need for endurance, they each have their own peculiarities and I don't believe they can be addressed adequately with a one size fits all training program.

So I investigated TrainingPeaks.com as it appears to be associated with CyclingPeaks who make the software I use to get the most from my PowerTap. I had recently, Sunday in fact, picked up Joe Friel's "Cyclist's Training Bible" and apparently the TrainingPeaks site uses it as the basis for the training plans that are developed. So I played around with their site for a bit, actually I started playing around with it last week, and found a number of things I liked and that are more user friendly, at least for me, than the CTS system.

First is that you can have any number of events, classify those events as A, B, or C and their Virtual Coach system will lay out your training blocks in a way that allows you to have a proper peaking period for your 'A' events, a lesser rest for your 'B' events and use 'C' events as training events. You can also see the entire year at a glance to see how the periods change to have a greater sense of what the program is heading for.

Secondly, you can upload either the data files downloaded from your PowerTap or other cycling computer or heart rate monitor, directly to your log on the site, saving you from having to enter data if you have a device they support. Or if you use CyclingPeaks you can upload the day's file from that which will also copy your notes to the online log. In the case of uploading power data, it also automatically updates your critical power ranges used for workout intensities so that you can easily see what power level a given workout should be done at.

Thirdly, there is a nutrition log that allows you to enter the foods you eat and keeps track of macro nutrients and compares them to your RMR+ the calories burned through exercise. It has default values for calories burned per hour of exercise that you can modify to suit your situation or you can override this in the training log with the results from the power meter if you use one. The only issue I have with the nutrition log is that there is no place to enter in calories burned from regular daily activities, but I found a way around that easily enough by adding a 'RestDay' workout to my day and putting the calories I burned from daily events there. This also gives me a seperate place to put non-training notes in.

Lastly the pricing is less expensive than CTS. I went with a 3 month subscription which cost me $49, so $10 more than CTS but for a period of time 3 times as long. CTS: $39 for 1 month compared to TrainingPeaks: $49 for 3 months. If you wanted to pay a year at a time the deal is even better, working out to something between $9 and $10 per month.

The one downside I've come across is that the community on their forums is not as active or supportive as that on CTS, but I can live with that.

Somedays you should listen to the omens

2006-05-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

This post is for Monday, May 22nd.

Well, today was a day where I guess a long ride wasn't meant to be.

Started off getting ready at 11am. Got everything on the bike and went out and found that once I finally got my new shoes clipped in to a pedal I couldn't get it out. Nearly broke the shoe getting it off the pedal and had to take the pedal partially apart to finally get it off. Tried swtiching pedals from the MTB to the road bike but couldn't get the pedals off the Trek to swap them out. So changed the cleats from the mountain shoes to the road shoes and finally got off a little after noon.

So an hour messing around with stuff. Anyway, so I get out on the road and head out Rte 2 towards Lancaster. I work on the FastPedal intervals, getting used to the different feel of the new shoes. I was bouncing a litle when cadence got up around 120 when there was little load on the pedals. Not sure if I need to adjust fit because of the shoes or not.

Just before my last FP interval I must have caught something with the rear tire because it flatted, loudly. Something had cut into the sidewall of the tire and punctured the tube. Called for Mom to come get me. THen I remembered something my boss had said so I tried to jury rig the tire using a piece of powerbar wrapped to help keep the tube in the tire at the cut. Oddly enough it seemed to work so I replaced the tube and remounted the tire and started back towards town, watching for Mom. I guess the ride wasn't meant to be. I'll end up rescheduling the long ride another day later this week.

Daddy needs a new pair of shoes

2006-05-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

After my ride today I took a trip over to the town that has one of the better LBS in it. My main goal was to go to the very nice bookshop that is in the same town to buy Joe Friel's "The Cyclist's Training Bible". While I was there I also picked up a book called "The Rider" by Tim Krabbe which I have heard good things about.

After visiting the bookstore I went to the LBS and ended up getting my first pair of road cycling shoes. I've been wearing a pair of Shimano MTB shoes as a friend recommended them as a good place to start since they are easier to walk in than road shoes. I felt it was time to 'upgrade' my footwear and ended up buying an inexpensive, relatively speaking, pair of Specialized Sport Road shoes using their BodyGeometry system and the correct insoles for my feet. They are supposed to balance out how the leg is aligned when pedaling so that you pedal straight up and down rather than the knee tending to push in as you push down. The little blurb on the tag from the shoes reads:

Body Geometry
Biomechanically Correct Shoe Design
Co-developed with Dr. Andy Pruitt, sports medicine expert and Director of the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. Based on three dimensional studies of the pedalling motion, this patented technology is deisgned to measurably increase performance, reduce injuries and increase comfort.

We'll have to see how they work out on a long, 3:30:00, ride tomorrow, assuming the showers miss me.

Recovery Day

2006-05-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

You know, sometimes recovery days are the best days on the bike, in spite of the fact that I sometimes find it hard to go that slow. They are days I can just tool along and enjoy looking around.

Things like 'chasing' a pair of birds along a fence line. They would take off as I approached but fly along the fence in the direction I was travelling so that when I got to them they would take off again. This happened several times which I thought was amusing.

Or inadvertantly startling a couple of young horse when I called out "Hello horsies" as I went by.

So here are my notes from this ride:
Rode out Rte 2 to Danville then down Brainard St to Joe's Brook Road. Took a bit of an alternate route rather than going up the short steep hill into town. Took the left turn at the bottom of the hill that went through a residential area, much lower gradient. Has a nice corner there to practice on maybe. Was a bit breezy and a little cool, but was nice. Recovery rides are fun because I really feel like I'm just enjoying the time on the bike rather than having to 'accomplish' something. SOmetimes it is hard to take it this easy, but its a nice change. Drank 1 bottle of water during ride.

My Staple Food - Bread

2006-05-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

It's funny. I haven't bought bread in a store for about 6 months. Not since I discovered/modified a very basic bread recipe that suits me very well. I got the original form of the recipe from watching "Good Eats" on the Food Network. The recipe is for a rustic round loaf and takes a day to make (includes an overnight prep time), which is really way to long for me.

So I experimented to see if it would work in my bread machine. I have an older one, but it has a timer on it which is perfect so I can put bread going in the evening and wake up to the smell of fresh baked bread in the morning. I've tweaked the recipe and method a bit to fit my bread machine, but it has remained largely the same. It makes a nearly perfect loaf almost every time. Sometimes if the humidity is a bit higher or I put in a bit too much liquid, the top will collapse, but by and large it makes a nice smooth loaf.

Ingredients:
8 oz Whole Wheat Flour (by weight)
8 oz Bread Flour (by weight)
1 oz molasses (by weight)
9.5 oz lukewarm water (by weight)
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons yeast

Pretty short ingredients list huh? To make the bread is pretty simple. I measure out the molasses into a medium sized bowl and add to it the warm water and kosher salt. I then wisk these ingredients together until everything is disolved together. I then pour the mixture into the bread machine. My machine needs the liquids added first, so if your machine is different, follow the instructions for it as far as the order of ingredients goes.

I then measure out the two types of flour and put them together in a sifter. Sift the flour into the bread machine then level out the flour. Sprinkle the yeast on top of the flour and set the timer for when you want the bread to be finished and hit the start button.

You can also make a plain white bread version of this recipe by using all bread flour (16 oz total by weight) and reducing the yeast to 1 teaspoon.

The nutrition information for a 2 oz serving (and one loaf should make 12 of these):
132 Calories
5.22g Protein
28.934g Carbohydrates
.373g Fat
2.839g Fiber

During the Specialization period I eat about 7 or more servings of this stuff per day to help get all the calories I need to fuel my workout and maintain my weight. Nice thing about it is that it has nearly no fat which makes it easy to use when you are really watching the fat % as you do in the Specialization period.

Another CTS Blogger

2006-05-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

Another CTS member has a blog up about his training with power. Lots of good stuff there I think.

Cycling with a power meter

And here is another:
George's training spot

And yet another, this one dealing with far more than cycling:
Tricia's Place

PowerStarts on a windy day

2006-05-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

Well, today started with a choice. Two hours and fifteen minutes on the trainer or outside in the wind. Needless to say, I took the wind. Apparently a weather system was moving through the area as when I started I had a SSE wind of 10-20mph judging by how the flags were snapping around. By the time I got home the wind had shifted to be a WNW or so, still around 10+ mph. So lucky me, I had headwinds for most of my ride. Joy. On the other hand, its not everyday you get dive-bombed by a peregrine falcon during a ride. There is a pair nesting in a road cut cliff on the top of what we call Barnet Mountain, and they do not like cyclists going by below them and tend to fly around screeching and swooping down on you.

At least it had stopped raining, at least for awhile. We've had more than our fair share of rain here in Vermont, with some places flooding 5'-10' above flood stage in local rivers. Luckily I didn't see any of that on my ride.

So here are my notes from today's ride:
Rode down to Barnet, then across into NH and up Rte 135 then back across to VT on Rte 18 and up over Hurlburt Hill and back home.

Did a really good job of stamping out the PS. Avg power for the first 5 intervals was about 30W higher this time than back on the 6th. Highest power achieved is higher as well with my 5s peak being 47W higher this week than back on the 6th (877W vs 830W) and max power being higher as well, 919W vs 830W. Other than the PS, I mainly (see below) took it easy, my average power for the whole ride only being 193W.

Did some things on this ride that I probably shouldn't have done. I did Hurlburt Hill at CR pace, which was definitely not in my schedule for today. I did it to sort of confirm my power ranges I've estimated to use til my next FieldTest. I kept my HR in my CR range, more or less, and looked at the average power during the 7 minute climb. Since CTS says CR are done at 95-100% of your FT max power, I figure this is a good estimate to use for power for now. My HR averaged 150bpm, right in the middle of my range and my average power was 329W, a tad above what I was estimating for now, so I'll update my figures in CyclingPeaks.

The other thing I did was to really power up Sand Hill just to see what kind of power I could maintain on this climb. This climb which is .6km averages 6% grade with 17% max. It gave me my 1min max power today, averaging 477W for toughest part of the climb. Again, definitely something that wasn't in my schedule and likely put a lot of stress on my legs that I didn't need.

Drank 2 bottles of sports drink and ate 1 powerbar during ride. Had a glass of chocolate milk to start my recovery while I worked on my notes.

Theoretical Ponderings to Avoid a FieldTest

2006-05-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

One thing I'm not overly fond of is doing the 8-minute all out FieldTests, two at a time even, that CTS uses to set HR and power ranges for training. Maybe it has something to do with having done 3 of them since January 9th this year, or maybe its just that they are danged painful to do. :)

Anyway, now that I have a powermeter I've been trying to come up with a good estimate of my threshold power without disrupting my schedule for a rest week with a FT in the middle. So today during my training ride I tested a theory.

The theory is this: HR likely doesn't change all that much in a month or two of training, especially if you've been training for awhile. So, if you do something like a CR effort for about 8 minutes or so, your power should be pretty close to your FT power as according to the handbook, CR efforts are done at 95%-100% of your FT power. So if you ride a hill at your CR HR, set by a recent FT, your average power should be your FT power, which in turn can be used to set your ranges for your other workouts.

So today when I was on the return leg of my training ride I happened to be going up over the hill I use for my CR and I decided to do one and see what sort of results I got. So I tried to keep my HR in my CR range, 148-151, and when I got home I took a look at the results. My average HR for the climb was 150, so pretty good there. The average power was 329W, which is pretty close to what I'd been using for an estimate. [I'd been using an estimate of 'real' power based on the 'calculated' power from my HAC4, modified by how much I thought it was under-reporting.] Further agreement with this 329W number is from my Tempo workout on Thursday. In that workout my HR averaged 141, the top end of my Tempo range, and my power was 269W, which at the time I thought was a shade high, but is right in the range you get if you use 329W as FT power.

So, I think I have a pretty solid 'guess' as to my FT power that I can use for my training until I have a new FT scheduled.

Rainy Day Muscle Tensions

2006-05-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

The image to the left is the power distribution graph from CyclingPeaks for today's MuscleTension workout. While it is sort of disheartening to be back on the trainer indoors again at least the extended forecast is showing the rain ending after this weekend. So it looks like I've got one more Endurance ride and one Recovery ride left on the trainer before I it looks like I can get back out on the road. Monday is a bit iffy, but I'm hopeful since the chance of showers is only about 40%. At least it looks to be decent weather for my group ride on Tuesday. Since I have to change my work schedule to be able to make it to the group rides, it would be a definite bummer if they had to cancel it for rain as they did last weeks.

At any rate, here are my notes from my workout:

Pouring rain so did workout on the trainer, dang it. Warmed up for 20 minutes and then raised the front wheel on a cinder block for the MT intervals. I'm not sure how effective they are indoors though. Power was averaging just at the top end of my EM range. The first interval definitely felt easy, but by the end I was having to work to maintain the 55 cadence recommended, so maybe it is doing its job after all. I wonder how much more I'd feel it out on the road. Drank 2.5 bottles of sports drink and ate 2 powerbars during the ride, pretty nearly what I had planned on, if a bit low on the liquid side...

Tempo

2006-05-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

A first for me today, I did part of my training ride on the trainer then went outdoors for the rest. It was raining when I started, so I did my warm up and then 30 minutes of Tempo on the trainer. I was sort of torn between going with HR or power and ended up doing both to some extent. I had a good idea of what my Tempo range should be based on my calculated FTP of 280W. This gives me a range of rougly 252 to 265 for my Tempo workouts. My average power for the interval was 269, so a little bit high, while my HR averaged at 141 which is dead on for my HR range of 140-143.

Interesting thing though. In the first 10 minutes of the interval, my HR was well below the Tempo range, averaging 137, and my power was above the Tempo range, averaging 283W. In the last 10 minutes of the interval HR was above the range, averaging 146 while power was just within the upper limit of the range at an average of 263W. The middle 10 minutes had both HR and power in the right ranges at 142bpm and 263W. I'm thinking that this indicates that I've got my ranges right and in the future I'll just go with the power trying to hit right around 260 or so and let HR do whatever it does.

After I finished my Tempo workout I noticed it had stopped raining so I took the bike out of the trainer and hit the road for the rest of my EnduranceMiles. The roads were a bit wet still but by the time I got back they were almost bone dry and the sun had come out. Turned out to be a really nice day out for a ride. Tried to keep my power around 200 watts during the ride and ended up with 188W average for the hour and a half I was outside.

Sports Drink

2006-05-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

There are a ton of sports drinks out there for folks to choose from and they all seem to make claims about improving performance, aiding recovery or what not. There is an interesting article on velonews.com about a study on recovery drinks that I thought was pretty interesting and sort of indicates that maybe the 'specially designed' drinks are not quite worth the money you send for them.

Which brings me to my main topic, the sports drink I use. I came across a recipe for a sports drink that seems to work well for me, is inexpensive to make and has a very wide variety of flavors.

Homemade Sports Drink:
480g sugar
17g Morton Lite Salt
4 packets of unsweetened Kool-Aid mix

I take all the ingredients and give them ten 1 second pulses in a food processor to get it all thoroughly mixed together.

To make my drink I take 40g of the mix and add 20 fluid ounces of water and shake well. This gives the following nutritional information:
Calories- 138
Fat - 0g
Protein - 0g
Carbohydrates - 35.66g
Sodium - 325mg
Potassium - 362mg

This compares pretty favorably I think to a commercial product like Powerbar Endurance which has the following:
Calories - 170
Fat - 0g
Protein - 0g
Carbohydrates - 42g
Sodium - 480mg
Potassium - 25mg

You could of course make the homemade drink a bit stronger and come up with almost exactly the same numbers as the Powerbar stuff. If you are worried about the extra potassium, you can use a mix of regular and lite salt to achieve the balance you want. The homemade stuff costs less than $0.20 per 20oz bottle while the Powerbar costs around $0.80 per 20oz bottle. So, this recipe works for me and I can get four bottles worth for the price of one of the Powerbar. Win win.

Rest Day

2006-05-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm glad today is a rest day. It has been raining off and on all day and I'm still feeling the effects of my goal ride on Monday a bit.

Yesterday when I got "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" I also received "Racing Tacticts for Cyclists" by Thomas Prehn, so I've been starting to read that today. I haven't gotten very far but so far it seems interesting.

The more I'm getting into cycling and being smart about my training, the more I'm intrigued about the idea of actually racing. I don't have enough group riding experience yet, at least I don't think so, to actually enter a race, but I'm seriously thinking about finding one sometime this summer to try things out. There is a road race this weekend not all that far from here, so if the weather is nice I may take a drive down there to watch it and soak up some atmosphere. The race is the 31st Lake Sunapee Bike Race. If I had more pack riding experience I'd definitely go down and try my hand at this one, and I'm certainly going to add it to my list of things to do next year.

Recovery Ride

2006-05-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

After my goal ride yesterday, I really felt I needed to do a recovery ride rather than the 2:15:00 EnduranceMiles with MuscleTension workout assigned by my CTS Classic program. Given my TSS score from yesterday I felt it was justified, so thats what I did.

Pouring rain outside today so did recovery ride on the trainer. Sweated a lot, really need to move the fan out onto the porch where the trainer is now. Did a good job keeping power steady throughout the workout, right around 140 watts. Noticed that I was putting out slightly more watts in the last part of the workout for the same HR than the earlier part. About 9 watts more for an addition 1 bpm in average HR. Not sure that means anything or not. Drank bottle of water during ride.

Entire ride (142w):
Duration: 1:14:58
Work: 640 kJ
TSS: 32.7 (intensity factor 0.512)
Norm Power: 143
Distance: 19.093 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 201 142 watts
Heart Rate: 60 111 101 bpm
Cadence: 31 146 92 rpm
Speed: 0 17.1 15.2 mph
Torque: 0 81 62 lb-in

I've included an image of the power distribution for my recovery ride. One thing you can say about working out on a trainer, it is danged consistent.

Today I also received in the mail my copy of "Training and Racing with a Power Meter" by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan. I've done a quick read of most of it already and have added a few more graphs to CyclingPeaks based on things they mention in the book to watch for. It is going to be interesting to see how things look once I have some more data to look at as several of the items they mention you need to have a goodly amount of data, six months or so.

I'm still working with my estimated FTP figure, which I'm refining as I go along. Given that CTS and CyclingPeaks don't use quite the same system I'm likely going to have to fudge things a bit as I go along anyway, so doing my best estimate for now doesn't bother me too much. Given the ranges in the CTS handbook I'm pretty sure I've worked backwards to about what my CTS FieldTest average would be and from there I've taken about 10% to get to my FTP. This is pretty close to what Allen & Coggan suggest, especially as they take 5% from a 20 minute TT effort and the CTS FT is only 8 minutes, so should be pretty close.

Goal Ride

2006-05-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

For this first goal ride I decided I would re-ride my longest ride from last year to see how much improvement there was, if any, between the end of my first season of riding and the early part of this one. Last year I did this ride on October 1st after having been riding for about 3 months, gradually extending my riding time from my first rides of all of 15 minutes

The ride is a total of 65.163 (as measured by my PowerTap today) with 3829' of climbing, the biggest climb coming in the last 15 miles of the ride.

Last year I completed the ride in 4:04:00 of riding time at a weight of 205.4 lbs. During the ride I stopped every hour to have a gel or pudding stick. Didn't get off the bike, but did stop for a minute. There was also one longer stop, maybe 5 minutes, about 20-25 miles from the end of the route to get more fluid and ended up talking with a friend who was also out riding.

When I started with CTS in January, I decided my goal would have two parts. First to complete the ride in 3:41:00 (3:30:00 for a stretch goal) of riding time and get my weight down to 173 lbs. At the time I set the goal my weight was 181.6. Taking the advice from the coaches and others here on the forum I came up with process goals as well, the main one working out a ride plan and doing my best to stick with it. I looked at the different sections of the ride and decided on HR ranges to go for in each one, keeping in mind I wanted to have enough left to do really well on the final long climb.

I spent yesterday getting my bike ready, redoing the bar tape, adjusting the rear deraileur, putting a road tire back on in place of the tire I use on the trainer. This morning after having a good breakfast I got my sports drink ready and on the bike, got the bike computers on and made sure they were working. I also made a little 'cheat sheet' that I taped to my top tube so I could refer to it to remind me what my plan was for a given section of the ride.

The weather today didn't look like it was going to co-operate as it started raining a bit an hour or so before I was planning on starting off. I checked the weather forecast on-line and it looked like the showers would move off and there wasn't anything behind them that looked troubling so I pushed my start time back an hour, topping up my fuel supply with a Powerbar and kept drinking water to be sure I was hydrated at the start.

The pavement was a little wet when I started out and I got caught in a light shower and I started to have some doubts about the wisdom of going ahead with the ride. I kept going though and by the time I had gone about 10 miles the shower had long stopped and the pavement was drying out. There was no more rain or showers during the ride but I did get some wind just about the half way point, when I turned east and then north. I figure it was an ENE wind around 10 mph with higher gusts. I just kept going with my plan as best I could and hoped I'd still make my goal time. The longest section of the ride was a ~20 mile section that I had planned on doing at Tempo pace. This section trended generally up (about 1% average gradient) but was rolling. I have to say an hour and nine minutes at Tempo pace is ... interesting. I was actually 1 bpm out of my Tempo range on average but close enough I think

I definitely was getting tired by the time I got to the last long climb (#7 on the route profile). I had my HR up to my CR range for the 13 minutes it took to do the steep part of the climb but my average power output was 52 watts less than I had on a similar duration and grade climb earlier in the ride (#4 on the profile). I kept pushing according to my plan though. The most painful part was the 150 meter sprint I had planned after a 500 meter 12% climb, but after that it was a bit of easier spinning the last 500 meters to house as a bit of a cool down. I have to say my legs are as sore as they have been after a ride, if not the most sore they have been. Otherwise I feel pretty good though.

So, the results:
Process goals- I was able to maintain either the HR ranges I had planned or was within a couple beats per minute of that range on average. As I noted above my power definitely dropped off from the first hour of the ride to the last, but that's something to work on for the future.

Weight goal - my weight this morning was 170.6 and my average weight for last week was 171.2, either way I achieved this goal. Also, I am very pleased that I've kept my weight steady at this level (171-172lbs) for the last 8 weeks.

Ride time - my riding time for today's ride was 3:35:54, so in between my main goal and my stretch. Also, there were no stops in the ride other than for traffic at intersections and one very brief stop on that last long climb to get the sweat out of my eyes. I had enough sweat in them so that I nearly couldn't see for a bit. Guess I need a headband or something under my helmet to help absorb that.

Overall I'm really happy with my results, but can definitely see where progress can be made, mainly in maintaining power output over this long a ride and using that in my ride plans instead of HR.

For those that are curious, here is the information from my PowerTap (via CyclingPeaks software) for this ride. Maybe in the future I'll do something neat with the information but for now just the raw stuff I guess.

Entire ride (220w):
Duration: 3:35:54
Work: 2835 kJ
TSS: 256.7 (intensity factor 0.847)
Norm Power: 237
Distance: 65.163 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 598 220 watts
Heart Rate: 69 165 138 bpm
Cadence: 29 236 94 rpm
Speed: 0 38.6 18.1 mph
Torque: 0 401 96 lb-in

Peak 5s (505w):
Duration: 0:05
Work: 3 kJ
TSS: n/a
Norm Power: n/a
Distance: 105 ft
Min Max Avg
Power: 455 526 505 watts
Heart Rate: 159 162 160 bpm
Cadence: 99 113 106 rpm
Speed: 13.4 14.8 14 mph
Torque: 203 260 239 lb-in

Peak 10s (472w):
Duration: 0:10
Work: 5 kJ
TSS: n/a
Norm Power: n/a
Distance: 213 ft
Min Max Avg
Power: 422 526 472 watts
Heart Rate: 159 162 161 bpm
Cadence: 99 114 108 rpm
Speed: 13.4 14.9 14.4 mph
Torque: 188 260 218 lb-in

Peak 20s (408w):
Duration: 0:20
Work: 8 kJ
TSS: n/a
Norm Power: n/a
Distance: 433 ft
Min Max Avg
Power: 167 526 408 watts
Heart Rate: 159 164 162 bpm
Cadence: 99 124 110 rpm
Speed: 13.4 15.4 14.5 mph
Torque: 78 260 187 lb-in

Peak 30s (370w):
Duration: 0:30
Work: 11 kJ
TSS: 1.5 (intensity factor 1.32)
Norm Power: 370
Distance: 653 ft
Min Max Avg
Power: 167 526 370 watts
Heart Rate: 159 164 161 bpm
Cadence: 99 128 111 rpm
Speed: 13.4 15.4 14.7 mph
Torque: 78 260 167 lb-in

Peak 1min (341w):
Duration: 1:00
Work: 21 kJ
TSS: 2.5 (intensity factor 1.214)
Norm Power: 340
Distance: 0.207 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 246 450 341 watts
Heart Rate: 146 150 148 bpm
Cadence: 72 91 86 rpm
Speed: 10.4 15 12.3 mph
Torque: 126 267 184 lb-in

Peak 2min (323w):
Duration: 2:01
Work: 39 kJ
TSS: 4.6 (intensity factor 1.171)
Norm Power: 328
Distance: 0.491 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 233 450 323 watts
Heart Rate: 130 152 144 bpm
Cadence: 70 99 87 rpm
Speed: 10.4 20.7 14.5 mph
Torque: 77 267 155 lb-in

Peak 5min (301w):
Duration: 5:01
Work: 91 kJ
TSS: 9.8 (intensity factor 1.084)
Norm Power: 304
Distance: 1.414 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 135 450 301 watts
Heart Rate: 130 152 148 bpm
Cadence: 70 138 95 rpm
Speed: 10.4 24.6 16.9 mph
Torque: 45 267 125 lb-in

Peak 10min (289w):
Duration: 10:01
Work: 174 kJ
TSS: 18.1 (intensity factor 1.042)
Norm Power: 292
Distance: 2.42 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 450 289 watts
Heart Rate: 140 153 149 bpm
Cadence: 57 209 93 rpm
Speed: 6.5 25.4 14.4 mph
Torque: 0 401 151 lb-in

Peak 20min (254w):
Duration: 20:08
Work: 305 kJ
TSS: 30.7 (intensity factor 0.96)
Norm Power: 269
Distance: 6.68 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 450 254 watts
Heart Rate: 118 153 143 bpm
Cadence: 33 209 95 rpm
Speed: 0 38.6 19.8 mph
Torque: 0 401 107 lb-in

Peak 30min (235w):
Duration: 30:13
Work: 423 kJ
TSS: 41.2 (intensity factor 0.908)
Norm Power: 254
Distance: 10.395 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 450 235 watts
Heart Rate: 109 153 140 bpm
Cadence: 29 209 94 rpm
Speed: 0 38.6 20.6 mph
Torque: 0 401 93 lb-in

Peak 60min (230w):
Duration: 1:00:02
Work: 827 kJ
TSS: 70.6 (intensity factor 0.84)
Norm Power: 235
Distance: 18.408 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 472 230 watts
Heart Rate: 126 146 139 bpm
Cadence: 40 215 95 rpm
Speed: 0 35.6 18.3 mph
Torque: 0 235 93 lb-in