Bike People

After two days of driving I am safely home. I did get three hours in Tuesday morning. It was the best ride of the trip. The weather was just fantastic with 70 degree temp and beautiful sunshine. I could have stayed out all day long.

I will have to get my training back on track today. Because I was pressed for time I never completed my weekly training plan. This is a recovery week so I am not too worried about it but I still need to get myself organized. I haven't lifted weights in almost two weeks.

I checked out the comments and was heartened to see that my favorite bike people are checking out the blog. Thanks everyone! DMO, I am glad to see you are watching...thanks. Doug, you dog! Joe, Zack and all the rest thanks so much.

Doug Gatto Thrown' Down At Rochester

There are a few people who make this sport happen in our area. These are the people who are always at the races. The people who work tirelessly managing clubs and teams all for the love of the sport. Where would we be without their enthusiasm? The folks I mentioned above are at all the races, rides, you name it. You see them at an event or just out on the road and they just make your day. Thanks to all of you. Thanks to Mark, Andy, DMO and Brian for giving the time you do to make our club what it is. Thanks to Joe and John for the hours they put in to make our team what it is. Thanks to Rich for taking inexperienced riders under your wing and teaching them the ropes. Thanks to Rob for never letting up on the gas, giving me those awesome selfless lead-outs and showing me that there are kind, welcoming folk in the bike racing community.



My first experience with bike racing turned me off completely. I left that day thinking bike racing was just not for me. These guys were stuck in junior high and I didn't need that at this stage of my life. Fortunately for me, I did go back and I learned that there are a few riders in the Michigan peloton that are not maturing normally but they are certainly the exception! I still run into these kinds of folk from time to time but they are easily written off.

Training Data

I thought I would post up some data from my powertap.

Work is measured in kilojoules. To convert to calories mulitply by 1.3.

TSS = Training Stress Score...Cycling Peaks comes up with this number which is a measure of overall effort of the ride. A TSS of 100 would be the effort required to ride one hour at my one hour critical power also referred to as "threshold power". This is the most power I can sustain for an hour. This helps to quantify training stress.

Intensity Factor = normalized power divided by threshold power.

Normalized power = This is the average power for each second of the ride. This would be the power applied if I applied a steady-state power for the entire ride without coasting, etc.

Entire workout (165 watts):
Duration: 3:16:24
Work: 1925 kJ
TSS: 252 (intensity factor 0.882)
Norm Power: 203
VI: 1.23
Distance: 53.33 mi

The numbers reveal I was a little excited. My normalized power should have been 175-126 watts if I was training only base endurance. However, I was doing some hill repeats for force training which accounts for part of the elevated normalized power.

Florida, Frost, Mexican food and Montezuma

So I drive done to Florida to enjoy some time relaxing with family and bike and what do I find? The coldest week of the year in Florida. Highs forecast for my stay never get above 65 degrees but at least there will be no major rain storms.

I hit the road last Friday in 45 degree weather and 30+mph winds. It was still awesome!! All these months inside and the odd outside ride is less than optimal. I put in just over three hours. I am riding in the Clearwater Beach area which is, like the rest of Florida, flat as a pancake. But to my delight, I discovered some newly constructed bridges that were just excellent for hill repeats. One thing of note is that your head must be on a swivel down here. The locals, all well over the age of thirty, are unpredictable as heck. We have all experienced the odd boneheaded driver that just blunders into your path but down hear they take it to new highs. I was just humming along with that thirty mph tailwind and very red Ford F150 pulled across my lane into a driveway and just stopped. I mean it, he just stopped with his big fat rear end completely blocking my lane. The brakes were applied and coupled with a sketchy evasive manuever, an ugly crash was averted.

Saturday was a better day for riding here with temps rising into the mid-fifties. The winds faded and I was off for two hours in glorious sunshine. I rode the Pinellas Trail which is a a fairly wide bike trail that runs up and down the coast. I was on it and off it because the stops got to be a bit much. Noteworthy on the ride were the numerous Osphrey that were nesting along the the trail and roads.

Before my training ride we hit a local Mexican restaurant for lunch. The food was great but about midnight a raging attack of the green apple two step was in full swing. This was a major downer because it ruined Sunday for riding. I consider myself a tough rider but training through this would have been physically impossible.

Today was better but I wanted to take it easy just to make sure there would be no relapse so I went out for an hour. I felt great and even did a few more hill repeats. I just have to say this, and I know I am saying it to a sympathetic crowd, I love riding my bike. A sunny day, good legs, the wind in your face and the freedom to steer your bike anywhere you want to go. Awesome.

Tomorrow morning I will try and get an early ride in before beginning the drive back to Michigan. Even though it has been cold it has been relaxing and fun.

Training on the road

I have been in northern California for the last few days. My boss is playing in a golf tournament and I have a few days to decompress. Monterey is an awesome area for biking but not this week. It has been raining the entire time so I have been using the hotel stationary bike. These things can be a major problem because of fit issues but this has been a pretty good experience. The bike has its own TV installed in the unit and it is pretty smooth. I rode for an hour yesterday and two hours today pain free. The gym is pretty good here also. I was able to get a complete workout yesterday.

After bfast this morning I cruised a couple of bike shops. Jocelyn's Bicycles is a terrific little shop very close to Fisherman's Wharf. Winning Wheels is up in Pacific Grove and is a great shop also. Sea Otter is coming up here in April and looks to be a huge event.

I picked up a copy of the Velo News and there is a special Tour of California appendix. Priority Health has been invited this year! That's is just way cool. Guys we saw racing in Michigan last year are going up against the big dogs.

Sad news tonight out here. A rider was killed by a drunk driver on the coast highway south of Carmel. I know he was drunk but he didn't even stop. The cops found him reeking of alcohol at his home with his car bloodstaind and smashed up in the driveway. How could he just leave the guy there to die? I guess he didn't want to get caught. Very disturbing.

Coldest Day of the Year So Far

Unbelievable weather here in south east Michigan today. Forget riding outside unless you gear up like your off on the Iditorod. Seriously, it looked like pics I have seen of Antarctica with strong winds blowing up snow and just throwing it everywhere.

Today is the day of the week that I write weekly plans for my athletes. It usually doesn't take too long to complete but this week has been a bit different in that I have two new athletes and I am tinkering with every one's annual plan. It struck me that it might be smart to schedule a transition period for everyone after the first A-race has been completed. It sounds like an easy process but it jumbles up the whole plan. I think I have everyone set up except for myself!

Rune Duke was over this morning bright and early for testing. Not too high tech we just wire up my power tap on his bike so we can measure power output. We talked a lot about stuff including the kind of training a lot of others are doing. The bottom line is that we are not going to be at the front of the pack in March. That month will have us just beginning our build periods so LT intervals and anaerobic capacity intervals will just be getting started. The base miles we have been putting in won't be winning us any races that's for sure. Rune reads a lot and knows the story. The testing today confirmed that the base miles haven't magically moved Rune's LT but we fully expected that. More than anything else, I just want to make sure we are hitting our targets and so far so good.

What is a blog anyway?

Blogs. Blogging. Web logging. Whatever you call it, just don't call it easy to set up! Remember this is a mid-lifer blog. I used to be on the cutting edge of technology but I am rapidly becoming like those I used to pity earlier in life. The flood waters of technology are creeping ever further up my figurative neck each and every day. After a few hours of work I managed to get this thing working but there is more to do.

I played child chauffeur today which allowed me some time to sip coffee and read at Panera Bread. At the moment, I am finishing up Joe Friel's book The Cyclist's Training Bible. Lot's of good info on fuel. Basically, my diet stinks. I don't get enough protein and way too much carbohydrate. The need for carbohydrate has been so ingrained in my thinking that I don't think about the importance of protein. In fact, protein and fats are very important to endurance athletes. Protein is important not only for recovery but also as a critical component in the metabolic process. We get about a ten percent contribution from proteins to fuel muscle movement. The other contributors are fats and glycogen stores. Additionally, protein stimulates the release of glucagon, a hormone that allows the body to use fat for fuel more efficiently. Protein is so important that it can impact the outcome of races. Studies have shown that race outcomes have favored those who ate more protein over those who ate less in favor of carbohydrate. Even the skinniest bike racer has hundreds of thousands of stored fat calories but this is not true with regard to glycogen stores. They are a precious commodity that we as bike racers want to guard very carefully. As intensity increases we burn more and more glycogen as a percentage of fuel required to cause muscle movement. Once we run out of glycogen we slow down and get dropped...race over. Training your body to burn fats is very important to all of us. That is why base mileage is so important because we are training ourselves to burn fats efficiently.

This week is a recovery week for me. That means 8.5 hours of training. Sunday was an off day as was yesterday. Today's schedule calls for 1.5 hours of E2 training, (Endurance Zone 2 125-173 watts). This is an outdoor volume so I will take 66% of that for an indoor volume of 1.0 hours. The last couple of weeks my long day on the trainer has been 2.7 hours which is just a killer. I listen to my Napster playlists or put a movie on the computer. Andy Pruitt writes in his book Andy Pruitt's Complete Medical Guide for Cyclists that getting up out of the saddle for one minute for every five in the saddle will go a long ways towards a more comfortable training ride and I can testify that this is surely true. I was doing a 15/5 minute trade off but I like this 5/1 minute drill much better.

Since the ride is pretty short, I think I'll take advantage of the extra time and lift weights today also. This has actually been really fun. When I was younger I did a lot of weight training but lost my taste for it in my advancing years. Once I got passed the first few workouts it actually became fun and now I am into the maximum strength (MS) phase and I am going very heavy on my legs. I am using the leg press primarily due to some back issues but I am edging closer to my strength goals. On Monday I was able to press 370 lbs. 8 times for 3 sets. I need to get my strength up to around 400 lbs. to meet my goal. Once there, I will go on a strength maintenance program (SM). The upper body goals are really very modest even on those areas where max strength is called for. Everything I have read suggests that weight training is one of the most important areas of training for the aging cyclist. Younger riders can give up weight training altogether after the base training phases are over but not so for the master. He must weight train year round if he wants to maintain his/her strength gains.