Rodentathon 1

Last Sunday was a very pleasant spring day which drew out hordes of RRs.

Some pics from my crappy cell phone camera...



RRs winching themselves up the southern face of the RR KOM. At one point I counted at least 9 at one time on this ~0.5 mi climb. The steeper bits at the beginning and end aren't visible in this picture.



RRs at the top.



RRs were swarming the roads like rodents at a KFC/Taco Bell.

At the start of a long popular climb, we stopped to see if other riders we were to meet were still waiting for us. Meanwhile, a steady stream of RRs made their way up the climb. Then an aggressive-looking RR zoomed past. He had this intense "eye-of-the-tiger" expression.



My guess was that he was hell bent on catching the lesser RRs up the road. I wanted to get going so we could catch this guy and watch his world crumble around him as he tried to latch onto us and failed. However, I didn't say anything because it's a long climb and I knew we'd probably catch him in short order.

We caught him quickly and our relative speed was such that we were several bike lengths ahead of him before he could even react. I saw him dig deep to try to match our speed but instead he kept going backwards.

It must have been traumatic to for the RR to have been mowing down one lesser RR after another only to other riders blast past him at a much higher speed. On the matter of perspective, don't faster riders zoom past me? After all, there's always someone faster. Well, in all the years riding on that climb, I haven't met them yet. It's sad, really, since I'm not that fast. Whenever I think about this, I recall a particular scene from Futurama:

Bender: "You guys realize you live in a sewer, right?"
Dwayne: "Perhaps. But perhaps your civilization is merely the sewer of an even greater society above you!"
Leela: "No. We're on the top."
Fry: "Daylight and everything."
Dwayne: "Oh."

This guy was wearing a Triple Bypass jersey. For some reason, RRs wearing that particular year's jersey are very aggressive. This behavior is so common that RRs wearing that jersey deserver their own classification ("TBP RRs"). Perhaps the TBP jerseys from that year leech testosterone into people's skin.

Something like this:



Whenever I see someone wearing that jersey, I expect him to want to thunderdome.

The Triple Bypass is considered the RR world championships.

Fool me twice...

About two weekends after my encounter with SNOD1...

It was another warm Saturday at 71°F so riders were out in droves. It was quite windy though, probably 3.5/5 on my wind scale. As usual, I felt weak after the previous day's L4 workout. So there were potentially a lot of RRs but not that much ammunition.

On warm weekends, I'm often under attack before I even ride a single mile. My route always involves crossing a 4-lane road and getting onto a peripheral bike path. Then I turn onto the main bike path that takes me to the park I often ride at and in turn into the mountains. However, on that Saturday I did not even cross the road before I encountered some RR that wanted to thunderdome.

As I was waiting for gaps in vehicular traffic so I could cross from the south to the north side of the road, an RR rode down the path from the west. I crossed the road the same time he crossed in front of me. He knew I'd likely be getting on the path behind him so he got out of the saddle and hammered. He was an odd-looking kid with an ungainly position on the bike. More interestingly, he was adorned from head to toe with "Dopers Suck" paraphernalia--cap, socks, maybe even a jersey. His bike was plastered with their decals in case there was any ambiguity regarding his position on doping. He flailed away on his bike for awhile then faded dramatically, perhaps thinking I was far behind him or perhaps because he was out of shape. I zoomed past him and that was that. Perhaps he needs to dope.


Yes, I was already under siege only 2.5 minutes into my ride.

Near the end of my ride, I was heading towards the west face of the RR KOM. A couple came down a side road riding slowly. I passed them riding leisurely in L2. The man was almost a clone of SNOD1 (beard, graying hair, and clydesdale build). It was basically the same scenario as before. Because SNOD2 was with a woman, riding slowly, did not react when I cruised past them, and allowed a sizable gap to open, I did not sense any malevolence. However, after my experience with SNOD1, I was not going to be lulled into a false sense of security so easily.

Sure enough, as I approached the top of the hill, SNOD2 had left his companion and was out-of-the-saddle charging up the hill after me. I got out of the saddle as well and with a maniacal expression on his face, he dug deeper. Unfortunately for him, victory could only be achieved with a surprise attack and I easily held off his charge.



When I hit the top, I did a victory salute to rub it in. I hope he wasn't too far back that he didn't see it and that his female companion also wasn't too far back to witness the destruction of his masculinity. A motorist coming up the hill in the opposite direction appeared to be amused by the victory salute.

The whole scenario was so similar to the SNOD1 episode that I wondered if they were actually the same person. The odds of that happening are quite slim though.

Neat trick, eh?

Lately, I've been focusing more on eating B.D.A. (before, during, and after training). It should be obvious that if you're going to eat a restricted number of calories that it would be best if they were consumed around exercise time. What doesn't work is pigging out in the morning and early afternoon, then getting hungry before riding followed by not eating while riding and not eating after the ride.

Yesterday, I thought about how it'd be nice if lunch was ready to eat just minutes after finishing my ride. Yesterday's lunch would have taken about 25 min to cook, pushing the limits of the 30 min post-workout refueling window. I thought it would've been great if my convection oven could start cooking at a designated time. It was a long shot but I checked the manual and discovered that this oven that I've had for several years did indeed have an auto start feature. So after a particularly hard ride (4x20 at 300W), I didn't have to prepare a recovery drink or eat junk food (my other recovery food).

Fool me once...

A bit of an RR backlog has developed. Not due to a high body count but my laziness.

This post is about my 2nd day riding outside this season, which was on a Saturday back in February. It was when my TSB was like -45 and I felt like utter crap. Being a warm weekend day in February there were a lot of riders out.

In the middle of the ride, I returned from a leg down a side road and when emerging onto the main road, a guy on a TT bike went by at a pace a little higher than what I felt like doing. He passed two riders riding slowly together and then I passed them. I was just riding low tempo and everyone seemed to be minding their own business. Then I noticed a rider a few hundred yards behind me and closing. I ramped it up to L4 briefly and started pulling away. The chaser appeared to give up and slow down while looking around behind him. He must've been one of the duo earlier and had decided to chase riders not going all the fast--testing his early season legs in a fairly unambitious manner. Yet he was sent back to his companion in shame. Oh, the shame.

As I approached the back of RR KOM (pictured below), I passed two older clydesdales riding really slowly. I was just chugging along doing low tempo and was content to shift to a really low gear, keep power steady, and just spin up the hill.



The two old dudes didn't register as threats because they were riding together, riding slowly, didn't accelerate when I passed, and let a big gap develop. All indications were that neither of them would try to chase me up the climb.

It seems that each season an RR or QRR gets the better of me. It's always early in the season when I don't have the proper RR hunting mindset and never because they have superior fitness. It's always the result of my letting my guard down and subterfuge on their part.

My mistake was assuming they were non-combatants and not checking my six every few seconds when passing someone on the approach to the hill. As I leisurely summited, one of the fatsos squirted past me on the right, in my blind[er] spot. That was a true WTF moment for me since I thought he was still a few hundred yards behind me. Now some fat old dude thinks he's hot shit when his "victory" spoke nothing of his fitness but only of his subterfuge. Always subterfuge. In Latin, that would be a good motto for RRs.

That incident really emphasized one of the most annoying things about RRs--not that they want to race all the time but that they are shameless cheats. Why not just jump in front of the peloton at the TdF and cross the finish line just ahead of them? Congratulations, you just won a stage at the Tour de France.

In the aftermath, my new protocol was to assume any rider that I pass while heading towards the hill is a threat and to keep an eye on them no matter how non-threatening they seemed.

name: SNOD1 (Sneaky Old Dude #1)
fitness rating: 5/10
aggressiveness: 5/10
pusillanimity: 10/10
arrogance: 7/10
special ability: some kind of cloaking device

Stay tuned for part two...

Training

Yesterday, I did something a bit different--4x20 at 295W rather than 3x20 at 305-310W. It hurt a lot less but that may have been due to better eating habits or, though there isn't any sound evidence, simply being more rested.



Perceived exertion was reasonable. It was somewhat annoying but I didn't really feel any pain. About 12 minutes into #3, the VT load unit suddenly switched off. The power cord had apparently been vibrating itself loose over time and finally lost its connection. The flywheel had come to a complete stop and it took quite a lot of effort to get it going while the load unit was still braking. It put a nice "burn" in my legs which went away after a few minutes of extra high cadence pedaling.

I will probably switch both of my weekly L4 workouts from 3x20s to 4x20s.

Performance Manager™

Though I've been using powermeters for a long time, I've been slow to embrace things like NP, TSS, etc. Because I felt so utterly terrible on my second day riding outside (Feb. 9), I decided to get Performance Manager Chart™ up and running. That entailed the tedious semi-automatic importing of several months of files.

My TSB around Feb. 9 was -40. I also discovered that the rides I'd been doing everyday were around 170 TSS rather than my estimate of ~145 TSS. Whoops.

Though I'm still reluctant to put that much stock into PMC, it seems to be a lot better than my ability to gauge my form.

Ergometer syndrome part II

It appears that, like Y2K worries, erg' syndrome was really nothing to get all excited about. After one week of higher intensity training, it appears to be vanquished. I'll probably stick with higher intensity training but skip L6 workouts until closer to racing time.



An L6 workout on a popular local hill that assuaged my fears. This was just my 2nd L6 workout and I was already rivaling my best times and powers from last season.

In addition, my L5 workouts confirmed that L5 power hadn't suffered and had actually improved a bit. Considering how rapidly I regained my short steep hill climbing ability, I'm fairly certain that erg' syndrome was mostly a neuromuscular problem.



QA of that day illustrating the high force pedaling.

Hurt me plenty

Early last fall, it was killing me to do 3x20 at 270 VT watts and I tapered before that workout/test. A few weeks later I was up to 275W, 280W, 285W, and then didn't do any 3x20s until late January. Since then, I've done 3x20s at 285W and 290W and wasn't really hurting. So today, with TSB at a reasonable -8 but otherwise not tapered, I incremented by 10W and did 3x20 at 300W. That did end up hurting but still not quite as much as the 3x20s last fall. It was sufficiently painful that I won't be doing anymore 5 or 10W increments. From now on, it'll be like 1-2W if at all.

Last fall, I set a lofty goal of being able to do 3x20 at 300W by May 2008. It would be with a taper and be 300 VT watts or 310 SRM watts. I never really thought I'd be able to do it as it was one of those "reach" goals.

Anonymous leafy green sues USADA

Pez recently posted an editorial riddled with grammar and spelling errors suggesting that professional cyclists strike. I suppose Georgia Gould and other female cyclocrossers could fill in as replacements during the strike.

http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=5670&status=True

I would rather ride in a team structured and run like Slipstream, but could it be possible that Michael Ball forcing the rules (including supporting the law suit from Kale Leogrande vs USADA) is doing more to change cycling than Jonathan Vaughters is in creating tougher rules within his team? In a way Slipstream is simply putting in a structure outside the system while Ball could ultimately be doing more to change the system it's self.

Kale Leogrande returning to racing after being sidelined by a bad case of root fungus.

Ergometer syndrome

If you ride indoors a lot, once you head outdoors you may feel like you can't turn over the pedals on climbs or that you have trouble generating power on rolling terrain. Outdoors, there are always subtle changes in wind and gradient that will result in spikes and dips in power if you're to hold speed and cadence reasonably constant. In a group ride, surges are greater in magnitude and not solely due to changes in gradient and wind but also the whims of the group. A powermeter file of almost any outdoor ride will reveal the stochastic nature of outdoor riding, no matter how determined one is to ride at a steady power output.

Training that has too much low force pedaling (quadrants III and IV) likely recruits fewer muscle fibers which may then result in loss of oxidative capacity in those fibers. In addition, there is almost certainly a decline in neuromuscular power. Either, or a combination of both, is responsible for "ergometer syndrome." Neuromuscular adaptations occur rapidly but retraining oxidative capacity may take awhile. Capillary density is probably not affected since it is an extracellular adaptation. Mitochondrial density, however, may be subject to the "use it or lose it" principle and fibers not recruited will "lose it." Thus, I hope erg' syndrome is more of the former and less of the latter.

The solution is fairly straightforward. Indoor riding and especially ergometer riding is generally very time efficient and allows for very focused training. With the increased training efficiency, one has the extra time to add L5 and perhaps even L6 workouts to provide the needed high force pedaling. L6 efforts are likely too short for any meaningful aerobic adaptations so if erg' syndrome is due to lost oxidative capacity in a population of muscle fibers recruited primarily during high force pedaling, L5 workouts or even efforts in the upper range of L4 would be more effective.

One idea was to insert occasional power spikes into SST ergometer rides. Like L6 training, that likely would not help oxidative capacity. Another problem was that it increased the perceived exertion of long SST rides, making them far less tolerable.



Four plots on the same chart.



QA plots of ergometer rides can be weird. This one looks almost like some sort of crop circle. Note how small the cloud is and how it's all relatively low force pedaling. This is representative of most of my training for the past few months.



Road race with some fairly big hills.



My first L6 workout in a long, long time. The uppermost cloud is the L6 workout on a short hill. The cloud below it is the tempo riding I did afterwards. Pedaling force is quite a bit more than on the erg.




Training ride with several long climbs. Some steep sections where I ran out of gears.



3x20 at 295W on the erg. Rest intervals were 5 min at 145W. Notice how the data points follow the 295W and 145W power curves so closely.

The great equalizer: Armadillo tires

The regular Armadillo tires, not the Elite model, are the only tires I've used that can reliably defeat goathead thorns. The goatheads stick into the tread, get spun around a few times, and either snap off or are thrown off the tire. One time, I dug about a dozen snapped off goathead thorns out of a pair of Armadillos. The tips had been embedded in the tread for awhile but still didn't puncture the armored casing.



Here, I've ridden the tire to the point that the tread is paperthin and separating from the casing. I forgot exactly how many miles I'd get out of an Armadillo tire. I think it was in the area of 6-8,000 for a rear tire.



For those of you who don't already know, Armadillo tires have incredible rolling resistance. Among clinchers, they are the only tires with more rolling resistance than Tufos. At 20 mph, their incredibly stiff tread and sidewalls require about an extra 35W to deform compared to my current training tires, Michelin Krylion Carbons. Armadillos have such a dead ride that the first time you ride them, you think you have a flat tire. In fact, you can deflate an Armadillo and the stiff sidewalls will hold the bike up as if the tire was still inflated.

What are the RR slaying implications? Well, once again, RRs forced me to make a terrible choice. I had to choose between risking punctures or being handicapped by slow tires. Of course, the RRs train on tires nicer than I race on and with their perpetually fresh legs, I needed to even the odds a bit so I switched to Michelin Carbons. I've had more flats but it hasn't been an epidemic.

The funny thing is that during the 2 years or so that I trained on Armadillos, I was still faster than the RRs. There they were, putting forth heroic efforts to race me and reveling in their success (success being defined as hanging on for a few minutes longer) , not knowing that with normal tires I would have stomped them even harder. Sorry RRs, that's one less "cheat" you'll be able to exploit.

Dumb Post of the Day

This posting just leaves me speechless. Because of the lack of paragraphs, I've parsed through this mess and highlighted the most amusing sections.

http://groups.google.com/group/wattage/msg/561b04090955b817?

I wanted to start a new discussion so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. First, a little background disclosure: What I am-totally committed avid cyclist who logs 10,000 miles/500,000'+ of climbing per year, non-racer except the occasional TT, but I do lead one of the hardest group rides in my area.. What I am not-pro cyclist, scientist, engineer. I've been reading the wattage forums much longer than I have been using my ibike, so maybe I'm not qualified enough, and deserving enough, to throw this post out there, but here are my observations: First let me say, I have really enjoyed the numerous great training tips and superb advice I have derived from this site. I only wish that was the major focus of the group. What I have been able to gather about devices, is that there is no perfect power meter, and the only consistent talk about power meters revolves around the inconsistency of the imperfections and limitations. Now back to the ibike. For me, it's real simple. If, at the end of a ride, I simply dropped my bike on the ground across the finish line, and said to my mechanic, "Have it ready for tomorrow's stage", I would have an SRM Pro, if for no other reason, that than it "seems" to be the best, and a lot of pros use it. Whether they get paid to is a good question, but my point is that I don't hand my bike to somebody, I either work on it, or pay somebody to, and I buy my equipment with my own money. Now, if you were to see my bicycles and my kit, you would probably gather that I could afford multiple SRM Pros, and if I felt I needed one, or even wanted one, I would certainly have one. I want a more simple solution. I've been waiting for the ibike people to get the product dialed in, and I decided that they were close enough, so I went ahead and got the wireless unit. I'm willing to accept thelimitations of the ibike because they are far outweighed by the advantages, and for me, in my world, 99% of the time it generates not only highly repeatable numbers, but accurate ones if I compare it to my power based trainer I've used for years now, mostly for fitness testing. Now, I'll try my hand at predicting the future. I have never experienced customer service at the level of the ibike, and certainly not from the top level of a company. Richard Wharton and John Hammand seem to be available 24 hours a day. I don't think anybody works that hard unless they know they have something very special, so here is how I think the story ends: ibike does really get it dialed in, so much so, that, guess what, it becomes good enough for people like me and most of you. There are a lot more of us than there are professional world class cyclists. A large sports equipment company buys ibike out, spends a lot of dough on marketing, and within 2 years, they have a majority market share, if not a near monopoly, of the power meter market. At this point, the ibike people laugh as they trot off to the bank. I'm guessing the thing most likely to drerail this track is the introduction of an even simpler and/or less expensive alternative to the ibike, not another product costing many multiples more, and offering yet another set of unique limitations and disadvantages. And I imagine at that point I'll be mad that I didn't wait for this new "better" product, and I'll join in with all of you, and bash a product I have not even tried! My point is, if you haven't ascertained it already, that most people want a simple, not complex solution for measuring their power. For me, the ibike is that solution.


Rebuttal

Yes, we're all very impressed by your 10,000 mi/yr and 500,000' of virtual climbing.

You bought an iBike because you thought an SRM would require too much effort to use? The same iBike that iBike users have described as having a calibration procedure equivalent to a space shuttle launch? The iBike that customers feel they are beta testing because it has so many problems?

You calibrated your iBike using the most inaccurate power measuring devices of all, indoor trainers? This would have been interesting since the iBike doesn't actually work indoors.

A near monopoly of the powermeter market? This is truly delusional.

A monopoly that can only be derailed by a cheaper and simpler powermeter? That would be the basic PowerTap. Much, much simpler. Less expensive and much more accurate.