Maybe the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is just what the U.S. needs. For a moment individuals can stop arguing about global warming and gay marriage rights, and unite against pseudo-citizens; i.e. corporations.
Sign the motion “to amend our Constitution to: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights…”
Don’t open any e-mail messages or attachments that appear to be from Facebook regarding resetting your password. This trojan has been circulating since the end of October, but I just received a copy of the spoofed e-mail this morning.
More information –
Massive bot attack spoofs Facebook password messages
Ok, so it started out a little chilly…24deg F, but by the time we reached Hatch, NM, 24 miles into the Radium Springs 200k, my fingers had thawed. The 136 mile route is beautiful and at least 90 miles of it has very little traffic. It first travels west and north, with a very gradual climb. After an easy warm-up of about 50 miles, we headed into some hills; steep-ish, short-to-medium climbs….nothing too extreme. After Nutt was a fast 20 miles, east, back into Hatch. The last 20 miles, riding south into the wind were a bit of a grind, but more mentally, than physically difficult.
The New Mexico Brevet Series organizers and volunteers are awesome! The level of support was as good or better than any organized century I’ve ridden. At $25 per rider entry fee, I don’t see how they even cover their costs. Not only was there drop bag and sag wagon support, they provided sandwiches, fruit, brownies and soft drinks and home-cooked dinner afterwards.
Even though I’d ridden Tejas 500 eight weeks ago, I felt only minimally prepared for this ride. Seeing Radium Springs on my calendar three weeks out, I’d added a weekly long ride on the rollers of 3, 4 and finally 6 hours to get ready.
If you ride Radium Springs it’s probably a good idea to have a light that’s bright enough to comfortably ride with and a bright taillight, and a good amount of reflective material on your bike and clothing. Daylight is pretty short on December 6th, and the traffic between Hatch and Radium Springs really picked up late afternoon and evening. All the drivers gave me lots of room, but I’m sure they aren’t used to watching for cyclists that time of day/year.
Coming from the north, we stayed at Truth or Consequences, about an hour from the start rather than driving farther south to Las Cruces. That saved a little driving on Friday and Sunday. I hope to do more NM Brevets in the coming year!
the HRM trained group showed significantly greater increases in peak output (5.0% vs 3.5%)
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a power meter. I just can’t justify spending $1500 or more on one. I’ve read that some very experienced riders would take an old bike with a power meter over a new bike without one, but I’m not convinced. I found this article from March, 2009 that supports that view, “Put Down That Power Meter, Eugene“.
If this is repeatable, I think there may be two reasons why the HRM group did better than the power meter group, one related to recovery, the other related to adaptation. My guess is that when a rider is not well recovered, a heart rate based target will account somewhat for that. In other words, a power-based target remains the same no matter how tired an athlete is, while one’s heart rate is likely to be affected by fatigue and naturally ratchet the effort level to lower power. I know that training at consistent power is something proponents of power meters site as an advantage, but it could be an obstacle to good recovery.
The second reason, and probably the more important of the two: Hopefully as one adapts to training, the power that can be maintained at a given heart rate increases. By training with a heart rate target, the power level will naturally adjust upward. If training with power, as one improves, the power target would remain the same, while the heart rate decreases. My intuition is that by training with an HRM one’s power level is always incrementally adjusting, whereas a power target would often not be adjusted for as long as 2-4 weeks, until the next test.
For those reasons, even before I saw this study, I questioned the supremacy of power meters for endurance training. Though I’d guess that power meters are far better for anaerobic training; when the rider is doing short, hard sprints where heart rate response lags behind effort. It’s unlikely that sprint training was even included in this study, since HRM’s give such poor feedback in that situation.
Ideally one would use both power and heart rate data, but this study indicates that at least for some aspects of cycling training, a heart rate monitor can be as good or better than a power meter.