Category: training

The Universal Sports‘ coverage of the Giro is great! The best cycling coverage I’ve seen in awhile, if not ever. I did my first 200k last weekend. Actually I rode about 210k because I wasn’t sure of my route and I wanted to get in at least 200k. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I took a look at the Giro route. Stage 6: 248km, Stage 7: 244km, Stage 8: 209km. That’s just three stages of a 21 stage race. Makes my 210km look pretty unremarkable.

I’d planned to do an organized ride, but a majority of the other riders voted to cancel 15 minutes before the scheduled start because of inclement weather. I can understand rescheduling a club ride because of weather; especially low visibility, i.e. drivers can’t see riders well. However, if someone had made the call 12 hours earlier it certainly would have saved a lot of time and fuel.
 
I needed to get in a long ride and didn’t have a lot of daylight left after driving from Longmont to Pueblo. The “route” I chose was pretty awful. Using “route” loosely, because I only had a vague idea of where I was going and spent a fair amount of time riding around in circles getting the mileage in. The weather was decent though, dry and overcast with mild wind.
 
The “bike trail” at the Pueblo reservoir is paved, but in such poor condition that it is unrideable except on a mountain bike. The road surface is not much better. Really the main road around the reservoir is in absolutely terrible condition. Many drivers are not polite and two yelled at me to get on the bike path. There was one excellent part of the road, the spur to Osprey lookout. Nice pavement and the testosterone level of the drivers seemed much lower in that part of the park … away from the reservoir. I rode Route 96 for a few miles west of the reservoir. It has a decent size shoulder, but is in nearly as bad condition as the reservoir road. It is covered with sand and has cracks every few yards, each supporting a good crop of weeds. I came home with two thorns in my front tire. One was causing a slow leak. I was lucky to make it back to my car just before dark without having to change the tube.
 
My route covered these roads and trail, though obviously some them were ridden more than once to get to 130+ miles. Other than the road conditions, it was a nice, easy ride.
 

In January, I started using TrainingPeaks in addition to Polar ProTrainer which I have been using in some version for many years. It has been helpful for me as a Mac user to be able to keep my training log up-to-date without having to start up Windows in VMWare Fusion.

My favorite thing about Training Peaks is the Annual Training Plan. With a paid account you can use the ATP wizard. You first answer some basic questions about sports and training time, then enter your planned races and prioritize them A, B or C. The ATP wizard generates a plan for you which you can adjust manually. I was reading Base Building for Cyclists by Thomas Chapple when I started using Training Peaks. Chapple uses a similar approach to Joel Friel, who developed Training Peaks. The ATP was very helpful for backing out base building from goal events. The ATP and Friel’s “abilities” are very similar to Rob Sleamaker’s SERIOUS training for Endurance Athletes and the way he breaks up training time over the 7 SERIOUS components. I read Sleamaker’s first edition nearly 15 years ago and used a complicated Excel spreadsheet to allocate yearly training hours. The ATP wizard makes the process much easier and, if you haven’t done manual edits, you can play around with different variables to look at different plans.

Once you’ve set up an ATP you can use the Virtual Coach to recommend workouts. The VC only recommends bike and run workouts for me. Since I am doing a lot of skate skiing for base training (and fun!) I haven’t used the VC much yet.

I also really like the CNS score, developed by coach Rick Crawford, which is in the daily log section of the Classic version of TrainingPeaks. I am probably not using its full potential, but keeping track of those 6 subjective factors gives me an idea about how well I am balancing stress and recovery.

TrainingPeaks has a free trial if you’re interested and I highly recommend Base Building for Cyclists. It has more discussion of training for ultra-endurance events than any general training book I’ve read, which is not a lot, but a lot more than a single passing reference (or no mention at all), and it has a couple sample training segments for ultras. To me the big difference between Chapple and Carmichael, compared to older books like Sleamaker, Eddie B and Lemond, is not the idea of a training progression or training different skills for your sport, but the emphasis on low intensity base training. Chapple’s entire book discusses how to structure this part of your training year.

Perry, the average joggler, is on day 74 of a joggling streak. His goal is to joggle at least one mile a day, but he usually runs further than that. 74 days is a great streak. I would be pretty impressed with myself if I’d run every day for almost two and a half months, but Perry’s goal is 1000 days! That’s nearly three years!

It doesn’t seem right to me that his joggling pace is faster than my running-without-juggling pace. I have yet to try running and juggling at the same time, but I imagine I would spend more time picking up my juggling balls than making forward progress. Check out Perry’s “drops” stat. After a 1000 days I wonder what his longest streak with no drops will be. I’ve already seen one of 8 days!

Yes, I’m still alive. I drove to Idaho about 10 days ago and skate skiing has taken precedence over posting to my blog.

I love winter in Southern Colorado! This is a photo from a short January 7 mountain bike ride at Pueblo Reservoir. There is a great network of trails south of the reservoir, built by Southern Colorado Trail Builders. Pueblo has nice days for riding all winter long. I also got in a 50 mile road ride near my house on January 17. The opportunity to go for a long road ride in January, between 7500ft and 9500ft, even in Southern Colorado, is not that common and it was fun to be outside on my bike in the sun. Unlike the Pueblo photo, there was snow all around, but the road was almost completely dry.

The weather in Teton Valley has been unusually mild too. On January 20th I did my first skate ski of the year, about 24km. The trail was a little bumpy, but hard and fast, and look at that blue sky!! It seemed more like March than January. I got in another 30km or so on Wednesday and Thursday, in similar conditions. Then on Saturday, the day of the Spud Chase, the weather changed. At least the snow started. The temperature stayed warm. I totally screwed up my wax. I would have been better off with dry skis, but I finished my first cross-country ski event and fourth ski of the year. Anyway, I am excited to be skating again and am hoping for more fun and better wax if I do the Boulder Mountain Tour on February 7.