I was reading Fatty, and he talked about his goals for 2006. So, I thought that I’d talk about mine, and perhaps give him a bit of advice…

I’ve decided on my bicycle goals this year. My big rides are going to be:

STP One-day (July 15th)

I’ve never done STP. I’ve thought about doing the two-day variant, but I didn’t really want to go on a ride with 8000 of my closest friends. Last year I was probably in shape to do the one-day version, but I didn’t know I’d be there in March when I needed to register.

RAMROD (July 27th)

RAMROD (Ride around mount rainier in one day) is a 143 mile ride all the way around Mt. Rainier. It features around 10,000′ feet of climbing. This will be a  long and hard ride.

I think that I can get into decent shape on my own, but I’ve been thinking of spending some money on a coach. Since I don’t have any racing aspirations, it seems strange to think about a coach, but I’ve taken ski lessons for the last 5 years or so, and it’s had a tremendous impact on both my ability and my enjoyment. I spend enough time on my bike training (well, much of it is just *riding*…), and I’m pretty sure I could be more efficient in using that time.

Carmichael provides an entry-level service for $40 a month that gives you a program to follow that I’m thinking of using.

Anybody tried Carmichael, or any other coaches?

Oh, and Elden, I noticed that Carmichael also provides nutritional consultation. If you’re planning on dropping that much weight, it might be worth considering…

The last few days, I spent eating, sleeping, and reading, so today I got back on the bike and did 25 miles with just under 2000 feet of climbing.

Fatty is talking about overtraining as a possible excuse for not riding, and mentions Friel’s statement on overtraining ()

Less than one-tenth of one percent of the general population is capable of attaining such a feat.

That’s a pretty powerful statement, and Fatty uses it to assert that only the upper level of pro athetes can overtrain (it’s not clear to me if his statement is another Friel quote, or a paraphrase, hyperbole, or the product of too much of “the best cake in the world“)

To me, what it comes down to is this question:

Is my overall fitness level going to be better if I:

a) train today?
b) rest today?

If the answer is “b” and you train today *anyway*, you are overtraining. Of course, there are some caveats – your “training” today might be more “active rest” than training.

So, how many cyclists overtrain? Well, my experience is that many people – especially those who like to push “until I start getting tunnel vision” – tend to have trouble controlling their intensity. Friel says:

Generally, a week should have at least as many recovery workouts as hard workouts, if not more. Every third or fourth week there needs to be a period of greatly reduced training with an emphasis on rejuvenation.

Carmichael says something similar.

So, anyway, my point – and there is a point this time – is that many – if not most – serious recreational athletes are in danger of overtraining now and then. I have a friend (no, really, a friend…) who would ride his bike “all out” for 75 minutes every night for a period of months. I don’t see how he could be anything but overtrained.

Tonight I read a post by Eldon, where (among other things) he says that he has learned how to lose himself in his ride. I’ve experienced that a number of times – I’m just riding, still paying attention to what’s going on, but not thinking about anything.

I’ve been thinking about how that relates to the flow state when programming. In my experience, it’s a lot easier to get into the flow state when programming than it is to get into the analogous state when riding. It may have to do with the degree to which you can shut out external input. In programming, it’s pretty easy – put on some appropriate music, and lose myself in the task. On the bike, it’s often not possible, since losing oneself can have some pretty bad consequences.

Thoughts? Are the two states analogous, or are they different things entirely?

A post over at the Fat Cyclist (entitled “I Fear My Bathroom Scale“) got me thinking.

I first started cycling seriously a few years ago, when 9 months of being a PM and not working out had added about 20 pounds on my frame. The weight came off fairly easily, but I was hungry a fair bit, and it took me quite a while to come up with a nutrition plan that worked, both when I’m training hard and when I’m not.

The basic problem is that if you are a recreational athlete, you need two different diet approaches. Both have the aim of keeping your blood sugar at a consistent level, but the way that you do that during (and after) exercise is very different from how you do it the rest of the time. You also need to realize that an approach that works for mostly sedentary people may be the wrong thing for you as an athlete, with Atkins being the prototypical example of this.

There are two good books that I know that can help a lot. The first is Chris Carmichael’s “Food for Fitness“. Chris’ hypothesis is that you should match what you eat to the period of training that you’re in. That conceptually makes a lot of sense if you’re on a fairly serious training regimen, but it probably over the top for many recreational athletes. That doesn’t mean that this book isn’t valuable, however – it has a lot of great basic nutritional information and covers fairly well how your diet needs are different than those of the sedentary part of the population.

The second book is “The South Beach Diet”. In general, most diet books aren’t very useful, but there’s a lot of good science – and clinical research – behind the South Beach approach. To sum up, each fewer processed foods, more natural foods, and you’ll keep your blood sugar more constant, and therefore not be hungry all the time. I know several people who have lost good amounts of weight while not spending a lot of time hungry. There are some sacrifices here – I don’t eat as much pasta as I used to, nor rice, and when I do, they’re the whole-wheat varieties. Same with bread. But it’s something that’s sustainable.

So, for me, I’m “South Beach” on most days, trying to eat things that will give me sustained energy. That often means eating a little more fat that you would on low-fat diets, which is a good thing in my book. There are a bunch of “south beach” brand foods in the supermarket, but the ones I’ve tried have been pretty poor, so I’d suggest staying with the natural food.

I then modify on days when I work out. During workouts, my goal is to get enough glucose into my system on a consistent basis so I can burn fat efficiently. For me, this means a snack about an hour before (banana or clif bar, something like that), then Accelerade to drink now and then plus something else to munch on during stops (sometimes Clif bars, sometimes newtons). If I get it right, I’ll have a nice constant stream of glucose so that I can get most of my energy from my fat stores. If I do this right, I don’t get that “I’ve got to eat and eat and eat” feeling that Mr. Fat Cyclist (can I can you “Fat”?) speaks about in his post.

On the first day of RSVP, I rode about 6 hours on Accelerade, a couple of clif bars, some beef jerky (sodium), and a few other assorted nibbles. That’s not a lot of food, which means the bulk of my energy came from my fat stores. That’s good – not only does it help with weight loss, it means that I can have plenty of energy without trying to each a lot, which is bad – you can only expect to get a limited number of calories from eating without getting too much food in your stomach.

I should also probably note that you may need to back off a bit if you’re in a sport for weight loss. The goal is to get your fat-burning metabolism working well and to use that for the bulk of your ride – that means you need to spend most of your time in a comfortable aerobic range. If you can find a good group ride that isn’t too gonzo for your fitness level, you can stay comfortably aerobic on the flats and then push yourself (if you want) on the hills. If you push too hard, you won’t establish the aerobic engine that you need. Carmichael talks about this in “The ultimate ride“, also a good book.

Oh, and I use my scale, but mostly to weight myself before and after workouts to see how I’m doing on hydration.

Last week I bought and set up hosting for BicycleClimbs.com. Thanks to all that recommended hosting services – I ended up at webhost4life, and it’s been pretty painless so fair, with good tech support when I’ve needed it.

The site is a slightly-improved version of my original site – the display now includes a list of climbs (expanded), and I’ve added an RSS feed that lists the climbs, so you can find out when new ones are added.

I plan on doing dynamic generation of the pages in the future, when I get some free time to figure things out. How do you generate an XML file from within ASP.NET, anyway?

I’ve also looked at Virtual Earth, but haven’t seen an API show up yet.

Yesterday, I participated in my first Century of the year, a hilly 100-miler (hence the term “century”) known as the Flying Wheels Summer Century (alternately known as the “Screamin Thighs Summer Century”).

In last year’s edition, I rode by myself and finished in 6:49:22, averaging about 15 MPH.

This year, I was hoping to do better. Though I had only broken the 50 mile once this year, I had been riding hard with some faster riders, I had a new bike (“the beauty”) that was nearly 10 pounds lighter than my last bike (the rain bike, aka “the beast”).

I did the 50 mile version with a group a week ago, and then rested my legs for the week. I prepared Friday night by getting about 3 hours of sleep and arose Saturday at 6 feeling groggy, dehydrated, and a bit queasy. The almond Clif bar and 16 oz of water I had for breakfast did nothing to improve the situation, but at least I made it to the starting line with all my gear, including my shoes.

We ended up with a group of about 12 riders, and headed out. The first section of the ride (about an hour or so) takes you on two major climbs, and I wasn’t feeling much better at the first food stop. I drank a large chunk of my Accelerade, and we headed out in a paceline across the valley towards Duvall at a bit over 20 mph. I wheel-sucked mercilessly, as there was no way I was going to be doing a turn at the front the way I was feeling. By the time we got to the third climb at Stillwater hill, I was feeling okay, and I spun up it in my lowest gear (yes, buying the triple chainring was a good choice, even though it’s not quite as manly) with one of my friends. We worked our way past a detour, and then flew back downhill on the descent down Cherry Valley Road. The 19th century pavement combined with the high redneck quotient make this an exciting section, especially when there are a hundred riders on it and you’re trying to pass them, but it was better than last year, and we made it to the next water stop.

At that point, I decided I might just live, so I at half a Clif bar and mixed another bottle of Acclerade. We headed north on High Bridge Road, which is when things started to deteriorate a bit.

There’s an interesting feature of group rides. If you’ve watched racing on TV, you’ll know that the big breaks happen on the climbs, so you might expect that the climbs would break apart the groups, but nearly all groups have a “regroup at the top” policy where you wait until the group gets together. If you don’t do this, you end up without a group, as a good hill spread out the group pretty well.

It’s rolling hills that break up a group, mostly because of the way that pacelines work. The lead rider is trying to maintain a steady pace, warn the group of hazards/turns/stops, and not puke his lungs out. The second rider has an easy job – he drafts closely behind the first rider usually at around half a wheel diameter. Because the lead rider’s speed isn’t constant, he needs to adjust his speed up and down,  but that’s pretty easy to do – you pedal a bit harder, or soft pedal. It’s a cushy place to be, except that you know that in a short period of time – somewhere between 2-10 minutes – the lead rider will peel off, and you’ll put in your time.

The third rider has a harder job, as he keys off of the second rider, so instead of the small speed variations of the leader, he has the larger variations of the second rider to work with.

And so on, back through the paceline. As you get farther back, you have to make harder efforts to stay on the wheel of the rider in front of you, and you also have to be more careful not to hit the person in front of you. Ideally, you never use brakes in a paceline, but realistically, if pulling a bit to the side to slow you down (from the wind) isn’t enough, you sometimes have to feather your brakes.

Obviously, the longer the paceline, the harder it is to stay one, and we had 12 people at that point. If there’s a short climb, and your leader doesn’t drop the pace a little at the top, you’ll break off 3 or 4 people on the back. They then need to regroup and try to get back to the lead group, but 1) it’s 4 people vs 8 people at that point and 2) a couple of those people likely just finished their turn at the front.

That happened twice on the hilly part to Snohomish, as there were a few people pushing the pace (ie 23-24 mph). After the second break, our group of 3 or 4 decided not to bother chasing, and took a slightly more sedate pace into Snohomish. I pulled a section at about 20-21MPH, though it was near the airport and my wireless computer couldn’t decide whether my speed was 20, 45, or 67. We picked up a couple more people in Snohomish, and went about 20-22 into Monroe, which is a pretty good speed as it’s very flat.

This put us just a hair over halfway through the ride, and with the exception of the ominous “it’s going to rain really hard very soon” raindrops, we were doing fairly well. We took a 15 minute break, I made my last bottle of Accelerade, and we headed out. The first part of this section is flat, and we cruised at around 21MPH. Steven (one of the organizers of the group) took a turn, I took a second turn on the flat part, and then as I pulled off the front as we came to a short hill, one of the fast guys came to the front, sped things up, and the group rode both Steven and I off the back, leaving us to ride by ourselves to the next rest stop.

We were not amused.

It’s not that we were ridden off the back of the group. I don’t begrudge the fast guys their speed, and I know what it’s like to be with a group that’s riding slower than you want to. It happens to me all the time… Well, occaisionally… Okay, I read about it in a book.

So guys pulling fast at the front is not a problem. What is a problem is that there were a few people who were curiously absent from the front of the group for the whole ride. Because of the distances and times between stops, if you grab the 7th or 8th position consistently and put your effort in on hills to maintain that position, you can hang back and not do any of the hard work.

This behavior may be acceptable, depending on the group. If you have one or two riders who aren’t up to speed that day but you want to keep them in the group, the rest of the riders may not mind carrying them along. I’ve certainly done that on some of our Wednesday rides.

The underlying problem was the size of the group. If we could split our group in half, the fast guys could ride at a speed they were comfortable with, and we could ride a bit slower. Steven and I decided that it made sense to split the group, and we told people that we thought it was a good idea to break into smaller groups, and that the two of us were going to ride a bit slower.

We’d hoped that a few others would join us, but nobody did, so we headed off towards Fall City at around 19MPH, a bit faster when Steven was on the front, a bit slower when I was there. Before the final hill in Fall City, we met up with three more guys who’d decided the fast group was a bit too fast for their liking (without Steven and I keeping the speed down at the front, they’d picked up their pace), and we headed up the hill, hit the last rest stop, and ended up with 4 of us for the spin back into Redmond along East Lake Sammamish.

A great ride overall. Given that my goal was to finish in around 6 hours and I felt so bad at the beginning, a great day.

Statistics:

Distance:            100 miles
Time:                  5:34
Average Speed:  18 MPH
Elevation Gain:    5375 feet

The elevation gain at Flying Wheels is usually given as 3200′ of vertical. One of our group had a GPS with him, and he came up with 5400′ of vertical. I did the route in Topo USA, and came up with 5375′ for the course.

My guess is that this is the difference between measuring elevation gain with a barometric altimeter and a GPS or topo mapping program. My guess is that the barometric sensor is doing a lot more data smoothing, and is missing a lot of the little ups and downs.

Food:

1.5 Clif bars
56 oz Accelerade
1 bagel
1 newton
33 pretzels
70(ish) oz water

The switch to Accelerade has been a huge success. It really doesn’t have that many calories – only about 10 per ounce – but they are very easily accessible. The Accelerade gave me enough glucose to keep going, and the rest of the energy came from my fat stores.

• General comments and suggestions
• New climbs to add, both on the eastside and in Seattle and elsewhere
• Better data for maximum gradients
• Descriptions for the climbs.
• Rankings for the climbs. I currently have green, yellow, and red. I’m going to add something beyond red for climbs like the zoo, but if you think I’m off on the relative ranking of climbs, let me know.

This morning, I went on the 7 Hills of Kirkland ride. I had been planning on riding with a co-worker, but he got scared and decided to crash his bike on Thursday night so that he wouldn’t have to go. Okay, that’s not what he *claims*, but I’m pretty sure it’s the truth.

There are three options on this ride:

Those are hard rides. As a comparison, the Flying Wheels Summer Century has a similar elevation gain, but spreads it over 100 miles. I was there to ride the 40 mile version.

The day started poorly. I got up, drove to Kirkland, pulled the bike out, sat down to put on my… shoes… where are my shoes?

They’re sitting back in the kitchen.

Argh. So, once I picked up my shoes and got back, the other riders I had hoped to ride with had already left, so I did the ride solo.

What’s the ride like? Well, it’s hilly. Or, to be more correct, you spend lots of time going uphill, followed by short and fast descents, with little time going flat. The worst hills are the third one (seminary hill) and the sixth one (winery hill). As your turn onto the last pitch on Seminary hill, you can see (and hear) a lone bagpiper playing at the top of the climb. Pretty cool.

40 miles
2:32
15.8 MPH

7 Hills Elevation Profile (from Topo USA)

I took advantage of the nice April weather that we’re having in Seattle to go on a lunchtime ride. There’s a traditional Wednesday ride at Microsoft that the faster riders go on, where “faster riders” == “riders who also race”, which means they’re anywhere from pretty fast to really fast. But, with rain expected tommorrow, I decided to bring my bike in today and have a go.

The first 4 or 5 miles was fairly calm as we wound through Marymoor park and east on highway 202, and it was easy to stay on the back of the pack (drafting can save up to around 30% of your effort, though I don’t generally ride close enough to see that much benefit). But as we turned south and started climbing, the pack broke apart a bit more. I blew up a bit (ie exceeded my aerobic threshold) on the climb up 244th Avenue, but rode with another rider who was waiting for me. Turns out, however, that I was faster up the hill than he was, so after a weave through some repaving, I crested the hill and joined the rest of the group. We rode down to NE 8th, turned right, rode a bit more, and then descended down the 12% grade of Inglewood hill, ending up back on East Lake Sammamish going north. At that point, I latched on the rear wheel of another rider and held on for 7 or 8 minutes until I got dropped off the back. A regroup at the end of Eastlake, back through Marymoor, and then up 40th to the campus.

Overall, a pretty good ride. I did have to draft to stay with the group, but could do so with a little trouble. It helped a bunch that this is early season and these guys aren’t close to how fast they’ll be in 3 months or so, but my aerobic fitness is better than I expected, though I’m down quite a bit on strength.

The new bike worked pretty well, and I’ve gotten the seat adjusted to where I like it. My back and right wrist hurt a bit, which either means that I’ll need to raise the bars (or perhaps shorten the stem), or merely that my overuse injuries are showing up. The difference between the new bike and the old bike is pretty drastic – I did 28 miles on Sunday morning on the old bike, and averaged about 13.5 MPH. Today, with a bit of drafting help, I did 19 miles in around 68 minutes, which is pretty darn fast for considering there were a couple of steep hills, and I didn’t quite spin out on the downhills. So, the verdict on the bike is “great” so far. Oh, and I may have finally found a seat that my butt can tolerate well.

Two of the guys on the ride showed up of fixies – bikes that are fixed-gear. Not only do they only have a single speed, they have no freewheel, so you can’t coast – you pedal all the time, both up and down the hills. That they can ride both up and down the hills in a single gear is pretty impressive, and on the steep downhills they’ll be spinning their cranks at something like 150RPM, or even a bit faster.

I should also mention that all the other riders are really nice guys and quite tolerant at having less experienced guys along for the ride.

Last fall, I wrote a post about being an aspiring Fred, where a “Fred” is someone with more bike than rider. Apologies to anybody named “Fred” – I’m not the one who coined the term .

I had gotten tired of my LeMond Tourmalet, whose decidedly midrange components have seen better days, and whose main claim to fame is “heavy”.

I rode bikes made of steel and titanium, but it was the carbon fiber Trek that I fell in love with. It’s certainly not as live of a feel as the metallic bikes that I rode, but it doesn’t feel mushy either. Just sort of muted, a marked opposite to the Litespeed TI bike I rode (their entry-level bike, to be fair), which was a bit springy. I was either going to buy the 5000 or the 5200, the chief difference being that the 5200 comes with full Ultegra (Shimano’s second-best line of bicycle components), and that 5000 comes with some Ultegra, some 105.

My first Fred post got a comment from SeanB, where he pointed me to Trek’s ProjectOne website. On this site, you can choose a model, a paint job, and then customize parts of the bike. You can choose color, saddle, wheels, component group (to varying degrees based on the bike), seatpost, bars, etc. When you order, you can specify a stem and crank length as well.

I first test rode the 5200 in 58cm (the frame size), doing some hills outside of Greggs. I found two things – that I loved the feel, and the 58 was too small for me. They ordered in a 60, and I rode that, and it was pretty much perfect. I decided to go the project one route, did my customizing, and had them order the bike. As part of their model year switch, Trek is changing their line, and the 5200 is being replaced by the 5.2 Madone, which is just like the 5200, except it has the fin behind the seat post (for improved aero above 23 MPH, I have heard). Oh, and it’s about $150 more expensive, though that also corresponds to the change from a 9-speed cassette in the rear to the new Ultegra 10 speed cassette, so it’s not just the frame change. Coupled with the triple up front, that gives me 30 different gear combinations (brief aside – you can’t really use all 30. First of all, there’s lots of overlap, and second, if you ran the large ring on the front and the large on the back, the angle could lead to noise, wear, or even chain breakage. But more speeds gives you more chance to find the exact one you want).

The paint job is the project one “Deep South” motif – bright red with some yellow accents on. I’d considered getting “Pave Flambe”, but it was a little too muted for my taste. Notice the flowing curves of the carbon fiber frame.

The bike arrived in good condition, except that it came with a carbon seatpost (I wanted aluminum because I sometimes run a seatpost rack, and carbon seatposts don’t hold up to that), and Gregg’s had put a 2″ x 3″ silver sticker right on the bottom of the downtube. The seatpost will get re-ordered, and the sticker came off fairly easily.

Unfortunately, it’s been cold and wet here, so I haven’t been able to go on a real ride yet, but I did go out on Saturday for 5 or 6 miles. I’m not sure how fast it is, since I don’t have a computer yet, but it’s definitely faster on the flats, and felt really nice on the one hill that I threw at it.

On, and here’s a picture of “Fred” next to his bike. The shorts are normally black/silver, but the retro-reflective fabric really shows up in the flash. Oh, and what were they thinking with the blue bar tape? I can handle the saddle being blue, but blue bars on a red bike?