Starting Spring Training

While surfing Facebook the other day, I came across a post from the folks at RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa — the granddaddy of all the cross-state tours) concerning training. Even though Iowa is under snow right now, the post noted it’s time to start training for the July ride.

Now, the folks in Iowa have a real disadvantage. There’s that snow I mentioned. It’ll be cold there for quite some time to come. But cycling coach David Ertl, who provides training tips for RAGBRAI riders, is right — it’s time to build up your base.

I, on the other hand, have been doing nothing but base building for several months. I’m lucky enough to be able to ride most days, even when it’s colder than I like (If I want to — sometimes, I prefer to roll over in bed and pull the covers more tightly over my head). But here we are at the beginning of March, and those base miles I’ve built up need to develop into something more.

I’m going to start by lengthening my weekend rides. The club rides I do every Sunday have been dependably in the 30-40 mile range. Now, it’s time to add some decent distance to those rides, and make them in the 35-50 mile range. I find that riding longer is the single best thing I can do to improve my cycling.

Then, lengthening the shorter rides of the week could be added in. That means more time in the saddle, and time doesn’t always cooperate. But my usual 20-mile ride on weekday evenings might have to extend to 25 miles or so. I mentioned Daylight Savings Time in the last post — that will really help with longer weekday rides.

Finally, adding in some hard riding. Last weekend, I attacked a hill that I’ve just been riding up during the winter. It left me gasping for breath. But I’ll keep working it from here on out. It takes me about three minutes to climb, and during last summer, I hit a personal best on that hill of 2:24. I’ll be working to get back to that time.

Intervals are not my favorite kind of riding, but I know from experience that they’re very helpful in building speed. I start out easy: 30 seconds all-out, followed by one minute easy pedaling. The 30 seconds will grow to a minute, then to two minutes. Once I get up to two minutes fast, two minutes easy, I’ll be where I want to be.

Does this sound like a change in riding philosophy for the Bike Noob? Maybe. But I just had yet another birthday, and I want to make sure I don’t let my age catch up to me. More rigorous training will help stave off the aging monster.

And heck, I just want to enjoy my biking. Certainly, just riding brings enjoyment. But riding well brings more enjoyment, because you can ride longer and stronger. So — let the serious spring training begin.

Weekend Riding

I like Fridays, because more often than not I’m able to work from the house — just as I did this past Friday. One of the things I like about working from home is that it’s easy to get out for a bike ride.

Problem is, I haven’t done that now for the last two Fridays in a row. A combination of work stuff and household stuff has kept me indoors, and I can’t even squeeze in the 80-minute ride I usually do on Fridays. And since I don’t get a chance to ride during the week, those Friday jaunts are important to me.

Now, that’s not to say you can’t make something out of riding just on the weekends. Since Sunday morning is the club ride, I can count on 30-40 miles there, and Saturday sees me on a 25-mile route through the neighborhood that includes some decent hills. Taking the advice of our friend Don Blount, I’ve been making sure those weekend miles I get in are “quality miles,” and involve such things as attacking hills, doing short intervals, maybe some fartlek, or cruising along at a tempo pace.

I figure if I can make use of the weekend, I’ll still manage to be in good enough shape when the weather moderates to do some meaningful rides.

One thing in my favor is that Daylight Savings Time is just around the corner — next weekend, as a matter of fact. That means I’ll be able to get in some miles on at least one weekday.

Quality Time on the Bike

Guest poster Don Blount has been working on improving his biking.

BlountOnBiking Time on the bike.

Ask any serious cyclist how to improve and that will likely be the essence of the answer you will receive.

It makes sense, as to improve at anything you have to spend time doing it.

However, I would qualify that statement by saying that to improve as a cyclist you have to spend quality time on the bike.

I worked hard at that last year in my attempt to become a better overall rider and to become a better climber

Now I doubt I will ever be a climber others will look up to, neither my body type nor skill set is made for climbing. (That is a topic for another post.) However, given those limiters, I want to become as proficient as possible.

Although it is early in the year and I only have a bit over 500 miles through mid-February, I am in better shape now than I have been at this point during the past five years I have been riding.

I would attribute that to riding more purposefully both this year and last.

I am not regimentally structured but I make sure to work in a variety of rides – fartlek (random change of pace), intervals, long rides, tempo rides, hills and recovery rides. I even scheduled a late February metric century, something that I would have never considered in the past. But I realize that organized rides are good landmarks and motivators for me as I am less likely to lag through my training when I have a ride scheduled.

In retrospect, I do not think I was solely riding junk miles but I was not working in a manner to help myself improve. And when I saw that if I hurt more during my solo rides that I would hurt less on group rides or in the hills, then follow through became easy.

Does this mean that a rider should go out and beat him or herself up at every opportunity? Of course not. It means look at your goals and then set up your training so that you can reach them. Whether you want to be able to ride 30-flat miles (48 kilometers) in two hours or do100 miles (160 kilometers) with lots of climbing.

As you get stronger, you will enjoy hearing  someone say to you: “Wow, you are sure riding strong today.”

 

Going Fast Sooner Than Planned

I’d been pretty good at following my slow biking strategy since the beginning of the year. But today being Sunday, I decided to do the club ride. The main ride would go north in the city — a ride I’ve been on before, and liked all right, even though I’m not a big fan of urban riding — but I was concerned it would be too fast for me.

The club also has a Saturday ride, that was canceled Saturday because of wet conditions. They rescheduled for today, and planned to start later than the regular group, at 9:30 instead of 8:15. The leader of the Saturday group always adheres to a “no drop” policy, unlike the main ride, and I figured its pace would be more to my liking.

I was disabused of that notion early on. One rider with a reputation for going fast showed up on a tandem, and his stoker was a blind female triathlete who apparently has something of a stellar record in big events — like Ironmans. The others who wandered in were mostly A riders as well. Oh, what the heck. We set off.

To my surprise, I stayed with them for quite awhile. In fact, I fell back only when one of the other riders told me there was some concern about my rear wheel alignment. One person thought it was out of true, another thought it was off center, perhaps due to the axles not going into the dropouts correctly.

The group waited at the Walgreens in Buda, and several milled around my bike when I arrived. No one was able to find anything wrong, and one rider opined that it was my 25 mm tire that was the cause of the problem — because it fit between the rear stays with little clearance. “You’ll prefer using 23s on this bike,” he said. I didn’t tell him that I’d dropped the 23s I used to run in favor of the 25.

Out of Buda, I was with the group again, until we reached Farm Road 1626. That road has a good shoulder, but it’s a slight uphill grade for several miles. I’m terrible on those. By the time we reached the turn toward Kyle, I was trailing by a wide margin. Again, they were kind enough to wait, and even insist that I grab a breather before we got going again. “It’s no fun to push yourself to catch the group, and then not get a little rest,” said one. “I’ve been in that situation lots of times.”

Jerry, the ride leader, decided to pace me all the way into Kyle. We trailed the peloton by a considerable distance, but finally got to the gas station that serves as a rest stop and turnaround. The break was only about 10 minutes — just right, I thought. I looked forward to the return trip, which featured a fast downhill with a tailwind most of the way back to Buda.

Okay, I trailed again, and Jerry paced me again. We made pretty good time, but the rest of the riders got to the town well before me. We regrouped, helped by a red light, and began the final 15-mile push to Austin. This time I wasn’t so far behind, because the tailwind pushed me a bit. We took a hilly, curvy road up to an intersection where all the traffic was stopped by a freight train., Then it was a recently-paved shoulder on a mostly downhill leg where we could make good time.

Pow! My friend Rick ran over a shard of glass and punctured a tire. Four of us stopped — the rest were too far ahead to realize what had happened. I was sent to catch up to them and tell them to keep heading for home — Rick and the two other guys would meet us at Starbucks.

The last couple of miles involves riding on Slaughter Lane — a divided four-lane that I hate to ride. Traffic is usually heavy, and not tolerant of bikers, who do not have a shoulder here, but must take the right lane. We did, and didn’t even get honked at. After sitting at another stop light, I took off after Nancy, who jumped out ahead. We pushed hard to the Starbucks where our rides begin and end. There, some nice outdoor tables awaited, and we could unwind with riders from the earlier ride, and swap stories.

It wasn’t until after I got home that I realized just how hard I had pushed it. After a quick shower and a sandwich for lunch, I couldn’t stay away from the bed. I flopped down, but didn’t get my usual post-ride nap — I was just too worn out to sleep.

At 43 miles, the ride was the farthest I’ve gone since the new year began, and to couple that distance with the faster speeds of this group really wore me out. I’m glad I’ve been practicing slow riding lately, but it’s obvious that it’s time to step it up a bit in order to tackle longer distances at a decent pace.

Quiet Time

We here in Central Texas have a nice advantage over many other places during the winter. It never really gets too cold to bike. Oh, we moan about chilly weather, as in the case of last Sunday’s ride, but our conditions that day would have been welcomed in, say, Iowa.

So when I got home from work today, the first thing I wanted to do was jump on the bike. It wasn’t even chilly today — 66 degrees (19C) at 4 p.m. I added a pair of arm warmers to my usual summer bike clothes, and hit the road.

I stuck to a familiar route through the neighborhood, knowing that I wouldn’t be out for much longer than an hour. Wide suburban streets with little traffic. But I didn’t feel the need to push it. Instead, I settled into an easy, steady pace, and pretty much maintained it for the entire ride.

Because even though our winter is mild, it’s still a time to relax on the bike. No need to ride as hard as possible, or to do intervals, or to maintain an average speed above a certain mark. Winter is recovery time — time to build the base for the upcoming season.

Instead of speed, I concentrated on more mundane things, like keeping a steady pedal cadence, making sure I applied even pressure to the pedals throughout the stroke (“pedaling in a circle”), and keeping my heels down on the pedals. I never breathed hard during the ride, and don’t expect to do much hard breathing for several more weeks.

At the Veloway, I passed several guys decked out in racing kit as they faffed around at the start of the track. Midway through my second lap, I  rounded a hairpin turn and saw one of them gaining on me fast. Soon, he zipped by me with a friendly “Hi!” I think he would have been glad of some company, but I just let him go (I never did figure out where his two buddies got to). I checked my watch, realized it was time to head home, and did so, getting passed in a two and a half mile stretch by three more cyclists.

A couple of years ago, I took a cycling clinic at the onset of winter, and all we did was pedal in Zone 2 (That’s slow and easy riding, where the heart rate doesn’t get elevated much). The clinic leaders explained that while it’s tempting to ride faster, we need to resist the urge for awhile, and let our bodies recover from the hard riding we’d done in the spring, summer and fall.

I wasn’t maintaining Zone 2 on this ride, because I did pedal strongly up an easy hill or two. And when I got home, with 18 miles on the computer, I was once again surprised (this shouldn’t surprise me anymore, because it happens frequently) that my average speed was 15.8 mph. Riding easy will still get you from Point A to Point B in good time.

I’m looking forward to taking it easy for another four or five weeks.

The Month-Ender

Dashed home from work this evening to get in an hour on the bike. After chilly weather over the weekend, it got up to 79 — which means one MUST pedal a bit. The Veloway was loaded with bikers, who all seemed to have the same idea I did: This can’t last much longer, so let’s make the most of it while we can. 

A familiar rider passed me. Our club president, Joe, often does Veloway laps if he wants to work on speed. Tonite it was two minutes all out, followed by two minutes easy. Joe is doing a two-man team time trial this weekend, and he was prepping for it.

“How many laps will you do?” I asked. 

“Until I can’t last the full two minutes anymore,” he said.

He stood up on the pedals and took off. What the heck, I thought. I’ll stick with him.

Yeah, that lasted for about a minute. He disappeared around a bend, and I slowed down to a medium-fast cruise.

I had orders from headquarters to get back for dinner anyway, so I left the Veloway and headed home. The final tally: 15.3 miles at an average speed of16.9. Not bad, considering I wasn’t moving fast on the way over there.

This would also be my last ride of October, and my total for the month was about what I thought it would be: 189 miles. That’s the lowest monthly total I’ve had all year. But that’s okay. I’ll ride more in November. Time to mount the headlight on the bike.

Inspired By the Tour

Well, it’s Tour time again. As I have done in past years, I didn’t pay much attention the first few days. But I did watch Saturday, and that stage has inspired me for the rest of the year.

When Chris Froome went around Cadel Evans on a 20 percent climb and won by a wide margin, that got me thinking. I’ll never be Chris Froome, but I can be a better me.

Chris Froome wins Stage 7 ahead of defending champ Cadel Evans.

I’ve got some things going for me. My weight is finally starting to come down. I’m about seven pounds lighter than I was at the beginning of the year. But I’ve noticed that my average speeds are lower than they ought to be for mid-summer. I must be slacking on my rides. A friend of mine is coming back from hip replacement surgery, and has been riding like crazy to get back into biking shape. She (yes, she!) posts her Garmin stats online, and her average speed is now ahead of mine — and this on the same routes in our area.

Hmmph! That was a wakeup call. But that’s all right. Now, I have something to shoot for. Two things, actually. I’ve decided I’ll do a century later this summer, maybe in August, maybe in September, and I have to get myself ready for that.

I’ve done three centuries so far, and as a friend observed, I’ve been pretty done in after each one of them. So the goal is not just to finish the century, it’s to finish it feeling good. And that doesn’t mean riding it so easy that I still have a lot of oomph left at the finish. It means marshaling my resources so I can get through those testy last 30 miles or so without dropping to an average speed in the single digits.

My work toward that goal has already begun, and it wasn’t all by design. I’ve got a balky cassette that will be replaced this week. At first, I thought the problem was just my chain, so I got a new chain. But the new chain and old cassette don’t play well together. I am effectively limited to about eight or nine of my 18 speeds when I ride. So I’ve been spending a lot more time riding in the big ring than I usually do. (I prefer to spin with a high cadence in the small ring.) I’ve even been climbing Convict Hill, my neighborhood grade, in the big ring — something that had never occurred to me before. The first time, I struggled. Yesterday, I got to the top without much trouble, much to my surprise.

Today, out on the club ride, my job was to guide a new rider. Although he had mountain bike experience, this was his first real road ride. He’s a big guy, with huge calves from his mountain biking, and he could have pulled away from me fairly easily for much of the ride. But I was in my big ring strategy, and kept with him or ahead of him for most of the 40-mile trip. And when I got home, I didn’t flop on the bed and nap for two hours as I so often have done. I’ve been working on household chores for most of the afternoon.

Thibault Pinot congratulated by his team director as he approaches the finish line in Stage 8.

I also watched today’s stage of the Tour, and saw how first-time Tour rider Thibault Pinot caught the lead rider on the last hill of the course, then gave it everything he had to hold off the peloton made up of all of this year’s top riders to win the stage. He dug deep. I’ve been doing a lot of riding, but not much digging. The digging begins. I’ll keep you posted.

Time to Start Training

Monday was my last day off before the start of spring semester (Yeah, I know — we academics have it rough), so I was determined to get in a ride. Pat called one of our good local riding friends, because she had the MLK holiday off too, and we met at the Veloway for some laps.

Our friend Penny is coming back from a hip replacement, and is almost ready to rejoin our B-level club rides. But she has something more pressing on her mind right now. In March, she and her husband Rick will spend several days riding in the Big Bend area of West Texas.

The Big Bend is mountainous, so the routes they’ll be riding will be challenging, to say the least. Not only is Penny riding to come back from the surgery, but now she’s riding to train for her biking trip. And that lit the lightbulb over my head.

The Bike Noob riding a century several years ago. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s mid-January already! While I don’t have any multi-day mountain rides coming up, I do have some rides I want to do in March. And March is a whopping six weeks away. The easy riding I’ve been doing has been good at maintaining my base. Now I have to start doing something to boost both my speed and my endurance.

What am I going to do? I’m not really sure yet. That’s not really a problem, since I have gobs of training plans around here — both in cycling books and various online sites. I’ll come up with something that will work.

But I know I’ll be working on two different elements: increasing distance and riding faster. On weekends, at least one of my rides will be longer than I’ve been used to. I’ll be increasing that long distance each week, until I’m up to metric century snuff. During the week, I’ll get in a fast ride. My fast rides might involve intervals, almost certainly fartlek, or maybe just maintaining a higher average speed than I’m normally comfortable with.

But I’ll be riding with a purpose from here on out.

It’s Zone 2 Time

Okay, here we are in November. In most of the country, it’s pretty chilly now. Lots of bikers are moving to their basements, setting up their trainers, and starting the winter ritual of putting in stationary miles.

For those of us in milder climes, the cooler weather is welcome after a blistering summer. But even though we get to ride outdoors year round, it’s time to start thinking differently about riding.

It’s time for Zone 2.

For those not familiar with training zones, they’re based on heart rate. Zone 1 is the easiest, at about 55 to 70 percent of lactate threshold heart rate. Your lactate threshold is the point at which you realize you’re working hard, with heavy breathing and a burning sensation in the quads, according to cycling coach Joe Friel. Zone 2 is roughly 70-85 percent of max. These percentages vary depending upon where you get your coaching advice, but above 85 percent you’re in Zone 3, and Zone 4 can run from 94-99 percent of max. Zone 5 puts you in world of hurt territory, where you’re riding at 100 percent or more of your lactate threshold heart rate.

Now, why would we want to train in Zone 2, a relatively easy pace? Because we’re at that time of year where speed doesn’t matter. Most of us aren’t training for a race, or an organized ride, or even an extra long ride. What we’re really doing is building our base for the next season’s riding. In addition, the slower pace will have your body burning fat rather than glycogen.

Heck, that’s the kind of riding I tend to do most often anyway. In Zone 2, I have to remember to shift into really easy gears when climbing hills, because I don’t want to reach the top huffing and puffing. In fact, when I’ve done Zone 2 training in the past, I’ve always pedaled in easier gears, because I can spin at a higher cadence that way.

In another sense, Zone 2 time is a relief, because I know I don’t have to push it. I just have to get out there and put down some miles. The more I can do that, the better prepared I’ll be come spring, when it will be time to start pointing at some riding goals.

Activation Energy

Guest poster Don Blount discusses how to deal with cold weather riding.

I feel it this time of the year. For that matter, I think we all do. When the temperatures fall, the wind howls and the days get shorter, we find it takes a bit more “oomph” or work to get out and ride.

The weather, which is much more dreary than in the spring and summer, surely plays a part in it. But so do a few other things.

For example, I have to keep a closer look at the weather. Instead of sunny and warm or sunny and hot, I have to monitor if it is going to be rainy, foggy or overcast or how low the temperatures will go. Thank goodness snow is not a concern for where I live in Northern California.

And instead of just putting on light base layer, jersey, bibs, gloves, socks, gloves, helmet and going, I have to decide what I am going to wear. Do today’s conditions require long sleeve or short sleeve base layer? What about warmers or thermal jersey and tights? Toe covers or shoe covers, medium or heavy gloves? After going through all of this, it takes longer to get dressed and out the door. And on some days there is additional time to clean the bike after a ride.

Spring and summer riding is fun. Most often my biggest concerns are getting out before it gets too hot and making sure I have enough food and water.

Preparing for fall and winter rides turn into work.

A New York Times story described it best as that exercise this time of the year requires more “activation energy.” That’s a chemistry term describing the amount of energy needed to start a reaction.

For cyclists and others trying to exercise it means the amount of effort needed to begin our activity. It takes more during these months. Some people crosstrain, others train less and still some just keep going no matter how much “oomph” it takes just to get out the door. I try to be in the last category, no matter how much work it takes.