Bike Noob

Because I'm Always Learning Something New

Archives for November 2012

Pre-Thanksgiving Intervals

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I got home early today. The university is closed Wednesday so students can travel home for Thanksgiving, but students being students, many of them lighted out today. Heck, I’m aware of a few who took off after classes last Thursday. Anyway, with only five students showing up for my afternoon lab, and finishing their tasks within an hour, I got an early start on vacation, too.

I decided to take advantage of unseasonably warm weather to get in a bike ride. We’re traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday as well, so this will be my last chance to ride until Sunday. Before setting out, I took a few minutes to dig my headlight out of the bike stuff box and mount it on the bike. I don’t ride in the dark as a rule, but the long shadows of late afternoon make a front light as useful as a tail light.

My ride would only be about an hour, just a few laps at the Veloway. I often get over there on late Tuesday afternoons, and try to get in a little speed work. It’s the only time during the week that I really try to ride fast. Today, it occurred to me that I should try the intervals my friend Joe was doing when I ran into him a couple of weeks ago.

His intervals aren’t rigidly structured. Two minutes all out, two minutes easy. I did a warmup lap, then noted the time on my bike computer, stood on the pedals, and pushed hard.

After about a minute, I was ready for this interval to end. Not only was I going reasonably hard, but in this section of the Veloway, the track is a slight upgrade. I kept pedaling against the resistance, and finally saw two minutes click by.

Not being an experienced intervalist, I suspect I really mucked up the easy part of the ride by not riding easy enough. I caught myself powering through a curve, and reined it in. After another minute ticked off — in what seemed like a much shorter period of time — I stomped on it again.

The intervals were good. I felt powerful throughout the ride, although I’m sure I didn’t do the fast parts nearly as fast as Joe does. I know I didn’t keep up the effort as long as he does, either. Three laps on the Veloway, plus riding from and to my house, comes out to about 15 miles. I do it in less than an hour.

It was dusky enough that I could see the beam of my headlight hit the pavement ahead of me on the way home. While I’ve often stated on these pages that I’m not much for training, I also know that to get faster, you have to ride faster. I have no aspirations of joining the A ride in my club, but I’d like to be able to open it up halfway through a Sunday ride and still have some stuff in reserve for the trip home. Maybe doing this unstructured structured riding once a week will help me toward that end.

I’m also feeling a bit smug about the ride, because it left me feeling as though I can save a little space for all the food I’ll be eating over the next three or four days. My wife and I are traveling north to see our new grandchild, all of 10 weeks old — and no, I’m not taking my bike along with me, even through Minnesota is also enjoying some relatively mild weather for this time of year. Sometimes, you just have to deal with things that are more important than biking. See you Sunday!

Noob Mistake: Not Replenishing Protein

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There’s a plethora of material out there, both online and in print, about nutrition and exercise. For the most part, I have ignored it. That’s because I’m a procrastinator. I just don’t get around to reading up on stuff I know I should be up on.

Take tiredness after long rides. It’s a particular problem for me, one I’ve written about before. I just could never figure out why, after a couple of hours in the saddle, I would crash on my bed for a long nap. Those naps were more trouble than they were worth, because they threw off my sleep schedule for the next 24 hours, and I had a lot of trouble readjusting my internal clock.

My routine after a long ride is to settle in at a coffee shop or restaurant or even the living room at home, and have a large drink of something. Usually, it’s iced tea. That takes care of the liquids I lose on a ride through sweating, but doesn’t do much to refuel my body.

I remember riding once with an acquaintance — an experienced cyclist — who couldn’t wait to get some food after we’d finished the ride. “I have to have some protein within a half hour of the ride,” he said. I chalked it up to his personal idiosyncrasy.

Turns out, he was right on the money.

When you take a long bike ride, you’re using up branched chain amino acids. When these essential nutrients are depleted, that leads to the doubling of tryptophan, another amino acid. Once it’s in the brain, tryptophan converts to serotonin, which makes us drowsy.

That drowsiness can set in during the ride itself, as fatigue. If you overtrain, you’ve probably experienced it. But if you maintain adequate levels of branched chain amino acids, you should be able to ward off fatigue. So as my friend does, try to get some quality protein into your system immediately after a ride.

Where do you find quality proteins? Meat, dairy products, and legumes. That might be why cyclists are adopting chocolate milk as a recovery drink.

Today, after two and a half hours riding over rolling hills, I whipped up a ham sandwich right after getting out of the shower. Sure enough, although I felt my eyes get a little heavy while sitting in my chair watching football, I soon snapped out of it. Any other day, minus the sandwich, I would have been crashed on my bed.

It’s a simple solution, but one I’ve bypassed for far too long. I guess I’m still a noob.

Bicycle Injury Study

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This blog is aimed primarily at road bikers, and based on the comments and feedback I get from readers, most fit that description. However, I think it’s also safe to say that lots of road bikers don’t stick exclusively to road riding. They might engage in other types of riding, too, such as commuting or utility biking.

That kind of riding is usually done on city streets, and transportation cycling garners a small share of overall trips — as low as one to three percent in the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. One reason often cited for this is safety. Bicyclists tend to be injured more often in countries where transportation cycling is less common.

Examples of cycle tracks in Holland.

A study done in 2008-09 in Canada has gotten some renewed attention here. It’s called the “BICE” study — for “Bicyclists’ Injuries and the Cycling Environment.” The study — of 690 bicyclists who had been hurt in bike crashes — found that the kind of infrastructure available for cyclists is associated with the risk of injuries from bike crashes.

The highest risk infrastructure was a city street with no bike lane and with parked cars. Other high-risk features included train or streetcar tracks, downhill grades, and construction.

Lower-risk features included off-street bike paths, major streets with bike lanes and no parked cars, and residential street bike routes. But the safest bit of cycling infrastructure was the “cycle track.” That’s a segregated bike lane adjacent to a street. They’re not seen much in the United States, but are quite common in the Netherlands.The authors of the study suggest that transportation planners can use the results to help pick cycling structure that will improve safety, and thereby, promote transportation cycling.

The University of British Columbia has a synopsis of the study on its “Cycling in Cities” website, and a complete version of the study can be found as it was published in the American Journal of Public Health.

How is safe cycling infrastructure being incorporated into your area?

 

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