Training – week of 2/1/2010

Somewhat of an impromptu rest week as I had some big work deadlines, friends visiting and some winter weather to top off the week. Still managed to get in 3 quality rides and do some awesome backcountry skiing.

Mon – 0.5 hours easy
Tues – 1×25 @ 103% FTP *, 1×25 @ 86%, 1:43 total, 35.5 miles
Wed – Unstructured tempo w/ 60 min @ ~86%, 1:25 total, 28 miles
Thurs – 0.5 hours easy
Fri – 80 min @ 91%; 1:45 total, 38 miles
Sat – 3 hours backcountry skiing above Bear Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park. Mmm… fresh, deep powder. Hanging out in Lyons with some friends.
Sun – 0.5 hrs easy on rollers, lots of coffee, beer, cajun food, football and hanging out.

* This was my sort-of-monthly FTP test where I go all out for about 25 minutes on an 11 mile course. If I bust 105%, its time to raise the FTP. Not this week – FTP stays set at 336 watts.

Training – week of 1/25/2010

I don’t normally post on my day-to-day training … mainly I just don’t know if anyone cares … but figure I’ll give it a trial run and see if I find it at all rewarding. At the very least it will act as some sort of training log and maybe get some feedback from my friends, peers, colleagues and coaches who want to give out free advice

First a quick discussion on some of the new year’s training philosophies:

Last year I spent tons of time (6+ hrs a week) in the gym doing Pilates and strength training and relatively little putting in quality time in the saddle. it felt good but overkill and this year I really have to focus on maximizing every second of my training time. So I’m following Core Performance with a few additions and modifications and find it to be a great and quick way to effectively cross-train, get some core/upper body strength and flexibility. Plus I can do it in my basement so no travel time to the gym. I do it for pretty much 1/2 hour daily so I’ll leave it out of the description to avoid redundancy.

In terms of riding, I’ve drunk the koolaid of the power training gurus and am focusing on building a base through steadily increasing tempo/sweet-spot/threshold work mid-week with a few 5+ hr rides to build endurance on the weekends. Goal = no junk miles. The “sweet spot” philosophy is that you go out and consistently ride for moderate time at a moderately-hard pace. The mid-week workouts are just hard enough to stress my body but I can recover quickly and can do them day after day. Best of all, they work well if you’ve got very limited time. Most of my rides will reference a % FTP which refers to my “functional threshold power” or power that I can sustain for a 1 hour time trial.

Mon: no ride
Tues: 2×25 min @ 97% FTP, 33 miles, 1:38
Wed: Tempo ride with 75 min @ 85% FTP, 37 miles, 1:50
Thurs: (Indoors on the rollers) 4 x 8 min @ 100% FTP, 20 miles, 1:05
Fri: 4 mile run, easy pace
Sat: The Oval Ride, 68% FTP, 88 miles, 4:50 (met lots of cool folks, pace was either easy spinning or hard attacking … would have prefered a steadier tempo as I have no top end speed this time of year!)
Sun: Endurance ride, 64% FTP, 95 miles, 5:15 (rode NW out to the prairie to the Wyoming border, windy, cold and lonely out there… but beautiful.)

So there we have it. 14 hours of riding, a little running and strength training, 270+ miles. I’m feeling good, my 3 day mid-week block of tempo/threshold work combined with a 2 day weekend block of long rides seems to be working nicely. I’m settling into the groove here in CO.

And the nice thing about a power meter in the long term is that I can really track my progress … I’m stoked to be where I am today which is roughly at the same power levels as mid-2009 … but its early season, i’m at 5000+ ft and I’ve lost a good 8 kg which translates into big potential performance gains for this coming year. We’ll see how it goes .. looking forward to the first big MTB race, the Dawn till Dusk!!

Back to the damp, rainy forests

Jos and I took a long weekend and flew out to Mt. Hood for a friends wedding this past weekend. It was great to be back in the pacific northwest!! I had planned on doing some backcountry skiing up on the mountain but instead put in ~ 24 miles of hiking and running in the National Forest and surrounding wilderness area trails. There is something magical and alluring about the big trees, the raging creeks, the sheer volume of living green things, misty valleys and mossy trails. I haven’t been back in this ‘bioregion’ since 2003 (when I graduated from Humboldt State University) and I really miss it. Only wish I had a fly rod and my MTB with me!

2010 Season

It’s time to start thinking about my 2010 cycling season. I really love doing this .. scouring the interwebs for cycling events and watching the pieces fall into place.

First of all, what lessons can I cull from the 2009 season? I spent a lot of time racing road bikes and doing laps on non-technical suburban XC courses – slightly rewarding but not really my thing. What I LOVED were the epic point-to-point or single lap endurance/marathon races that really take you out in the boonies (counting coup, idyllwild, etc). And, probably not coincidentally, those events were my best race results of the year as well. Big climbs, technical terrain, awesome views, self-sufficiency, pushing the limits of endurance for hours on end. That is the stuff I ride for, the reason I got into MTB in the first place 20 years ago! And luckily CO has no shortage of endurance events.

The Rocky Mountain Ultra Endurance Series will be my main focus. I’ll also hit up a good number of the Mountain States Cup endurance series and Winter Park races though these will all be ‘C’ or ‘B’ priority races. The US Cup, my main focus last year, has nadda for the Rockies and doesn’t really offer the kind of racing I’m looking for this coming season. There are a few road events that look pretty fun, mostly hill climb time trials and maybe the local Rocky Mountain stage race.

The ‘A’ races this year – the Firecracker 50 (The US Marathon National Championships) and the Breck 100.

I’m not hoping for any huge breakthroughs – just lots of quality time on some epic trails. In the macro view, I’m treating this entire year as “base building” for 2011. We’ve got the wedding coming up in September so I wont be showing up to any races that month. Nothing planned after that though there is a big CX scene in CO so fall 2010 might see a renewed focus after the honeymoon – who knows. In any case, it looks like a solid 5 months of racing there … time to start putting in the miles!

Oh … my tentative race calendar is over on the right –>

Weather

Colorado has it. We’re getting hit with another big snowstorm here in the front range. Unfortunately too busy today to bust out the skis or snowshoes but I thought I’d post a few pics of our snowshoe trip last weekend up Young’s Gulch:

Crisp, clear day in Fort Collins so we drive up the Poudre river canyon. On the drive out there, we were caught in a blizzard with high winds. By the time we got to the trailhead, it was again a crisp, clear day, sun shining bright, not a cloud in the sky…

Then a few miles later:

Colorado rule #1 – never trust the weather report and always expect the weather to fluctuate rapidly no matter how tame it may look out your living room window!

the central governor

While it sounds like something out of a political distopia, the theory of the central governor has really changed the way I look at training.

I first read about it a few months ago in Tim Noakes’ excellent book, The Lore of Running:

Despite the title, its probably the best book you’ll ever read for your cycling training – especially the first half where he delves very deeply into excercise physiology. And in presenting and analyzing a number of competing theories, he leads readers to his theory (of course) of a central governor.

To paraphrase, our central nervous system is continually monitoring the state of our peripheral systems and, based on these indicators, can adjust muscle power accordingly in order to prevent harm to our bodies. In other words we don’t completely run out of fuel, or have a heart attack, or tear our muscles irreparably, or acidify our muscles to the point of paralysis. At some point during exercise, the brain/central governor recognizes that keeping the same level of effort will cause catastrophic damage so, long before the damage takes place, it slows down muscle recruitment and you start experiencing ‘fatigue’. Note that, according to this theory, the lack of fuel or oxygen, the presence of lactic acid or any of the myriad of other theorized peripheral system don’t directly cause the slowing and fatigue; rather they are signals to your nervous system to cut back the effort. Our brain, looking out for our bodies, is subtly telling us to slow it down by causing fatigue!

So I’ve begun to shift my mental approach to training. Instead of training my heart, lungs, capillaries and muscles, I am training my brain. I am conditioning my “central governor” to live dangerously, applying subtle pressure and reassuring it that nothing bad will happen to me if I push it just a little bit further and harder. Getting it used to the feeling of pushing hard, assuring it that I will indeed recover so that next time, it doesn’t try to hold me back quite so soon. Its a balancing act of trust… hard, steady effort vs. recovery … teaching my nervous system to understand that my body, while it may be hurting, is not in harm’s way.

It doesn’t actually change much in my actual training plan, its just a subtle shift in how I conceptualize and visualize the overall process. Next time I’m halfway up Rist canyon and it starts getting steep, I’ll just say to myself, “OK brain – I know things look bad right now but if you let me keep pushing to 8000 ft, I promise to feed you a nice steak dinner tonight and take it easy tomorrow. Deal?”.

I remember winter …

When the streets look like this…

And the temps look like this…

You can either hammer out the miles in the basement…

Or wax down the skis and bundle up…

Moving to the Fort

After a great thanksgiving, I loaded up the car with all my important stuff (ie computers, bikes and Japhy) and headed out to CO. I had to deck out the yakima rack with all 4 bike mounts for this trip:

My last day in SoCal and I saw more rain than I have in the last 2 years combined. I headed out to Vegas, Utah, spent a few hours sleeping in a dirt cheap motel then hit I-70. It was a gorgeous drive but I was sick of being behind the wheel. Japhy was the best traveling buddy a guy could ask for (even if he did puke in my front seat on a particularly hilly and winding section!):

I arrived on sunday and we’re already getting settled in. Did a nice 3 hour zone 2 ride yesterday, just exploring some paths, roads and trails on my cyclocross bike. Today was my first snow as a CO resident .. a “light dusting” of a few inches. Not enough to bust out the XC skis but enough to keep me indoors and sipping coffee rather than out on the trails again. I’m gonna love this place…

O’side Turkey Trot

A quick belated post on my brief foray into running:

Jos, my Dad, Japhy and I got up at the crack-o-dawn on Thanksgiving to get to Oceanside for the 7 am start. Whose idea was that? No turkey for you.

Blurry pic but you can still make out my fab outfit … I know y’all are jealous of my keen sense of fashion:

The best finishing stretch of any race I’ve ever seen!

I pulled off an 18:46 5k… good enough for 60th overall out of 1600. I only missed my PR by 1:40 (set back in 1995 when I might have self-identified as a runner) so i was happy with it. Now I can stop with this running nonsense and get back to base miles on the bike . Jos did pretty well – 1 min off her PR from this summer which is not too shabby considering it is her off season.

Thanks to my dad and japhy for coming out to spectate and good job to mark, christina and jos for coming out and putting in good runs as well. The rest of thanksgiving holiday was spent eating, defending my Wii Tennis championship and watching my annual allotment of television. Of course my final day in socal, we took my parents (visiting from CT) to the beach in the pouring rain!

Then it was time to pack up and drive out to CO… more on that later.

The ‘Farewell to SoCal’ epic

My last ride in santa barbara and we went big. 50 miles, 8000 ft vert, 6 hours, 2 of the best technical singletrack descents in the county (Knapps/Snyder and Cameusa Connector) and the feared ascent of Angostura.

Starting at the SB Mission at 6:20 …

Bob and I, ready to rock Cameusa. Dave, sitting down eating donuts but still ready to rock nonetheless…

Killer views of the SB backcountry…

Lots of climbing. With almost 5 hours done and the prospect of a 50 minute climb looming, I started to get really excited. I just love to climb. My friends may say I’m sick and insane but the only way to make a ride better is to add longer, steeper climbs and ride them even harder until you can’t see straight. I nearly got there today…

Some horrendous cramping…

And an all around good time.

The two best trails and toughest climb in SB, the good company and the killer backcountry. I will certainly miss Santa Barbara and CA in general but what a ride to remember it by!

Next post will be from San Diego where Jos and will rendezvous with the families for thanksgiving. We plan on running the Oceanside Turkey Trot 5k … i’ve even been running frequently and intensely enough to even consider it “training”. I’ve been clocking some mile repeats at sub 6:00 so I can hopefully break 20 minutes on turkey day. Then its off to Fort Collins. Crazy days we are living.