Although I have long recognized the importance of (and my own relative weakness in) the mental side of cycling, it’s only in the last few months that I have begun to consciously “train my brain.”  My usual practice is to set a timer, sit quietly for 10′, focus on breathing, repeating certain key phrases I use on the bike when I really need to dig deep (e.g. “pain is power”) and visualize.  Any timer will do — usually my watch or the kitchen timer — but the smartphone provides much more than a simple alarm to tell me I’m done.

For example, some apps will ring a bell or a gong at set intervals or continuously to help you focus.  Others might play soothing music or white noise such as the sound of waves crashing on the beach.  Even a simple timer like Just Sit provides a neat twist by putting the phone in airplane mode for the duration, which is a great feature for the absent minded.  I have been known to silence my phone for a meeting or a class and forget to turn it back on for hours.

Finally, if you’re less into the DIY meditation, there are a whole slew of “guided meditations” available as podcasts or apps.  These are fairly generic — I’ve yet to find one that deals directly with sports, let alone cycling, but they are certainly effective in helping me clear my mind, relax, and focus.

The next step would be to combine some of those meditation aids with a custom script focusing on those specific mental skills you need to train, recorded with the digital recorder function of your phone and listened to while you meditate. But that is the subject for another post, right after I figure out how to make my phone quit vibrating and ringing simultaneously whenever anyone actually calls.

I’ll be racing the Virginia State Track Championships for the first time next Saturday.  The event is run as a 3 event omnium -a sprint time trial, an endurance time trial, and a points race (in my case a 1k tt, a 3k pursuit, and the mass start points race), and for the past few weeks, I’ve been training for those specific events.

First, let me say that those short time trials are among the most painful moments I’ve spent on a bike, despite their being over in a few minutes.  What I find interesting, though, is that despite their short length, pacing plays as vital a role in them as any longer tt.  For the 3k perhaps that’s not that surprising, but for the 1k, an effort that lasts, at most, 90″, I thought conventional wisdom said to jump hard and hang on for dear life, but for me at least, that doesn’t work as witnessed by the first graph below.

I jump hard, average 545 watts for the first 15″, over my sustainable 1′ power, have a momentary brain fart (or a possible data drop) and coast for 4″ and then as you can see the power starts its long descent to the right until I’m barely above threshold by the end.  (I should note, though, that I’m not coming at these fresh; we’d already done 2x500m, so my anaerobic work capacity was somewhat diminished.)

As the second repeat shows, not jumping so hard at the beginning results in a much better effort.

My jump is nearly 100 watts lower, the power doesn’t drop off nearly as precipitously, and I average nearly 80 watts higher for this effort, despite it being the 4th all-out effort of the day.  So, the lesson here is that the first, second, and third rules of time trialing applies no matter what the distance: Don’t start too hard; don’t start too hard; don’t start too hard.

I‘ve written before about the value of a coach having a coach him or herself (here), but I want to expand on that a bit today by thinking about the advantages (and potential disadvantages) about being able to race with your coach.

Last Tuesday, my coach (Gary Hoffman) and I drove down to the weekly Bryan Park training crit in Richmond, VA.  Since I moved up to the “A” category (Pro, 1,2,3), this has always been a tough race for me.  In fact, for a long time I considered just finishing with the bunch as a strong result.  Because this is a training race, I often race it “stupid” and jump after early breaks, try to bridge up to breaks made, and generally burn my entire matchbook by midway through the race.  This week the goal was simple – don’t get dropped and if at all possible mix it up in the sprint.

To that end, I sat in the entire time, even as the winning break developed right in front of me (that sort of rankled, but if I’d jumped after it, there was no guarantee I would have survived).  I was in the 2nd group on the road on the last lap, sitting 3rd wheel.  A teammate jumped past me on the downhill and someone behind us shouted “go with him”; without thinking, I did.  He did a monster turn on the backside and pulled off and there I was on the front with a little less than half a lap to go.  I took a short pull, pulled off, hoping to jump on a wheel for the sprint, and then as absolutely swamped by the onrushing pack.

From my perspective, I thought I was on the front too early and needed a wheel to follow, but because my coach was in the same race, we were able to dissect the finish and figure out what went wrong for each of us.  In Gary’s case it was pretty straightforward — he miscounted the laps and sprinted with 1 to go.  In my case it was a tactical mistake — what I didn’t realize was that the race was strung out behind us and if I had jumped all out when my team mate pulled off, I would have had a much better shot — I probably wouldn’t have won the bunch sprint, but would have had a respectable finish.

It’s that chance to conduct a post mortem on a race, especially the opportunity to see the race unfold from another perspective that makes racing with a coach valuable, especially one with Gary’s experience.  But even if you don’t have a coach, conducting that kind of post mortem is valuable; just some team mates getting together and talking can provide valuable insight (of course, each rider’s individual goals may make conducting the discussion objectively more difficult).

The ability to be objective is another advantage to racing with your coach, but there are some potential disadvantages.  From the athlete side, you might feel as if you’re under constant scrutiny.  For some that might actually be a benefit — a sort of constant reminder of accountability.  For others it may lead to additional pressure that can compromise performance.  From the coach’s perspective, racing with an athlete requires some juggling of roles or wearing different hats as you’re concerned both with your own success as well as that of your athlete(s).

But as a coach and as a rider, I find the experience quite helpful and that I invariably learn something both when I’m the athlete and when I’m the coach.

Technorati Tags     coaching,cycling,training

As many areas do, we here in Central VA have training tt that we do once a month (big shout out to Eric and Alice Fletcher who make it happen).  The challenge in this area is to find a course that has any sustained flats.  The best place has a fairly steady false flat on the way out and a correspondingly slight down hill on the way back.  Here’s quick Google earth shot of the course.

Time trials are my least favorite of all the disciplines, but the point of this post is not to bitch and moan about tts. Rather, I want to look at one of the new features in wko+ 3.0 by comparing my last three efforts on the course and seeing if there is any useful data that can be gleaned.

This is a screenshot of my last three tts using the MFRA feature of wko+ 3; they’re arranged in descending order of average power — the middle file is actually my best time, but interestingly not the highest power.  As  you can see all the times are within 12 seconds of each other; power has a six watt spread, probably not significant given the usual +/- 2% error of the power meters. There is a relatively large variation in heart rate — the average for yesterday’s effort is closer to the max of the previous two.  At first I thought that might be significant, but then I remembered that I had a bottle of EFS Pre-Race before heading out, so the extra stimulant (even for a coffee addict like me) could explain the difference in heart rate.

So that leaves two bits of data to look at.  One would be how aero I can get with clip-on bars on a road frame.  Because my power was actually lower for my fastest time, I suspect this explains the time difference.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the math to calculate my drag coefficient nor access to a wind tunnel, so I can’t do much with that info beyond getting as low and narrow as I possibly can.  Oh, and remembering to take the second bottle off the bike.

That leaves cadence.  The two sub 22 efforts were 86, 87 rpm average, yesterday was 93.  Significant? Probably not.  There are too many other factors at play for one variable to explain the differences, but it is interesting, and I will focus on pushing a slightly bigger gear next time.  Because I’m thinking about cadence, it’d also be interesting to play around with the Quadrant Analysis feature, but that’s for another entry.

Thanks for Reading!

However, the point of this post is not to make excuses for poor performance, but to give a quick visual showing how one can tell if tactics not training might be a problem — in other words, are you racing stupid and not knowing it?  Below you see the cadence distribution from the Cat 3 race I did last Saturday.  Notice how little time was spent coasting (less than 4%, less than 2 minutes out of the 45 or so the race lasted).  If you see this same pattern in your race files (be sure to look at the race alone, not any warm up or cool down), you need to start thinking about how you can conserve energy better during the race.

For a more substantial discussion, see Allen and Coggan’s book Training and Racing with a Power Meter.

 I just watched the end of the second stage of Tirreno-Adriatico, won by Tom Boonen.  What struck me was the work done by the Liquigas team.  They were the only team to have a real train organized, leading it out from at least 3k out, and yet their guy, Bennati, only managed third.  But guess who was attached to Bennati’s wheel the whole time — Boonen.  So my question is whether or not pro-teams employ a "sweeper" on their train; that is a guy who sticks to the sprinter’s wheel and prevents another rider from essentially getting a lead out from the team’s effort.  It seems a fairly basic tactic, if one only rarely executed well at the amateur level.  Perhaps it’s considered amateurish and that’s why we don’t see it more often in the pro-ranks? or is it because the pro-level leadouts are so long and intense that they need every rider doing his turn on the front?

I don’t think this stage was a case of Liquigas getting it wrong leading it from too far out and exhausting the lead out men — they still had two guys with in the last kilometer, but Boonen starts his sprint before Bennati and Bennati never comes close to coming around.

Have a look a the stage here or if that link is no longer live at universalsports.com and let me know what you think.

To lift or not to lift is a question that has, well, exercised physiologists, cyclists, and coaches for quite some time.  Two recent papers have just come out (one a study, and the other a review article) with opposing conclusions as to whether or not lifting weights will benefit cyclists, and the appearance of these two articles combined with a continuing interest of mine prompted me to return to this long-neglected blog.

Let me begin with an apparent contradiction: I personally lift and suggest that some of the athletes I coach lift regularly,  but not because lifting will benefit directly their cycling performance.  There are very few situations in which pure strength (such as the effort needed to squat 2x your body weight) factors in cycling.  Some common instances would be steep, technical climbs off-road in which you are moving at a slow speed, track sprinting, and BMX starts.  (Interestingly enough, apparently some of the highest wattages ever recorded at the national level come from BMX riders training for the Olympics, but those numbers are from a dead stop and not after several hours of racing).  So, then why lift?  There are several reasons both physiological and psychological; I will cover them in what I see as decreasing order of importance below.

First (and most importantly to me and many of my athletes): the Master’s athlete.  There is strong evidence that as we age our Type II muscle fibers (the “fast-twitch” muscle) decrease in both number and size. This is borne out by anecdotal evidence — many basketball players or wide receivers in football “lose a step or two” towards the end of their careers.  Or in a more specific example, a cyclist who early in his career was a top sprinter, but later either had to change his approach or be content with getting close but not quite winning a lot of sprints he did formerly (think Erik Zabel in the last few years of his career).  That loss of explosiveness results from the deterioration of Type II muscle fiber.  The good news is that regular sprint training and resistance training (especially exercises that incorporate explosive movements) can stave off this decline.  A corollary here might be the athlete whose sprint is lacking; however, it’s been my experience that if a rider doesn’t have a strong sprint either their overall fitness is weak (it doesn’t do you much good to have a great sprint if you’re not at the front when the bell rings) or they can adjust their tactics (e.g. attack multiple times until they form a break) and place highly that way.

Second: address imbalance and injury.  Cycling is great for the muscles that extend your knee and hip (quads and glutes), but most other muscles don’t get much of a workout.  Resistance training can help balance the focus cycling places on the legs.  Thus, core and upper body exercises are key, and even if you don’t lift at all with your legs, you should incorporate some form of core and upper body work.  The relatively static nature of the cycling position can also exacerbate any imbalance we have in our strength (and we all do; the human body is never perfectly symmetrical).  In my own case, my left shoulder and arm are much weaker than my right (a broken collarbone on that side didn’t help matters), to the point that I would sometimes have to end sprint workouts early not because the legs gave out, but because my left shoulder did.  Ever since then I have been assidiously working those muscles 2 or 3 times more than I do the right side.

Third: avoid burnout.  We can race only so many stages of the “Tour de Trainer” before we begin to go a little nuts.  Resistance training provides a way to keep training without resorting to the trainer day in and day out, at least early in the season.  Incorporating a day or two of lifting should help you mentally so that when February and March (and beyond depending on where you live) roll around and you absolutely must be on the bike, no matter what the weather.  An added benefit here is that resistance training will increase lean muscle mass which burns more calories which will help keep you closer to racing weight over the winter.

Thus the majority of the time was spent addressing my biomechanical issues.  The actual on the bike session didn’t take that long and didn’t result in a too radical position change.  My saddle was lowered by a little more than a cm and titled forward, and the wedges I had been using as shims beneath my cleats were removed to be replaced by some in-shoe wedges.  I’ve only had one ride in the new position, and so far, so good.  In fact, I don’t feel all that different as far as my pedaling action goes, but one thing that has become clear after talking with Jay and focusing on some of the issues he noted is that I need to shorten my reach.  Even with lowering my saddle, which effectively shortens the reach to the bars, I’m still a bit too stretched out, can’t get a good bend in my elbows, and put too much pressure on my shoulders.  What really interests me is how counterintuitive some of this process has been.  It looks as if I’ll be more aero with a lowered saddle and shorter reach than I was with the higher, longer position, which seems to go against most conventional wisdom (as least as I was taught) about making the on-bike position more aero.

Technorati Tags     training,bike,fit,cycling

As for # 1, this year has reinforced the truism that it is easier to "earn" tss points and thus raise ctl by riding outside (at least for me).  Notice to the left of the chart, before I got sick, how shallow the ramp rate is for ctl.  After recovering from being sick, there is a steady increase for March and April, and surprise, surprise, that corresponds to my getting outside more often for rides.  Living in Chicago, nearly everything before that was indoors.  This trend is reinforced by a similar scenario after we moved to VA. In Chicago we lived in a fairly congested area.  It was difficult, if not often impossible, to find open roads to train on.  Thus, even when the weather was perfect, I’d often get my midweek workouts in on the trainer.  In VA, the open road is at my door and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been on the trainer so far (though that will change given our current cold snap).  I find it much easier to ride at nearly all levels outdoors.  Added to that is the fact that I also find it easier to ride at a higher power level on hilly courses and that there is nary a flat road for miles ’round here, and you can see how both my volume and intensity will have risen simply by changing where I ride.

So, hopefully this increased training load will pay off as we build towards 2009.  Of course, I could still have the right volume but still get the mix of workouts wrong, but that is another topic all together.

The genetic potential thought strand was initially sparked by turning 38.  I know Michele Bartoli is thinking about a comeback at that age and a certain Texan with a penchant for yellow who is nearly my age is jumping back on the bike, but the difference is that they are genetically gifted, while, having as the saying goes, chosen my parents badly (at least when it comes to endurance sports ), I most certainly am not.  My palmares makes ” Famous Jewish Sports Legends” read like War and Peace, but each weekend there I am, pinning on a number. 

John Milton , writing about turning 23 (boy, how I wish I could go back to that age and train with the knowledge I have now) complains that his “late spring no bud or blossom showeth.”  In other words, he feels he hasn’t accomplished what he believes himself capable of.  He doesn’t despair of reaching his goals, but those goals remain undefined because he doesn’t know precisely what he is capable of — whatever that potential is, he can do nothing to change its limits.

Technorati Tags     goals,coaching,cycling