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.

So, what happened?  It was a hard race, but it certainly wasn’t beyond my current abilities.  The NP for the 40′ I was in was nearly right at my ftp.  It did have over 20 bursts of at least 15" over 150% of ftp as opposed to the Amphibious Assault which had only 5, but had a similar NP.  But I believe the reason I dnf’d was not mainly physical.  Yes, I probably wasn’t going to be tearing up the course on this particular day, but I should have finished the race and been sprinting for a top 10.  No the reason, I believe, is psychological.  I was never into the race mentally, and the rain and the string of crashes early in the race certainly didn’t help.

One way to deal with with a bad race is to examine the experience for lessons (and not get sulky and snippy as I initially did, just ask my wife).  In this case the lesson is fairly simple — I clearly wasn’t on a good day, either physically or psychologically, so I needed to look for other ways to succeed.  One answer that became obvious as soon as my brain came out of oxygen debt was the corners — after the field thinned down and the rain lessened, I found I could corner as fast if not faster than the other guys in my group, and even I as would get gapped off on the finishing straight I could make the space up in the corners.  Of course, doing so also meant having my rear wheel slide quite a bit, but I held it up every time.  If I had been able to look beyond the fear the slides engendered and the pain of the efforts, I would have seen that I could hang in, and because the field was so much reduced, I would have had a good shot at a top 10, 15 at worst.  I suppose I need to "reframe" the situation, seeing what was worrying me — the  wet corners — as an opportunity and redefine success on that day not as a top 5 finish, but as simply completing a very tough race on a technical, tough course.

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6/13 Amphibious Assault Crit

The Amphibious Assault Crit is a unique venue — we literally race around around parked hovercraft used by the Navy to, well, assault things amphibiously (see video here ).  And because it’s on the landing apron, the course is pancake flat and relatively smooth — a crit racer’s dream.  The course is extremely wide and not all that technical, although the organizers did throw in a nice chicane on the backside just to keep things interesting.  The final corner was a good 500 meters from the line.  My race went accordingly to plan — I marked Dominic Meier who has been just tearing up the VCA Cat 4 Bar.  I lost a sprint for an early prime by less than a wheel (to Dominic of course) and then we settled in.  The course nearly guaranteed a field sprint, despite the heavy rain falling at the race start.  On the last lap, I was 3rd wheel, but as the rider leading out tired coming out of the last corner, we got swarmed, and in that instance I hesitated and my shot at the podium was over.  I still managed to worm my way out and unleash a decent sprint, passing several guys, but only managed 8th.

6/20 Virginia State Crit

Fast forward a week and the same last lap scenario replays itself.  The lead up to that moment, however, was quite different.  I arrived a bit later than I prefer and had to fix a loose cleat, so my warm up was cursory at best.  No hard efforts, no measuring out of the sprint and only 1 lap of the course.  Given the extreme heat, I didn’t think the lack of a warm up would be that big of a deal.  I would just sit in the first few laps and use that as a warm up.  Well, I sat in and sat in and sat in all the way to the back of the pack and when a break went, I missed it.  I still wasn’t feeling sharp and continued to do no work.  It was a gamble that the other guys would bring the break back, but it was a gamble that should have paid off.  By two-thirds through the race, I was back in the main pack, maintaining decent position, but still feeling awful.  (This was the first time this season I contemplated a voluntary DNF.)  Coming out of the final 180 turn, may be 400 meters from the line, there was a near crash just to my left.  Normally, after my initial instant of panic, I would have gone hard to take advantage of the reduced field, but not today.  I stood up to jump and nothing happened.  Those few seconds are something of a blur, but what is clear is that at that point I gave up and didn’t even attempt a sprint.  I rolled in at the very back of the pack for 26th place.

What do these results share, despite being nearly 20 places apart?  That instant on the last lap that I hesitate and get swarmed.  I suspect that if there were an organized leadout and the pack stayed single file until the sprint started, I might do better, but that is rare in amateur races and probably non-existent in Cat 4.  So it’s back to working on my own limiter, which, it is increasingly clear, is mostly mental.

The race started out well — I jumped across to what I thought was a dangerous break (with 2 NCVC guys in it.  NCVC had something like 1/4 the 80 person field), and I was up the road when the crash happened.  I was surprised at the effort it took to get across.  I guess these MABRA races are harder.  We were caught and I was recovering deep in the field when the surprise bell lap happened and was nowhere in position to sprint, so I rolled in.

But it gets better.  When Jake had been taken care of, there was an announcement that we’d restart and that the person who won the sprint  in the previous “race” was awarded only a prime.  We were given 10 laps and sent on our way.  Again, what I thought would be a dangerous break went and I killed it jumping across.  But although we kept a gap for a few laps, there was no real cooperation and once again we were caught.  My biggest mistake was letting myself drift too far back while recovering and not checking the lap card when we went back into the field.  The result was that the bell came as a surprise to me (again), and I was woefully out of position.  I managed to move up a bit, but could only manage 19th out of 80ish.

But I wasn’t too upset — all my thoughts were with young Jake. Here’s hoping he recovers quickly.

As an English professor at a small liberal arts college, one of my teaching duties is first-year composition.  One of the hardest lessons students have to learn is that writing is process and often a long one.  That process should include multiple drafts, and most importantly, having someone else read and comment upon the piece of writing in progress. Once you’ve “lived with” a piece for a while, it’s almost impossible to come to it with fresh eyes, the kind of objectivity a first-time reader (or more importantly for the students, a professor) will bring to the piece.

In many ways, I think training for cycling and writing parallel each other.  Both are time-intensive processes, and neither is conducive to overnight success.  But for me the key connection is the need for an outside observer to provide a more objective point of view.  Even if you are well-versed in training methodology and can design smart, effective workouts, having someone else to look over the mix and timing of those workouts can be key.  My own experience certainly bears this idea out.  Over the years I have worked with three different coaches, one before I became a coach myself, one when I first earned my certification, and one currently.  Working with each coach, my racing took a big jump, and not because they had that “secret” workout that put me over the top.  In fact, I’ve done and/or prescribed nearly all of the workouts before.  No, the major benefit lies in the analysis.  Just like student writers, it’s easy for a rider to get so involved with the details of training that they lose track of longer term goals.  Having a coach, for me at least, provides that “fresh pair of eyes” that I discuss with students.  And invariably not only does my riding improve, but I learn something new about coaching and the sport in general in the process.

The one positive is that my form is coming around; now all I have to do is put the tactical pieces together.