ride joe ride

After you’re apprehensive, then excited, then eager, then reflective, then bored, then in pain, then in some more pain, then in abject pain, then doubtful, then despairing, then considering quitting, then planning quitting, then resigned to quit, then (and in my experience only then) do you find yourself in the absence of ambition but still moving and faced with the immediate and endlessly repeating question: “do I stop now, or keep going?” Every decision to keep moving, keep moving the feet, yields a forward motion at your invincible pace. Maybe someday you’ll stop, but at that moment your progress in inevitable. Finding my invinicible pace is what ultra events are about for me. I’d forgotten mine for a few years. I found it again at the Dairyland Dare.

Many thanks to everyone who made the ride happen and special thanks to Allison, Francisco, Steve and Angela. It was an awesome day and I am glad to have shared it with you.

I should note here, in case I am maimed or unable to ever again look at bike related material, that I am signed up for the Dairyland Dare 300k. In addition to being 180 glorious miles, it also graciously provides 22k feet of climbing (the summit of Everest is 28k ft above sea level). Though I am already working on cross training, I figured that it would be a travesty to let the summer pass without at least once attempting some serious self-inflicted bike related torture.

Okay, that sounded like I actually made the decision as a rational agent. In fact, Steve preyed upon my post-baseball/beer/bratwurst intoxication and tricked me into signing up. I woke up the next morning with that awful “oh what have I done” feeling. I came to terms with this feeling by cajoling fellow Tatito and Morning Roll author, Francisco into doing it as well.

Man, it’s great to have friends.

Oddly enough, one year ago today I reminisced here about my first 100 mile run. Five years later, and still not very much sense.

When I used to run intervals, I’d set out with a handful of pennies equal to the number of intervals I’d be doing. Invariably, I’d forget which interval I was on mid-way through the run. This, of course, was due to interval head — the condition of having your brain scrambled by the interval effort. This week I set up my pile of pennies beside my trainer and commenced the first set of VO2max intervals of the season. Five minutes at 107% of FTP done five times with the same period of rest between, and then some LV7 (all out) efforts in tempo rides on Thursdays. I’ve been pushing at the FTP from “underneath” and now comes the more fun (ha!) “pulling up” on it. And so the base period is officially brought to an end and the build begins. I used to complain about running intervals, but I secretly love the seconds after the intervals is done soft pedaling as my heart rate drops. I can’t wait to be doing them outside.

Just in time too, as the Chicago racing community was treated to an awesome chance to race, and do it soon. Half Acre cycling, the guys who brought us the awesome DeKalb cross race, are putting on a series of crits which will occur almost in my back yard. Five nights in a row, south Chicago will have a bunch of Cat 4/5ers riding laps around a park in the cold near dark. Sounds like lots of fun — I’m signed up.

Finally, I’ve been meaning to write about nutrition recently. I’ve been a big proponent of incorporating protein into replenishment and recovery drinks since my running days. Recently I ran out of Accelerade and cracked Joel Friel’s book, to find his recipe for a recovery beverage which I adapted into this: 2cps of milk, 2 tbls of cocoa, 3 tbs of sugar and a banana blended). This hits the 4:1 protein to sugar ratio which is supposed to be key to quick recovery. Google around if you haven’t read about it. As expected, I found that pounding one of these immediately after hard/long rides significantly reduced fatigue later in the day and increased recovery time by a whole lot. They’re also really damn tasty.

That worked so well that I tried to replicate Accelerade itself (so a replenishment drink for use while underway), and came up with a recipe I’ve been super happy with. I use 500ml bottles, so you’d have to adapt this to a 24oz bottle if you use those. Fill the bottle about 1/3 full of water. Add 2 tbs of sugar, whey powder, an individual pack of crystal light drink mix (fruit punch tastes the best in my opinion), a little pinch of salt (sodium) and a little pinch of salt substitute (potassium). Shake it and then fill it the rest of the way up. How much whey powder? However much yields 5g of protein, so read the label. This ended up being a really fat teaspoon or just over a half scoop for my brand. The resulting mixture is nutritionally almost identical to Accelerade. I’ve been using it on tempo rides and while doing the LV5 intervals, and it seems to sit on my stomach like Accelerade as well. Let me know if you try and/or improve upon it.

I have bemoaned my fair-weather powertap. At temps below 40F it usually closes up shop within 10 minutes, only to pop back into service as soon as it hits the balmy indoors. Anyway, this post isn’t about my wimpy powertap. It’s actually an announcement that I somewhat officially clicked my 1000th mile of base training over the last two months. I rode outside today and the powertap conked out at 985 miles, and I rode a route I know is longer than 15 miles, so I’m gonna call this the 1000 mark. In fact, I’ve ridden outside with a conked out powertap several times over the past two months, so I probably actually hit 1000 a week or two back.

Since I’m sorta guessing anyway, I’m going to say that a good 900 of those miles were clocked indoors. 900 miles — the distance from Chicago to Boston — all covered in my living room and without actually making any forward progress excepting leaving the rollers at speed. It boggles the mind, and I’m not sure that it does much to lighten the soul.

The old-skool training methodology was “ride 1000 miles easy and then race twice a week.” After the week of new numbers and the looming build perdiod, my version of that is now officially “ride 1000 miles on a torture device, er trainer, and then jump directly to post-season.”

I am still pretty much in shock about this, but week before last a friend of mine gave me his “old” road frame. This turned out to be a really, really nice Bianchi SL3, which I immediately whipped up into this sucker here. I could go on and on, but basically I love it. It’s freakin seriously light and stiff. It’s also not only fits me perfectly, but the Bianchi geometry works very well for my warped torso to leg length ratio. I am bravely waging war on italiocentrism, but I am feeling a switch to a totally campy group coming on (I’m already shimano free and sporting a campy crank).

Also of note: I filled in some details on the race/training schedule. My focus is on the cross season, and this current ramp – up is really a test run for the second periodization cycle in the fall. That said, this schedule works out super well in that July and August are going to be base building. Unlike the torture of doing base building on a trainer in December, this bodes well for long lazy LV2 rides in late summer as opposed to racing in the hot sun. I consider this further proof of cyclocross’s inherent perfection, by the way. This will also allow me to come out of base #2 with a significantly higher CTL than I am from base #1– something which will be  welcome in dealing with the super intensive cross race season.

That unplanned weeklong vacation from blogging was mostly due to the best sort of reason to interrupt a biking blog: I was too busy with cycling to find time to write. First, the weather in Chicago decided to take a very welcome turn toward spring and I ended up riding a number of times outside — a couple of them done in genuine summer form. Second, I got a new road bike and have been dumping extra time into generally playing with it.

I’ll get to the bike later in the week, for now: riding. I had no idea just how much I missed long rides outside until I took the ride down to Munster on the 7th. I left around noon, so I got the warmer afternoon temps (in the 60s) but also the afternoon wind. Even overdressed, though, the first 50 mile ride of the year was seriously a welcome break from all the indoors stuff. This actually constituted my first serious road ride since I began racing cross back in the fall, and I think I can feel how road racing will work, now. I’m looking forward to it. Somewhat intentionally, and assisted by the wicked southwest wind, I kept a pretty hard pace and wound up with a normalized power just outside tempo level. A good hard ride that I was feeling for a few days.

A few days later, our thermometers were again in the 60s. I took the day off of work to get a few put-off things done, and I managed to get in two very good rides — a quick, intervally one in the morning and a totally leisurely spin around the city in the afternoon for another ~50 mile day. I thought I needed to add “had a beer sitting on a patio after having biked 50 in February” to my list of accomplishments, but alas none of the obvious patio-bearing places had their patio set up (I added a few miles riding around checking).

So where does this leave the training? By the end of week 8, I was definitely feeling the “base period is over” sensation. I’m ready to have another day of higher intensity riding and a longer ~3 hour ride on the weekends. Conveniently enough, that’s more or less what’s on the horizon in a couple of weeks. I have been teetering on the edge of succumbing to a cold, so I am probably going to skip testing tomorrow, even though it’s time. I can tell from the feeling of the tempo rides that I’m probably going to post some higher numbers, but I could use another week at this level to avoid adding significant stress while borderline sick.

I was lucky enough to get a number for the very popular Hillsboro-Roubaix. I didn’t expect this to be as motivating as it turns out to be: it’s a short six weeks until the first race of the season, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m working on the training schedule through the first month of races now and will post it soon.

Muster ride (first ride well over 100 TSS in months)

Week 7-8 journal

Week 7-8 PMC (check out the peaks from the bigger rides)

First off, serious thanks to Tim for putting together a very fun morning of alley cat style cross yesterday in Jackson Park. We did a tag-team race (lots of fun!) and a couple of shorter mass-start races. In all, it was a great workout and an excellent alternative to sitting around wishing there was a CCC race on Thanksgiving weekend. This is defentitely something we should consider doing regularly during the season next year.

In other news, I have been spending some time thinking about what next year’s early-cross season (aka the road season) is going to hold for me. As a result, I’ve also been giving some thought of where I am going to go with this blog after cross season ends next week. I looked back through my previous posts, and I’ve realized that this has become a cycling blog. I’ve written only a few non-cycling related posts in seven months. I’ve been having fun doing that so far, so I think I am going to go with that theme somewhat more officially.

So, here’s what I have in mind. I’ve gone through periods of using a coach and not over the years, and I’ve found that some of my best experiences have been self-coaching. For your general entertainment, the collective good of the interwebs, and to give myself something to do, I’m going to move toward making this blog a record of my attempt at self-coaching for next year’s road and cross seasons. I’ll set some goals, devise a training plan and race schedule, record my progress, and try to figure out what works and what does not. At this point, I am planning on training with a power meter, so I’ll probably have an area where I post profiles of my workouts. The cornerstone of this will be a weekly post in which I review what I’ve done, how the numbers are stacking up, and what I will change about my plan for the next week (this was always the biggest benefit a coach offered me). The goal will be to offer some commiseration for anyone else who tries a similar plan of self-coaching. Well that and also offering some entertainment vis a vi my suffering and blowing off workouts publicly.

So look for some changes in the near future. I’m planning on taking a month off after the cross championships to get familiar with my training toy, get the road bike squared away, get the blog format worked out, and devise a training program which takes me through the summer. Totally PRO without all that weighty “winning” stuff.

This morning the signs that the summer is wearing on ratcheted up a notch: it was finally too dark to wear sunglasses even on the way home. It was a cloudy morning with rain threatening, but the signs are unmistakeable: the summer is coming to a close. Back in my running days, this change of seasons would have been something I would greet happily. Running in the morning twilight in the early fall is pure joy after a summer of trying to make it out before the heat started to set in. This would be the time when I’d start thinking about breaking out the headlamps and long fingered gloves for long mornings on the trails.

With biking, though, this seems to be the time where you begin to think about paying up for the luxury of a cool summer sport. The cooling effect of a spirited ride begins to look like the adversary which will continue to grow as the temps dip. Running has the summer heat and biking has the winter cold. The situation isn’t made easier by the fact that unlike running, it seems pretty common for cyclists to simply take the winter off, or resort to weeks of training indoors. That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me

So we’ve hit all the last-year winter clothes sales before the new winter stuff begins to make it’s way out to the racks, and we’ve built our winter kit. I’m planning out winterizing the fixed gear and trying to devise a plan which will allow actual winter training as opposed to simply enduring. And, of course, cyclocross season is looming — something to look forward to despite the cold. Even so, no planning will allow morning coffee rides or all-dayers with stops for food and beer on a fortuitous patio. I’ve always loved this time of year for the way the fullness of the summer is mixed a bit with the sadness of it’s impending end. It’s good to find the late-summer vibe in cycling as well.

Astute readers of my words (one can pretend) will remember I promised to relate my experiences with tubular tires, and it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve mentioned them. Well that’s because I dumped them, and I have been waiting for some objective distance to say why. The inciting incident was a pair of flats within a week of each other. The first was a massive sidewall blowout on a group ride. The tire, a nicer Vittoria, had barely 300 miles on it. The sidewall just failed. The second was a flat when, if I followed the advice over at BKW, I shouldn’t have been riding them. It was pouring rain, and I was trying to sneak in some miles. Once I’d removed the shard of glass, I decided to try my Tufo sealant instead of switching tires to my spare: changing rear tires is more of a pain, I wanted to finish my ride on a tire I knew was glued securely, and I wanted to see how the sealant worked. After waiting the requisite ten minutes in the deluge, I had my answer. I had barely put a couple of bars of air in before a thin jet of latex shot out of the tire, covering my shoes and leaving me standing in a puddle of white six feet across. That, I think, is when I was done with tubulars.

Frustration aside, I came up with a few good reasons for not sporting the tubs. First, running tubs takes time. Aside from everything else, getting a flat means that for the remainder of the ride you’re on a semi-glued tire and you’re looking at a 45 minute glue job that evening. I decided I’d rather use that time doing something else. Riding for instance.

Second, riding tubs is expensive. My second flat was on a cheaper Vittoria tire. Honestly, all the good benefits of running tubs is erased if you use crappy tires. Cheap tubs ride harsher and are less resistant to flats. Good tubs cost $60 and up and $90 is where the really good ones are. While $60 for a good tire doesn’t seem obtuse to me, it does if every flat means I am performing surgery on it. The lack of demand for non-race tubulars also means that a good $45 clincher in tubular version runs $90 (the Continental GP4000, for instance). The doubled price is, I suppose, for the doubled amount of fun you get to have with them.

Finally, the failure of the sealant raises a serious question of what happens when you flat more than once on a long ride. I like to ride longer out and backs, often through less than comfy neighborhoods which always seem to have nice glass-carpeted areas. One flat and I am limping on my semi-glued spare tire. A second flat and I am depending on sealant to get me home. Or, standing on the side of the road waiting for someone to come pick me up. With clinchers, my first flat is repaired with the spare tube I carry. Subsequent flats can be fixed with the flat kit. If I cut patches in half, I could probably ride across the country with one patch kit and make it just fine as far as repairing flats goes. This is by far the biggest reason I dropped the tubs.

So yeah, no more tubs. I initially thought that I’d glue up my super light wheels with a set of very good tires and use them for a treat every once in awhile — i.e. when I’m not riding on streets, don’t have to be anywhere, am not riding with a group, and when it hasn’t rained recently. I think rides fitting that description occur about twice a year, so I am not holding out lots of hope for tub riding time.

One of the things I appreciate most about cycling is the ethos it wraps around nearly every aspect of itself. Even the most basic act of riding with a group can echo a history of tradition and epic structure. My two favorites of these are Rapha’s Gentleman Riding and Belgium Knee Warmer’s “brethren“. Though coffee is certainly a player in the cycling esthetic, the glory of the coffee ride falls through cracks even in these epic models.

Granted, the most efficient way to do coffee is to sip it while rubbing in the embrocation before a ride. Depending on which study you read, caffeine likely has some performance benefits which won’t get you kicked out of the Tour. If the ride extends more than 30 miles, a coffee stop is likely to be a second coffee stop for me.

The true coffee ride, though, is the one undertaken on sleep addled legs and with bleary eyes. As we roll up the empty bike path with the sun rising over the lake, our initial thought is mostly on securing some caffeine. Almost invariably, the plan is to take it easy heading out. It’s not even a plan, really, but the dictate of bodies which have just rolled out of bed. Easy cadence, and chatting, and that satisfaction that comes with knowing that you’re enjoying the best part of the day while most of the city is sleeping.

After a few miles, the blood starts pumping and the legs loosen up. The thought of coffee fades and the path momentarily free of renegade rollerbladers begins to look like a stolen opportunity to get into the drops and push the pace. By the time the half-way mark clicks by, the ride is just about the ride.

And then the coffee. Bliss is drinking coffee outside downtown in a big waking city with your favorite riding partner in the world, knowing you have the second half of your ride ahead of you. When we roll out toward home, the plan is usually the same as on the way up. We’ll take it easy, stretch the legs and enjoy the morning. The empty path, the thrill of a tailwind or the challenge of a headwind usually changes our minds.