My Training Rides

For this post I am going to talk about what I actually do on my training rides, and record some info about my physiology.

I am riding my road bike right now. My mountain bike is “put away” for the winter. I do this for several reasons. The mountains in my area are very steep and hilly. Sometimes changing from an agonizing climb to serious elevation drop very quickly. This prevents me from keeping a heart rate steady in the mountains. This doesn't fit with my train goals right now. Also the mountains have snow in them right now, and they get muddy with just a little bit of snow. I don't want to fight the mud and ruin trails, or fight to keep my bike clean. With my mountain bike “put away” I can also get major repairs done. Like fork rebuild or just diss-assembly and clean/service without any interruption in my training plan. So I am riding my road bike right now, which is a 2010 Giant Defy 3.

My training rides right now are pretty boring. I do either a 2 or 3 hour ride keeping my heart rate below 145 BPM. Its just that simple. Those are my “rules”. It seems simple in concept, but in practice its a little harder to do. First thing is finding a suitable place to ride. It can't have too many hills or stops as that would tend to send my heart rate up through 145. There is a farming area west of me with long straight roads, very few hills and light traffic. This is where I'm doing most of my training rides. Its a nice place to ride, but the roads can be bumpy. The next hardest thing for me is keeping that damn HR below the target. This is the first time I've tried to do a “Base” training and my mind knows I can push so much harder. After 8 rides at my new rules, I'm finally starting to anticipate my HR against my exertion level. It is a skill that you learn, just like anything else. I can see how a slight incline only 100 yards long that only goes up 10 feet in elevation really changes my HR. My last ride had a average HR of 138 bpm at 3 hours. I'm hoping to bring the average HR for a session closer to my target HR. I know I get above my 145 target, but not for long. Things like an intersection or hill will make it jump for a few seconds. I am getting better at keeping it lower though.

One thing that I have noticed is my average speed has come up after only 8 rides. My average speed after my first 3 hour ride was 13.36 mph. My last 3 hour ride my average was 14.32 mph. This isn't definitive, but its encouraging to me. I hope this trend continues. That would mean for a given HR I could produce more watts,which is my goal. To produce more watts fro any given level of exertion. I don't have a Power Tap, that’s just not in the budget, so I just have to use the next best thing, my HR.

Another thing I noticed is when I did my 3 hour rides, my speeds really fell off after about 2 hours. I hope this will start to change as I do more 3 and 4 and longer rides.

There are some measurements I want to post about me. Remember this is for my use also.

Body mass: 184.2 lbs

Stomach fat: 17 mm

lowest resting HR: 53 bpm

Ave speed for week: 14.49 mph

Hopefully you will be able to see my progress as I journey toward more speed. That’s all for this post, I will be posting soon, because I couldn't talk about all that I wanted to this post. Check back soon!

From The Performance Experiment.

After some thought, I have a better understanding about what I want to do with this blog. I am going to outline a little more about what content I am going to have in this thing. Its going to be my training journal, and also a place someone else can find info on training. I do most of my research on the inter web thingy. I will try to post the links to the actual website, and give credit to original authors. When I research on the web, I generally take advice of someone who practices what they are preaching. If Todd Wells says he does this kind of training but a scientist says that’s wrong, I’m gonna believe Todd Wells over the scientist. That doesn’t mean I wont have scientific research papers referenced here, but I am gonna take a World Champions advice over a scientist. My experiment isn’t going to be completely scientific for obvious reasons. I don’t have control groups, and the research will not be applied over a wide range of subjects. It’s gonna be a bit subjective. Maybe really subjective. My overall goal is to be faster on a mountain bike. The overall goal is objective, sort of. My race placing is the true goal. This appears to be objective, but its not. On any given race the best races in the world can show up, or the worst. My placing should change accordingly. I will compare times from previous years, but weather and course changes could come into play. Obviously if I start winning with the same general group of guys, where I was a middle pack racer before, then I can call that an improvement. 
 
I like numbers and graphs. So I’m defiantly gonna have some charts and numbers in this blog. I’ll try to compare training rides and look at average speeds as an indicator. I’m gonna be posting heart rates (HR). I’m gonna be posting nutrition info, and weight info. I’ll probably do some posts on managing life while training. I plan on doing a post based on mental preparation and toughness. I work as an industrial mechanic, so I’ll do some articles on bike repair and maintenance. I might do some product reviews, although the budget is pretty tight (right now) so I can’t go out and buy a bunch of thingies and try each one and compare against each other. I will be including my opinion in here also, I don’t claim to be a reporter or news source or scientist or anything other than a guy who races mountain bikes and writes a blog. 
 
One more thing, I am not going to schedule posts to be published at any certain time interval. With training and family and kids and life in general I don’t want to hold to a certain schedule. I hope I don’t get to sporadic with my posts, but I also don’t want endless posts about my training that hasn’t changed in weeks.  There may be months at a time when training just doesn’t change much or there were not any significant events to write about. That’s about all I have to say about summarizing where I plan to take this. I hope you find this blog useful. 

Lazy day

I woke up today and within a few minutes decided not to go for a bike ride. I had scheduled a 2 hour base ride keeping my HR below 145 bpm. I know it seems early to be skipping a workout, but I have a couple of reasons. The first is an incident that occurred yesterday. During my run my right calf started hurting. It felt like a cramp, so I found the nearest telephone pole and stretched it out for a few minutes. I continued my run starting with a little bit of pain, but it eventually went away. So I thought. After I got back home it didn't take 10 minutes to start hurting again. It was getting very stiff. Now I feel like I have a massive knot in my calf. I tried stretching it and massaging it all night, but it still just plain hurts. I want to give my calf a chance to rest and heal. So this is the first reason I'm not riding today, the second is I want a Lazy Day. I have to be careful here. Wanting too many of these leads to not enough workouts and slow performance, but a Lazy Day every once in a while can give my body a chance to rest and recover. And the final reason: The Weather Channel on my iPhone claimed a chilly 26 degrees outside. I'll save my workout for a warmer day, or until I get that second rear wheel for my indoor trainer, which I'm currently shopping for. Thats all for now, remember don't take too many Lazy Days.

First post.

So this is my first post. As the description says, I will posting about what kinds of training I will be doing, how long, what intensity, and so forth, and the performance its gained me or hasn't gained me. My athletic performance is, in my mind, an experiment. My body is an experiment. So I will be taking you on a journey into (hopefully) my athletic performance.  With that being said, today I ran 5.4 miles in 1:02:36 while keeping my average heart rate at 160 bpm. This is significant for me because I am in my base training season. This was probably the lowest ave. HR for running that I've had. This loop that I ran has a significant hill near the start that always spikes my HR. After the hill there is a little flat then a long gentle down hill until it levels out again. For cycling, during base training I am trying to keep my HR below 145 bpm. I've done 3 rides so far like this and I am getting better at keeping my heart rate up near the threshold yet stay below. This is also significant for me because I have never really trained with that low of a heart rate. My experiment this year is the base training. In future posts I will post my race times from previous seasons, as well as training times, and ave speeds, and other stats. This is also my first blog, so actually creating and maintaining the blog will be a learning process also. Until next time good luck to you all.