Two Wheel Blogs

I don't know, can I really call this training for the Ouachita Challenge?

I'm doing this training inside my house on a road bike. Does that count?

It has to. Otherwise nothing will. At this particular point in time the roads are out and the trails are a complete unknown. The weather's been so bad lately there can be no question about trail conditions. It's trainer or nothing.

If the Ouachita Challenge was about riding well on a road bike on a trainer in your spare bedroom, I'd be one to watch out for today. Seated, standing... I had it all going on today. It's what fresh legs from power outage induced recovery can do.

According to Performance Manager, TSB was at +9 at the start of this ride. Just over 100 TSS later it's still slightly positive. Could there be another one of these in these legs? I might find out tomorrow; but then I'd planned to do some strength work. I guess I'll play it by ear and do what I feel like.

I think it might be time to think about raising my FTP. All this sweet spot training seems to be paying off. Today's hour of power workout turned out to be nearly an hour and a half of power. Perceived Exertion would have been down in the comfortable range but for my sore legs and glutes. I lifted yesterday. Power was darned good for me - about 94% of FTP for the last 60 minutes.

It helps a lot that I didn't ride at all yesterday. I lifted weights, which made me sore. But lifting doesn't seem to have any effect on my aerobic output. Riding with sore muscles hurts but it doesn't decrease power output if you don't let the pain get in your way.

With no ride yesterday I logged no TSS. I gave up a handful of TSB and got a bit of freshness in return. It's my solution for avoiding winter burnout. Take a day and give back some TSB. The freshness I get in return shows I'm making progress and that's powerful motivation. And a sure cure for burnout.

You know it seems like Fridays are getting to be a lot like Mondays these days. Maybe it's the rush leading up to the holidays. Escaping the office today was just that. I almost had to wait until nobody was looking and make a dash for the door. I mean really, a 4pm conference call on Friday afternoon?

When I finally called it quits it was too late to get out. My only remaining option was a ride with Kurt, my least favorite riding partner. Kurt's always up for a ride and he's always willing to ride at whatever pace I want to ride at.

Today it was a nice, long sweet spot spin. Not too hard, but enough to get a decent sweat going. I was pleasantly surprised to see halfway decent watts with a relatively low PE. I remember doing this kind of workout last year, or was it the year before, and seeing 25 fewer watts. I'm really happy to see growth in power output despite reduced intensity and duration in training over the last year because of my back problems.

I guess there's a lesson in there. Keep training through injury if you can. Whatever time you can train will contribute to better performance.

About 103TSS on the day. If you want to see it, there's a closer look at the chart after the jump.

Well it do look like winter finally got here. And it got here in a big way. I'm listening to frozen rain pelting the windows. It's supposed to turn into snow sometime tonight. Why it's not snowing already is a mystery to me. The temperature is hanging tight in the upper 20's. This was a good day for a ride on the old trainer.

I did a little experimenting with cadence tonight, just to see if this muscular endurance idea made any sense. I set my sights on around 100TSS in the sweet spot - intensity factor in the upper 80's. I thought I'd ride 4 separate 20 minute segments - Easy stuff. Not intervals, not this time of year... These were not painful in the least. - at 4 separate cadences.

What I found is that the really low cadence stuff is murder on my back. It didn't take more than a few minutes of pedaling squares - even easy squares - for my back to shoot me a clear message that this was clearly a bad idea and would I please stop immediately. Not wanting to risk another lost season, I agreed to my back's demands.

So that experiment didn't take long. After that I selected a couple of gears in which I could turn between 85 and 95 rpm and all was well once again.

You guys can have your muscular endurance work. I'll get plenty of it grinding up hills when the weather's good enough to allow it.

Feeling a little thick around the middle after the big holiday? I have just the solution for you. It's my very own fat burner workout. Do this easy workout 2-3 times a week and those libbies will melt away.

OK enough sounding like and infomercial, but I did in fact do a really nice fat burning workout today. It occurred to me while I was out there spinning up a storm that by the end of my ride I would likely expend more calories on this ride than on many others I do around here. The reason is I substituted intensity with duration. I rode easy for a long time today.

In reality I exchanged intensity for duration not to burn fat but to see whether I have my bike fit dialed in well enough that I'm comfortable even on longer rides. It is. After about 2½ hours I decided I wasn't going to get uncomfortable. That's a big step forward.

In the process of trying to torture my back, however, it became apparent to me that this particular kind of workout is ideal for someone looking to burn fat. Why? Because the calories expended are high. Wattage wise, I did 25% to 50% more work on my bike today than I typically do in a regular threshold / sweet spot workout. But wait! There's more! (sorry, don't know what came over me... no ginsu knives or whatever) In all today's ride amounted to a bit over 140 TSS. The really interesting thing here is this: I could do this 140 TSS again tomorrow. I'm not particularly tired or sore. I have no real fatigue to speak of.

I don't know about where you are, but around here the weather doesn't get much better than this for riding this time of year. Temperature-wise, well top out in the low 70's under a bright blue sky. We all got out to ride today. All of us that didn't line up to find parking spots at the mall, that is.

It was one of those great days to be out on a bike, not only because the weather was so cooperative but also because there were people on bikes everywhere. Maybe they were all shamed into it after gorging themselves yesterday. Who cares. They were out and it was fun to see.

I saw kids on bikes with tiny wheels. There were whole families out, two and three generations all doing the two wheel thing. Most of them looked at me like I was from Mars with my cycling kit, road bike and (gasp) helmet.

Yes, sorry to say too many decided to go out for a ride despite not having enough helmets in the family for each rider. Which would be worse - little Joe or Jane breaking a head on the pavement, or Joe/Jane's dad?

I don't know, maybe some of the looks I got were incredulous adults wondering why someone my age wears a helmet. By my smile they probably thought I'd banged my head one too many times. No kidding, I was ear-to-ear seeing so many people out having a good time.