Justin

It’s my own fault

So I signed up for my first 24-hour race a couple of weeks ago.  For those that don’t know, a 24-hour race is where you have anywhere from one person on up to 8 person teams complete laps in relay fashion on a mountain bike course from noon on a Saturday through noon on a Sunday.  For the solo racers (people that are literally riding for all 24 hours by themselves), it is a masochistic exercise of mind over body.  For the five-person teams, it is more of a reason to get together with friends, ride bikes, and camp.  Don’t get me wrong, getting up at 3 AM to put on a wet and cold helmet, hop on a bike for the third time, and try to navigate a course with a headlamp that was difficult enough to ride in daylight, is no walk in the park.  But, facing a challenge with a few like-minded guys (think a bit off) is kind of fun.  The team with the most completed laps wins.  I set the ball in motion by asking my Velocity teammates if anyone was interested in joining a 5-man team for the race.  Joe, a friend of mine from the team, picked up the ball and filled the team fairly quickly (thanks Joe!).  We decided that it would probably be a good idea to go out and get a lap in on the course before the day of the race.  So Dave, Joe, and I set out on Sunday to drive up to the race course for some pre-race recon.  It was a beautiful day for a ride.  The course starts with a nice little 15 minute climb with plenty of rocks thrown in to make it challenging.  After that is an amazing single track descent with dips, whoops, jumps, banks that was basically like riding on a roller coaster you could steer.  Then, more climbing.  At this point I start having problems with my bike.  Specifically, in the middle of a technical uphill my bike would shift from the granny gear up to the middle ring (this makes it virtually impossible to keep pedaling so I have to stop and walk).  At the top of the climb I diagnose the problem.  My front derailleur cable is getting caught up on my stem when I turn too far to the right.  Now, a smart man would have figured out a way to keep this from happening for the rest of the ride (seeing as how having a cable catch on your stem could prevent you from steering, not a good thing when you are hauling down a rocky descent).  But, in the words of Forrest Gump, I am not a smart man.  About 6 miles into the 9 mile loop comes a fairly technical little descent.  As you may have guessed, I got up to speed, tried to turn, cable got stuck, bike went left, body went right.  I was barely able to stand up and lean against something then Joe came by.  He saw the distorted look of anguish on my face and when Dave came by said, “yeah, I think we should stop.”  I was able to finish the last three miles thanks to the fact that it was mostly flat but boy did it hurt.  On the drive home the pain got progressively worse.  I made it to the doctor the next day.  After two hours in the doctors office the x-rays tell me that there is nothing broken but my ribs tell me that coughing, laughing, standing, sitting, laying, breathing, etc., hurts like hell (I was going to go Lance on everyone and post a picture of the x-ray but the doc never brought them in the room).  Thank god for a doctor with a willingness to prescribe Vicodin.  I got on my road bike hooked up to the trainer today without much pain but on the trainer the upper body doesn’t have to do much.  With all of the twisting and turning required when riding a mountain bike on a technical course there’s little chance I’ll be able ride in the race this weekend. 

Saturday's weigh-in = 242.5

Saturday's Club Ride:  2:52, 51 miles, 60 min. 288 Watts or 2.64 Watts/Kg, 5 min. 354 Watts or 3.26 Watts/Kg, 5 sec. 1,438 Watts or 13.21 Watts/Kg

Something New

Life can get monotonous at times, especially for cyclists.  It’s so easy for us to get locked into riding the same rides over and over again.  There is a sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with learning the minute details of the roads we typically ride.  During the week I ride up Turnbull Canyon on Wednesday’s, I do a mountain bike ride or two each week on one of two local loops.  On Saturday’s I do the club ride.  I ride endless hours (I refuse to call them miles since I’m not going anywhere) on the trainer.  I’m lucky, my club has many rides that they rotate through but even so, you get used to that set of rides and it starts to become redundant.  There’s one ride, for example, where we make a right turn out of a neighborhood and right in the middle of that right turn is a huge, wheel eating, hole.  It’s been there for years.  It’s comical that we all start to point it out far before ever seeing the hole just to prove that we’ve done the ride enough to know it’s there.  It all becomes kind of like listening to your favorite song over and over again.  You love the song but after a while you’d like to hear something different.  It’s nice to go out and explore once in a while.  Well I had the opportunity this week to try something new.  My wife and I got away for a couple of days to the Temecula Valley for some wine tasting.  We’ve taken this trip a few times but this is the first time I took my bike along.  I’ve driven around the valley a number of times but you forget how different the experience is on two wheels.  You have time to take in views, you have time to savor the sights, you have time to breathe in the aromas.  There was something new around every turn.  I had no schedule.  There were no attackers to chase or slackers to drop.  It didn’t matter if I made a wrong turn.  I haven’t felt the feeling of truly being lost in a long time.  It’s freeing to be in the middle of nowhere with only your bike and no cell phone reception, not sure if you’ve missed the next turn on your route slip, trying to decide if you should double back or just keep on going (I chose to keep on going by the way, the turn I thought I’d missed was only about 200 yards ahead of where I stopped to contemplate turning around).  It was an amazing ride!  

For my friends that read this that don’t ride a bike very often I encourage you to get out once this week and ride (or walk) around your neighborhood.  I think you’d be surprised by the things you’ll notice that just fly by you as your driving in your car.

I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about the PowerTap.  One of the guys in my club, one of the fittest guy’s I know, asked me the other day if I thought it was useful.  He was my personal trainer for a while and I learned more about how to properly exercise from him in two months than I did in all of my years as a wrestler.  I’ve read a couple of books, done the research online, experimented with it and have come to this conclusion.  If you are the type of person that wants to quantify, calculate, analyze, and improve your performance you need to have a power meter in your arsenal.  Yes, perceived exertion, heart rate, and average speed give you a picture into how your body is reacting to the stresses you are placing on it but these are only measures of the effect the amount of work you are doing is having on your body.  Only a power meter can give you a look at the actual work you are doing.  A good analogy I read was that training without power was like baking without knowing what temperature the oven was set to.  You could observe the effects that the temperature was having on what you were cooking but you never really know if you are under or overcooking it.  The same applies to training with power.  Just because the last interval you did felt hard, are you really addressing your needs or attaining the goals you’ve set for yourself?  How hot is hot enough?  How hard is hard enough?  The power meter helps you answer this question.  Is it the end-all, be-all training device?  No.  But are you getting a truly accurate picture of your performance and progress without it?  I don’t think you are.  Now, I’m just in the infancy of designing my training program and I will be able to give you a better idea of how it has impacted my training once I’ve had more time to work with the PowerTap but it seems like if you want all of the information possible regarding your performance, a power meter (working together with a heart rate monitor and your own perceived exertion) is pretty hard to beat.