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.

Comments

[Rachel]

We used to do a training camp down in the Temecula area. It sure is beautiful.

Justin - Next time I am going to ride (or push my bike) up Palomar