Happy New Year

One of the things I like about cycling is the time it affords one to think.

Ideas come to me on rides and I occasionally remember them all the way home and write them down, or better yet act on them. More often then not they are spur-of-the moment pearls of wisdom and insight that i promptly forget when the next hill or interval comes along. 

Such was the case on Saturday. I hadn't been on my bike much at all since the last BASP at Coyote Point December 9th, and District CX was coming up on Sunday so I thought a little blow out might help, and it did. During the ride I had one of those epiphanies...a thought that was SURE to revolutionize my training, my coaching, my life, the sport of cycling, or something equally impressive...but I forgot it and can't seem to pull it back. 

I hope it comes back...it was pretty good. I'm kinda the same about memories in general. I simply forget, so I wanted to take a quick look back at 2012 before it gets lost. Let's break it into simple categories: 

Mitch Going Fast!

Race Team - Smaller and leaner this year....Sterling Cross p/b Fusion IO was still in all a success by the numbers. We had ONE elite rider - Mitch Trux...but he pulled a bunch of podiums and was constantly in the top 10, usually the top 7! Our other standout cateogry? Single Speed A's! We pulled a podium at almost every race we did this year. Either myself of Patrick Kitto...weird that we couldn't seem to put it together at the same events...had solid rides at all the BASP's and a host of other events in and around NorCal including:

• WIN! BASP #1 Candlestick Park - Patrick Kitto
• 2nd BASP #4 Candlestick Trippel - Matt McNamara
• 2nd BASP #5 Coyote Point - Patrick Kitto
• 3rd BASP #3 Sierra Point Night Race - Matt McNamara
• 3rd Santa Rosa Cup #3 - Patrick Kitto
• 5th NCNCA District Championships - Patrick Kitto
• 5th Surf City #1 Aptos HS - Matt McNamara
• 6th NCNCA District Championships - Matt McNamara

I think that's about all the races we entered except for 2 mechanicals and a terrible mud race at Manzanita...not bad. Next year....we're going bigger badder and faster!

A Jeff Namba Photo

Athletes - This year I had the pleasure of working with an Elite Team in HONG KONG...Team Direct Asia! They were awesome to work with and the topped it off by taking the OVERALL GC and TEAM GC at Tour De Bintan..a big race in SE Asia. I also had the pleasure of working with some juniors - two talented sets:

• USAC Regional Development Camp - This is my third year working with Larry Nolan and the other coaching stalwarts at the camp, but this year we did it a little different..we divided into teams and got to work with our riders individually the whole week - AWESOME! 

USAC Campers

• Matadors HS MTB Team - I kinda lucked into this one, but it was time well spent as our small 3 rider team finished 16th in the team overall standings for Division 2 in NorCal...a pretty huge accomplishment that was only possible with a true team effort by each rider! 

Matador Racing 2012

My other athletes were also consistently strong and impressive. There are too many to go rider by rider, but suffice it to say that we won some races, reached some new personal bests and I don't think anyone took a major digger this year, which is huge in my world From KMH killing Du's all year to Adam Carr racing the Tour of Vietnam (UCI 2.2) and Joe Carpenter slogging off several top rides in 8+ hour MTB races! Can't wait to jump deep into 2013 and see what turns up...

Personal - This year started off slowly with almost no riding from January til May..then I dialed up a solid summer and hit some of my best power numbers EVER, including new PR's on 5, 20, and 60 minute efforts. That fitness carried me thru a gradual decline in the fall that culminated with almost NO riding the past 6 weeks...

SO - HERE'S TO A BIGGER AND BETTER 2013...so Happy New Year to all...(yea, done with 1:20 left in 2012, I'll post pics to this shortly

Oh Fitness, Where Art Thou?

I've got a really bad trend going...let's call it the ebb and flow of fitness. For the fourth year in five my fitness has ranged far too wide during the course of a year. If a Chronic Training Load above 75 TSS/day is considered the cross over point of 'real' fitness then I've managed only a few scant months of such over the last 60 months. I'll admit that I have a pretty good excuse for the loss of 2012 fitness, but still it's a bit disconcerting when you strive to be your best and it's constantly transient. First let's look at training volume over the past five years:

2008 is the largest at 390 hours for the year - about 33 hours per month, 2010 the lowest at a mere 243 hours, or just over 20 hours per month. The last 2 years are very, eerily, similar on a host of fronts. I don't know if I can hit 400 hours this coming year, but it is certainly a goal. Here is a look at my CTL track (blue line), with notes the last few years:
2012:

You can see the ramp rate jumps in May after a terrible spring. Peak 20m power is the highest I've tested since 2008 at 361W for 20m. CTL is also at the highest point since I started training consistently with power at a peak of 90 TSS/day in mid September just before 'Cross Vegas.

2011:

A slightly longer runnup to high CTL - peaking at 88 TSS/d in late August - had me better prepared for the CX season than in either 2010 or 2009. The fact that CTL dropped so readily in the months of the season illustrates the same lack of training consistency that is my unfortunate habit. Peak 20m values for the year

2010:

Peak value for CTL was only 64, again in late summer. Not sure why the bottom fell out of my early spring, but the fact that peak CTL was only 64 says I was pretty busy with the rest of my life this year.

2009:

This was one of the better years with regard to consistency of training after September 1st. Peak CTL was 74 in early August, but didn't plummet until the end of November. Instead it approximated the kind of gradual drop in CTL that would normally accompany a block of racing. 20m best was actually from a race in November.

2008:

Certainly a different look to the season. Peak CTL of 83 was in early May rather than late summer. This was the first season of Sterling 'Cross and CTL stayed high (well, sorta) thru the season, varying only 10 points from September to the end of November.

So what is the take away from all of this? Essentially it's that consistency is the most important part of fitness - and I'm pretty mediocre at consistency. Life has a funny way of interrupting training! Will 2013 be any better? Given a new situation I am optimistic...

Playing With Numbers....

Montebello is a sweet little climb near my house that has a couple of steep pitches, it’s a favorite.  I use it pretty regularly for what I call 3-peats, 3 times to the school (2 miles up),  usually in the 13-15 minute range.  Today I didn’t want to ‘hit out’ super hard…hoping to keep good form away a bit longer before my annual implosion, so I decided to do a little experiment.  My current FTP is set at 320W, so I thought I’d see the difference in pacing a 320W effort on three trials. First I did the climb at 320W aveage. Then I did it again at a 320W average, but did the first 5 minutes at 10% over (352W) and gradually lost average power the rest of the climb as close to 1 watt at a time as I could. Finally, I tackled the climb at 10% under FTP (288W) for the first five minutes and then tried to raise my average back to FTP over the remainder of the climb in 1 watt increments. Scientific? No, not really…but let’s see what we got anyway:

	320W Steady	320W First 5m 110%	320W First 5m 90%
Time	15:36	15:44	15:28
Average Watts	320	321	321
Normalized Watts	323	323	324
Kilojoules	300	303	298
TSS (Intensity Factor)	26.4 (1.008)	26.7 (1.008)	26.4 (1.00)
VI	1.01	1	1.01

Very interesting…the fastest was the 5m @ 290W start, but let’s see what else stands out...

Here are the three efforts laid out together:

yellow @ 320W, red @ 320W+10% and green @320W-10%:

Recall that green was a steady push from 5:00 on and you can see the slight uptick in power (top graph) and cadence (lower graph). I like to look for landmarks in the files as time stamp reference points. For example in the first 5:00 the file shows a noticeable jump in cadence at around 3:00 –  4:00…this is where the course flattens out for a bit and you can see that the second effort (+10%) moved to both a higher cadence overall and a bit earlier than the other two. In contrast the third effort (-10%) had a much lower cadence in those first few minutes (closer to 40RPM) as I had to try and keep average watts down, so the stair step of cadence comes nearly a minute later, and the power remains well below the other two at all points.

Moving a bit farther up there is a final ramp that shows up nicely. On the first run it is about  1:30 @ 350W and 71rpm:

On the2nd run it is closer to 1:39 @ 302W and 65rpm as I tried to keep the average at 320W for the whole interval.

On the 3^rd pass I am still chasing the 320W average a little bit (started the final climb at ~317W), but had to be careful to not go too hard. In the end that got me to the top in 1:22 @ 359W and 72rpm, very similar to the first pass, so why the 9s second difference in time? Entry speed.

You can see the differences in speed over the last 6:00 of the climb in the graph below. It’s pretty easy to reference landmarks on each and you can see that the final pass was faster in almost every area over the final minutes as I was both chasing the targeted 320W average and covering more ground. The first landmark is the obvious bump in speed around 6:00. The red represents the +10% pace, so I arrived at this ‘flat’ section about 20 seconds faster than the first pass and about 35s faster than the final run. By the second speed surge at around 9:00 the gap is down to about 5-8 seconds over the first pass, but still hovers near 35 seconds to the final run. Finally by the third speed surge, about 11:30 in, the final effort is starting to close the gap, down to about 15 seconds. Note that the final 0.22 miles were done at 9.2 mph (1^st pass), 8.2 mph on the second and 10mph for the third pass. In the five seconds before the final surge I averaged 19.7 on the third interval, but only 18.5 on the second, and a modest 17.3 mph on the first. This section is flat to slightly downhill, offering a small respite before the final surge if needed, or a chance to make up some time if you can.

For comparison let’s look at my fastest time up Montebello, a 13:01 effort that averaged 357W (I was about 7 pounds lighter too!).  The five seconds before the final surge only averaged 16.4mph, but the final surge was done in 1:04 at 473Wavg. The full climb is demonstrably more impressive all around when looked at side by side with these three...

Power:

Speed:

Guess I need to lose some weight and ride harder!

UPDATE: A friend asked a couple of good questions about the climb itself and my efforts relative to the grade, so here is some additional information on the climb - the full climb is just over five miles (5.3) and averages 'only' 6.9%

But I only went to the school:  

Info and the gradient graphs from a really great site:


Here is the raw data:

Raw Data:

Dist    Grade   Alti.   Location
----    -----   ------  --------
0.00    15% 550 start - Stevens Canyon Road
0.01 12% 555
0.04 10% 570
0.07 10% 580
0.10 11% 600
0.14  4% 620 Brookside Stables - left turn
0.16  9% 630
0.18 10% 640
0.22 12% 660
0.25 10%  680
0.28 12% 690
0.30 12% 700
0.33 10% 720
0.35  7% 730
0.38  6% 740
0.41  8% 750
0.44 8.5% 760
0.46 4.5% 770
0.50 6% 780
0.52 6% 790
0.54 8% 795
0.57 8.5% 810
0.59 9% 820
0.63 13% 840
0.66 11% 855
0.69 8.5% 870
0.71 12% 880
0.72 12% 890 Peacock Court
0.75 12% 905
0.77 10% 920
0.80  5% 930
0.84 5.5% 935
0.86 9% 940
0.90 9% 970
0.93 6% 980
0.96 10% 990
0.99 13% 1010
1.02 14% 1030
1.05 14% 1050
1.07 16% 1060
1.08 12% 1070
1.10  8% 1080
1.12  6% 1090
1.15 5.5% 1100
1.18 8% 1110
1.20 11.5% 1120
1.23 9.5% 1130
1.27 8% 1150
1.35 7% 1180
1.38 8% 1190
1.41 10% 1200
1.44 11% 1220
1.47 8% 1240
1.49 4% 1240
1.52 11% 1250
1.56 11.5% 1270
1.60 10% 1295 View
1.65 10% 1310
1.68 8% 1335
1.73 9% 1350
1.75 7% 1360 Pichotti home
1.78 1% 1370
1.81 -2.5% 1370
1.83 0% 1370
1.85 8% 1380
1.87 12.5% 1390
1.89 9% 1400
1.92 9.5% 1410
1.94 8% 1425
1.97 6% 1430
1.99 8% 1440
2.03 10% 1455
2.05 8% 1465
2.07 1% 1470 Montebello School

Sprint Technique

One of the best things ever is when a couple of sprinters, should I quotes that(?), "sprinters" get in a huff off. It happens every few months on a blog I follow and it's a riot every time. Thanks for the entertainment, did you ever decide who was the fastest Cat 4 world threat?

Alas, while sprinting may come down to hubris and elbows, in the end technique trumps the day.

Good sprint drills are ones that challenge you to deliver power in a variety of ways.  Before I knew much about power as a training tool I wrote an article about delivering power that is an interesting perspective in the discussion of technique. The focus was on technique and rider bike connectivity rather than watts production - and although incomplete for not discussing the high cadence end of the equation, I've posted it below...

First a sample workout that you might like:

FTP Coastdowns - As easy as it sounds...ride 2:00 at your Threshold Power with your average power screen visible and intervals view on. After 2:00 at FTP soft pedal and coast your AVERAGE power down 10Watts then SPRINT it back up to the FTP average and repeat the 10W Loss/Sprint sequence for an additional 8 minutes (10 minutes total on interval). Rest 6-8 minutes between and repeat. Do 2-3 reps the first week and add a rep or additional time to the interval each week. Here are a few graphs that break it down a bit:
1. Full Interval - 1h16m at 0.94 IF (288Wnorm/FTP 300) - you can see the 2:00 start off interval each time and the high variability of efforts. VI was 1.3 for this workout - not quite steady state, yet a circa threshold effort for the duration

2. Interval Detail:

10:00 @ 1.10 / 1.03 VI / 88rpm avg overall

3 Individual Effort Detail

Lots of short and crisp efforts in the 12 - 15s range, and a nice block of 1:20 averaging 341 @ 96rpm early in the interval when power spikes higher and return-to-average times are shorter. As the interval continues the peak power values drop, the efforts take longer to return to FTP:

Throwing those efforts all together we get a quadrant analysis that looks like the one below and reflects the Neuromuscular/Quadrant 1 inclination of the efforts, with a solid foundation of Type II muscle fiber recruitment in Quadrant 2:

Thanks for reading...the reward is my 1998 Intro To Power...

POWER! It means different things to different people, but rest assured if you want to be a better cyclist you

need to have more power. Yes, endurance work, planned recovery, lactic acid work, and VO2max efforts are all important components of a complete training program, but in the end power is what drives the bike forward. In assessing your power you must ask yourself these questions:

1. How much power do I have? We offer a couple of otions to assess your current power

2. Where is my power best? Flats? Steep climbs? Downhill at high rpms?

3. Where is my power worst? Focus on improving these areas first

4. How do I get more? Read on faithful scribe...

Watch top World Cup riders in both Cross Country and Downhill. They rely on and deliver power with

amazing grace and blistering efficiency. They apply power throughout the pedal stroke, at all different RPM’s and across all conditions. They have mastered the technique with brutal effects. To help you develop this type of focus try these three easily adaptable techniques:

*Note: If you haven’t done the requisite base training then don’t attack power efforts with too much vigor in the early season or you will pay for it through injuries and overtraining.

1. Big Gear Efforts: Riding a big gear at high RPM is a great way to increase power. First, get comfortable turning a big gear at low RPM’s. Try 50-65RPM in your largest or second largest gear for 2 minutes. Focus on applying pressure throughout the pedal stroke in a smooth and circular manner; literally pedal circles. These efforts help you improve your muscle fiber recruitment and increase the total number of muscle fibers involved in each effort, making your pedal stroke more efficient. Once you’ve developed base level competency at low RPM, it’s time to work with higher RPM efforts. Start with 30 second to 1 minute efforts at 80-90 RPM (RPM efficiency varies from rider to rider but is usually highest around 90 RPM). Use manageable gears to begin with (53x19 road, 46 or 48x17 MTB) and work up from there. Spend a few weeks adapting to this new form of training and begin increasing the duration of your efforts. You only want to attempt focused power intervals 1x per week, although you can incorporate power into much of your regular riding too.
2. Rider/Bike Connectivity: This is the relationship between you and your bike. Sorry, but you won’t need to buy it new tires and a bell to get it. What you need to do is ride your bike. Learn how it reacts to your inputs and commands. Practice riding your bike with little or no upper body movement. Watch your favorite professionals, emulate their strengths and overcome your weaknesses. When climbing click up one gear before you stand, this helps you maintain the same rhythm and speed. Practice riding wheelies, jumping objects and skidding the front and rear tires (yes, you can skid the front tire). All of these techniques will make your application of power more supple and responsive. Get to know your bike and feel you are part of the same symbiotic relationship, because you are.

3. Ride with Stronger Cyclists: If you can’t find anyone to ride with who really pushes you, get out and broaden you circle of riding partners! Seriously though, riding with people stronger than you helps develop power across a spectrum of conditions and tactical situations. Hard accelerations uphill, long gear wind-ups for the finish line, sprints to single track, all of these tax your power systems in different ways. When you’re with stronger riders, attack them! Don’t be afraid to go hard because you might “blow up.” What’s the worst that can happen? You blow up, get dropped and have to ride the rest of the 50 miles home into a fierce headwind by yourself? Hey, great opportunity to work on your low RPM power!

That's It For Now!

H.I.T.oo Early

H.I.T. - a current buzzword for lighting it up....High Intensity Training is all the rage! It seems that most everyone has a workout or class that is HIT...and given the nature of exercise physiology one must ask why?

What's the nature of physiology? Well, high intensity - anaerobic (despite the misnomer) efforts are produced via fairly straight forward pathways..namely the ATP-PC system (very short term) and Glycolysis (up to several minutes)...these capabilities - capacities, are the result of developing the infrastructure needed to support them whether by volume of 'stuff' that facilitates energy production or the aparatii that allows sufficient recovery, neither of which I have currently.

As I have both terrible fitness and occasionally surprising power on rides during the last month or so, it seemed like a terrible idea to do a HIT workout on Thursday, but I did it anyway as I was riding with a client and it was on his schedule. The workout is called FTP Coastdowns and it consists of riding 2:00 averaging FTP and then letting that rolling average drop 10 watts or so by softpedaling for 10-20 seconds...then sprinting the average back up to FTP before letting it again drop 10W...and repeating for 8-12 minutes total interval time. Rest intervals should be at least 1:1, but we cut it short a little...anyway, here is what the workout looks like in both macro and up-close views:

Close up of a coast down - 2:00 at FTP'ish (in this case 330W - which is really about 110% of my current FTP) followed by a block of efforts between 5 and 15 seconds at between 400 - 880 watts...usually with about 17-20 seconds at ~180 Watts for recovery.

The upside is that I could do 7'ish minutes of it..the downside is that it was a 10-12 minute interval, and I was DONE by the third block! That I could consistently turn out 5-15s efforts at better than 500W is probably more about Type II muscle mass and genetics than training - but I'll be curious to see what I can do when true fitness returns. True fitness requires taking the time to actually build those systems mentioned above...so that is my goal these next months, but I can't say I'll swear off the hard stuff completely. Here is the workout macro view - 34 efforts like the ones above:

Would I improve by doing just these types of efforts - or doing more of them..probably, but my hypothesis is that I'd plateau much earlier than if I take the time to build a more efficient engine and improve my overall endurance and capacity. Guess we'll see. I need to do some more reading to better understand how this all falls together...

Relative Fitness

We all know the value and import of 'fitness' - that undefined element of racing success that seems so transient and largely elusive depending on how much you ride. If you don't ride you don't have much capacity, but lots of freshness...if you ride a lot you have capacity, but little freshness...what power types call ones training stress balance....and while I appreciate the essence of it, I have of late been a bit perplexed by its application...

I always consider 300W to be a decent reference point of where I'm at. If 300 is easy to hold I'm probably doing ok in my progress, but I don't do too many full hours at 300W, and have only done a 'best' 60m at about 326Wnormalized - or about 4.3W/Kg. I've done much better on 20m or so...up to about a 4.65W/kg (man do I want to see 5W/Kg sometime). Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, after a solid stint of not riding - I did an hour of power at 307Wnormalized, which was very suprising since I had no real fitness, freshness, or capacity to speak of - then again that's not too bad for having a TOTAL of 29 hours of training in April and May, so what gives?

What allows for a baseline of relative fitness that is roughly 88% of an all time best*? The first step was validating the power numbers were ok....so I opened the file and hand edited it..plus I'd calibrated it mid-ride as well, so I feel pretty confident. I think a bigger question is the speed of degradation of ones fitness...without this getting too far into the article format here are some points to ponder...

1. 5 weeks of detraining in swimmers showed a peak VO2 loss of 7% and a similar decrease in resting metabolic rate as well.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22027854

 2. The effects of detraining are less noticeable in long term athletes, and the return to 'fitness' is quicker too...sort of the 'once you've been there, it's easier to get back there" rule. I did find this interesting though - the long term benefits of doping (in this case steroids) as a permanent adaptation (and possible impact on doping jurisdiction:

http://www.doctorsolve.com/blog/2010/08/a-new-kind-of-muscle-memory.html

Ok, so the point of this post was to look at relative fitness - to that end I'd have to say that my sustained steady state fitness seems to have a fairly high basement - that is to say even when I don't train much I can still hit some pretty good numbers on steady state efforts. But, unfortunately, racing is often not about steady state fitness, it's about attack, assess, counter..and that requires the type of fitness that I do not have right now, and which is the kind of elusive that makes one wonder if 6-months will be enough (I doubt it)...

*sigh*

 

Belgian Training Day 2 (and 3)...

Tuesday I met up with one of my H.S. MTB athletes - well, I actually met up with the other 2 as well, but they went MTB'ing - and we headed out to do the legendary "Sweet Spot" or "Hour of Power" ride...60m at ~90% FTP. I figure my FTP is probably around 300W right now (maybe a bit lower), so I set out to do 270W, figuring that was going to be a stretch after not-a-lot-of-riding the past couple of weeks (months, years)...and figuring that Malcolm might not be ready to go full gas since this was his first time doing the workout. I use a sweet little loop by my house:
View Sweet Spot Loop in a larger map It takes about 22-25 minutes to do a lap, making it the perfect loop for this workout. You do have to wait - or blow - one stoplight, but that's not too bad for an urban area like this. Anyway, off we went and I quickly found that 270 was pretty easy - in fact I could hold near 300W without too much strain or heart rate drift. I even kept the "sprint-every-3-minutes" component because it wasn't that bad. Malcolm did a good job of sitting on my wheel (he's about 140 lbs to my 173 lbs - so in the draft he had it "easy"). Here's the quick version: 48 minutes of Sweet Spot, 12 minutes of Groveling! Things were going great into the third lap when I gapped off Malcom just before the turn around, roughly 45 minutes into the ride, and was feeilng pretty good. My average was down to 295 but I thought I might be able to pick it up again if I tried... then the wheels came off over the small hill on Arastradero - couldn't hold the power, couldn't really pedal very well...and over the next 12 minutes of nearly focused effort I lost about 12W of my average!. Here is the Strava for the ride: Roughly 20.5 miles in the hour...but still need the power download (F*%&king Powertap Cradle!)
 


 Day 3 was NO RIDE b/c I wasted too much time on my job today instead of riding - oh yea, and I ate a McDonalds out of depression...I suck. Back at it tomorrow...