On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

The past weeks have been dominated by priorities other than cycling or running -- the occasional ride, including a few in the gorgeous Amalfi Coast of Italy, but a lot of moving to a new neighborhood in San Francisco, travel, recovering from jet lag, and solving problems at work. So after resolving to "make time" for yesterday's Noon Ride Old La Honda, my rational expectations, my self-assessment of fitness, were low. Indeed, after having missed the Red Kite Patterson Pass Time Trial the weekend prior, an event I normally would have been excited about especially since it had a 3-4 master's category in which I'd have the reasonable hope of getting a top 3, I wasn't too disappointed. I'd not even looked at the racing schedule. I don't believe in racing without proper preparation. Long rides? Nope. Interval sessions? Not unless you count one ride in Amalfi. Extended climbs? Virtually none. At least my weight was fairly good, within 1 kg of my ...

Today was my third consecutive week of Old La Honda. So I moved the Powertap wheel to the Ritchey Breakaway and took that to work. At the start, my legs felt fairly good. I'd ridden into work Tue morning (75 km) with some moderate intensity. On Monday I'd ridden a short ride with some brief efforts, mostly on the flats, partly to compare Vector to Powertap on the Winter Allaban. Sunday I'd done nothing. Saturday I'd done some steep hills, again to compare Vector to Powertap. So there'd been no really depleting rides in the bunch. If I had one thing against me my calories the previous day had been on the low side, considering I'd ridden in. It was nice seeing my old friend Randy at the start. He'd been traveling and it was good hearing about that. Also there was Chris & Greg, two very fast climbers. Kieran wasn't there, nor was Mark. This was to be the last Wed noon ride before the NCNCA championship race on Saturday, up the north face of Mo...

Thursday of both last week and this week I did a sprint workout. This involved cruising over the Sunnyvale Trader Joes, buying some rice tortillas, goat chedder, and organic blueberries, stuffing them in my pocket, then cruising residential Sunnyvale streets to the Steven's Creek trail. Along the way, on roads of relatively smooth pavement and with enough length between intersections, I do some sprints (4 each of the weeks). Then I cruise the Steven's Creek trail back across the freeway mess and do a few more (2 the first week, an extra the 2nd week when I sprinted for a green light). I'm not sure how much these help the sort of riding I do. But I think improving the top end potentially offers benefits at lower powers, as well as if I need to put in hard efforts to close gaps. I've not been a position where I was sprinting to win races in quite a long time. But sprint repeats challenge multiple aspects of riding: muscle strength, neuoromuscular coordination, pedal ...

After last week's disappointment on Old La Honda, I did a sprint workout the following day (Thursday), then rode in at tempo on Friday with Jason. But there was no riding through it. I was cooked. I needed some days off. Saturday & Sunday were total "rest" (actually doing home stuff which absolutely needed doing). Monday and Tuesday I was still feeling fatigued, so I took the train to work, riding only to-from the train. Finally, today, I felt energetic again, ready for another try at Old La Honda. Like last week, Greg and Kieran set a ferocious pace from the start, with Mark in tow. I let them go. But unlike last week, I wasn't in a chase pack, but rather solo. But also unlike last week, Mark didn't try to hang with the leaders too long. He dropped off and paced himself very nicely the rest of the way. And the whole rest of the way I chased him. I focused on trying to maintain a steadier pace this time: keep a cap on it at the beginning when I felt ...

I did the Noon Ride again on Wednesday, up Old La Honda, and I had high hopes. I'd had a recent block of training since the last time I'd done it 6 weeks prior , including the 4-day Memorial Day Tour, always good for a fitness boost. But I'd been feeling fatigued in the 1.5 weeks since the tour. Wednesday, riding out to the Noon Ride start, was the first time I felt legitimately good. Not frisky, race-ready good, but "I can climb Old La Honda" good. At the start, Maciek from SF2G asked what my goal was. "I've got to do 18:30", I told him. I figured just lay it on the line there. 18:30 is a decent time on the Ritchey Breakaway, which I was riding. With Powertap wheel, no bottle, no GPS, no toolbag, but with pump and two cages it's 18.32 lb. That probably made it the heaviest bike on the ride by a decent margin, but still, not too bad. Hitting the base of the climb I was near the front, but got pushed toward the back when we had to wait fo...

Since the Woodside Ramble 50 km, my focus has shifted to cycling, and with that I've been riding to work more, riding home from work more, and if not riding full distance at least trying to ride to/from Palo Alto, Menlo Park, or even Redwood City rather than riding the train all the way between San Francisco and Mountain View. Less time on the train = less blogging. Here's a plot of riding distance per week since the Woodside race: There's a steady upward progression except for a week where I suffered from cold and/or allergies. That was, coincidentally, the week leading up to the Diablo Time Trial, so a bit of a taper made sense then anyway. That race went rather well relative to my modest expectations (at least my legs felt good) so the reduced distance paid off. Yesterday I did a double Diablo day. Riding that second Diablo is more a psychological barrier than a physical one. Diablo is a long effort, and it's easy to lose motivation during the long effort. ...

Today, as I'm typing this, is the Boston Marathon. If I'd been 40 seconds faster @ CIM 2012, I'd have had a qualifying time and maybe I'd be running the streets of Boston instead. But rather than running Boston I'm a week after meeting a New Year's resolution, to run my first ultra, the Woodside Ramble 50 km last Sunday. I'd had a training plan for the race, and it crashed and burned when 3.5 weeks out oral surgery left me fatigued and prone to allergies. My running came to a virtual halt for 12 days, leaving just enough time for a brief test run and 3 decent volume days before I had to taper for the final week before the big day (indulging in a 17-km test run 3 days prior). This completely blew my plan to do big volume up to 2 weeks before, then taper in: maintaining CTS the second-to-last week, then letting it slip slightly that last week to come in with an optimized combination of freshness & fitness. CTS is a metric of chronic training stress, ...

Training for the Woodside Ramble 50 km race, while not without hiccups, was going nicely to plan. I'd plotted a gradual increase in my simplified running form of CTS, ramping 0.43 km/day per week, and I was sticking to that schedule, initially by increasing the length of my runs, but later transitioning to an increase in frequency. I was tired, of course, but a good tired. I was pushing my limits, as one must to get them to shift, but it seemed to be working. The problem with simplified training stress metrics is they exclude stress from other sources, and in this case the big ugly stress source was oral surgery. A tooth broke and the dentist gave me the sobering news the next day: it should be removed and replaced with an implant. So the tooth came out, a process involving the expenditure of extremely few kilojoules on my part, but which nevertheless left me very, very tired. Initially I persisted in my plan to run every day. Length didn't matter, speed didn't mat...

Each day this week I felt like not running. My right leg was bothering me a bit and I was even hobbling a bit at work from a sore something-or-other (foam rollering was "productive"). Lunchtime would come, my usual running time, and I couldn't go out: too tired, too much work to do, yadda yadda. But then I'd take a not-too-late evening train, despite succumbing to temptation and eating first thing after riding my steep commute route from the train to home, put on my running clothes and trot down the hill. And after a solid weekend running in the Marin Headlands, every day I did this: Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thu, my legs magically felt better and I got a wonderful run in, taking advantage of daylight time's later sunsets, and running into the night if necessary. Today was going to be the day I for the first time ever made it to 7 consecutive days of running. On Tuesday a 9.5-year-old crown came loose, taking a piece of 18 with it. There wasn't much left. The...

The generalized form of the ATS and CTS metrics developed by Coggan & Allen for the analysis of power meter data is the following: f n = sum { i from 0 to n } exp[ (t i - t n ) / τ] s i where t i is a time associated with point i, τ is a time constant associated with the stress score f, and s i is the stress associated with the activity at point i. For my tracking of running training, for simplicity I've used distance run as the training stress (which I measure in kilometers). Then I've used the conventional values τ for two stress scores: 1 week for an "acute" stress ATS, and 6 weeks for a "chronic" stress CTS. The advantage of this sort of approach versus a more conventional "miles per week" is "miles per week" is arbitrary. You could run 1 km today and if you rested 7 days prior, ATS goes up. Then you could do 30 km tomorrow and if you ran a marathon the week before, ATS drops. Obviously that's not representative ...

Another day past, and another day less until the Woodside Ramble 50 km race. I've been focusing on plots showing weighted average distances (which I refer to as ATS, CTS, after the cycling power metrics of the same names), and to number of runs per week. These plots have been guiding my training. An example is the following: But long run distance is important as well, and that's been increasing. This hasn't been as much planned as it's been based on what I can do: I like to run long, and if I feel good, I try to extend my previous distance a bit. Here I plot the distance of my runs versus the date relative to 18 Mar, where I label training runs as crosses, and races as stars: The long run distance has been steadily tending up, but not fast enough to approach 50 km by 13 April. I've run 3 races so far this year. The first was just 4 km (listed as 4.5 km here because of warm-up). For that race, distance wasn't a factor; I'd already done runs twice the ...

In the March 2014 Ultrarunning, page 16, Gary Cantrell writes: "The biggest obstacle to accumulating the mileage necessary to achieve the results we desire is inconsistency". He advocates running every day, maybe for just a mile, maybe for just 15 minutes, but to get in the habit of running every day. So how have I fared? Not well. It's easy to see the biggest killer on my consistency has been races. The solution may simply be to get out and do more super-easy runs after races. But easier said then done: if I feel hobbled, that even running across the parking lot at work is infeasible, it seems better to just let my body recover and not go out and force myself to run out of "habit". I'm doing better in the plot once I get a few weeks out from racing. Yesterday my non-running status wasn't directly from a race, but from my right leg bothering me a little, which it's done since that downhill run on Empire Grade. But could I have gotten a sh...

I initially posted this at 1:59:26 am PDT on π day, which made me feel slightly clever, but then I felt considerably less clever when I realized I'd mistakingly concluded I had 5 weeks until the Woodside Ramble 50 km, rather than the 4 weeks I actually have. Analysis revised... With only 4 weeks to go until my 50 km race, I'm becoming more and more obsessed with it. After Lake Chabois, I took a week off from running, but helped fill the void with cycling, made even more irresistable by my new bike, the Winter Allaban. Woodside Ramble 50 km, Michigan Bluff photography But with "rest week" over, my body fatigued from the rapid ramp-up in riding volume, it was time to start running again. And that meant Caltrain to work instead of SF2G. For Caltrain, it would be folly to take the Allaban, so I've been riding my "rain bike", a 1989 Trek 1500. That bike needs a new drivetrain, the derailleur and 7-speed cassette both well past their replacement dat...

Five weeks to go until the Woodside Ramble 50 km trail run , which means prime time is now for building my fitness. I have at most 3 weeks of build ahead before I need to taper the distance. Following the Lake Chabot 30 km race, I took a planned week off from running. This was originally going to be 6 days off, but I extended it to seven to do a Saturday bike ride to Mount Diablo with Patrick and others from SF2G . That capped off a week in which I did two solo rides to work, totaling 153 km, making for 276 km total on very little cycling base. That's not exactly "recovery", but at least my running-specific muscles got a break. But it left me tired, rather than fresh and ready to go, on the Sunday of the weekend after Chabot. So a modest 12.8 km on Sunday (actually a bit more due to Strava app problems), then a rest on Monday, but 14.8 on Tue, a solid 22.8 on Wed, Thu another rest, only 1.7 on Friday, but a year's best 32.6 km on Saturday, then a straight-up, st...

As I sat shivering in the Marin Coffee Roasters in San Anselmo today, trapped in my soaked clothes, I reflected on the year so far. Since December, I've been sick 5 times and injured once. First in Laos, I got a bad cold, which I battled for a week before finally recovering during the final day of the Red Spokes tour, in which Cara and I were participating. Then there was that extremely tastt smoothy in Vientiane, which left me in bed for a day and a half staring at the ceiling fan in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Upon returning from that trip on Jan 6, Cara and I got sick again. Another cold, another week. My plans for the Austin Marathon on 15 Feb ruined, I decided instead to run the 28 Feb Woodside Half, a 12-mile trail run promoted by EnviroSports. A fantastic event, the extended decent through Huddart park trails left me with trouble in my left leg which continues still, although I've slowly improved. It's most noticeable when I stretch my hamstrings. But I feel it ridin...

I'm a bit better than I was yesterday, but still generally out of commission. I drowned my personal sorrows in my sorry physical state by hacking GoldenCheetah , a great project for managing power meter data. GoldenCheetah has been around for several years, but thanks to a recent infusion of excellent contributions from Ned Harding, it's finally become for me a useful tool. I decided to dive in and try to implement a critical power model extraction technique I've been thinking about. The critical power model says a rider can produce a given level of "aerobic" power (the "critical power", or CP) forever, but additionally has a fixed budged of "anaerobic work" capacity (AWC) which can be spent as extra power. The shorter the total effort during which the anaerobic work is spent, the higher the average power during that period. For such a simple model, it seems to work fairly well. Power-based training isn't typically based on the critica...

I had a really solid sprint workout today, extending my maximum recorded power to 749 watts on sprint #4. Then 737 watts on sprint #5 was my second best. So maybe my recent series of sprint workouts is paying off. With this ride, I closed off what's been a very mixed month. On the surface, with the exception of today's ride, it's been discouraging. I was 73rd in the Menlo Grand Prix, never a factor. I've never once this month felt strong on climbs. I got dumped from my one and only Spectrum Ride (okay, I ran 12.3 miles the day before). I did manage to hang with the main group over Canada College on a Thursday Noon Ride, but on a Tue Nooner, I was overwhelmed before I dropped off to do my assigned sprints (I'd done a long run two days before). I've not done a single ride this month much over 45 miles. So when things don't seem to be going so well, it's nice to look at some data. Here's my maximal power curves for the month (before and after t...

I managed to port Ned Harding's Golden Cheetah patch for the new Powertap raw data format over to the command line utilities I prefer using, and finally got the chance to look at the numbers from my recent rides. A comparison: the Menlo Park Grand Prix to the Wednesday Noon Ride.... Powertap data, Menlo GP and OLH. PDF version also available . Interesting results. First of all, I simply didn't think I could produce that sort of power this year. Average power of 271 watts is bigger than what I've managed on any of my climbs of Old La Honda so far. And average power doesn't tell the whole story: normalized power gives higher weight to power above the mean than to power below the mean. It attempts to describe an "effective power": the constant power which could be produced with comparable effort. The number for the criterium was 289 watts for close to 38 minutes. That's almost as good as my best normalized power last year (291 watts) up Old La Honda...