Too Much Biking

3 workouts since last Friday:

On Friday, February 23, I biked 25.25 miles in one hour on the Lifecycle. I maintained > 105 cadence at “level 15″ for the duration. The bike claimed 1024 calories burned.

On Sunday, February 25, I biked up in Marin for 66 miles — here’s the route. There’s a lot to say about this ride. It started with a moment of great success. After watching my chain wheel wobble for 15 miles or so, followed by a “Fred’s” attempt to fix it myself, I happened upon Mike’s Bikes of Sausalito. It didn’t take long for them to find every single loose bolt and cable. After they were done with it, it rode as well or maybe even better than when I first rode it.

After 30 miles of fun, varying terrain and decent weather, things started to go down hill (or up hill, yuck yuck). Just past Stinson’s Beach going south, Highway 1 was closed for construction. The detour was a four mile, 8% grade up toward Mt. Tamalpais. At the time, I didn’t know exactly how far up it was going to go, which made for a brutal mental battle. I approached every hairpin turn with anticipation that perhaps around *this* bend I would see the light at the end of the tunnel. But time and time again I was met with disappointment as the road continued uphill. Before I got home and mapped it out, I would have sworn that this climb had to have been at least 10 miles long.

It is easily the biggest climb I’ve ever done. I’d like to say I enjoyed it, except that about halfway up, it started to rain — this is what ultimately killed the ride. By the time I made it to the top, it was nearly pouring. Water had completely soaked through my cotton long sleeve shirt (don’t comment, I know), and was flowing steadily into my shoes. All of this was just in time for the 10 miles of downhill where I wouldn’t have to pedal or otherwise exert any energy. Sure enough, it wasn’t five minutes over the top of the hill before I started shivering. Eventually I started breaking and pedaling at the same time, just to try and stay warm. Miserable.

Like the climb, the worst part was not having any idea how long I would have to endure. Fortunately, I made it to civilization before things actually got bad. But at the same time, there was definitely a point (probably around mile 62 or so) where I started to worry that I might actually have to start worrying. Ha. Anyway, I stopped at the first gas station I found, bought two Power Bars, a Sprite, and called my roommate. Done.

It was a good ride.

Tuesday, February 27, I biked 24.25 miles on the Lifecyle in one hour and ran three miles on the treadmill at an 8:30 pace.

Average Watts

Per the advice of TBV, I made a point of tracking my average watts for the entirety of tonight’s spin class rather than monitoring the averages over each interval. It was tougher to run the intervals going only by instantaneous readings, but honestly, that in itself is probably a skill worth practicing.

Inspired by this article in Triathlete Magazine, I put forth a conscious effort to even out my pedal stroke. And by “put forth a conscious effort”, I mean I tried to make tonight as much of a meta-training experience as possible. As taxing as it can be, I wholeheartedly agree with the conscious training philosophy — even beyond sports.

With all of that said, the numbers for tonight are not really so inspiring, but I had fun as usual… 235 watts average over an hour.

Ultra Runners

By word of the Golden Gate Triathlon Club discussion group comes this story about three runners who ran 4000 miles across the Sahara Desert. Eff yeah! My favorite excerpt from the article:

Zahab described stopping one recent day for a bathroom break only to discover the wind was blowing so harshly that he couldn’t keep the sand out of his clothes. “And I thought to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing?’”

Reading this brought to mind a pretty relevant post on The Dilbert Blog. Haha… it’s so apt.

Tonight I biked the Lifecycle for 40 miles in 1:44 and ran 2 slow miles on the treadmill. Legs again are feeling good to go for Napa.

Hiatus, but not.

Well, I haven’t posted in a week, but not for a (complete) lack of working out. Here’s the workout summary:

* Thursday, February 15th, I hit up M2 Revolution for a spin class — as before, I’ll rate it an effective equivalent of 25 miles in 1 hour.

* Friday, February 16th, I did 37 miles on the Lifecycle in an hour and half, followed by running 2 miles from walking up to jogging. Although I took it slow on the treadmill, my stride felt very comfortable.

* Sunday, February 18th, I went for a long ride up through Marin County. I have yet to map it out on gmap-pedometer, but I’m guessing the ride is probably about 60 miles.

Now that that’s out of the way, Thursday’s spin class featured a major news-worthy announcement — in March, Floyd Landis is going to join one of our spin classes. The correct response is “Wait, are you serious?” Yes I am. I don’t have all the details, but pretty awesome, no?

A Pain

With the Napa Valley Marathon coming up, last night I thought I would grease the running wheels and go for a long run at an easy pace (8:00/mile) on the treadmill. Things felt fantastic until about a mile in when I started to notice a slight pain in one of the tendons in the back of my knee. I should have stopped then and there, but I thought I just wasn’t warmed up yet, so I kept going. Another quarter mile or so and that slight pain became overwhelmingly sharp — I practically came up lame and had to jump off the treadmill.

I spent the next few minutes in a subdued panic consulting my injury. My range of motion was actually fine and I was having a hard time consistantly reproducing the pain. I’m no doctor, so I don’t really have any expectation for my ability to diagnose, but this was somewhat of a unique injury for me.

It would have been too frustrating to call it a day after only one mile due to injury, so I went ahead and tried out the bike to see how my leg felt on it. Fortunately, cycling’s particular motion caused me no pain, so I still managed to get a workout in: 20 miles, 50 minutes, 100-105 cadence.

For those of you wondering if I’m endorsing working out despite an injury, I’m not. I think it’s a sign of my lack of self-control, and if I did things right, I would have gone home, iced and elevated my leg, and then consulted a sports physician today. I did not, and I probably won’t. My leg feels decent and my plan leading up to the race in two weeks will be to continue biking to keep my fitness, while walking and stretching a couple miles after.

Flat Tire

Today I went for a long ride down past San Mateo and back. I don’t know for sure (I’m in dire need of an odometer … and a heart rate monitor and a computrainer and a…) but it’s very likely that I rode over 60 miles.

As the subject implies the “highlight” of the ride was the flat tire I encountered some 30 miles out. I don’t know for sure what caused the flat, but I’m almost certain it was a giant crack in the pavement I didn’t notice until too late. I tried hopping my bike over it at the last second, but being the inexperienced rider that I am , I probably ended up doing more harm than good. Although my front tire cleared the breach easily, the hop more than likely shifted all of my weight back, driving my rear tire that much harder into the crevasse. Bummer.

You’d think I might have read up on changing bicycle tires before I ventured out a couple weeks ago, but no. After I made it home today I did a little post mortem to see if my methods were at all conventional. I don’t know if anyone ever enjoys replacing a flat tire, but at least one person made light enough of the process to create an amusing guide on how to do it.

I’m pleased to report that I did in fact use the tire levers correctly. Alright fine, I never did figure out that they were meant to hook onto the spokes, but I definitely used them to pry the tire from the rim. It’s not like I used them to lift the chains off the gears so I wouldn’t get my fingers greasy……..

Anyway, the whole ordeal makes me want to seriously consider airless tires. In fact, I will… consider it, I mean.

Google Calculator Almost Delivers

Tonight I rode the Lifecycle for 44 miles in 2 hours with a cadence around 96. Lifecycles do not report any estimate of average watts, but while grumbling over this fact, I realized that calories per hour is also a measure of power. Awesome! So after my workout I figured I’d rush home and type in “875 Calories per hour in watts” into Google Calculator, and viola, I would have my average watts…

875 (kilocalories per hour) = 1016.94444 watts

Hmmm… Yep, I averaged over 1000 watts for 2 hours straight. Ha! So I guess, my initial theory was a little whack. Clearly there’s a difference between the power I generate while riding the bike (Calories burned per hour), and the power that’s actually transferred to the pedals (what I mean when I say “watts”).

Oh well, it was a good thought.

Digressing further… assuming the numbers above are accurate, and assuming the actual power transferred to the pedals was somewhere between 200 and 300 watts, then isn’t that saying that I’m only about 20-30% efficient as an engine for a bike. That’s kind of interesting. Huh.

Uninspiring Start

Well, after going down to the gym and attempting to ride the ole’ reliable lifecycle, I wussed out and came home. I felt completely out of energy. I would have been physically drained anyway from yesterdays spinning, but to make it worse I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night.

For me, sleep is a huge factor in how I feel on a given day (fair warning: I’m about to go down the road of TMI). If I don’t get enough sleep, the food I ate the day before does not digest properly, throwing off my entire days “schedule”, if you know what I mean. Furthermore, despite what I imagine is an unfinished processing of yesterdays food, my appetite skyrockets. I love to eat, but working out after a day of overeating is usually a disaster. It’s probably only a pound or two more, but carrying that weight around in my stomach (especially on a run) makes a huge difference in my performance.

Then again, maybe I’m being shortsighted. What’s true given the current state of my physiology, won’t necessarily hold with the right training… whatever that may be. If cutting back on sleep works for Dean Karnazes, of 50 marathons in 50 days fame, then I guess I can’t claim that less sleep is unquestionably bad for everyone’s training.

Ramblings aside, for now I think I’m going to make a point to try and get eight hours of sleep a night. In fact, I’m going to add hours slept along side miles biked and miles run in my training goals.

Spin Class

Tonight I attended the 8pm spin class at Michael McCormack’s M2 Revolution. The class runs on Cycle-Ops’ Cycleops 300 PT. The class runs about an hour during which Michael coaches the class through a series of intervals based on personal benchmark wattage (average sustainable wattage over two ten-minute time trials). The class can be pretty killer — I didn’t have a problem pushing myself since I knew it was only going to last an hour.

I’m not sure how to record this kind of training effort. I was able to do my 90-100% intervals around 270-300 watts. I’m not sure there’s much point in reporting my average watts (even if I knew it) for the entire session since output is so inconsistant while doing intervals. In the interest of keeping a yearly mileage goal, however, I’m going to estimate that the distance traveled for an equivalent performance on a properly paced one hour time trial would have been about 25 miles.

I have some ideas for a few web applications that I want to expose on this site (beyond the run-of-the-mill spreadsheet). If anyone has any requests, I’m all ears.

First

Today I rode one of Cole Valley Fitness’s lifecycle upright exercise bikes, logging “37 miles” in 1:45. My cadence was generally 95-100 with resistance at 15 for the first hour and 13 for the last 45 minutes. It’s really too bad I have no clue what those resistance numbers mean. Afterwards, I jumped on the treadmill for a mile at an 8:00 minute pace — the transition felt good.

I took Sunday and Monday off after my first ride on my new Tequilo (sweet!) on Saturday. I’ve been dealing with some pain in the outside blade of my left foot as well as the tendon on the right side behind my left knee. I’m pretty sure these are a result of the heavy running I did with an altered stride due to similar pains in my right leg a few weeks earlier. Neither of these injuries have been debilitating, but I’ll probably be running less this month since the Napa Valley Marathon is coming up.