Bits of loose bone. Cracked ribs. Things weren’t looking too good 9 months ago. This morning I was back in the morning mist, breath heavy and damp dropping like cotton wool towards the blacktop as it rattled and rasped under black chilli tyres. I am coming back.
Moonshine Rd, Wellington.
“I can’t possibly win, you take it.” “No, I couldn’t…. well I may, but I couldn’t possibly just yet.” Voeckler and Contador are so busy not winning the Tour de France, I think I may just have to go and throw up.
“Voeckler discounts Tour chances” the spin doctors say. He says he has zero chance of winning in Paris. So, looking at his achievements, he has won ten big races this year, successfully (and easily) stayed with the GC contenders in the Tour de France mountain stages so far. Absolutely zero…. really? I think I’d be going with something more like “The Schlecks are too afraid to try a sustained attack, I feel great and I am never giving up. This TdF belongs to France and I am going to ride everyone else into the tarmac. Or die trying.” Maybe Voeckler can’t hang onto yellow on the 14% ramps in the Alps. But don’t give it up without a fight.
And Contador – a rider who at least does attack, with ruthless pleasure. Sitting back on ‘Giro legs’, well within stiking distance. At least he’s not having another war of manners with Andy Schleck like 2010! The question is, is he stuffed or playing the biggest, multiple stage, game of possum ever played?
In the meantime, the road racing even-ness of Cadel Evans, Ivan Basso, Frank and Andy Schleck leaves me longing for the competitive rush of Spanish steak, just to see a rider, all heart and lungs, lay it on the line to win the Tour.
My pick, Evans and Contador will both take a big risk. For those who don’t, ‘looks like a pigeon, acts like a pigeon, TASTES like a pigeon!’
A daily “toughen the f**k up core workout”, to turn you into the complete athlete. You’ll have to search the interweb for pictures of the exercises because I’m not exercise eye candy. This is garnered out of the cycling specific weights training books I’ve read and sessions I’ve done with cycling trainers:
Beginner Workout:
2 sets of 15-20 ‘supine lifts’.
2 sets of 60 seconds ‘side planks’ (2 each side).
2 sets of 90 seconds plank pose.
2 sets of 20 crunches.
2 sets of 20 reverse crunches.
Week four, I am more comfortable moving around on crutches. My second week back at work – made possible by ACC funding taxis. A small (non-existant) milestone this week, I am Half Way There – the (various) casts come off at week 8, when the rupture is supposedly knitted, but not supported by muscle nor accustomed/flexible enough to use. Or put another way, half way to healed but not healed.
Weighing on my mind has been this conservative protocol – no surgery – which reads as unusual in a significant amount of the literature. I found support for the non-operative approach last night. Previous studies showed surgery had a quicker and more effective result. However, as younger and more athletic candidates formed a much larger percentage of the ‘surgery set’, the results were skewed. Once findings were normalised for the age and athleticism of the candidates, the results showed no discernable difference in healing time and re-rupture rate. Although surgical solutions still showed a markedly higher infection rate. Time will tell of course, but I no longer feel I am on the ‘slow track’.
It is left to me to determine the load I put on the walking stirrup. Some studies indicate early load is a significant plus. While the re-rupture rate seems strongly linked to early overload. I’m guessing that my ‘get around at work’ light load patterns are about right, but it is strictly guess. My toes take turns at feeling numb and like a steel band connects them to my heel.
Workouts – ‘The Improvised Athlete” approach is working great! Two and a bit weeks in the bag and I feel stronger in the workouts already. Plank pose (including side variations) for 7 minutes last night!
I started riding at the beginning of 2008. Using a commute (with a decent hill, for a beginner, unavoidably placed in the middle of the ride) as the backbone of a 3-4 ride week. In the weekend, a long slow ride with a recreational group introduced ‘peleton skills’. This was really very valuable. 11,000 riders do Taupo, riding in a group is an essential skill.
By June 2008 I had 4 -5 months training under my belt, commuting with climbs, weekend longer rides with a group, I felt like a cyclist… though a little rough around the edges: riding in mtb pedals (SPDs), mtb helmet with a peak, wearing underpants under cycling shorts (no, not a good idea,) with an average pedalling cadence on the flat around 80rpm (slow.)
I hoped my belly was getting smaller (3 kg off, now around 89kg). Getting stronger on hills, I didn’t mind being called ‘The Whale’ by a friend. The Taupo event in November every year motivates a number of cycling groups around the country. This is the raison d’etre for the Tarbabies, a recreational (and free) cycle group in Wellington, which prepares allcomers for the Taupo classic ride in November.
8am in the morning, at my desk, the morning is clear and cold early winter weather and I am on the Taupo website, pausing over the ‘pay now’ key. I have never done a formal cycling event of any kind. It has 1500m elevation and 160kms… its a complete unknown. I push the button with excitement, trepidation. I’m in. Hang on, I can’t complete this ride on current fitness!!
My first training read was a Chris Carmichael / Lance Armstrong book which outlined several 8 week plans to improve fitness. It introduced the idea that you need different kinds of fitness, in short, to introduce variety into my riding week. I tried to do this, but looking back, I was still only doing 3 types of ride. Firstly, commuting fast enough to not get caught. Secondly the commute, extended by 15 kms with an extra super hard 15 minute climb in the middle (grinding at 50rpm cadence). And finally, the long rides with the group on Sunday, which became longer and hillier as the year progressed. In the last month, everyone was fired up and the group rides gained some very useful intensity.
In the meantime, Wellington progressed into a freezing, wet winter. Wet / cold riding gear comprised long cycle tights, water proof overshoes (they never are,) heavy gloves, long sleeved thermal base layer, long sleeved cycle jersey, rain jacket. I froze.
I could have done with skull cap / ear flap cover thingys, thermal socks, quality gloves (worth the money). Busted zips on nearly every sleeveless jacket (gillet)….shell jacket!
Two maxims 1.you are only ever as warm as your fingers and toes – never a truer word said, might add ears to the list. And 2. in cycling, to improve, as Eddy Merkx said, ride more! It improves the efficiency of your muscles on the bike and builds the endurance needed to get to the end.
Whats powering the legs on a tough climb?
There is a basic lack of correlation between energy you can eat on a bike and energy you need as you ride. By a factor of something like 3:1, the body burns more glycogen then the digestive system can process and make immediately available. But it seems that those of us who are time-crunched in our training may not be achieving optimum energy use from another source. At the Wellington Vets Cycle Club Tour of Wairarapa in January, a fellow competitor who had improved greatly, outlined how his coach had ‘fundamentally adjusted his metabolism.’ Lab V02 and lactate threshold testing showed that his high intensity training had lifted performance, but implied that his body was inefficient at burning fat as energy.
The outcome? He was sent back to base building – long slow rides (Did sound like there was still intensity sessions in the programme, but didn’t discuss this) – to teach the metabolism how to burn fat rather than ‘sugar’ for energy purposes. Or at least to achieve a higher threshhold for this. Has anyone else had experience with this?
Material I’ve read gave me the view that fat burning and therefore also reducing weight would only occur with high intensity intervals. This view is pretty common amongst people I ride with. So it was with interest I read a piece by kiwi pro cyclist Greg Henderson on his off season, published in Ride Cycling Review (January 2010). He opted to be in form for the new Team Sky’s first outing. The first pro event of the season, The Tour Down Under in Feb, found him challenging for the podium. In the off season break he rode long, unstressed rides with mates and reports for the first time, he didn’t gain an extra 5kgs in the off season.
For those of us that cram our training into short hours, there is something to be aware of here. Of course it might be that excercise foods/drinks create an overload of sugar/glycogen that are stored, not used. Or in fact any of a range of other factors (and there is a body of scientific study in this area). But it seems like a balanced programme also needs to lift the metabolic ability to operate from fat sources. In pre season conditionning, there are metabolic gains as well as muscular ones from a varied programme.
Recent comments on time-crunched-training have picked up that it is a challenge to race for longer than 2.5-3 hours on ‘short intense training’. Muscle efficiency, habit and energy use patterns are linked – and develop togehter like a ‘habit’.
Climbing Paekakariki Hill, Wellington New Zealand.
It was early in 2008, February I think, Wellington summer, when a group of bright red and green cyclists rode past me, sweating and mashing my way around the bays on my first ride on a new BMC SL01. “Jump aboard” the last man said. And I did, for what felt like 40 agonisingly long kms.
I suffered. I didn’t see the green sea in the straits, nor the mountain peaks in the distance, all I saw was the wheel in front as I throttled my bars/brakes with a deathly grip and tried to concentrate through the rivulets of sweat. “See you next week” someone called as the peloton deposited me back in Wellington City.
Jelly legs. Dripping with sweat on the outside, lungs so dry they felt like sandpaper inside my chest. Did they really say “next week” – thats how it sounded to my ringing neural processes. Maybe it was “see you, you’re too weak.” Yet, I was hooked and next Sunday, there I was, waiting part way through the designated route and thats how I joined the Onslow Tarbabies.
My training week was 2 or sometimes 3 x 50km rides (commutes, 24km each way) and the Tarbabies Sunday long ride (80-90km). And a whole lot of useful advice and useless banter from the group. I was 93 kgs, 1.78m tall and struggled like a number of short, slightly heavy men in their 40s to get up the hills with a recreational group.
For the first 4 months I rode without a computer. All my rides were essentially the same – just struggling along to complete the distance, probably ‘at tempo’ would be a generous way to describe it. Another way would be to say, that I was quite taxed to finish every ride. After 4 months I purchased a Polar CS600 HR monitor / computer. And immediately ruined a real wheel (staring at data on a descent, hit a boulder). But the understanding that came with heart rate information gave me a baseline and a challenge. The stats bug got me. Although in reality I barely had a need for the data – I turned the alarm off – why would I need to know which intensity level I was at? But seeing the parts of information together – cadence, heart rate, altitude, speed, distance – created awareness and discipline in training.
I slipped in some 55km Saturday rides, over a scenic country route with 450m of climbing. Beautiful, quiet routes that looked like rural France. Alongside this were the weekly unavoidable climbs. My commute has a 180m climb (in 2kms) and its unavoidable, both ways. Carrying my bulk up the hills paid big dividends. Month by month I was improving on the hills and exhaustion levels at the end of the ride. By mid winter – June, I started to ride to the start of the Sunday group ride. This meant climbing 260m in 3kms to the meeting point. These climbs were achingly hard – and at the slowest cadence. But these climbs did something – they built leg strength in the fastest way possible.
By mid winter (June 2008) I was fit enough to ride with (or rather, stubbornly stick to the back of) the first group. The fit older men. Dropped on every climb, the relaxed atmosphere gave me a chance to get back. This wasn’t a racing club, the encouragement and friendly group feeling gave me every incentive. But the penny didn’t drop on the goal of this recreational peleton for a while. Why does this group do this? In November they aim for an iconic race – 160kms!
Preparing for Taupo, part 2….
A new road bike, 2006 BMC SL01.
Not for those seeking honey. A bike is nirvana in the swarm.
The Beehive. Cycling in the middle of the bunch. 
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