Workouts - Stack em High

"Warm up for a solid hour at Endurance pace. Hammer eight all out intervals recovering for one minute between intervals.Cruise for 15 minutes or so and then begin four 10 minute intervals at Threshold increasing your cadence by 5rpm. Rest for 10 minutes between intervals. Finish by riding 45 minutes in Sweetspot riding just below threshold."

The above is a sample workout picked at random from the latest edition of "Training and Racing with Power" There is absolutely nothing wrong with the workout, indeed to the contrary it is an excellent example of a one that is challenging, fun to do and very likely to help build fitness.

All in all it will take about 4 hours or so to complete, so quite a while. But what I am about to suggest applies equally to workouts of this length, of even more or much less time.

The suggestion is a simple one. Use every workout as an opportunity to squeeze in as many things as possible.

That is think of all the many things that you would ideally like to practice and stack every workout with as much of these as possible.

There are three major benefits to this approach

• Every workout becomes a lot more productive. Instead of just improving your fitness you can be improving your fitness and much else beyond.
• It helps time pass. The more things your mind is working on the quicker time will fly by. This isn't necessarily a good thing but it usually is as it means you are having fun and enjoying yourself. But think of the counter case. When time really drags its usually because you are bored. Or when working out it can be when you are feeling exhausted and the end seems a long way away.
• It recreates reality. Workouts are the ideal way to prepare for real life conditions, such as the need to eat and drink or deal with unexpected situations. It is much better to practice, say, getting your food out of your back pocket while wearing a rain jacket than doing it for the first time in a race.

The approach towards stacking can be methodical. Creating a list of every possible thing you may want to practice then ensuring these are all ticked off at some point.

Or you can just do whatever you fancy. Set a number, say 4 and aim to do incorporate that many additional things.

It really doesn't matter, just doing one extra thing is already a start.

So purely off the cuff here are some suggestions for the workout above.

• During the hour at Endurance pace ramp cadence up and down between say 60 and 100rpm. Really focus on a smooth steady pedal stroke.
• Set an alarm on your Garmin at 20 minutes when you will plan to eat 20g of carbs and drink 1/3 of a bottle of water.
• During the Endurance hour spend a steady 20 minutes in the drops trying to be as aerodynamic as you can possibly be without affecting the smoothness of your pedal stroke.
• For the eight one minute intervals imagine it is you and a team mate trying to work together to get to the finish before the pack. Visualise yourself in a race winnning move or try to imagine you are a pro in the Tour de France in that situation.
• During the recovery after try putting on and taking off a gilet while still riding, If this is too difficult just practice riding no hands for short intervals.
• During the recovery, when it is safe, practice bunny hopping at speed. This may seem like a dangerous maneuver but it is an essential skill.  
• During the Threshold efforts focus on breathing, Really feel yourself using your diaphragm and synchonise your breathing with your pedal stroke. Also focus on your weaker leg. Make it work harder than your stronger leg. 
• For the Sweetspot imagine it is a long steady mountain climb, every now and then stand up and stretch, again imagining you are doing this up a climb. Break the time down into chunks and just focus on nailing each chunk not thinking about the full 45 minute duration.

That's enough I think to provide the idea. Stack em high...

TTT BMI

We are just having a discussion about Zwift team time trial tactics.

I've proposed a simple one and it struck me that it follows a universal formula that I have applied with great success not only to cycling but all my life.

As with all great ideas it requires a TLA, so this one is "BMI".

• Baseline: Deciding where I am at the moment for whatever I want to make better, basically what exactly it is
• Measure: Just do it and find out where I am
• Improve: Improve the measure in some way. Which takes me back to B.

So for the TTT the baseline I'm proposing is we keep it dead simple and just aim that the lead rider holds 5.0 W/kg  (Baseline) for a minute(Baseline) then the next rider moves up. So everyone will end up doing 1 minute at or over FTP and 4-7 minutes under, which should be possible (and also happens to a very good workout).


Depending on whether it turns out to be easy or hard (Measure) it will be a simple matter to change either of the 2 key variable of target power or duration, hopefully in the "Improve" direction.

The Picture That Changed My Life

This picture changed my life. To me it is a thing of pure beauty.

Actually to be accurate it was a picture like this not this one.

But it doesn't matter because the beauty lies not in the picture itself but what it represents.

Way back in 2007 I became interested in taking training more seriously and followed the blog of Flamme Rouge Tony. 

http://www.flammerouge.je/home/home.htm

He's a guy who lives in Jersey and he was way ahead of the trend in many ways. Just one was his love of sportives, at a time when most British cyclists had never heard the word and he was was on the reasons I started trying them for myself.

But the thing that was really special about him was that he was power mad. He was absolutely clear that power meters were the way ahead and his infectious enthusiasm came across in every one of his posts.

He was so convincing that I arranged to go and see him, in order to perform my first ever ramp test. He made me very welcome and also took me on a tour of the island with a couple of his mates. One of them owned a bike shop and before the trip we had agreed a price on a Powertap wheel, my first ever power meter.

After the island tour Tony opened up his lap top, connected his Garmin, did a bit of stuff then told me to take a look. This was another baptism, my introduction to WKO.

He took me through the ride we had just done, explaining the various graphs and I loved every minute of it. Seeing the long steady drags, the really tough hills and the peak when we had a sprint.

But then he showed me the picture like the one above. He explained that what it showed was something called "mean maximal power" (or MMP). This is a complicated name for a simple idea. It just captures on one line how much power you can produce and how long you can hold it for.

It's a plot of watts vs time so it starts high in the top left because you can produce a lot of power for a short time. But if you try to push for longer the power comes down. In fact it comes down very quickly. The time axis on the bottom is a logarithmic scale, so the left hand side is represents much less time than the right. (It has to be like this or it would not be possible to see any detail,)  For illustration, In the example above the line near halfway is just under 2 minutes while the extreme right is 20 hours.

As an example, at my best, if I go all out I can just about produce 800W. But for a minute the max is around 500W. For 5 minutes its around 400W, for 20 minutes 340W, for an hour 310W and for 4 hours 250W. So its very obvious how quickly power changes with time, In fact my power changes less than most others which is why I'm more comfortable doing longer events that do not involve and sprinting.

You can choose to report on any time period. So the line may just be for a single ride. Or a week, or a month.

But the magic came when Tony told me what he was showing me. He said the bottom line was this year's power. The upper line was his best ever power. He explained that he had a simple mission, every year he wanted to get the lower line to meet and ideally pass the upper line.

In plain English this meant that his goal was to set new personal bests, but seeing it as a picture like this felt so much more real than just a set of numbers.

My life changed at that instant. From then on, through to the present and for the rest of my days Tony's goal became my goal. I love going for rides, downloading my stats and seeing how close I have come to a new PB.

I reset the bottom line every birthday and the graph above is about one month in. It's obvious I still have a way to go. Still there is already good news, which the line highlights, I've already managed to a small nudge up.

One of the main reasons for starting this blog is to give me the motivation to keep pushing so I can post updates when another breakthrough happens.

Technology has moved on so now I can even see the picture when I am riding. On many occasions it has been the spur to make be push harder as it changes colour at that point which means more to me than any race finish position,

But watts are not all that there is to this picture.

The really great thing about it is the bottom time axis, because it ranges from 1s to as long as you can ride a bike. So the quest to move the entire line upwards means I have been encouraged to try pretty much every form or road bike riding from criteriums where I could try (and fail) to win a sprint finish to 1000 mile epics riding continuously for days with barely a pause to sleep.

I would never have done this or even a fraction without the drive to raise the line. I will forever be in Tony's debt for changing my life for the much much better.

Mind Game - Using The Placebo Effect to Best Effect

I took a degree in psychology so I'm biased but have always believed that as well as building physical fitness, developing mental fitness is also important in achieving one's goals.

That's not to say you can think yourself fit. You can't. You have to work. But your mentality can be a great friend or a mortal enemy in actually doing the work and in reaping its benefits.

It is obviously best to have your mind on your side so I thought I would share a bizarre but simple trick to help with this, one that I learned at university and have used with great effect in cycling.

Placebo

Most will be familiar with the "placebo" effect. This an extremely powerful though still very mysterious phenomenon where the mind can affect the body for good or ill. It is so strong that all drug or similar trials have to be done "double blind" in order that any effects of the experiment, good or bad, are known to really be a result of the drug and not just what those taking part think it will do.

What is less familiar is the even stranger fact that the placebo effect can happen even if someone knows they are being given a fake. So you can tell someone that a tablet will provide a benefit, give them a tablet, then tell them that the tablet is a fake. Still the person will get some of the benefit. It may seem stranger than fiction but its been repeatedly demonstrated.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-know-placebo-201607079926

Breaking the Century

So how to apply this to cycling? Here is an example from my own experience. A while back I was chasing time trial records. One ambition was to be the first person in my club to ride 100 miles in under 4 hours. I had several attempts and each time came maddeningly close, just a few minutes over.

I realised part of the problem was the pacing. Obviously the average is 25mph but it extremely hard to hold that as a steady speed for such a long time. At times you go faster and at times slower. Whenever I saw the numbers dip under 25 and especially under 24 I would get stressed and try to push harder, trying to go at 26 or 27 to even things out.

This is fine once or twice but over 100 miles this in itself became taxing and I would find myself doubting if I would make up the lost time. This self doubt is exactly the sort of thing that I meant when saying your mind can be your enemy. When time trialing it is just you and the bike. There is little by way of distraction and once the first negative thought drips into your head it can quickly turn into a torrent.

So for my next attempt I went back to my university days and tried out an experiment on myself. My speed was calculated from my wheel size. So I subtracted a few inches from this so that when I was going at a real 25mph it would appear as 24.9 or something on the display (I deliberately didn't do any exact calculations, I just knew it would be less than 25)

My theory was that this would make me more relaxed. 24 would be the new normal and every time 25 showed I would be ahead of pace but not too much so. Also I would be less likely to dip below 24.

For the race I set my display to only show speed, nothing else not even the time or distance. Then I rode, just focusing on keeping the display in the high 24s and giving myself a pat on the back every time I went into the 25s which, of course, happened a lot.

The time ticked by a lot more quickly than on previous attempts and only when I finished did I check the clock. I had smashed my PB, taking 10 minutes off it, finishing in 3:55 so it was mission accomplished. Despite the theory I was amazed but very pleased that it had worked so well.

Other Applications

I have repeatedly used the same trick since. It doesn't always work, the mind gets used to things, but it has been successful more often than not and even when it is not an outright success it still helps keep the mind occupied and is better than nothing.

But much more often than not its been a great help. Here are a couple of examples:

• Having broken the club record at the sprint distance of 100 miles my next target was a the 12 hour one. The main problem with this event is from just past 1/2 way until 3/4. At this point you are very tired but the finish still seems a long long way away (because it is!). So I paced on "chunks" breaking the 12 hours down into 24 half hour laps. Except for the early laps I didn't hit the lap button until several minutes late, again not looking at real time, just using the lap counter as information. This way I mentally thought I was still not quite half way even though I was actually well past. When, inevitably, my spirits started to flag once I was past "half" way I checked the real clock and as if by magic jumped forward an hour or so, much closer to 3/4 with spirits high, battery recharged and record comfortably in sight.
• I use pretty much the same trick when climbing high mountains. Again with these the hardest part is after half way, especially so if, as is often the case the gradient is worse there. I pace my climbs on elevation. At the bottom I work out where the summit will be based on current height. I then add 100-200 extra metres (tip climbing in metres feels easier than climbing in feet as the numbers are much less daunting). I then work out how far through I am based on this new number. Again if I feel rough (which will always be in the later stages of the climb) I remind myself that of the trick I played and whoosh I am suddenly much higher.

So in conclusion. These ideas may seem barmy but in fact they are based on hard science and they can work wonders. The mind can be very suggestible especially when under the sort of pressure lots of hard slog puts on it so it's best to give it suggestions that work in ones favour rather than allow it to come up with ideas of its own like "wouldn't it just be easier to give up now?"

Moving Goals Post

Training is all about chasing goals. But then so is life. These can come in a variety of forms and this post takes a brief look at these and what they entail.

One aspect it highlights is that goals can shift and change with time. What can start as just a hobby can become an all consuming passion. And vice versa, it is easy to be a jack of all trades but being a master of one (let alone a few) takes focus and that requires discrimination. In my case for example I had a period from 2006 to 2010 when it was all about cycling. Then my wife and I did the walk of a lifetime so cycling played a second fiddle as it continued to do so while I took gaming to the limit and explored the world of WOW. 

When I returned to cycling around 2014 or so ish it was just to lose the weight I had gained, then I tried to reignite my time trialing but failed to really do so. But instead I discovered a new world, that of VR.  This allowed me to ride the climbs I love any time of the year in my own four walls. This in turn reignited the desire to improve and the self belief that I could do so despite getting "older".  Now I fully returned, my passion greater than ever. 

Here then is my take on types of goals along with brief reflections on how they relate to my here and now.

Fun

The simplest but also most essential. It is perfectly OK to ride a bike just for the sheer fun of it and nothing more. Ditto just about anything, be it doodling, gardening, cooking, taking a walk, whatever. 

My take: Fun is funny in that it is in the eye of the beholder.  What I have discovered is that for me the fun of cycling is the buzz of riding hard. It's probably the main reason I have become as good as I am. I just love smashing myself up, picking myself up and going again.

Benefit 

The other basic goal. For cycling the main benefit is that of fitness, along with the ability a bike gives you to just blow away the cobwebs and head off in any direction seeking pastures new or familiar. However ideally benefit will go hand in hand with fun. Doing something that one hates or even just doesn't particularly like just for a benefit, no matter how important, is unlikely to be something that one can sustain for a long time.

My take: The reason I started cycling. As a way to lose fat. Spurred on by boxed sets of 24 I managed this and only then started to find the fun side.

Completion 

This is the next rung upwards. Now the goal takes a definitive form. It may be to complete a 25 mile ride. Or to climb a mountain. Or finish an event. Whatever, the satisfaction lies in a job well done and accomplishing something. This is great, the only downside is that the first time is often the best time. Reaching the summit of a climb, when all around is new, is often the best experience. The second time round does not always quite elicit the same feelings

My take: This was the vital stepping stone. I started just wanting to be able to ride 25 miles and climb our local hills without getting off to push. 

Progression

The logical follow up to Completion, this is building on success and taking it a bit further. So after riding 25 miles going for 50 and then 100. Or after climbing one mountain aiming for two.

My take: To extremes. Looking back I can't believe that I decided to go from never having ridden a 100 miles to riding the Tour de France in a few months. But I did and it was the experience of a lifetime.  

The other massive take on this was the discovery of power and the MMP curve. I'll write about this shortly but ever since discovering these my whole focus has been about progression, progression, progression. 

Exploration 

Another follow up that may involve any of the above but trying a slightly different tack. So perhaps riding 25 miles off road. Or taking part in an Audax or a sportive. Or aiming to climb 100 different mountains. Or doing any of the above on a tandem.

My take: The tour of course but more interestingly has been that my quest for progression has led to me trying to be good at every type of road bike activity that exists, from short criterium racing to ultra long endurance events and everything between.

Speed – Another logical follow up to Completion, that can also go alongside Progression. Now the goal involves an element of competition. For Completion the main enemy is bad luck. Now it is the clock, though luck may still play a its part.

My take: This was my main goal 2008-2009 and it was very fulfilling chasing and beating time trial records and entering sportives going for the top standards. However after a while it began to pall. On my return I tried to focus on time trialing but it was never really something that I hugely enjoyed and I don't miss it much. 

Ranking – This marks a step change. All the previous goals are fundamentally intrinsic. It is just about doing it.. Ranking goals bring in an entirely new element, that of judging yourself against others. This can be a double edged sword, on the one hand competition brings out the best in many and its spur can drive one on to new heights. However on the other hand ultimate sucess is now in the hands of others for all but the very best of the best.

My take: I got into this 2008-2010 as well. It's fun for a while but really I much prefer beating my own PBs rather than some stranger. Still the spur of aiming to improve ranking can help motivation so from that end I continue to use this as a way to push myself. But I don't think I'll ever get massively into things like Zwift racing. It's just a good way to train and will remain so.

Being the best that one can be – A paradox. The terms can be set as one chooses, the essential point is that one feels one has done all one can possibly do.

In one sense this is the ultimate goal, it means performing to the very best of what one is capable of while taking account of limitations such as natural potential or resources.

However it may, indeed almost always does, require accepting compromise. One may simply never be able to be the best in the country, or town, or within a group of friends. Still being the best that one can be, however defined and whatever it actually means in terms of any of the goals above (though having fun at the same time is pretty essential to achieving this) is probably the best that one can aspire to.

My take: This is it for me. My overriding goal is to use a science based training approach to see how far i can progress in terms of increasing my power and/or resisting the supposed ravages of age.