It seems these days that everyone has some kind of cool climbing calculator - you've already read about my pretty cool Low Key Hill Climb Converter in a recent post (yeah - like my *last* post!).
Well it seems my beefed-up LKHC Converter spurred on others to see what they could cook up - and the top climber in this year's LKHC series, Tim Clark, came up with something pretty cool himself - what he calls his Climbing Power Calculator (version 0.1) - and here is what he says about it (I could paraphrase it, but Tim did a pretty good job of explaining it in an e-mail to the LKHC e-mail list - I hope you don't mind, Tim!) :
After seeing Steve Rosen's LKHC Climb Prediction page ... I got motivated to try to implement something in Adobe/Macromedia Flex.
Ultimately ... my goal is to have something which is capable of taking your 'Average Threshold Power' ... and applying it to the different (instantaneous) gradients throughout the climb ... hopefully giving you the best possible estimate of your time.
In order to do this ... I implemented the Power Profile spreadsheet that I found - which solves the quadratic equation for your climbing velocity based on a number of parameters (distance, grade, wind, rolling resistance, and POWER).
I also needed to be able to read the MotionBased (exported) XML files, so that I could get access to the Distance vs. Altitude data. I did this on the left 'pane' ... where it displays a plot of the MB data.
At present, it just pulls the (available) climb data for the climbs (I'm still missing a bunch), stuffs values into the Power Calc sheet, and allows you to Predict your Time based on the data. You can fool around with Rider Weight, Equip Weight, Head Wind, Power, etc ... and see how they would affect your times for the various climbs.
It's *FAR* from finished, but I thought I'd share it wit everybody, so that I can get feedback as I continue to fool around with it.
Well, I fooled around with Tim's new Climbing Power Calculator - and it's really pretty good. The main problem I see with his calculator is that it requires you to *know* your average power for a climb! Well, anyone with a power meter (like Tim and countless other more serious cyclists - especially the better racers) have access to this very important power information.
But others of us - me included - don't have power meters (yet!) - so with this in mind, I decided it would be useful to have YACC (Yet Another Climbing Calculator) - but I just call it The Climb Calculator.
So what's the big deal about this one?
Simple - I wanted a generic climb calculator, so I can play those "what if" games for *any* climb that I choose to do. And not just the LKHC climbs that most of us are so familiar with.
Also, what if *you* are convinced the elevation or distance info for one of the LKHC climbs is *wrong*?
Or, what if you think my choice of 50.0 watts of power needed to overcome tire pressure, wind resistance, extra cold weather, a bad hair day, etc. - is simply wrong and should really be 45.321 watts?
This Climb Calculator will feel familiar to you - except you can enter the *exact* height of a climb (in feet), and the *precise* distance (in miles) for that climb.
Then, do the usual - either enter time information (mins:secs) and/or weight information (and notice that you now enter the rider weight and the equipment weight as separate numbers - and it will automatically figure out the total weight - a good idea I saw in Tim Clark's cool calculator). You can also optionally enter in power information, if you have it!.
Note that if you enter in your average power information for a climb (and you don't have to - it will determine your power info from your weight and time, if you want), you can optionally enter in the "extra watts", i.e., that magic number (I use 50.0 for the LKHC Converter) that accounts for all the power you need to "move the bike", as Al Williams pointed out.
And, of course, this Climb Calculator let's you play all those fun "what if" games, by changing the rider weight (or, the equipment weight - or both!) and seeing the change in the climbing time. Or, you can change the average power output for your climb, and see the climbing time get re-calculated, etc.
I did this because I have good data for a lot of the climbs I do - dozens of major climbs, but also dozens of smaller climbs - some that are just a 1/2 mile long or so. Now I can see the effects of weight change or power change on all those climbs.
And, of course, for all those *big* climbs that we do, but have not been done by the LKHC (yet) - like Alba Rd - or Jamison Creek - or the San Bruno HC, etc. - you can now see what happens when you control yourself and stop having those second helpings of lasagna, that extra piece of apple pie, etc. - or do those extra hill repeats in the middle of winter and increase your power output by 2%, etc.
Have fun!
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The LKHC Converter - first release now available
Most of you that read this blog regularly (yeah - both of us) know about a great hill climbing series that is quite, uh, low key - the Low Key Hill Climb series (LKHC) - you can read all about this year's festivities right here.
I wanted to participate in the series this year, but we all know what a disaster it's been for me the last few months - I totally lost the (little) climbing ability I had so carefully gained in the first half of the year, as I delved back into the exciting world of bike racing for the first time in 30 years, starting back in about July of this year.
But a number of my friends did the LKHC series this year - and I always followed the action, anxiously waiting to see the results published later that day or the next (each climb was done on a Saturday, except for the last one, which is traditionally done on Thanksgiving morning and goes up Mt Hamilton).
I sent out some e-mails to some biking buddies of mine, to let them know about a great set of conversion charts that one of the organizers of the LKHC series, Dan Connelly, had put together for the 1995 and 1996 editions of the series. The LKHC series was abandoned for about 10 years, but was resurrected in 2006, and was so popular, they did it again this year - and gained even *more* converts! I suspect it will be even bigger in 2008.
The 1995 conversion chart and the 1996 conversion chart provided you with these cool conversion factors, so that if you knew your time up one of the climbs, you could use the conversion factors for that climb to calculate (or, predict) your expected times for all the other climbs.
I've used those conversion charts a lot in the last few months - in fact, a previous blog entry I wrote explained Why I Want To Climb OLH in 19:10. But I always calculated my predicted times the old-fashioned way, with a calculator, of course... :)
But one of my cycling buddies, Rich Seiter, sent me an Excel spreadsheet that allowed you to enter in your climbing time for one of the climbs, and then it would automatically calculate all your predicted times for the other climbs done that year - how cool! I made a few minor tweaks of his Excel spreadsheet and sent it out to all the rest of my biking buddies, with Rich's blessings, of course (thanks, Rich!).
But then I got to thinking - wouldn't it be cool to have an online version of that same concept? And hence, the LKHC Converter project was born - and now you can see the results for yourself:
The LKHC Converter
After I put out the first version of this web page, I let Dan Connelly know about it, and encouraged him to create similar conversion charts for the 2006 LKHC and 2007 LKHC series - and he said he'd do just that. He also asked me to let the LKHC e-mail list know about it - and so I did.
Naturally, I got all kinds of feedback - and as different ideas and requests came in, it got fancier and fancier - with more features and more goodies. The current version you see now represents about the 10th iteration of that web page!
So have some fun and play around with it - and drop me a note if you have any comments/suggestions to make - I'd love to hear your ideas.
And when Dan gets me those new conversion charts for 2006 and 2007, I'll be sure to update the LKHC Converter, of course.
I'm also working on creating a version of that same web page for our local cycling group - it would have a lot of the other climbs that many of us do in the local Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz area - but I won't have as many data points to use to create the tables that drive it, so it will mostly be useful to just a few of us, I suspect.
But who knows? Maybe this will be the start of a whole new career... :)
I wanted to participate in the series this year, but we all know what a disaster it's been for me the last few months - I totally lost the (little) climbing ability I had so carefully gained in the first half of the year, as I delved back into the exciting world of bike racing for the first time in 30 years, starting back in about July of this year.
But a number of my friends did the LKHC series this year - and I always followed the action, anxiously waiting to see the results published later that day or the next (each climb was done on a Saturday, except for the last one, which is traditionally done on Thanksgiving morning and goes up Mt Hamilton).
I sent out some e-mails to some biking buddies of mine, to let them know about a great set of conversion charts that one of the organizers of the LKHC series, Dan Connelly, had put together for the 1995 and 1996 editions of the series. The LKHC series was abandoned for about 10 years, but was resurrected in 2006, and was so popular, they did it again this year - and gained even *more* converts! I suspect it will be even bigger in 2008.
The 1995 conversion chart and the 1996 conversion chart provided you with these cool conversion factors, so that if you knew your time up one of the climbs, you could use the conversion factors for that climb to calculate (or, predict) your expected times for all the other climbs.
I've used those conversion charts a lot in the last few months - in fact, a previous blog entry I wrote explained Why I Want To Climb OLH in 19:10. But I always calculated my predicted times the old-fashioned way, with a calculator, of course... :)
But one of my cycling buddies, Rich Seiter, sent me an Excel spreadsheet that allowed you to enter in your climbing time for one of the climbs, and then it would automatically calculate all your predicted times for the other climbs done that year - how cool! I made a few minor tweaks of his Excel spreadsheet and sent it out to all the rest of my biking buddies, with Rich's blessings, of course (thanks, Rich!).
But then I got to thinking - wouldn't it be cool to have an online version of that same concept? And hence, the LKHC Converter project was born - and now you can see the results for yourself:
The LKHC Converter
After I put out the first version of this web page, I let Dan Connelly know about it, and encouraged him to create similar conversion charts for the 2006 LKHC and 2007 LKHC series - and he said he'd do just that. He also asked me to let the LKHC e-mail list know about it - and so I did.
Naturally, I got all kinds of feedback - and as different ideas and requests came in, it got fancier and fancier - with more features and more goodies. The current version you see now represents about the 10th iteration of that web page!
So have some fun and play around with it - and drop me a note if you have any comments/suggestions to make - I'd love to hear your ideas.
And when Dan gets me those new conversion charts for 2006 and 2007, I'll be sure to update the LKHC Converter, of course.
I'm also working on creating a version of that same web page for our local cycling group - it would have a lot of the other climbs that many of us do in the local Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz area - but I won't have as many data points to use to create the tables that drive it, so it will mostly be useful to just a few of us, I suspect.
But who knows? Maybe this will be the start of a whole new career... :)
Sunday, December 9, 2007
My "Secret" Training Program
Well, I guess it won't be much of a secret, if I'm publishing it here on my blog - but there are only one or two of us that read my blog anyway, and we both know about my "secret" training program.
But I thought I'd put it out there for posterity's sake - who knows - it could be a valuable training tool for some poor sucker that used to be in pretty good shape, somehow lost their conditioning, and wants to get it back again. Gee - that could describe me this year! And hence, I've devised a new, "secret" training program to whip myself back into shape as soon as possible.
What's the rush, you might ask?
Well, for one thing, the first race of the season, the San Bruno Hillclimb, is on January 1st - just 3 weeks from now! It's only a 3.7 mile climb, gaining about 1400 feet of elevation - very similar to Old La Honda (which gains 1330 feet in 3.3 miles). In fact, your time up San Bruno should be not more than about 1 minute slower than your time up Old La Honda, mostly because of the slightly longer distance.
Another reason - the first road race of the season that I intend to ride is the Cantua Creek RR on February 16 - just 2 months from now.
And finally, the Tour of California will be happening February 17 through February 24, and a few of us will be taking a "sanity day" off on Wednesday, February 20, to ride up Sierra Rd in the morning, and watch the TOC roll up over the summit of Sierra towards the end of that day's stage race - and I want to be able to climb Sierra Rd in a good time (33 minutes would be real nice!) - and right now, I'd be lucky to do that climb in 43 minutes!
Well, to climb Sierra Rd in just 33 minutes, I'd have to be able to climb Old La Honda in record time (for me) - just 22:51 (my current PB from earlier this year was 23:18), or Kings Mtn Rd in just 28:55 - and I haven't even broken 30 minutes on Kings Mtn Rd yet!
So, I've got my work cut out for me! Oh, how do I know about those times for Old La Honda and Kings Mtn Rd? Simple - just check out my Low Key Hill Climb Converters web page - it has these cool calculators that allow you to enter in a known time for some climb (say, 33:00 for Sierra Rd on the 1995 Climbs converter) - and it will predict your climbing times on all the other climbs done that year in the Low Key Hill Climb series. Those converters were fun to do, based on the fine work (conversion charts) that Dan Connelly did on the 1995 and 1996 renditions of those hillclimb series.
So what does this all have to do with my "secret" training program? And just what IS the "secret" training program, anyway? And why is it such a "secret"?
Okay - all good questions. And, I have some answers. If you've read any of my earlier blogs, you know that I've had this problem recently - I inadvertently lost a lot of climbing conditioning as I got into road racing this year (in the second half of the year, starting in July). I was on a great training program in the first half of the year, doing lots of climbing - almost every day, in fact!
But once I discovered how much climbing ability I had lost a couple of months ago, I got quite depressed - and instead of starting to just climb again, I got more and more out of climbing shape - and also just lost conditioning, in general, as my riding volume decreased quite a bit! I started missing many days in a row - sometimes as much as a week without riding at all! What a mess...
But now I've hit upon a really good idea to get myself motivated again, in a way that will demand a lot of work, but will be fun at the same time, which I believe is one of the "secrets" to any training program - you have to design something that works for YOU - and not somebody else! That's been my mistake - I've been trying too hard to bounce back according to someone else's ideas about how to bounce back - and not due to anything that anyone else has told me - it's been completely created in my own head, where I'm looking for answers and asking questions from all kinds of people that I admire and respect - and listening to their answers and advice, but forgetting to listen to the one person that knows best - me!
So here's my "secret": You know best how to motivate yourself - so use whatever "tricks" it takes to motivate yourself, then apply those tricks and let nature take its course - how simple can that be?
And, here's my "trick": I'm going to ride from my work location every day (it's in San Mateo), climbing over some small hills to get to Canada Rd - then I'll do a very moderate 5.0-mile time trial along Canada Rd, heading for the base of Kings Mtn Rd. After doing the 5.0-mile time trial, I'll go nice and easy for a few miles to get to the start of the Kings Mtn climb, then climb it hard, starting at Tripp Rd, and going up exactly 1.4 miles (this will be about 10 minutes or so, which is 1/3 of the climb of Kings Mtn Rd). Then, I'll turn around and head back to work, doing another moderate-paced 5.0-mile time trial on Canada Rd. This will be day 1 (Monday, December 10). On day 2, I'll do the exact same ride, but add 0.1 miles to the hard climb - and "hard" means at a time-trial climbing pace, or zone 5.0+ (about 162 bpm for me). This extra 0.1 miles will be an extra 45 seconds of hard climbing or so. And, each day, I'll continue to add 0.1 miles to the climb - and by the end of 28 days, or on January 7, 2008 - I'll be able to do a hard time trial pace up Kings Mtn Rd, all the way to the top (which is 4.2 miles - or 1.4 miles plus the 2.8 miles that I will have added by then, in 0.1 mile increments).
Hopefully, this "secret" training program will result in me being able to climb Kings Mtn Rd in about 30 minutes, which would be a new PB for me. Then, all I have to do at that point is try and and take off another minute or so from my climbing time, but I will have a good 6 weeks to get that done, before the big day on Sierra Rd (on Wednesday, February 20).
Another benefit is that I will working on those 5.0-mile time trials on Canada Rd, which is where the Beat-the-Clock time trial series are held - and as I get in better conditioning, I'll mix in some days where I do those time trial segments at a harder and harder pace, until I am doing the 5.0-mile time trial segments at close to a true time-trial pace - so by the time the first Beat-the-Clock time trial comes along (which I believe will be in about the middle of February, like this year), I should be in good enough shape to do well for that 10.0-mile time trial, where I will try to match or beat my best time this year, which was 26:14, or 23 mph.
And, as an added plus, this "secret" training program should get me in good enough shape to be able to do the San Bruno Hill Climb on January 1st in a time of about 24:xx (under 25 minutes) - and I get this number by using a Kings Mtn climbing time of 30 minutes in that LKHC Converter page, and noting that the Old La Honda time would be about 23:42 - and as I said, your time up San Bruno should not be much more than one minute slower than your Old La Honda time.
Make sense? Well, it doesn't really matter if it makes sense to YOU - the key is, it makes sense to ME!
...And that is the big "secret"... :)
But I thought I'd put it out there for posterity's sake - who knows - it could be a valuable training tool for some poor sucker that used to be in pretty good shape, somehow lost their conditioning, and wants to get it back again. Gee - that could describe me this year! And hence, I've devised a new, "secret" training program to whip myself back into shape as soon as possible.
What's the rush, you might ask?
Well, for one thing, the first race of the season, the San Bruno Hillclimb, is on January 1st - just 3 weeks from now! It's only a 3.7 mile climb, gaining about 1400 feet of elevation - very similar to Old La Honda (which gains 1330 feet in 3.3 miles). In fact, your time up San Bruno should be not more than about 1 minute slower than your time up Old La Honda, mostly because of the slightly longer distance.
Another reason - the first road race of the season that I intend to ride is the Cantua Creek RR on February 16 - just 2 months from now.
And finally, the Tour of California will be happening February 17 through February 24, and a few of us will be taking a "sanity day" off on Wednesday, February 20, to ride up Sierra Rd in the morning, and watch the TOC roll up over the summit of Sierra towards the end of that day's stage race - and I want to be able to climb Sierra Rd in a good time (33 minutes would be real nice!) - and right now, I'd be lucky to do that climb in 43 minutes!
Well, to climb Sierra Rd in just 33 minutes, I'd have to be able to climb Old La Honda in record time (for me) - just 22:51 (my current PB from earlier this year was 23:18), or Kings Mtn Rd in just 28:55 - and I haven't even broken 30 minutes on Kings Mtn Rd yet!
So, I've got my work cut out for me! Oh, how do I know about those times for Old La Honda and Kings Mtn Rd? Simple - just check out my Low Key Hill Climb Converters web page - it has these cool calculators that allow you to enter in a known time for some climb (say, 33:00 for Sierra Rd on the 1995 Climbs converter) - and it will predict your climbing times on all the other climbs done that year in the Low Key Hill Climb series. Those converters were fun to do, based on the fine work (conversion charts) that Dan Connelly did on the 1995 and 1996 renditions of those hillclimb series.
So what does this all have to do with my "secret" training program? And just what IS the "secret" training program, anyway? And why is it such a "secret"?
Okay - all good questions. And, I have some answers. If you've read any of my earlier blogs, you know that I've had this problem recently - I inadvertently lost a lot of climbing conditioning as I got into road racing this year (in the second half of the year, starting in July). I was on a great training program in the first half of the year, doing lots of climbing - almost every day, in fact!
But once I discovered how much climbing ability I had lost a couple of months ago, I got quite depressed - and instead of starting to just climb again, I got more and more out of climbing shape - and also just lost conditioning, in general, as my riding volume decreased quite a bit! I started missing many days in a row - sometimes as much as a week without riding at all! What a mess...
But now I've hit upon a really good idea to get myself motivated again, in a way that will demand a lot of work, but will be fun at the same time, which I believe is one of the "secrets" to any training program - you have to design something that works for YOU - and not somebody else! That's been my mistake - I've been trying too hard to bounce back according to someone else's ideas about how to bounce back - and not due to anything that anyone else has told me - it's been completely created in my own head, where I'm looking for answers and asking questions from all kinds of people that I admire and respect - and listening to their answers and advice, but forgetting to listen to the one person that knows best - me!
So here's my "secret": You know best how to motivate yourself - so use whatever "tricks" it takes to motivate yourself, then apply those tricks and let nature take its course - how simple can that be?
And, here's my "trick": I'm going to ride from my work location every day (it's in San Mateo), climbing over some small hills to get to Canada Rd - then I'll do a very moderate 5.0-mile time trial along Canada Rd, heading for the base of Kings Mtn Rd. After doing the 5.0-mile time trial, I'll go nice and easy for a few miles to get to the start of the Kings Mtn climb, then climb it hard, starting at Tripp Rd, and going up exactly 1.4 miles (this will be about 10 minutes or so, which is 1/3 of the climb of Kings Mtn Rd). Then, I'll turn around and head back to work, doing another moderate-paced 5.0-mile time trial on Canada Rd. This will be day 1 (Monday, December 10). On day 2, I'll do the exact same ride, but add 0.1 miles to the hard climb - and "hard" means at a time-trial climbing pace, or zone 5.0+ (about 162 bpm for me). This extra 0.1 miles will be an extra 45 seconds of hard climbing or so. And, each day, I'll continue to add 0.1 miles to the climb - and by the end of 28 days, or on January 7, 2008 - I'll be able to do a hard time trial pace up Kings Mtn Rd, all the way to the top (which is 4.2 miles - or 1.4 miles plus the 2.8 miles that I will have added by then, in 0.1 mile increments).
Hopefully, this "secret" training program will result in me being able to climb Kings Mtn Rd in about 30 minutes, which would be a new PB for me. Then, all I have to do at that point is try and and take off another minute or so from my climbing time, but I will have a good 6 weeks to get that done, before the big day on Sierra Rd (on Wednesday, February 20).
Another benefit is that I will working on those 5.0-mile time trials on Canada Rd, which is where the Beat-the-Clock time trial series are held - and as I get in better conditioning, I'll mix in some days where I do those time trial segments at a harder and harder pace, until I am doing the 5.0-mile time trial segments at close to a true time-trial pace - so by the time the first Beat-the-Clock time trial comes along (which I believe will be in about the middle of February, like this year), I should be in good enough shape to do well for that 10.0-mile time trial, where I will try to match or beat my best time this year, which was 26:14, or 23 mph.
And, as an added plus, this "secret" training program should get me in good enough shape to be able to do the San Bruno Hill Climb on January 1st in a time of about 24:xx (under 25 minutes) - and I get this number by using a Kings Mtn climbing time of 30 minutes in that LKHC Converter page, and noting that the Old La Honda time would be about 23:42 - and as I said, your time up San Bruno should not be much more than one minute slower than your Old La Honda time.
Make sense? Well, it doesn't really matter if it makes sense to YOU - the key is, it makes sense to ME!
...And that is the big "secret"... :)
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
My Cycling Goals for 2008
Okay, it's time to put it all out there - what I want to achieve in 2008, at least for my cycling "hobby" (or, "infatuation", as my wife describes it!).
Looking at my strengths from 2007, it's clear that I should aim high for any time trials that don't go straight uphill. This would include unsanctioned things like the Beat-the-Clock time trials on Canada Rd, or the Swanton Rd time trials. Of course, there are also the sanctioned flatter time trials - Dunlap TT, TT Championships in Sattley, Esparto TT, etc.
Another strength I observed from 2007 (just based on 4 crits and 2 road races) is that I can do well in those flat crits and flatter road races. However, I'm not super crazy about the crits - they're okay, but obviously quite dangerous - I never got involved in any crashes in the 4 crits that I did, but I sure came close! I got to personally see 2 or 3 good crashes, including 1 or 2 that were very close to me - but that's just bike racing, for sure...
I've identified the flatter road races that I *should* do well in - Snelling, Merco Credit Union Foothills, and Bariani / Zamora for the early season, then Dunnigan Hills, San Ardo, and Henleyville for the later season (and maybe Warnerville, a new road race for 2008, near Oakdale - but there are no details about the course yet).
And my weaknesses that I saw in 2007? Well, climbing - obviously! Anytime the road goes up for more than about 1 mile, I will be at a disadvantage until I can lose a bunch of weight and/or improve my power output in watts. So here are my climbing goals for 2008:
Yes, the goals are a bit lofty, especially considering that most of my current PBs on those climbs were set earlier this year, when I actually had climbing legs, which is not the case today. But you gotta stretch, right?
What are the numbers in parentheses, you might be asking? Why, those are my lifetime goals for those climbs - something to shoot for before I die one day... :)
My racing goals are pretty realistic for next year - I'm going to focus mostly on the flatter road races (where I have a chance to place in the top 10) and the flatter time trials, plus some crits. But I'm also going to try my hand at some of the tougher road races and time trials (i.e., hillier) when I feel ready - whatever that means! So, my goals:
There are also some goals that are the traditional goals I've set each year for the last few years - they are all related to participating in some of the organized bike rides that many of us enjoy doing each year:
Finally, I have my more immediate goals - the most important of which is to get myself back to the same climbing conditioning I had about the middle of 2007 - and attempt to get there by the first real road race of the season on February 16, Cantua Creek, which I also consider to be one of my 4 tougher road races, since it occurs relatively early in the season - the climbing is not severe, but it will certainly feel like it to me!
Lastly, I want to do well enough in the first half of the season, to consider getting an invitation to join either the Bike Trip or the San Jose Bicycle Club team for the last part of the year, where I can help them in the flatter road races and some crits. My current team, SCCCC, just doesn't have enough serious road racers that want to work as a team - and I've seen that both Bike Trip and San Jose Bicycle Club have road riders with that kind of dedication and teamwork ethics.
That's about it for 2008 - now it's time to get on my bike and start training seriously!
Looking at my strengths from 2007, it's clear that I should aim high for any time trials that don't go straight uphill. This would include unsanctioned things like the Beat-the-Clock time trials on Canada Rd, or the Swanton Rd time trials. Of course, there are also the sanctioned flatter time trials - Dunlap TT, TT Championships in Sattley, Esparto TT, etc.
Another strength I observed from 2007 (just based on 4 crits and 2 road races) is that I can do well in those flat crits and flatter road races. However, I'm not super crazy about the crits - they're okay, but obviously quite dangerous - I never got involved in any crashes in the 4 crits that I did, but I sure came close! I got to personally see 2 or 3 good crashes, including 1 or 2 that were very close to me - but that's just bike racing, for sure...
I've identified the flatter road races that I *should* do well in - Snelling, Merco Credit Union Foothills, and Bariani / Zamora for the early season, then Dunnigan Hills, San Ardo, and Henleyville for the later season (and maybe Warnerville, a new road race for 2008, near Oakdale - but there are no details about the course yet).
And my weaknesses that I saw in 2007? Well, climbing - obviously! Anytime the road goes up for more than about 1 mile, I will be at a disadvantage until I can lose a bunch of weight and/or improve my power output in watts. So here are my climbing goals for 2008:
- San Bruno HC - 22:59 (18:59)
- Mt Diablo - 1:08:59 (59:59)
- Old La Honda - 21:59 (18:59)
- Kings Mtn - 27:59 (24:59)
- E Hwy 9 - 39:59 (34:59)
- Mt Hamilton - 1:39:59 (1:29:59)
- Sierra Rd - 31:59 (27:59)
- Page Mill Rd - 45:59 (39:59)
Yes, the goals are a bit lofty, especially considering that most of my current PBs on those climbs were set earlier this year, when I actually had climbing legs, which is not the case today. But you gotta stretch, right?
What are the numbers in parentheses, you might be asking? Why, those are my lifetime goals for those climbs - something to shoot for before I die one day... :)
My racing goals are pretty realistic for next year - I'm going to focus mostly on the flatter road races (where I have a chance to place in the top 10) and the flatter time trials, plus some crits. But I'm also going to try my hand at some of the tougher road races and time trials (i.e., hillier) when I feel ready - whatever that means! So, my goals:
- Enter 6 of the flatter road races, placing in the top 10 for 3
- Enter 3 of the flatter time trials, placing in the top 15 for all
- Enter 4 of the tougher road races, finishing at least 2
- Enter 2 of the tougher time trials, finishing them both
- Enter at least 6 crits, including 2 hillier ones
- Enter all Swanton TT races, breaking 33 minutes every time
- Enter all Beat-the-Clock TT races, finishing in the top 15 for all
- Earn at least half the upgrade points needed to get into Cat 3
There are also some goals that are the traditional goals I've set each year for the last few years - they are all related to participating in some of the organized bike rides that many of us enjoy doing each year:
- Death Ride - finish in under 10 hours
- Santa Cruz Mountains Challenge - finish in under 7 hours
- Mt Diablo Challenge - finish in under 1:09
- Enter all the LKHC series climbs and average 100 pts for each
Finally, I have my more immediate goals - the most important of which is to get myself back to the same climbing conditioning I had about the middle of 2007 - and attempt to get there by the first real road race of the season on February 16, Cantua Creek, which I also consider to be one of my 4 tougher road races, since it occurs relatively early in the season - the climbing is not severe, but it will certainly feel like it to me!
Lastly, I want to do well enough in the first half of the season, to consider getting an invitation to join either the Bike Trip or the San Jose Bicycle Club team for the last part of the year, where I can help them in the flatter road races and some crits. My current team, SCCCC, just doesn't have enough serious road racers that want to work as a team - and I've seen that both Bike Trip and San Jose Bicycle Club have road riders with that kind of dedication and teamwork ethics.
That's about it for 2008 - now it's time to get on my bike and start training seriously!
The Year (2007) in Review
Yep, it's that time of year - gotta figure out what I want to accomplish for next year, at least from a cycling perspective (is there any other?)... :)
But before I try to figure that out, I need to do a quick review of what I did - right and wrong - for this year. I didn't plan on getting back into racing for 2007 - it just sorta happened! One of my cycling buddies had talked about doing some racing this year - and I thought it would be cool to try it again, myself. I mean, I had raced - way back when (in my college days) - so why not try it again? Ironically, the guy that initially motivated me about racing again turned out not to race this year - maybe he'll get into it for 2008!
Before I got into the serious racing stuff, I thought I'd start out with some easy things - like the Swanton Time Trial series - informal, needs no racing license - not too long (11 miles, 5.5 miles out and back, with a solid, one-mile climb just before the turnaround point) - you can read all about it right here. I also heard about this cool (and again, informal) time-trial series called Beat-the-Clock, which had the extra benefit of being a great charity cause, with all the proceeds going to the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) - read all about that great series right here.
Well, I did (finally!) do one of the Swanton Time Trial races, but not until it was near the end of the season (see the results of that race here). As you can see from the results, I did pretty good for my first Swanton TT - 34:14 - almost 20 mph (I was shooting for 33:00, which is exactly 20 mph).
And, I did 2 of the Beat-the-Clock time trials, both 10-mile TTs on a rolling course (Canada Rd in Woodside/San Mateo) - one in May, where I did 26:14, or just about 23 mph - wooohooo!! I did the second one in September, slipping a bit to 26:42 - but followed that ITT just 5 minutes later with a 2-man TT - we did 26:07, which was mostly my partner, who had done a better ITT (he was my 30-second man in the ITT), with an excellent time of 25:00.
After I did my first Beat-the-Clock TT, I decided it was time to get serious and get an official racing license, which I did in May - and promptly joined a local cycling club, the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club (SCCCC) - too many 'C's in our acronym! Then, with my fresh new racing license (#264162), I looked around to figure out what I'd do for my first race in 30 years! I decided to sign up for the Watsonville criterium - a few people I knew had said that it was a fun crit - and since it would only last 30 minutes or so, it couldn't be *that* bad, right? Well, it turned out to be a blast - and I even managed to get 8th place, after forming a breakaway with 7 other guys (yeah - I got last in the sprint finish, but that's not 'cause I'm a bad sprinter - I was just, uh, rusty - it was my first race in 30 years).
With that first race under my belt, I was hooked again - and totally motivated to do more races - a few more crits (although I never liked crits as much as I liked the regular road races) - and I had a couple of road races singled out - they were not too hilly, and not too long - good test cases for my re-entry into the cool world of bike racing!
And, I continued training - I had been doing a LOT of climbing in those first 6 months of the year, getting more PBs in May and June, as I continued to get stronger and faster.
Then I made a strategic error - I didn't realize it at the time, but it turned out to have some dramatic effects on my conditioning. I decided to start doing a lot of the 'Noon Goon' rides, as I affectionately called them. They are great training rides - leaving at noon every weekday from Palo Alto and, after a 10 to 15 minute warmup, going at a race-type pace for the next hour or so. My strategic error? I started limiting my training mostly to these shorter, faster rides on the weekdays (instead of the climbing routes I had been doing by myself) - and the weekends consisted of either doing races or more of those same shorter and faster routes - but not too much climbing.
Well - that strategy paid of well for the crits and flatter road races that I chose to race (4 crits and 2 road races) - but when I went to get ready for the Mt Diablo Challenge race in early October, I found out I had lost a lot of my climbing ability!
It turns out that I'm one of those types of riders that needs to climb all the time to keep myself in climbing shape - I'm not a natural climber, so when I start to get in better climbing shape (from climbing, of course!), I need to keep climbing - a lot - just to not go backwards!
It was depressing to see how bad I was on the longer, harder climbs in September and October - and I continued to beat myself up the last couple of months, bemoaning how much conditioning I had lost. I noticed that when I tried to push it on the climbs, I was a LONG way from any of my PBs that I had established earlier this year.
So it was fun getting back into racing, but I paid a dear price for my training strategy - and now I have to figure out how to re-capture the motivation - I'm terribly de-motivated right now, as I've seen other cycling friends of mine get better and stronger (especially on the climbs), while I've been pedaling backwards at an alarming rate!
So, how do I stop the carnage and start moving forwards again? That, my friends, is the crux of my dilemma these days.
Fortunately, I have a secret game plan that I'm putting into action - and if it works, I'll have a very interesting blog entry to create in about one month! I won't reveal the secrets right now, as I want to get some more feedback before I announce to the world (uh, yeah - all two of you!) a very interesting idea I had that can be used to 'get back into the game', so to speak...
Next up will be a blog entry about my cycling goals for next year - I've been putting a lot of thought into it - and I have some very definite things I want to do for next year - and they don't all involve winning races...
Stay tuned!
But before I try to figure that out, I need to do a quick review of what I did - right and wrong - for this year. I didn't plan on getting back into racing for 2007 - it just sorta happened! One of my cycling buddies had talked about doing some racing this year - and I thought it would be cool to try it again, myself. I mean, I had raced - way back when (in my college days) - so why not try it again? Ironically, the guy that initially motivated me about racing again turned out not to race this year - maybe he'll get into it for 2008!
Before I got into the serious racing stuff, I thought I'd start out with some easy things - like the Swanton Time Trial series - informal, needs no racing license - not too long (11 miles, 5.5 miles out and back, with a solid, one-mile climb just before the turnaround point) - you can read all about it right here. I also heard about this cool (and again, informal) time-trial series called Beat-the-Clock, which had the extra benefit of being a great charity cause, with all the proceeds going to the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) - read all about that great series right here.
Well, I did (finally!) do one of the Swanton Time Trial races, but not until it was near the end of the season (see the results of that race here). As you can see from the results, I did pretty good for my first Swanton TT - 34:14 - almost 20 mph (I was shooting for 33:00, which is exactly 20 mph).
And, I did 2 of the Beat-the-Clock time trials, both 10-mile TTs on a rolling course (Canada Rd in Woodside/San Mateo) - one in May, where I did 26:14, or just about 23 mph - wooohooo!! I did the second one in September, slipping a bit to 26:42 - but followed that ITT just 5 minutes later with a 2-man TT - we did 26:07, which was mostly my partner, who had done a better ITT (he was my 30-second man in the ITT), with an excellent time of 25:00.
After I did my first Beat-the-Clock TT, I decided it was time to get serious and get an official racing license, which I did in May - and promptly joined a local cycling club, the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club (SCCCC) - too many 'C's in our acronym! Then, with my fresh new racing license (#264162), I looked around to figure out what I'd do for my first race in 30 years! I decided to sign up for the Watsonville criterium - a few people I knew had said that it was a fun crit - and since it would only last 30 minutes or so, it couldn't be *that* bad, right? Well, it turned out to be a blast - and I even managed to get 8th place, after forming a breakaway with 7 other guys (yeah - I got last in the sprint finish, but that's not 'cause I'm a bad sprinter - I was just, uh, rusty - it was my first race in 30 years).
With that first race under my belt, I was hooked again - and totally motivated to do more races - a few more crits (although I never liked crits as much as I liked the regular road races) - and I had a couple of road races singled out - they were not too hilly, and not too long - good test cases for my re-entry into the cool world of bike racing!
And, I continued training - I had been doing a LOT of climbing in those first 6 months of the year, getting more PBs in May and June, as I continued to get stronger and faster.
Then I made a strategic error - I didn't realize it at the time, but it turned out to have some dramatic effects on my conditioning. I decided to start doing a lot of the 'Noon Goon' rides, as I affectionately called them. They are great training rides - leaving at noon every weekday from Palo Alto and, after a 10 to 15 minute warmup, going at a race-type pace for the next hour or so. My strategic error? I started limiting my training mostly to these shorter, faster rides on the weekdays (instead of the climbing routes I had been doing by myself) - and the weekends consisted of either doing races or more of those same shorter and faster routes - but not too much climbing.
Well - that strategy paid of well for the crits and flatter road races that I chose to race (4 crits and 2 road races) - but when I went to get ready for the Mt Diablo Challenge race in early October, I found out I had lost a lot of my climbing ability!
It turns out that I'm one of those types of riders that needs to climb all the time to keep myself in climbing shape - I'm not a natural climber, so when I start to get in better climbing shape (from climbing, of course!), I need to keep climbing - a lot - just to not go backwards!
It was depressing to see how bad I was on the longer, harder climbs in September and October - and I continued to beat myself up the last couple of months, bemoaning how much conditioning I had lost. I noticed that when I tried to push it on the climbs, I was a LONG way from any of my PBs that I had established earlier this year.
So it was fun getting back into racing, but I paid a dear price for my training strategy - and now I have to figure out how to re-capture the motivation - I'm terribly de-motivated right now, as I've seen other cycling friends of mine get better and stronger (especially on the climbs), while I've been pedaling backwards at an alarming rate!
So, how do I stop the carnage and start moving forwards again? That, my friends, is the crux of my dilemma these days.
Fortunately, I have a secret game plan that I'm putting into action - and if it works, I'll have a very interesting blog entry to create in about one month! I won't reveal the secrets right now, as I want to get some more feedback before I announce to the world (uh, yeah - all two of you!) a very interesting idea I had that can be used to 'get back into the game', so to speak...
Next up will be a blog entry about my cycling goals for next year - I've been putting a lot of thought into it - and I have some very definite things I want to do for next year - and they don't all involve winning races...
Stay tuned!
Friday, November 30, 2007
So What's The Big Deal About Losing A Pound Or Two?
I saw that my friend, Dennis Pederson, created a recent blog entry about his cycling goals for 2008 (you can read all about it right here).
He mentioned that one of his goals was to increase his FTP (Functional Threshold Power) from his estimated 265 watts to 276 watts - and was wondering if that would allow him to break 19 minutes on the benchmark climb of the Bay Area, Old La Honda (OLH). His PB on OLH is currently 19:50, even though I suspect he could actually do that climb a little faster right now (that's a challenge for you, Dennis!).
So, I did some calculations of my own, and sent him a little note about it:
You said you believe your FTP power is 265 watts - that might be correct, but using your 19:50 time on OLH, I came up with this value: 260.6 watts (I'll explain how shortly).
You were wondering if raising your FTP to 276 watts would allow you to break 19 minutes on OLH. Raising your FTP from 265 watts to 276 watts is about 5%.
If we use *my* value of 260.6 watts, and increase it by 5%, which is another 13.0 watts, we get about 273.6 watts. And by my calculations, an FTP of 273.6 watts on OLH would translate to a time of 1133 seconds (18:53), or almost one minute faster, which would allow you to reach your goal of getting under 19 minutes.
So there!
Oh, how did I come up with my numbers? Simple - I use a very cool webpage, that I think I told you about before - or, if not, here it is:
http://www.chuck-wright.com/calculators/watts.html
If you plug in your weight of 172 (152 for you, and 20 for your bike and accessories) - in the Mechanical box, and plug in 1330 feet (the rise in elevation of OLH), then put in 1190 (19:50 for your PB on OLH) for the Time in seconds, you see the calculated power is 260.6 watts - now, start plugging in lower numbers for the time - when you get to 1133 (or a time of 18:53), you will see the calculated power is 273.7 watts, which is the 5% gain you were wondering about.
After sending him the above e-mail, I then thought about the fact that he had mentioned in his blog entry that he would also like to lose about 5 pounds, to get from his current weight of 152 pounds to just 147 pounds (I can only dream about getting to a weight like that!) - so I decided to do some additional calculations to figure out what losing just 5 pounds might do to his time on OLH - and I sent him this note:
Oh, I forgot to add this tidbit:
If you reduce your weight by just 5 pounds, so the total weight going up OLH is 167 instead of 172 (you + bike), then for that same power of 273.7 watts, your time drops to just 1100 seconds, which is a time of 18:20 - and now you're just 20 seconds from breaking 18 minutes! If you can drop 8 pounds, and get it to just 164 pounds for the total weight, you now hit the magic time of 18:00 exactly!
If ever there was a reason to drop 8 pounds, that would be it!
So is losing a pound or two going to make any difference in how fast you climb a mountain?
You bet!
He mentioned that one of his goals was to increase his FTP (Functional Threshold Power) from his estimated 265 watts to 276 watts - and was wondering if that would allow him to break 19 minutes on the benchmark climb of the Bay Area, Old La Honda (OLH). His PB on OLH is currently 19:50, even though I suspect he could actually do that climb a little faster right now (that's a challenge for you, Dennis!).
So, I did some calculations of my own, and sent him a little note about it:
You said you believe your FTP power is 265 watts - that might be correct, but using your 19:50 time on OLH, I came up with this value: 260.6 watts (I'll explain how shortly).
You were wondering if raising your FTP to 276 watts would allow you to break 19 minutes on OLH. Raising your FTP from 265 watts to 276 watts is about 5%.
If we use *my* value of 260.6 watts, and increase it by 5%, which is another 13.0 watts, we get about 273.6 watts. And by my calculations, an FTP of 273.6 watts on OLH would translate to a time of 1133 seconds (18:53), or almost one minute faster, which would allow you to reach your goal of getting under 19 minutes.
So there!
Oh, how did I come up with my numbers? Simple - I use a very cool webpage, that I think I told you about before - or, if not, here it is:
http://www.chuck-wright.com/calculators/watts.html
If you plug in your weight of 172 (152 for you, and 20 for your bike and accessories) - in the Mechanical box, and plug in 1330 feet (the rise in elevation of OLH), then put in 1190 (19:50 for your PB on OLH) for the Time in seconds, you see the calculated power is 260.6 watts - now, start plugging in lower numbers for the time - when you get to 1133 (or a time of 18:53), you will see the calculated power is 273.7 watts, which is the 5% gain you were wondering about.
After sending him the above e-mail, I then thought about the fact that he had mentioned in his blog entry that he would also like to lose about 5 pounds, to get from his current weight of 152 pounds to just 147 pounds (I can only dream about getting to a weight like that!) - so I decided to do some additional calculations to figure out what losing just 5 pounds might do to his time on OLH - and I sent him this note:
Oh, I forgot to add this tidbit:
If you reduce your weight by just 5 pounds, so the total weight going up OLH is 167 instead of 172 (you + bike), then for that same power of 273.7 watts, your time drops to just 1100 seconds, which is a time of 18:20 - and now you're just 20 seconds from breaking 18 minutes! If you can drop 8 pounds, and get it to just 164 pounds for the total weight, you now hit the magic time of 18:00 exactly!
If ever there was a reason to drop 8 pounds, that would be it!
So is losing a pound or two going to make any difference in how fast you climb a mountain?
You bet!
Thursday, October 18, 2007
What A Difference A Day Makes !
Good news - I'm back in the game - on this morning's ride with one of my biking buddies, Ed, I did the Hwy 9 climb in 48:05 - about 4:20 faster than just a few days ago (when I did 52:25) - Wooohooo!!
Interestingly, my average heartrate was identical on both climbs - 153 bpm !!
The difference? Pacing. I approached the climb much like I did my PB ride of Hwy 9 back in late April of this year - where I started out much easier, then started pushing harder after hitting the halfway mark of the climb (in terms of time, not distance).
So, comparing my splits today with my PB ride back in April, I was only 2 minutes down at the half-way mark (22:00 in April, and 24:00 today) - then I pushed the pace harder for the second half, when it gets a little steeper on average, and saw my heartrate steadily rise up, just like on my PB ride.
So, for the second half, my PB ride was done in 21:43 (for a total time of 43:43) and today I did that second half in 24:05, losing just a little over 2 more minutes from my PB time back in April.
And when I did that PB ride in April, I weighed 11 pounds less than today - according to Joe Friel, that ll pounds (5 kg) is worth 15 seconds per kilometer, and the Hwy 9 climb is 11 kilometers, so my weight penalized me 165 seconds, or almost 3 minutes!
So, subtracting 2:45 (165 seconds) from today's time of 48:05, you get 45:20 - which is my theoretical time on today's climb if my weight were the same as last April.
And 45:20 is only about 1:30 slower than my PB time back in April. Of course, I need to lose the weight to turn that theoretical time into a real time!
Bottom line? I don't feel quite so bad now.
Oh - more good news! Yesterday's disaster on Page Mill? It appears I had a slow leak in my rear tire! When I met Ed this morning and got my bike out of my car, my rear tire was totally flat! I took out the tube and pumped it up quite a bit, looking for the leak, which we could not find. So I tossed the tube into the back of my car, and when we got back from our ride this morning, the tube's pressure was down quite a bit!
So it looks like I was climbing up Page Mill with a bum rear tire - I hadn't even thought about having a slow leak after I got to the top and saw my horrible time of 1:01:15 (which was about 8 minutes slower than my time last week).
I guess I should have realized that something was wrong, because my descent back to my car took quite a bit longer than when Dennis and I did the descent last week.
Duh!
So now I'm all psyched up again about getting myself back on track with my climbing program. I've decided I'm going to try and mimic the training I did back in the earlier part of this year, when I really did a good job of improving my climbing.
Back then, I did a lot of rides for fun, but I made a point of hitting a lot of shorter climbs, some mild, and some quite steep - where I would turn on the after-jets and burn it up the climb - these climbs were often just 1/2 mile to 1 mile in length - so the climbs took anywhere from 3 or 4 minutes to 12 minutes (Crestview Rd is one of those harder ones - 1.36 miles, but 650 feet of climbing - ouch!).
Then, I started mixing in longer climbs (like Hwy 9 or Old La Honda or Kings Mtn Rd) and would then push it up those climbs - but only after getting in some "base" climbing on the shorter stuff.
Plus, I rode just about every day - doing lots of climbing most days. It's just that some days, my climbs would be "fun climbs", where I went at a very mellow pace, kind of like a cycling tourist - looking around and checking out the scenery, instead of suffering and doing that "blank stare" at the pavement in front of you, wondering when the pain and suffering would mercifully come to an end... :)
So that's what I'm going to do for the next couple of months. And this is a good plan, too, as I need to re-discover how fun cycling can be, but still mix in some useful training days, to keep improving on my climbing, which is my weakest area.
Another bonus about focusing on the shorter (and often steeper) climbs - the first race of next season is the San Bruno Hillclimb, on New Year's Day. I want to do that race - and focusing on the short, steep climbs will help, since that hillclimb is not super long - it's just 3.7 miles, and averages about 7% for the grade. This makes is similar to Old La Honda.
In fact, your theoretical time on the San Bruno Hillclimb should be within 30 seconds to a minute of your time on Old La Honda.
I haven't decided what my target time will be for the San Bruno Hillclimb - it will mostly depend on how I am progressing as we get near Christmas. I'll have plenty of data from my local training rides to see where I am at - hopefully, I will be getting close to my various PBs that I established earlier this year (in April, May, and June).
All I know is that after yesterday's disastrous climb up Page Mill Rd, I was going to call Ed and tell him I wanted to bail on this mornings ride - in fact, I was thinking about bailing on riding for the rest of this year!
But I'm glad I didn't bail - and I'm glad I decided to guts it out and do today's ride up Hwy 9, which gave me faith again that things aren't always as bad as they seem sometimes...
Yep, what a difference a day makes!
Interestingly, my average heartrate was identical on both climbs - 153 bpm !!
The difference? Pacing. I approached the climb much like I did my PB ride of Hwy 9 back in late April of this year - where I started out much easier, then started pushing harder after hitting the halfway mark of the climb (in terms of time, not distance).
So, comparing my splits today with my PB ride back in April, I was only 2 minutes down at the half-way mark (22:00 in April, and 24:00 today) - then I pushed the pace harder for the second half, when it gets a little steeper on average, and saw my heartrate steadily rise up, just like on my PB ride.
So, for the second half, my PB ride was done in 21:43 (for a total time of 43:43) and today I did that second half in 24:05, losing just a little over 2 more minutes from my PB time back in April.
And when I did that PB ride in April, I weighed 11 pounds less than today - according to Joe Friel, that ll pounds (5 kg) is worth 15 seconds per kilometer, and the Hwy 9 climb is 11 kilometers, so my weight penalized me 165 seconds, or almost 3 minutes!
So, subtracting 2:45 (165 seconds) from today's time of 48:05, you get 45:20 - which is my theoretical time on today's climb if my weight were the same as last April.
And 45:20 is only about 1:30 slower than my PB time back in April. Of course, I need to lose the weight to turn that theoretical time into a real time!
Bottom line? I don't feel quite so bad now.
Oh - more good news! Yesterday's disaster on Page Mill? It appears I had a slow leak in my rear tire! When I met Ed this morning and got my bike out of my car, my rear tire was totally flat! I took out the tube and pumped it up quite a bit, looking for the leak, which we could not find. So I tossed the tube into the back of my car, and when we got back from our ride this morning, the tube's pressure was down quite a bit!
So it looks like I was climbing up Page Mill with a bum rear tire - I hadn't even thought about having a slow leak after I got to the top and saw my horrible time of 1:01:15 (which was about 8 minutes slower than my time last week).
I guess I should have realized that something was wrong, because my descent back to my car took quite a bit longer than when Dennis and I did the descent last week.
Duh!
So now I'm all psyched up again about getting myself back on track with my climbing program. I've decided I'm going to try and mimic the training I did back in the earlier part of this year, when I really did a good job of improving my climbing.
Back then, I did a lot of rides for fun, but I made a point of hitting a lot of shorter climbs, some mild, and some quite steep - where I would turn on the after-jets and burn it up the climb - these climbs were often just 1/2 mile to 1 mile in length - so the climbs took anywhere from 3 or 4 minutes to 12 minutes (Crestview Rd is one of those harder ones - 1.36 miles, but 650 feet of climbing - ouch!).
Then, I started mixing in longer climbs (like Hwy 9 or Old La Honda or Kings Mtn Rd) and would then push it up those climbs - but only after getting in some "base" climbing on the shorter stuff.
Plus, I rode just about every day - doing lots of climbing most days. It's just that some days, my climbs would be "fun climbs", where I went at a very mellow pace, kind of like a cycling tourist - looking around and checking out the scenery, instead of suffering and doing that "blank stare" at the pavement in front of you, wondering when the pain and suffering would mercifully come to an end... :)
So that's what I'm going to do for the next couple of months. And this is a good plan, too, as I need to re-discover how fun cycling can be, but still mix in some useful training days, to keep improving on my climbing, which is my weakest area.
Another bonus about focusing on the shorter (and often steeper) climbs - the first race of next season is the San Bruno Hillclimb, on New Year's Day. I want to do that race - and focusing on the short, steep climbs will help, since that hillclimb is not super long - it's just 3.7 miles, and averages about 7% for the grade. This makes is similar to Old La Honda.
In fact, your theoretical time on the San Bruno Hillclimb should be within 30 seconds to a minute of your time on Old La Honda.
I haven't decided what my target time will be for the San Bruno Hillclimb - it will mostly depend on how I am progressing as we get near Christmas. I'll have plenty of data from my local training rides to see where I am at - hopefully, I will be getting close to my various PBs that I established earlier this year (in April, May, and June).
All I know is that after yesterday's disastrous climb up Page Mill Rd, I was going to call Ed and tell him I wanted to bail on this mornings ride - in fact, I was thinking about bailing on riding for the rest of this year!
But I'm glad I didn't bail - and I'm glad I decided to guts it out and do today's ride up Hwy 9, which gave me faith again that things aren't always as bad as they seem sometimes...
Yep, what a difference a day makes!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Why I Want To Climb OLH in 19:10
For 2008, I want to climb Old La Honda (OLH) in 19:10, which is about 4 minutes faster than my current PB (Personal Best) of 23:18.
Why 19:10?
Well, sometimes, when you're browsing around on the web, you find these little nuggets of gold - and I happened to just find this wonderful Climbing Conversion Chart from the first Low Key Hill Climb (LKHC) series that was done back in 1995 - check out this chart near the bottom of this page.
In particular, it will help you predict your times on various climbs in the Bay Area, based on your known time up any of those climbs.
So, let's use, for example, a very well known time up OLH that my friend, Dennis Pedersen did recently - a time of 19:50.
I always thought I wanted to break 20 minutes going up OLH some day for a couple of reasons:
1) It's fun to belong to the sub-anything crowd for a particular climb, and for OLH, under 20 minutes is that "anything" number, at least for me!
2) I figured that if I could break 20 minutes on OLH, then I should be able to break the magic hour mark for climbing Mt Diablo - and if you can get under 60 minutes for the Mt Diablo Challenge, you get this free t-shirt that tells the world you did just that - and that is one of the "Real Big Goals" in my biking life.
Now, Dennis did 19:50 on OLH recently, so what would be his time up various climbs that I do all the time?
So, using the chart, we can convert his OLH time of 19:50 into a Page Mill Rd time - the conversion factor for Page Mill (week 3) is 2.0921, using the chart.
So, 19:50 == 19.833 minutes
And, 19.833 * 2.0921 = 41.5 == 41:30
Thus, his OLH time of 19:50 should translate to a Page Mill time of 41:30. Pretty cool, huh? I think Dennis and I thought his Page Mill time should be close to 42 minutes or so - I had a slightly different algorithm - take the OLH time, add 1 minute, and double it, which would give us a predicted time of 41:40.
Using the same chart, this would mean his Kings Mtn Rd time would be this:
19.833 * 1.2655 = 25.1 == 25:06
Now, his Bike Trip teammate, Mark Edwards, did 21:46 on Kings Mtn Rd in a recent LKHC climb (he got 2nd place, too - check out the results here), so this means Dennis would have finished just a little over 3 minutes behind Mark, and just after Scott Martin on his team, who did 24:55 - so Dennis would have been 26th out of 75 guys that entered that hillclimb contest a little over a week ago. Excellent, Dennis!
And, Dennis' time on Mt Diablo would be very close to the magic 1 hour mark:
19.833 * 3.1290 = 62.1 == 1:02:06
Of course, you can use the chart to figure out what kind of time you need to do on OLH to break an hour for the Mt Diablo climb - the conversion factor for Mt Diablo is 3.1290, so you get this:
60.000 / 3.1290 = 19.175 == 19:10.5
This means, if you can climb OLH in 19:10, you can (theoretically) climb Mt Diablo in just under an hour.
So, is there any evidence to back up these numbers? Well, let's look at Martin Hyland. He did the first LKHC this year, up Montebello Rd (week 1) and did a time of 32:59 (see the full results here).
And, to convert this to an OLH time, the chart says to use 0.5827:
32:59 == 32.9833
32.9833 * 0.5827 = 19.2 == 19:12
And, Martin, it just so happens, did the Mt Diablo Challenge this year - just a week after doing his time of 32:59 on Montebello Rd. And Martin's time?
59:30.8 ( You can see all the results here)
How about that?
So, now you know why I want to climb OLH in 19:10 by the time we get to this time of year (October) in 2008.
Because if I can climb OLH in 19:10, then I can break 60 minutes for the Mt Diablo Challenge in 2008.
And get that free t-shirt.
Why 19:10?
Well, sometimes, when you're browsing around on the web, you find these little nuggets of gold - and I happened to just find this wonderful Climbing Conversion Chart from the first Low Key Hill Climb (LKHC) series that was done back in 1995 - check out this chart near the bottom of this page.
In particular, it will help you predict your times on various climbs in the Bay Area, based on your known time up any of those climbs.
So, let's use, for example, a very well known time up OLH that my friend, Dennis Pedersen did recently - a time of 19:50.
I always thought I wanted to break 20 minutes going up OLH some day for a couple of reasons:
1) It's fun to belong to the sub-anything crowd for a particular climb, and for OLH, under 20 minutes is that "anything" number, at least for me!
2) I figured that if I could break 20 minutes on OLH, then I should be able to break the magic hour mark for climbing Mt Diablo - and if you can get under 60 minutes for the Mt Diablo Challenge, you get this free t-shirt that tells the world you did just that - and that is one of the "Real Big Goals" in my biking life.
Now, Dennis did 19:50 on OLH recently, so what would be his time up various climbs that I do all the time?
So, using the chart, we can convert his OLH time of 19:50 into a Page Mill Rd time - the conversion factor for Page Mill (week 3) is 2.0921, using the chart.
So, 19:50 == 19.833 minutes
And, 19.833 * 2.0921 = 41.5 == 41:30
Thus, his OLH time of 19:50 should translate to a Page Mill time of 41:30. Pretty cool, huh? I think Dennis and I thought his Page Mill time should be close to 42 minutes or so - I had a slightly different algorithm - take the OLH time, add 1 minute, and double it, which would give us a predicted time of 41:40.
Using the same chart, this would mean his Kings Mtn Rd time would be this:
19.833 * 1.2655 = 25.1 == 25:06
Now, his Bike Trip teammate, Mark Edwards, did 21:46 on Kings Mtn Rd in a recent LKHC climb (he got 2nd place, too - check out the results here), so this means Dennis would have finished just a little over 3 minutes behind Mark, and just after Scott Martin on his team, who did 24:55 - so Dennis would have been 26th out of 75 guys that entered that hillclimb contest a little over a week ago. Excellent, Dennis!
And, Dennis' time on Mt Diablo would be very close to the magic 1 hour mark:
19.833 * 3.1290 = 62.1 == 1:02:06
Of course, you can use the chart to figure out what kind of time you need to do on OLH to break an hour for the Mt Diablo climb - the conversion factor for Mt Diablo is 3.1290, so you get this:
60.000 / 3.1290 = 19.175 == 19:10.5
This means, if you can climb OLH in 19:10, you can (theoretically) climb Mt Diablo in just under an hour.
So, is there any evidence to back up these numbers? Well, let's look at Martin Hyland. He did the first LKHC this year, up Montebello Rd (week 1) and did a time of 32:59 (see the full results here).
And, to convert this to an OLH time, the chart says to use 0.5827:
32:59 == 32.9833
32.9833 * 0.5827 = 19.2 == 19:12
And, Martin, it just so happens, did the Mt Diablo Challenge this year - just a week after doing his time of 32:59 on Montebello Rd. And Martin's time?
59:30.8 ( You can see all the results here)
How about that?
So, now you know why I want to climb OLH in 19:10 by the time we get to this time of year (October) in 2008.
Because if I can climb OLH in 19:10, then I can break 60 minutes for the Mt Diablo Challenge in 2008.
And get that free t-shirt.
Monday, October 15, 2007
The Streak (or, I Was Almost A Mutant)
I was just reflecting in an e-mail to my friend, Dennis Pedersen, about how I was doing a lot of climbing in the early part of this year.
And, when I was looking back at some of my records, I totally forgot about "The Streak", which was this magical period from February 28 through April 19 of this year, when I rode my bike every day - and most of those days involved a fair amount of climbing. You can see a record of all my rides (with my Garmin, anyway) right here.
In fact, during "The Streak", I rode for 51 days straight, and did 156,600 feet of climbing, which is an average of 3100 feet of climbing per day!
I also happened to have set a fair number of PBs (Personal Bests) during that streak, or just after the streak finally ended. I was even getting PBs on dead-tired legs (see my comments on day 12 of "The Streak" right here) !!
I didn't happen to plan "The Streak" - it was just one of those things that started spontaneously - I don't think I even paid any attention to it until I noticed I had ridden about 12 days straight - I think my previous "streak" was about 10 days of riding. So, I was suddenly on this roll...
And, during "The Streak", I even got sick for about a week, but still continued to ride (just doing easier rides for several days).
And why did "The Streak" finally come to an end? Simple - my youngest son, Grant, and I had to drive down to Oceanside for a couple of days for his surfing contest. I was going to bring my bike, but decided it probably would not really work out, since it was going to be just me and Grant for 2 or 3 days - it was a chance to do some good father/son bonding, which is what happened. Thus, my greatest streak came to a close at 51 days.
All in all, it was probably the single greatest period of my life on a bike - I was getting stronger, faster, and feeling healthier than ever - and my weight dropped down, too - which helped me immensely in setting those new PBs during that time.
Maybe I should start "The Next Streak"... :)
Gee, I was almost a mutant...
And, when I was looking back at some of my records, I totally forgot about "The Streak", which was this magical period from February 28 through April 19 of this year, when I rode my bike every day - and most of those days involved a fair amount of climbing. You can see a record of all my rides (with my Garmin, anyway) right here.
In fact, during "The Streak", I rode for 51 days straight, and did 156,600 feet of climbing, which is an average of 3100 feet of climbing per day!
I also happened to have set a fair number of PBs (Personal Bests) during that streak, or just after the streak finally ended. I was even getting PBs on dead-tired legs (see my comments on day 12 of "The Streak" right here) !!
I didn't happen to plan "The Streak" - it was just one of those things that started spontaneously - I don't think I even paid any attention to it until I noticed I had ridden about 12 days straight - I think my previous "streak" was about 10 days of riding. So, I was suddenly on this roll...
And, during "The Streak", I even got sick for about a week, but still continued to ride (just doing easier rides for several days).
And why did "The Streak" finally come to an end? Simple - my youngest son, Grant, and I had to drive down to Oceanside for a couple of days for his surfing contest. I was going to bring my bike, but decided it probably would not really work out, since it was going to be just me and Grant for 2 or 3 days - it was a chance to do some good father/son bonding, which is what happened. Thus, my greatest streak came to a close at 51 days.
All in all, it was probably the single greatest period of my life on a bike - I was getting stronger, faster, and feeling healthier than ever - and my weight dropped down, too - which helped me immensely in setting those new PBs during that time.
Maybe I should start "The Next Streak"... :)
Gee, I was almost a mutant...
The 10 Fingers of Death Ride
I work in San Mateo, which turns out to be the epicenter of a lot of very cool short and steep climbs. Since I bring my bike to work every day (and try to get out for rides 3 or 4 times during the weekdays), I decided earlier this year to map out an insane ride, where I manage to ride up 10 of the steepest roads I could find here in the San Mateo area.
Now, for those of us that ride a lot in the Santa Cruz mountains (which I do all the time, since I live in Scotts Valley), a typical ride just about anywhere will result in about 1,000 feet of climbing for every 10 miles that you ride, or 100 feet for every mile.
So, a typical 30-mile ride would be 3,000 feet of climbing, etc. - but I wanted to map out a tough ride where you would do closer to 150 feet of climbing for every mile you ride - about 50% more the typical ride you'd do in the Santa Cruz mountains.
And hence was born "The 10 Fingers of Death Ride" - an epic bike ride that, in only 42.6 miles does 6800 feet of climbing - about 160 feet of climbing for every mile - ouch!
There are 10 roads that are included in this insane ride - and it's partially insane because the climbing you do are not on these long, gentle grades (like Highway 9), but the climbing is done on shorter, steeper climbs - the kind that tend to average anywhere from 9% to 12% (and that's just the average!). These are roads that are like Jamison Creek, or Alba Rd, or Bohlman - On Orbit - Bohlman - but just not as long.
And here are the 10 roads (the "fingers", if you will), in their order of appearance on this insane ride:
1. Glendora / De Anza - 0.61 miles, 215 feet, 6.8% grade
2. Bunker Hill - 0.51 miles, 300 feet, 11.4% grade
3. Woodridge Rd - 0.51 miles, 290 feet, 11.0% grade
4. Tartan Trail Rd - 1.11 miles, 500 feet, 10.0% grade
5. Crestview Dr - 1.36 miles, 650 feet, 9.3% grade
6. Club Dr - 1.29 miles, 605 feet, 8.9% grade
7. Hastings Dr - 0.67 miles, 450 feet, 12.7% grade
8. Melendy Dr - 1.37 miles, 640 feet, 8.8% grade
9. Alameda de Las Pulgas - 0.75 miles, 340 feet, 8.6% grade
10. West Hillsdale Blvd - 0.51 miles, 300 feet, 12.0% grade
As you can see, this is not a ride for wimps! In fact, this is not a ride for anybody that has an ounce of sanity in their brain.
But, for any regular, crazy cyclist - a cyclotic, if you will (hee-hee!), this is a dream ride - one for the ages, one to tell your grandchildren about one day.
Now, I don't have the time to do this kind of ride during the regular workday week - I figured out this ride would take me about 3.5 hours to complete (Lance Armstrong could probably do it in about 2 hours!) - I have to limit my rides to somewhere between one and two hours. But one day, I'll do this ride on a weekend day - and hopefully, find a couple of other crazies to join me!
Is it possible to do this ride? Of course - in fact, to test it out, I decided to break it up into two rides that I could do during the weekdays, as part of my regular training rides that are based from where I work.
So, one day I did what I call the "Easy 5 Fingers of Death Ride", where I did the first 4 climbs of my insane ride, plus the last climb. It was about 20 miles and did 2800 feet of climbing and took me about 1.5 hours to complete - you can see the data from this ride right here.
Then, about a week later, I decided to tackle what I called the "Hard 5 Fingers of Death Ride" - basically, the last 5 climbs of the insane ride. It was about 22 miles and did 4000 feet of climbing, taking me about 2.0 hours to complete - and you can see the data for this ride right here.
Oh - and if you want to see a recording of the entire ride, where I first scoped it out by car, you can see the that data right here.
Okay, so who out there would like to join me one Saturday or Sunday to do this ride? The drinks are on me... :)
Now, for those of us that ride a lot in the Santa Cruz mountains (which I do all the time, since I live in Scotts Valley), a typical ride just about anywhere will result in about 1,000 feet of climbing for every 10 miles that you ride, or 100 feet for every mile.
So, a typical 30-mile ride would be 3,000 feet of climbing, etc. - but I wanted to map out a tough ride where you would do closer to 150 feet of climbing for every mile you ride - about 50% more the typical ride you'd do in the Santa Cruz mountains.
And hence was born "The 10 Fingers of Death Ride" - an epic bike ride that, in only 42.6 miles does 6800 feet of climbing - about 160 feet of climbing for every mile - ouch!
There are 10 roads that are included in this insane ride - and it's partially insane because the climbing you do are not on these long, gentle grades (like Highway 9), but the climbing is done on shorter, steeper climbs - the kind that tend to average anywhere from 9% to 12% (and that's just the average!). These are roads that are like Jamison Creek, or Alba Rd, or Bohlman - On Orbit - Bohlman - but just not as long.
And here are the 10 roads (the "fingers", if you will), in their order of appearance on this insane ride:
1. Glendora / De Anza - 0.61 miles, 215 feet, 6.8% grade
2. Bunker Hill - 0.51 miles, 300 feet, 11.4% grade
3. Woodridge Rd - 0.51 miles, 290 feet, 11.0% grade
4. Tartan Trail Rd - 1.11 miles, 500 feet, 10.0% grade
5. Crestview Dr - 1.36 miles, 650 feet, 9.3% grade
6. Club Dr - 1.29 miles, 605 feet, 8.9% grade
7. Hastings Dr - 0.67 miles, 450 feet, 12.7% grade
8. Melendy Dr - 1.37 miles, 640 feet, 8.8% grade
9. Alameda de Las Pulgas - 0.75 miles, 340 feet, 8.6% grade
10. West Hillsdale Blvd - 0.51 miles, 300 feet, 12.0% grade
As you can see, this is not a ride for wimps! In fact, this is not a ride for anybody that has an ounce of sanity in their brain.
But, for any regular, crazy cyclist - a cyclotic, if you will (hee-hee!), this is a dream ride - one for the ages, one to tell your grandchildren about one day.
Now, I don't have the time to do this kind of ride during the regular workday week - I figured out this ride would take me about 3.5 hours to complete (Lance Armstrong could probably do it in about 2 hours!) - I have to limit my rides to somewhere between one and two hours. But one day, I'll do this ride on a weekend day - and hopefully, find a couple of other crazies to join me!
Is it possible to do this ride? Of course - in fact, to test it out, I decided to break it up into two rides that I could do during the weekdays, as part of my regular training rides that are based from where I work.
So, one day I did what I call the "Easy 5 Fingers of Death Ride", where I did the first 4 climbs of my insane ride, plus the last climb. It was about 20 miles and did 2800 feet of climbing and took me about 1.5 hours to complete - you can see the data from this ride right here.
Then, about a week later, I decided to tackle what I called the "Hard 5 Fingers of Death Ride" - basically, the last 5 climbs of the insane ride. It was about 22 miles and did 4000 feet of climbing, taking me about 2.0 hours to complete - and you can see the data for this ride right here.
Oh - and if you want to see a recording of the entire ride, where I first scoped it out by car, you can see the that data right here.
Okay, so who out there would like to join me one Saturday or Sunday to do this ride? The drinks are on me... :)
Sunday, October 14, 2007
How NOT To Do A Climb
I did a ride today with a couple of my biking buddies, Ed and Sheila - and I had a lot of hopes that it would be a fun ride for me, even though I dreaded the fact that climbing up Highway 9 from Saratoga to Saratoga Gap was going to be a lot harder than normal.
Why would it be harder? Well, as you probably know from my recent posts, my climbing legs sort of did a disappearing act in the last couple of months, as I did a lot of shorter and flatter rides, even though they were often very fast rides (like 20 to 24 mph - mostly because I was doing training rides with the Noon Goons or actual races on the weekends and having a blast!).
But all those great climbing rides I was doing in the first half of this year were no longer a part of my weekly diet - and my recent attempts to do some long climbs resulted in total disasters!
We had planned to climb Highway 9 first, as a warmup climb - and then do one of the grand-daddys of climbs in the Bay Area, Bohlman - On Orbit - Bohlman (affectionately known as B-O-B). In fact, the Low Key Hillclimb (LKHC) series had just done the B-O-B climb yesterday (Saturday morning) - I didn't join them for a couple of reasons: One, I was taking my youngest son to surf team practice and two, I didn't want to embarras myself by being the last person to finish the climb, which would have most likely been the case!
So Ed and Sheila and I did a little 10-minute warmup from the Starbucks on Saratoga Rd, and when we got to the town of Saratoga, we warmed up a little stronger while going through the town, and when we hit the Bend-Of-Death after you get through the town (where there is a strong left-turn bend), we hit our timers and took off for the climb up Highway 9.
Now, I know that Ed has been getting himself into pretty good climbing shape lately, since he climbs up Sierra Rd near his home in Fremont about once or twice a week - and he also does a lot of mountain biking up Mission Peak, which keeps his legs used to climbing up a big hill.
But I haven't been quite so diligent, and it was interesting when we took off - I started out exactly right, going moderate, keeping my heartrate in the 140 to 150 bpm range (zone 3 for me, where my max heartrate is about 175 bpm). But as we hit those first little rollers on Highway 9, I started pushing a moderate/hard pace (150 to 160 bpm, or zone 4), and then pushed it up into the hard/hard pace (zone 5, above 160 bpm) - and by the time we got to the bridge at mile 2.1 (where Sanborn Rd meets Highway 9), I was 40 seconds FASTER than my PB time back in April of this year! I was cooking - and out there ahead of both Ed and Sheila.
But then, after that bridge, the road pitches up a little stronger, and I realized that I was just going too hard - Ed passed me up as I decided to consciously slow myself down a little - and I watched him pull away from me, which made me feel bad (since I was usually the first one to the top of Highway 9 when we used to ride together a couple of years ago). How depressing!
And, by the time I reached the big hairpin turn at mile 4.4, I was now down by 1:25 from my PB time (my PB on that climb back on April 25 of this year was 43:43).
Normally, being down by just a little over a minute, with just 2.4 miles left to climb would have been fine with me, since I'm 11 pounds heavier right now than when I got that PB back in April, and I haven't done too much climbing in the last 2 or 3 months.
But then, disaster hit - I just couldn't turn the pedals comfortably and get my heartrate back up to hard/hard - it was stuck in a moderate pace, hovering around 150 bpm - basically, I had blown up!
OMG!
And, in the next 2.4 miles, I lost almost 3 minutes PER MILE, losing another 7:15 of time - ugh!!! But, that's what happens when you blow - you just can't turn the pedals very well, and it's possible to lose a lot of time in a very short distance - and that is exactly what happened to me. Sigh.
So, in the end, I did a time of just 52:25, which was close to 9 minutes slower than my PB time of 43:43 just 6 short months ago - oh, brother!
The profile for my heartrate data on my PB ride in April was perfect - I started out moderate (140 to 150), rose to moderate/hard (150 to 159), then rose to hard/hard (160 to 170) for the last 2.4 miles.
To put that into concrete time, I did the last 2.4 miles in my April PB ride in just 17:15, my best ever (I would normally do this in about 19 to 20 minutes). My average heartrate for that last 2.4 miles was about 165 bpm.
For today's ride, I did that same 2.4 miles in 24:30 - quite a difference! My average heartrate for that last 2.4 miles today was only about 150 bpm.
Now, Ed did quite well today - his time for the 6.8 miles was about 44:30, just 45 seconds slower than my PB time of about 43:45 last April.
Ed was actually up by 45 seconds at the big hairpin turn (when you have 2.4 miles left) - and, as he said, his legs felt rather dead towards the end of the climb - he ended up doing that last 2.4 miles in 18:45, which is still an excellent time - but was 1:30 slower than my PB time, which is why he ended up 45 seconds slower than my PB time today.
The bottom line? When you start a climb, you need to stay well within yourself - especially in the first half of a longer climb, so you have something left for that last half.
You also need to keep your weight down, by monitoring it daily - and if you see it starting to creep up, it's time to put the brakes on those second helpings and cut back!
Today, I went out so fast, I was almost a minute faster than my PB ride back in April, which is ridiculous, since I'm not in the same climbing shape - I should have paced myself so I was staying consistently below my PB pace from last April - and if I had done that, I would probably have had a more consistent and stronger second half for today's climb - and not lost so much time so quickly in that last couple of miles.
I think if I had done the climb properly, I would have been about 2 minutes down at the hairpin turn (28:30), and then done about 19:30 for the last 2.4 miles, for a total time of 48:00 - this would have still have been about 4 minutes slower than my PB back in April, but I'd consider that a relative success, since my extra 11 pounds is probably responsible for an additional loss of about 3 minutes ( every 2.2 pounds extra slows you down 3 seconds per kilometer on a moderate 5% climb - so the 11-kilometer climb of Highway 9 translates to an extra 165 seconds for me, almost 3 minutes!).
So, taking the 11 pounds off my body and attacking the climb properly would get me to within 1 minute of my PB time, and would allow me to just about match Ed's time from today.
I'll have a chance to test this theory in early December, when I plan to have lost the extra 11 pounds... :)
And I think I'll try to climb Highway 9 again this week, and attack it like I did when I did my PB ride back in April, and see if I can get anywhere close to the 48:00 time that I should have done for today's ride.
Boy, sometimes your best laid plans...
Why would it be harder? Well, as you probably know from my recent posts, my climbing legs sort of did a disappearing act in the last couple of months, as I did a lot of shorter and flatter rides, even though they were often very fast rides (like 20 to 24 mph - mostly because I was doing training rides with the Noon Goons or actual races on the weekends and having a blast!).
But all those great climbing rides I was doing in the first half of this year were no longer a part of my weekly diet - and my recent attempts to do some long climbs resulted in total disasters!
We had planned to climb Highway 9 first, as a warmup climb - and then do one of the grand-daddys of climbs in the Bay Area, Bohlman - On Orbit - Bohlman (affectionately known as B-O-B). In fact, the Low Key Hillclimb (LKHC) series had just done the B-O-B climb yesterday (Saturday morning) - I didn't join them for a couple of reasons: One, I was taking my youngest son to surf team practice and two, I didn't want to embarras myself by being the last person to finish the climb, which would have most likely been the case!
So Ed and Sheila and I did a little 10-minute warmup from the Starbucks on Saratoga Rd, and when we got to the town of Saratoga, we warmed up a little stronger while going through the town, and when we hit the Bend-Of-Death after you get through the town (where there is a strong left-turn bend), we hit our timers and took off for the climb up Highway 9.
Now, I know that Ed has been getting himself into pretty good climbing shape lately, since he climbs up Sierra Rd near his home in Fremont about once or twice a week - and he also does a lot of mountain biking up Mission Peak, which keeps his legs used to climbing up a big hill.
But I haven't been quite so diligent, and it was interesting when we took off - I started out exactly right, going moderate, keeping my heartrate in the 140 to 150 bpm range (zone 3 for me, where my max heartrate is about 175 bpm). But as we hit those first little rollers on Highway 9, I started pushing a moderate/hard pace (150 to 160 bpm, or zone 4), and then pushed it up into the hard/hard pace (zone 5, above 160 bpm) - and by the time we got to the bridge at mile 2.1 (where Sanborn Rd meets Highway 9), I was 40 seconds FASTER than my PB time back in April of this year! I was cooking - and out there ahead of both Ed and Sheila.
But then, after that bridge, the road pitches up a little stronger, and I realized that I was just going too hard - Ed passed me up as I decided to consciously slow myself down a little - and I watched him pull away from me, which made me feel bad (since I was usually the first one to the top of Highway 9 when we used to ride together a couple of years ago). How depressing!
And, by the time I reached the big hairpin turn at mile 4.4, I was now down by 1:25 from my PB time (my PB on that climb back on April 25 of this year was 43:43).
Normally, being down by just a little over a minute, with just 2.4 miles left to climb would have been fine with me, since I'm 11 pounds heavier right now than when I got that PB back in April, and I haven't done too much climbing in the last 2 or 3 months.
But then, disaster hit - I just couldn't turn the pedals comfortably and get my heartrate back up to hard/hard - it was stuck in a moderate pace, hovering around 150 bpm - basically, I had blown up!
OMG!
And, in the next 2.4 miles, I lost almost 3 minutes PER MILE, losing another 7:15 of time - ugh!!! But, that's what happens when you blow - you just can't turn the pedals very well, and it's possible to lose a lot of time in a very short distance - and that is exactly what happened to me. Sigh.
So, in the end, I did a time of just 52:25, which was close to 9 minutes slower than my PB time of 43:43 just 6 short months ago - oh, brother!
The profile for my heartrate data on my PB ride in April was perfect - I started out moderate (140 to 150), rose to moderate/hard (150 to 159), then rose to hard/hard (160 to 170) for the last 2.4 miles.
To put that into concrete time, I did the last 2.4 miles in my April PB ride in just 17:15, my best ever (I would normally do this in about 19 to 20 minutes). My average heartrate for that last 2.4 miles was about 165 bpm.
For today's ride, I did that same 2.4 miles in 24:30 - quite a difference! My average heartrate for that last 2.4 miles today was only about 150 bpm.
Now, Ed did quite well today - his time for the 6.8 miles was about 44:30, just 45 seconds slower than my PB time of about 43:45 last April.
Ed was actually up by 45 seconds at the big hairpin turn (when you have 2.4 miles left) - and, as he said, his legs felt rather dead towards the end of the climb - he ended up doing that last 2.4 miles in 18:45, which is still an excellent time - but was 1:30 slower than my PB time, which is why he ended up 45 seconds slower than my PB time today.
The bottom line? When you start a climb, you need to stay well within yourself - especially in the first half of a longer climb, so you have something left for that last half.
You also need to keep your weight down, by monitoring it daily - and if you see it starting to creep up, it's time to put the brakes on those second helpings and cut back!
Today, I went out so fast, I was almost a minute faster than my PB ride back in April, which is ridiculous, since I'm not in the same climbing shape - I should have paced myself so I was staying consistently below my PB pace from last April - and if I had done that, I would probably have had a more consistent and stronger second half for today's climb - and not lost so much time so quickly in that last couple of miles.
I think if I had done the climb properly, I would have been about 2 minutes down at the hairpin turn (28:30), and then done about 19:30 for the last 2.4 miles, for a total time of 48:00 - this would have still have been about 4 minutes slower than my PB back in April, but I'd consider that a relative success, since my extra 11 pounds is probably responsible for an additional loss of about 3 minutes ( every 2.2 pounds extra slows you down 3 seconds per kilometer on a moderate 5% climb - so the 11-kilometer climb of Highway 9 translates to an extra 165 seconds for me, almost 3 minutes!).
So, taking the 11 pounds off my body and attacking the climb properly would get me to within 1 minute of my PB time, and would allow me to just about match Ed's time from today.
I'll have a chance to test this theory in early December, when I plan to have lost the extra 11 pounds... :)
And I think I'll try to climb Highway 9 again this week, and attack it like I did when I did my PB ride back in April, and see if I can get anywhere close to the 48:00 time that I should have done for today's ride.
Boy, sometimes your best laid plans...
Thursday, October 11, 2007
It's The Fat, Stupid!
So, I think I've figured out yet another reason - perhaps the main reason - why my climbing performance is suffering a little these days.
For those of you (most likely, all one of you - and you know who you are, Dennis!) that have followed my recent posts, you know that I've been just a tad disappointed that my ability to climb a hill has deteriorated in the last couple of months, which happened to coincide with my entry back into the world of bike racing.
"Aha!", you'll say - training for races makes you weaker, right? All those Noon Goon rides and crits and flatter road races have been really bad for you, right? Well, not really, as it might turn out.
This blog entry is a remarkably boring analysis of why you need to watch your diet - especially if you want to keep your racing edge.
So, I was reading Joel Friel's excellent book, "Cycling Past 50" (okay, so I'm 53 and "over-the-hill" - but I can still beat a lot of guys half my age on a road race course!) - and I came across this very interesting tidbit on pages 70-71 (oh, you can buy his book at Amazon.com right here):
"It's been estimated that every extra kilogram of fat (2.2 pounds) adds three seconds in a one-kilometer climb (0.62 miles) on a moderate grade of about 5 percent."
Really?
And I was telling my friend, Dennis Pedersen, just the other day, that I thought part of my problem in my recent poor climbing performance was due to the fact that I was about 10 pounds heavier now than when I was at my climbing fitness peak back in mid-July, just before I started getting back into the racing scene.
Hmmmmmm......so, I decided to do the math, to see what effect 10 or 11 pounds might have on climbing my old nemesis, Old La Honda (OLH).
Now, OLH is not a moderate grade of 5 percent - it's a lot meaner - like an average grade of 7.5% - so I decided to give myself a five second penalty for each kilogram of extra fat. I'll justify this value just a little later...
Okay - let's see...11 pounds would be exactly 5 kilograms, so I'll just say I'm 5 kilograms over my mid-July weight (okay - I'll go eat a couple of donuts to make that absolutely true). So my time penalty for those 5 kilograms is about 25 seconds for each kilometer of the climb. Hmmmm.....interesting!
And, OLH is 3.3 miles in length, which is about 5 kilometers (actually, closer to 5.5, but we'll just use 5 kilometers).
So, 25 seconds for each of those 5 kilometers gives me a time penalty of ... 125 seconds, or about 2 minutes!
Now, I recently did OLH in 27:02, as you all know - but I told Dennis that I thought this was a poor representation of the actual baseline for me right now - I went out way too hard on that ITT up OLH (remember - I got to the halfway point in just 11:45, which was only 10 seconds slower than my halfway point on my PB time of 23:18 - and you can see the data for that PB ride right here - the PB climb is the data associated with Lap 2). I lost about 4 minutes in that second half of the OLH climb.
So......I told Dennis that my most probable time for OLH right now would be 25 minutes, about 2 minutes slower than my PB time earlier this year.
And now, I have some evidence to suggest where those 2 minutes got lost - not so much in my legs (which I always thought made some sense, but it's not like I haven't been using my legs for the last few months!) - it sounds like those 2 minutes are buried in the extra fat rolling around my tummy!
If you subtract off that 2 minutes from my likely time of 25 minutes for OLH right now (where I pace myself appropriately for the entire climb), you get a magic time of about 23 minutes!
Oh, remember I said I could justify that value of 5 seconds per kilogram of extra fat? Well, in my interest of trying to be accurate (and fair) to myself, I did a little more research and found this interesting tidbit on Wikipedia:
"The formula for power suggests that 1 lb. saved is worth 0.06 mph (0.1 km/h) on a 7% grade"
You can find this little gem right here, if you want to read all the details.
Well, OLH is about 7% - and this means my extra 10 pounds would slow me down by 0.6 mph for the climb. For that 3.22 mile climb, if you use my average speed for my PB (8.3 mph) and subtract 0.6 mph, you get 7.7 mph - and if you then re-calculate what my time would be doing that climb at 7.7 mph, you get a time of 25:06 - about 2 minutes slower than my PB time of 23:18 !!
So, as you can see, my use of 5 seconds / kilogram for the time penalty on OLH is quite justified - and is probably fairly accurate, too...
And just what does this all mean?
Wooohoooo!! This means that all I have to do is lose those 10 or 11 pounds and I'll probably be able to match my PB time up OLH back on August 1.
Oh - and those two donuts I told you I'd eat? Uh, no way, Charlie - it's veggies and water for me, until I get back to my old climbing weight... :)
Okay, so now I don't feel so bad - it's the fat, stupid!
For those of you (most likely, all one of you - and you know who you are, Dennis!) that have followed my recent posts, you know that I've been just a tad disappointed that my ability to climb a hill has deteriorated in the last couple of months, which happened to coincide with my entry back into the world of bike racing.
"Aha!", you'll say - training for races makes you weaker, right? All those Noon Goon rides and crits and flatter road races have been really bad for you, right? Well, not really, as it might turn out.
This blog entry is a remarkably boring analysis of why you need to watch your diet - especially if you want to keep your racing edge.
So, I was reading Joel Friel's excellent book, "Cycling Past 50" (okay, so I'm 53 and "over-the-hill" - but I can still beat a lot of guys half my age on a road race course!) - and I came across this very interesting tidbit on pages 70-71 (oh, you can buy his book at Amazon.com right here):
"It's been estimated that every extra kilogram of fat (2.2 pounds) adds three seconds in a one-kilometer climb (0.62 miles) on a moderate grade of about 5 percent."
Really?
And I was telling my friend, Dennis Pedersen, just the other day, that I thought part of my problem in my recent poor climbing performance was due to the fact that I was about 10 pounds heavier now than when I was at my climbing fitness peak back in mid-July, just before I started getting back into the racing scene.
Hmmmmmm......so, I decided to do the math, to see what effect 10 or 11 pounds might have on climbing my old nemesis, Old La Honda (OLH).
Now, OLH is not a moderate grade of 5 percent - it's a lot meaner - like an average grade of 7.5% - so I decided to give myself a five second penalty for each kilogram of extra fat. I'll justify this value just a little later...
Okay - let's see...11 pounds would be exactly 5 kilograms, so I'll just say I'm 5 kilograms over my mid-July weight (okay - I'll go eat a couple of donuts to make that absolutely true). So my time penalty for those 5 kilograms is about 25 seconds for each kilometer of the climb. Hmmmm.....interesting!
And, OLH is 3.3 miles in length, which is about 5 kilometers (actually, closer to 5.5, but we'll just use 5 kilometers).
So, 25 seconds for each of those 5 kilometers gives me a time penalty of
Now, I recently did OLH in 27:02, as you all know - but I told Dennis that I thought this was a poor representation of the actual baseline for me right now - I went out way too hard on that ITT up OLH (remember - I got to the halfway point in just 11:45, which was only 10 seconds slower than my halfway point on my PB time of 23:18 - and you can see the data for that PB ride right here - the PB climb is the data associated with Lap 2). I lost about 4 minutes in that second half of the OLH climb.
So......I told Dennis that my most probable time for OLH right now would be 25 minutes, about 2 minutes slower than my PB time earlier this year.
And now, I have some evidence to suggest where those 2 minutes got lost - not so much in my legs (which I always thought made some sense, but it's not like I haven't been using my legs for the last few months!) - it sounds like those 2 minutes are buried in the extra fat rolling around my tummy!
If you subtract off that 2 minutes from my likely time of 25 minutes for OLH right now (where I pace myself appropriately for the entire climb), you get a magic time of about 23 minutes!
Oh, remember I said I could justify that value of 5 seconds per kilogram of extra fat? Well, in my interest of trying to be accurate (and fair) to myself, I did a little more research and found this interesting tidbit on Wikipedia:
"The formula for power suggests that 1 lb. saved is worth 0.06 mph (0.1 km/h) on a 7% grade"
You can find this little gem right here, if you want to read all the details.
Well, OLH is about 7% - and this means my extra 10 pounds would slow me down by 0.6 mph for the climb. For that 3.22 mile climb, if you use my average speed for my PB (8.3 mph) and subtract 0.6 mph, you get 7.7 mph - and if you then re-calculate what my time would be doing that climb at 7.7 mph, you get a time of 25:06 - about 2 minutes slower than my PB time of 23:18 !!
So, as you can see, my use of 5 seconds / kilogram for the time penalty on OLH is quite justified - and is probably fairly accurate, too...
And just what does this all mean?
Wooohoooo!! This means that all I have to do is lose those 10 or 11 pounds and I'll probably be able to match my PB time up OLH back on August 1.
Oh - and those two donuts I told you I'd eat? Uh, no way, Charlie - it's veggies and water for me, until I get back to my old climbing weight... :)
Okay, so now I don't feel so bad - it's the fat, stupid!
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Closing Down The Gap
So today, one of my cycling buddies, Dennis Pedersen, and I started a new fall/winter training program that will include climbing up Page Mill Road on Wednesdays, starting at about noon. Neither one of us had ever climbed UP Page Mill, even though both of us thought we had descended Page Mill in the far, distant past.
Our plan was simple - we wanted to do 2 relatively hard efforts (about 90% of your max heartrate) for 20 minutes each. When Dennis and I met on Old Page Mill at noon, I told him I might cheat a little and only put out about 85% of my max heartrate, since I'm typically a little conservative when doing a climb for the first time - I like to "scope it out", so to speak - get an idea of all the little nuances of the climb, like where it hurts the most - like those dang switchback turns that often hit 15% to 20%, unless you cheat and swing over to the wrong side of the road to flatten the bend a bit - but this can be dangerous, and is not particularly recommended - traffic coming down the mountain will be going a lot faster than you are going up the mountain!
And I had already "virtually" scoped out the climb by analyzing various people that had uploaded their ride data to MotionBased.com - what a cool site! I have a Garmin Edge 305 cyclometer - and anyone that has a Garmin can upload their data to MotionBased.com, which has much better software for analyzing your data than the stock software that comes with your Garmin (their Training Center program).
I had also driven up Page Mill several times, as it happens to be one of the "escape routes" when I commute home from San Mateo. If I get to the Page Mill exit on Hwy 280 and see a long line of cars parked on the freeway, I will often decide to take "the scenic route" home, going up Page Mill to Skyline, then Skyline to Black Rd, and down Black Rd to Hwy 17, where I latch back onto the freeway system and scoot on over to Scotts Valley, where I live.
So, the combination of having driven up Page Mill, and looking at the MotionBased.com data from different cyclists that had gone up Page Mill allowed me to inform Dennis that I had a basic game plan for attacking Page Mill to get our 2 20-minute workouts.
Here's the profile of the climb up Page Mill: The first 1.0 mile (starting at Arastradero) is fairly mild - just a 3% average grade or so. Then, from mile 1.0 to mile 4.5, it kicks up fairly strong (this is the hardest section of Page Mill, no doubt). In that 3.5 miles, you gain about 1500 feet, so the average grade is between 9% and 10% - and that's just the average! There are spots that hit 15% to 20% (yep - those damn switchbacks!). Then, after you hit the 4.5 mile mark, the next mile is fairly easy (back to a reasonable - and pleasing - 4% average grade). Then, the last 3 miles, from mile 5.5 to mile 8.5 is a series of uphill rollers, i.e., rollers that keep getting you up higher and higher. You climb another 600 feet in that 3 miles, which is an average grade of just 4% again - but they are rollers, so the aveage is a little misleading. Still, the top half of Page Mill is a piece of cake, compared to that tough 3.5 mile section you slog through between mile 1.0 and mile 4.5, for sure!
So I proposed a gameplan to Dennis - we go fairly mild for the first mile, then when the road starts to kick up, we do our 20-minute interval, which should get us to somewhere around the 4.0 mile mark. Then, we go easy for 5 minutes and do the last 20 minutes hard again.
Well, Dennis stuck to the plan, almost exactly as I mapped it out. He got to the 4.0 mile mark in just about 20 minutes (that is, 20 minutes after I said, "Go!", which was at the 1.0 mile spot of the climb). Then, he patiently waited for me to arrive, which was about 3 minutes later, we calculated. You see, even though Dennis got to the 4.0 mile mark as instructed, I was lagging behind, since I'm not climbing quite as strong as Dennis (that's an understatement!). So, when my 20 minutes were up, I was only at the 3.5 mile mark. It took me another 3 minutes to do that 1/2 mile to get to where Dennis had kindly parked himself, waiting patiently for me.
So we discussed what we had experienced so far and decided that Dennis would most likely do the rest of the climb in just another 20 minutes or so. And I would most likely take a few more minutes than that, again! So we started off rather easy, which is actually hard to do, since we had another 1/2 mile of steeper grades before we got to the "easy" part of Page Mill, at mile 4.5 - and after a couple of minutes, Dennis blasted off ahead of me, to head for the top.
And, right on schedule, he got to the top in 20 minutes (after going easy for 2 minutes with me).
And me? Well, I kind of cheated again and didn't really push it at 90% of my max heartrate - it was more like just 80% to 85% - so I lost a couple of minutes for the last half of the climb. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for you to do this, since Page Mill really lets up for those last couple of miles.
So, how did we do? Well, we figured out that Dennis probably did the entire climb in about 46 minutes or so - and I had an actual, official time: 53:31 - not too shabby, all things considered.
I believe that Dennis can do the climb in about 42 minutes, if he made an all-out effort for the entire climb. To see why, just check out the times of the guys that did Old La Honda (OLH) in last year's LKHC (week 2) and compare to their times on the Page Mill climb (week 6):
http://www.lowkey.djconnel.com/2006/week2/results.html
http://www.lowkey.djconnel.com/2006/week6/results.html
Check out, for example, the times of Ron Brunner, Fred Stamm, and Peter Tapscott:
RB -- 20:18 (OLH) --- 41:46 (Page Mill)
FS -- 20:03 (OLH) --- 42:53 (Page Mill)
PT -- 19:58 (OLH) --- 41:20 (Page Mill)
It looks like the algorithm for converting OLH times to Page Mill times is pretty simple:
Page Mill time = (OLH time + 1:00) * 2
Since Dennis did 19:50 on OLH last week (when I did that disasterous time of 27:02), there's every reason to expect his Page Mill time would have been right there, in the 42 minute range.
And, today's result on Page Mill backs up my algorithm - I did 53:30, but I'm pretty sure it could have easily done about 52 minutes if I had pushed a little harder on the top half.
So, reversing the algorithm, you get an OLH time for me of about 25 minutes ( 52/2 - 1 ), which is what I was telling Dennis earlier today - I don't think my time last week was a good baseline - 27:02 - I know I had lost my climbing legs over the last couple of months, but I figured that was good for a 2 minute loss on OLH, and not 4 minutes!
See? I'm a genius, right?
On the other hand, if I can get back to my OLH time of about 23 minutes (doable in the next couple of months), then my Page Mill time should end up in the 48 minute range.
So, this means I'll end up about 6 minutes behind Dennis, when I get my climbing legs back in the next month or two.
But by that time, Dennis will have most likely be approaching the OLH times of someone like David Kelly - he did 17:53 last year in week 2 of the LKHC. And, his Page Mill time was a very respectable time of 37:35 ( (18+1) * 2 = 38 ).
So even as I get better, so will Dennis - and the gap will still be there.
Or will it?
Obviously, I have a lot more room for improvement than Dennis does - we'll both reach some natural limit to our improvement - I just hope that I can end up close enough to him so we can work together in a few races next year, tearing the legs off all those guys that spent their fall and winter months watching football and pigging out during Thanksgiving and Xmas...
Well, I still like to dream, anyway... :)
Our plan was simple - we wanted to do 2 relatively hard efforts (about 90% of your max heartrate) for 20 minutes each. When Dennis and I met on Old Page Mill at noon, I told him I might cheat a little and only put out about 85% of my max heartrate, since I'm typically a little conservative when doing a climb for the first time - I like to "scope it out", so to speak - get an idea of all the little nuances of the climb, like where it hurts the most - like those dang switchback turns that often hit 15% to 20%, unless you cheat and swing over to the wrong side of the road to flatten the bend a bit - but this can be dangerous, and is not particularly recommended - traffic coming down the mountain will be going a lot faster than you are going up the mountain!
And I had already "virtually" scoped out the climb by analyzing various people that had uploaded their ride data to MotionBased.com - what a cool site! I have a Garmin Edge 305 cyclometer - and anyone that has a Garmin can upload their data to MotionBased.com, which has much better software for analyzing your data than the stock software that comes with your Garmin (their Training Center program).
I had also driven up Page Mill several times, as it happens to be one of the "escape routes" when I commute home from San Mateo. If I get to the Page Mill exit on Hwy 280 and see a long line of cars parked on the freeway, I will often decide to take "the scenic route" home, going up Page Mill to Skyline, then Skyline to Black Rd, and down Black Rd to Hwy 17, where I latch back onto the freeway system and scoot on over to Scotts Valley, where I live.
So, the combination of having driven up Page Mill, and looking at the MotionBased.com data from different cyclists that had gone up Page Mill allowed me to inform Dennis that I had a basic game plan for attacking Page Mill to get our 2 20-minute workouts.
Here's the profile of the climb up Page Mill: The first 1.0 mile (starting at Arastradero) is fairly mild - just a 3% average grade or so. Then, from mile 1.0 to mile 4.5, it kicks up fairly strong (this is the hardest section of Page Mill, no doubt). In that 3.5 miles, you gain about 1500 feet, so the average grade is between 9% and 10% - and that's just the average! There are spots that hit 15% to 20% (yep - those damn switchbacks!). Then, after you hit the 4.5 mile mark, the next mile is fairly easy (back to a reasonable - and pleasing - 4% average grade). Then, the last 3 miles, from mile 5.5 to mile 8.5 is a series of uphill rollers, i.e., rollers that keep getting you up higher and higher. You climb another 600 feet in that 3 miles, which is an average grade of just 4% again - but they are rollers, so the aveage is a little misleading. Still, the top half of Page Mill is a piece of cake, compared to that tough 3.5 mile section you slog through between mile 1.0 and mile 4.5, for sure!
So I proposed a gameplan to Dennis - we go fairly mild for the first mile, then when the road starts to kick up, we do our 20-minute interval, which should get us to somewhere around the 4.0 mile mark. Then, we go easy for 5 minutes and do the last 20 minutes hard again.
Well, Dennis stuck to the plan, almost exactly as I mapped it out. He got to the 4.0 mile mark in just about 20 minutes (that is, 20 minutes after I said, "Go!", which was at the 1.0 mile spot of the climb). Then, he patiently waited for me to arrive, which was about 3 minutes later, we calculated. You see, even though Dennis got to the 4.0 mile mark as instructed, I was lagging behind, since I'm not climbing quite as strong as Dennis (that's an understatement!). So, when my 20 minutes were up, I was only at the 3.5 mile mark. It took me another 3 minutes to do that 1/2 mile to get to where Dennis had kindly parked himself, waiting patiently for me.
So we discussed what we had experienced so far and decided that Dennis would most likely do the rest of the climb in just another 20 minutes or so. And I would most likely take a few more minutes than that, again! So we started off rather easy, which is actually hard to do, since we had another 1/2 mile of steeper grades before we got to the "easy" part of Page Mill, at mile 4.5 - and after a couple of minutes, Dennis blasted off ahead of me, to head for the top.
And, right on schedule, he got to the top in 20 minutes (after going easy for 2 minutes with me).
And me? Well, I kind of cheated again and didn't really push it at 90% of my max heartrate - it was more like just 80% to 85% - so I lost a couple of minutes for the last half of the climb. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for you to do this, since Page Mill really lets up for those last couple of miles.
So, how did we do? Well, we figured out that Dennis probably did the entire climb in about 46 minutes or so - and I had an actual, official time: 53:31 - not too shabby, all things considered.
I believe that Dennis can do the climb in about 42 minutes, if he made an all-out effort for the entire climb. To see why, just check out the times of the guys that did Old La Honda (OLH) in last year's LKHC (week 2) and compare to their times on the Page Mill climb (week 6):
http://www.lowkey.djconnel.com/2006/week2/results.html
http://www.lowkey.djconnel.com/2006/week6/results.html
Check out, for example, the times of Ron Brunner, Fred Stamm, and Peter Tapscott:
RB -- 20:18 (OLH) --- 41:46 (Page Mill)
FS -- 20:03 (OLH) --- 42:53 (Page Mill)
PT -- 19:58 (OLH) --- 41:20 (Page Mill)
It looks like the algorithm for converting OLH times to Page Mill times is pretty simple:
Page Mill time = (OLH time + 1:00) * 2
Since Dennis did 19:50 on OLH last week (when I did that disasterous time of 27:02), there's every reason to expect his Page Mill time would have been right there, in the 42 minute range.
And, today's result on Page Mill backs up my algorithm - I did 53:30, but I'm pretty sure it could have easily done about 52 minutes if I had pushed a little harder on the top half.
So, reversing the algorithm, you get an OLH time for me of about 25 minutes ( 52/2 - 1 ), which is what I was telling Dennis earlier today - I don't think my time last week was a good baseline - 27:02 - I know I had lost my climbing legs over the last couple of months, but I figured that was good for a 2 minute loss on OLH, and not 4 minutes!
See? I'm a genius, right?
On the other hand, if I can get back to my OLH time of about 23 minutes (doable in the next couple of months), then my Page Mill time should end up in the 48 minute range.
So, this means I'll end up about 6 minutes behind Dennis, when I get my climbing legs back in the next month or two.
But by that time, Dennis will have most likely be approaching the OLH times of someone like David Kelly - he did 17:53 last year in week 2 of the LKHC. And, his Page Mill time was a very respectable time of 37:35 ( (18+1) * 2 = 38 ).
So even as I get better, so will Dennis - and the gap will still be there.
Or will it?
Obviously, I have a lot more room for improvement than Dennis does - we'll both reach some natural limit to our improvement - I just hope that I can end up close enough to him so we can work together in a few races next year, tearing the legs off all those guys that spent their fall and winter months watching football and pigging out during Thanksgiving and Xmas...
Well, I still like to dream, anyway... :)
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Going Backwards
So today, my friend, Dennis Pedersen, and I joined the Noon Goon ride in Palo Alto. Our intent was to start out the ride with them, which includes a nice climb up Old La Honda (OLH). But at the top of OLH, we were intending to slide back down to the bottom of the hill and - oh, no! - do the climb - again!
So, you might be wondering - why the hell would we do that? Simple. Today was the official start of the off-season for us - and we both want to improve our climbing for races that we intend to do next year. We'll both do our fair share of crits and the flatter road races, but it would be nice to be able to hang with the main pack on some of the hillier road races, too - the ones that have significant climbs in them (in this case, "significant" means something more than a mile long, and gaining more than just a few hundred feet of elevation).
So Dennis proposed that we start doing a series of 2x20 climbing efforts - this is where you climb at about 90% of your max heartrate for 20 minutes - and you do it 2 times (hence, the "2x20" nomenclature). We'll be doing other hill-climbing feats of pain, too - like 4-minute hill repeats (5 or 6 of them - ouch!), and other equally horrific painful activities - all meant to make you stronger, of course ("That which does not kill you...yeah, yeah, yeah...") - and since climbing OLH takes a decent climber about 20 minutes (usually a little less), then doing OLH twice made total sense.
So we meet with the Noon Goons at precisely 12 Noon (that's partially how they get their nickname from me) - and head out for a nice, 25-minute warmup to the base of OLH. I was a little hesitant about doing this climb just once, mind you - I last climbed it about 2 months ago and did a PB (that's Personal Best, just to be clear) of about 23:18 or so. Not a great time, but good for me - and I was confident about 2 months ago that I could keep chipping away at that time and get it into the very low 20s by the end of this year. My modest goal for the year was 22:00 flat - and I was sure I could meet this goal - maybe even get it down into the 21:xx range. In fact, a time of 21:18 would have been perfect, since there's this guy, Lucas Pereira, who did 21:19 several years ago when he participated in the Low-Key Hill Climb series back in 1997 (see his personal cycling records here).
I always thought it would be great if I could, one day, match the records of Lucas Pereira, just because his time for various climbs were well beyond my capabilities just a few short years ago, when I first came across his Personal Cycling Records page. I'm sure that Lucas Pereira could care less that there is someone out there attempting to match his accomplishments - he even says this at the top of that page:
This page is mainly for my own use. The records are nothing special, but I figured I would write them down so that I don't forget.
Yeah, I know what you mean, Lucas - and that's how I feel about my own records (the PBs) - they're mostly just for my own benefit. But it's always fun to have someone that you are competing with - besides yourself - just to make the game a little more fun and interesting.
So when I did the Beat-the-Clock Canada Road Time Trial back at the end of May this year (see the results here), I was delighted with my time for the 10-mile TT - 26:14 - which translates to just under 23.0 mph !! Why was I delighted? Because I had done better than Lucas Pereira, who did a lesser version of this time trial on Canada Rd (a shorter, 7.6-mile version, but on the same road) - he did 19:58, which translates to just 22.8 mph - so I had gone a longer distance (2.4 miles longer), and averaged just a little faster speed! Woohoooo!!!
Now granted, there isn't much climbing in that time trial (just a few hundred feet), but it showed that I had made great progress, indeed! Lucas had also climbed Mt Diablo in 1:10:40 - and I had done that same climb in 1:15:30 just a couple of weeks before that Canada Rd time trial, with my friend, Ed (you can see a recording of that ride here) - and I wasn't even trying to go that hard that day - I estimated I could have ridden up Mt Diablo 5 to 7 minutes faster than that, which would put me right there with Lucas' time! Maybe even a little faster! Not only that, but another biking buddy of mine, Mike Tolaio, had climbed Mt Diablo in a best time of 1:09:35 - and so there was an excellent chance I could have done a better time than Mike - and he's someone that was always able to out-climb me on any given day. This year, I've been riding fairly consistently, but Mike has not (he's been devoting a lot of time to his son's baseball development).
So what is the point of all this? Well, getting back to Old La Honda and the ride we did today, I was feeling hesitant - mostly because I just knew it was going to be a painful ride up the climb - and not just because of the difficulty of doing the climb, but also because I have not been climbing much the last couple of months - I've been riding with the Noon Goons during the week, and then doing crits or flatter road races on the weekends, which are a ton of fun, but don't really help you climb any faster.
So today I found out the truth - I'm going backwards! My time up OLH today: 27:02 - almost 4 minutes slower than just 2 months ago! How can that be?
Well, it's not quite as bad as it sounds, at first. If you looked at my time when I was about 1/2 way up the climb, things were looking bright. True, my average heartrate was more like 95% of my max (close to 165 bpm) instead of the 90% rate I was supposed to target (about 157 bpm) - but my time at the 1.0-mile mark was just 6:45 - only 10 seconds slower than my PB time. At the 1/2 way point (mile 1.6), I was at 11:55, just 30 seconds off my PB time. So I was starting to slip, but not too much.
Then, my world blew up - or, at least, my legs blew up. Suddenly, I had that horrible feeling I was about to slow to a crawl - and, I did. At the next checkpoint, mile 2.0, I had a time of 15:50 - a full 1:30 slower than my PB, so I had just lost a full minute in just 0.4 of a mile - not a good sign! And, I knew the last 1.2 miles were going to be equally painful and slow - and, they were! At mile 2.2 (where you travel through these incredibly beautiful pair of redwoods - like a magical door), I was at 19:00, now I was 2:30 down - oh, no! - I had lost another minute! At the 3.0-mile mark, I was at 25:30, now down by 3:30 - oh, brother - I was losing time real quickly - was there a hole in the bottom of the hour glass? How could so much sand escape? Finally, I rounded the final bend and dropped dead at the mailboxes, with a final time of 27:02 - I had officially lost almost 4 minutes from my PB of 23:18 just 2 months ago, on August 1 (you can see a recording of that ride here). Horror of horrors!
Then, I had a bit of good luck - Dennis thought his head tube was a bit loose, and decided he didn't think it would be a good idea to do another climb up OLH. Well, I could have told him that - and I didn't need to pretend my head tube was loose, either - my legs had learned to "Just Say No!" - and they did! So, I didn't (do another climb, that is) - and Dennis kindly kept me company as I limped back to the start area. But we did get in a couple of practice lead-out sprints on the way back - I felt much better, once I was on semi-level ground again!
So what does this all mean? Have I progressed backwards that much in such a short time? Well, yes - and no - I definitely went out too hard, which I said I wasn't going to do - but I did, anyway. The lesson there is: Follow your plan - if you were smart enough to come up with a training plan, then try to at least follow the training plan! Otherwise, why make a plan? Why not just do random rides at random times on random days? So, I think I learned a good lesson here. I'm fairly certain that if I had just started out by working my way up to the 90% heartrate (about 157 bpm), and stayed there for the entire climb, I would have hit the 1/2 way point a little slower (like at about 12:30 or 12:45), but then finished a lot stronger, and would have only lost about 2 minutes from my PB, to finish at about 25 minutes or so.
Thus, I would have been down about 2 minutes, which is a lot more palatable than down by 4 minutes!
Oh, and my friend, Dennis? I had predicted that he would break 20 minutes, based on my observation of his performances over the last few months. And his time? 19:50. Boy, I'm getting awful good at predicting other people's performances - now it's time to work on my own! So congrats to Dennis - he is now officially in the "sub-20" crowd for OLH - and it seems that everyone who considers themselves an avid cyclist knows his/her time up OLH - it's a classic benchmark climb in the Bay Area. It's not the steepest climb (it averages about 7.5%), nor is it the longest (it's about 3.25 miles), but it does climb 1330 feet - and if you can do it in less than 20 minutes, you belong to a fairly elite club of cyclists - and I hope to be there by the Spring of next year, with a little help and encouragement from Dennis and his new training program for me, which will focus on a lot of climbing during the next 4 to 5 months, in preparation for some of the hillier road races next year.
So, I'm going backwards - but it's all about the journey, right? This has been a fun year - I got back into racing, which I hadn't done for 30 years - and I'm able to hang in for a lot of the Noon Goon rides, as well as crits and the flatter road races - and at age 53, that ain't too bad! I mean, I could be 60 pounds overweight and unable to ride around the block, which happens to describe me just 4 short years ago. So I'm not doing too bad - most of the weight is gone (and just why is that last 10 to 15 pounds so hard to drop, anyway?) - and my enthusiasm for biking is at an all-time high (too high, if you ask my family!).
And besides, next year, Dennis and I plan to be bona-fide mutants, tearing the legs off unsuspecting victims on a weekly basis...right, Dennis?
Yeah, right... :)
So, you might be wondering - why the hell would we do that? Simple. Today was the official start of the off-season for us - and we both want to improve our climbing for races that we intend to do next year. We'll both do our fair share of crits and the flatter road races, but it would be nice to be able to hang with the main pack on some of the hillier road races, too - the ones that have significant climbs in them (in this case, "significant" means something more than a mile long, and gaining more than just a few hundred feet of elevation).
So Dennis proposed that we start doing a series of 2x20 climbing efforts - this is where you climb at about 90% of your max heartrate for 20 minutes - and you do it 2 times (hence, the "2x20" nomenclature). We'll be doing other hill-climbing feats of pain, too - like 4-minute hill repeats (5 or 6 of them - ouch!), and other equally horrific painful activities - all meant to make you stronger, of course ("That which does not kill you...yeah, yeah, yeah...") - and since climbing OLH takes a decent climber about 20 minutes (usually a little less), then doing OLH twice made total sense.
So we meet with the Noon Goons at precisely 12 Noon (that's partially how they get their nickname from me) - and head out for a nice, 25-minute warmup to the base of OLH. I was a little hesitant about doing this climb just once, mind you - I last climbed it about 2 months ago and did a PB (that's Personal Best, just to be clear) of about 23:18 or so. Not a great time, but good for me - and I was confident about 2 months ago that I could keep chipping away at that time and get it into the very low 20s by the end of this year. My modest goal for the year was 22:00 flat - and I was sure I could meet this goal - maybe even get it down into the 21:xx range. In fact, a time of 21:18 would have been perfect, since there's this guy, Lucas Pereira, who did 21:19 several years ago when he participated in the Low-Key Hill Climb series back in 1997 (see his personal cycling records here).
I always thought it would be great if I could, one day, match the records of Lucas Pereira, just because his time for various climbs were well beyond my capabilities just a few short years ago, when I first came across his Personal Cycling Records page. I'm sure that Lucas Pereira could care less that there is someone out there attempting to match his accomplishments - he even says this at the top of that page:
This page is mainly for my own use. The records are nothing special, but I figured I would write them down so that I don't forget.
Yeah, I know what you mean, Lucas - and that's how I feel about my own records (the PBs) - they're mostly just for my own benefit. But it's always fun to have someone that you are competing with - besides yourself - just to make the game a little more fun and interesting.
So when I did the Beat-the-Clock Canada Road Time Trial back at the end of May this year (see the results here), I was delighted with my time for the 10-mile TT - 26:14 - which translates to just under 23.0 mph !! Why was I delighted? Because I had done better than Lucas Pereira, who did a lesser version of this time trial on Canada Rd (a shorter, 7.6-mile version, but on the same road) - he did 19:58, which translates to just 22.8 mph - so I had gone a longer distance (2.4 miles longer), and averaged just a little faster speed! Woohoooo!!!
Now granted, there isn't much climbing in that time trial (just a few hundred feet), but it showed that I had made great progress, indeed! Lucas had also climbed Mt Diablo in 1:10:40 - and I had done that same climb in 1:15:30 just a couple of weeks before that Canada Rd time trial, with my friend, Ed (you can see a recording of that ride here) - and I wasn't even trying to go that hard that day - I estimated I could have ridden up Mt Diablo 5 to 7 minutes faster than that, which would put me right there with Lucas' time! Maybe even a little faster! Not only that, but another biking buddy of mine, Mike Tolaio, had climbed Mt Diablo in a best time of 1:09:35 - and so there was an excellent chance I could have done a better time than Mike - and he's someone that was always able to out-climb me on any given day. This year, I've been riding fairly consistently, but Mike has not (he's been devoting a lot of time to his son's baseball development).
So what is the point of all this? Well, getting back to Old La Honda and the ride we did today, I was feeling hesitant - mostly because I just knew it was going to be a painful ride up the climb - and not just because of the difficulty of doing the climb, but also because I have not been climbing much the last couple of months - I've been riding with the Noon Goons during the week, and then doing crits or flatter road races on the weekends, which are a ton of fun, but don't really help you climb any faster.
So today I found out the truth - I'm going backwards! My time up OLH today: 27:02 - almost 4 minutes slower than just 2 months ago! How can that be?
Well, it's not quite as bad as it sounds, at first. If you looked at my time when I was about 1/2 way up the climb, things were looking bright. True, my average heartrate was more like 95% of my max (close to 165 bpm) instead of the 90% rate I was supposed to target (about 157 bpm) - but my time at the 1.0-mile mark was just 6:45 - only 10 seconds slower than my PB time. At the 1/2 way point (mile 1.6), I was at 11:55, just 30 seconds off my PB time. So I was starting to slip, but not too much.
Then, my world blew up - or, at least, my legs blew up. Suddenly, I had that horrible feeling I was about to slow to a crawl - and, I did. At the next checkpoint, mile 2.0, I had a time of 15:50 - a full 1:30 slower than my PB, so I had just lost a full minute in just 0.4 of a mile - not a good sign! And, I knew the last 1.2 miles were going to be equally painful and slow - and, they were! At mile 2.2 (where you travel through these incredibly beautiful pair of redwoods - like a magical door), I was at 19:00, now I was 2:30 down - oh, no! - I had lost another minute! At the 3.0-mile mark, I was at 25:30, now down by 3:30 - oh, brother - I was losing time real quickly - was there a hole in the bottom of the hour glass? How could so much sand escape? Finally, I rounded the final bend and dropped dead at the mailboxes, with a final time of 27:02 - I had officially lost almost 4 minutes from my PB of 23:18 just 2 months ago, on August 1 (you can see a recording of that ride here). Horror of horrors!
Then, I had a bit of good luck - Dennis thought his head tube was a bit loose, and decided he didn't think it would be a good idea to do another climb up OLH. Well, I could have told him that - and I didn't need to pretend my head tube was loose, either - my legs had learned to "Just Say No!" - and they did! So, I didn't (do another climb, that is) - and Dennis kindly kept me company as I limped back to the start area. But we did get in a couple of practice lead-out sprints on the way back - I felt much better, once I was on semi-level ground again!
So what does this all mean? Have I progressed backwards that much in such a short time? Well, yes - and no - I definitely went out too hard, which I said I wasn't going to do - but I did, anyway. The lesson there is: Follow your plan - if you were smart enough to come up with a training plan, then try to at least follow the training plan! Otherwise, why make a plan? Why not just do random rides at random times on random days? So, I think I learned a good lesson here. I'm fairly certain that if I had just started out by working my way up to the 90% heartrate (about 157 bpm), and stayed there for the entire climb, I would have hit the 1/2 way point a little slower (like at about 12:30 or 12:45), but then finished a lot stronger, and would have only lost about 2 minutes from my PB, to finish at about 25 minutes or so.
Thus, I would have been down about 2 minutes, which is a lot more palatable than down by 4 minutes!
Oh, and my friend, Dennis? I had predicted that he would break 20 minutes, based on my observation of his performances over the last few months. And his time? 19:50. Boy, I'm getting awful good at predicting other people's performances - now it's time to work on my own! So congrats to Dennis - he is now officially in the "sub-20" crowd for OLH - and it seems that everyone who considers themselves an avid cyclist knows his/her time up OLH - it's a classic benchmark climb in the Bay Area. It's not the steepest climb (it averages about 7.5%), nor is it the longest (it's about 3.25 miles), but it does climb 1330 feet - and if you can do it in less than 20 minutes, you belong to a fairly elite club of cyclists - and I hope to be there by the Spring of next year, with a little help and encouragement from Dennis and his new training program for me, which will focus on a lot of climbing during the next 4 to 5 months, in preparation for some of the hillier road races next year.
So, I'm going backwards - but it's all about the journey, right? This has been a fun year - I got back into racing, which I hadn't done for 30 years - and I'm able to hang in for a lot of the Noon Goon rides, as well as crits and the flatter road races - and at age 53, that ain't too bad! I mean, I could be 60 pounds overweight and unable to ride around the block, which happens to describe me just 4 short years ago. So I'm not doing too bad - most of the weight is gone (and just why is that last 10 to 15 pounds so hard to drop, anyway?) - and my enthusiasm for biking is at an all-time high (too high, if you ask my family!).
And besides, next year, Dennis and I plan to be bona-fide mutants, tearing the legs off unsuspecting victims on a weekly basis...right, Dennis?
Yeah, right... :)
Friday, September 28, 2007
Someday, I Want To Be A Mutant
Just to clarify, a "mutant" is actually a good thing, in the small world of bike racing. I first picked up the term "mutant" when reading some of the race reports of one of my friends, Dennis Pedersen - you can read some of those reports at the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club (SCCCC) Race Team Reports here.
So, just what is a "mutant"? Well, it's basically one of those guys that can rip off the legs of his competitors, especially during a longer climb up some mountain. In other words, an especially strong racer that usually makes his peers suffer during a race - and suffer a lot!
Dennis and I have often joked in our race reports about various "mutants" that we have both observed. In fact, two in particular happened to show up for one of our races, at the Giro di San Francisco - you can read my own report here and Dennis' right here.
Those pair of mutants I referred to in my race report are Kevin Metcalfe and Don Langley. Between the two of them, they win a lot of races, to be sure. And Kevin, in particular, is what I'd call a "super-mutant" - he's 46 years old, but you'd think he was fresh out of college - he has quite the racing palmares (that's like your resume in the bike racing world) - just check out Kevin's results over the last dozen years!
Kevin has also participated in the annual Mt Diablo Challenge hillclimb that is held the first Sunday of every October - and has usually placed in the top 2 or 3, with a time of about 47+ minutes - that's averaging more than 13.5 mph up an 11-mile climb that gains about 3400 feet of climbing - amazing!
Also, Kevin just placed 6th in the recent Masters World TT Championships held in Austria - he did the 12.5-mile course that gains 1400 feet in just 25:40, an average speed of 29.0 mph!! And he was only about 30 seconds away from 1st place! That's almost as fast as the pros go when they do time-trials in events like the Tour de France - truly a "super-mutant", as you can see!
As you can tell, I very much admire cyclists like Kevin Metcalfe - I'm only 7 years older than him, but I'm nowhere close to matching his abilities in the mountains - even accounting for my slightly advanced age.
So Kevin's a "mutant" (or, "super-mutant", whatever) - and so it amused me to no end when I happened to come across a race report that he wrote in the AMD Discovery Masters Team blog about a race he did this year - the Patterson Pass Road Race. Kevin normally races in the open 45+ races (meaning open to any category - and it's usually a bunch of Cat 1 and Cat 2 racers, as well as former Pros, who have simply gotten a little older - but not too much slower!). But for the Patterson Pass Road Race, Kevin decided to race with the Pro/1/2 crowd - it's just like the open 45+ crowd, but includes mostly the younger guys (the guys that *will* race in the open 45+ races, once they get old enough - like in 20 years!).
And why was I so amused when reading his race report for the Patterson Pass race? Well, here is a paragraph he wrote near the beginning of his report (you can read his full report right here):
"At the start line there were many Giant Strawberries including pro triathlete Chris Lieto. Also on the line was one of my old Sacramento team mates Mike Sayers and two of his BMC guys. And the usual crowd of mutants bent on making me suffer."
So I just had to laugh to myself - here's a guy that I consider a "super-mutant" - and he's complaining about the guys that *he* considers to be "mutants".
So I guess it's all relative, after all.
But, I'd still like to be known to my peers as a "mutant" one day...
So, just what is a "mutant"? Well, it's basically one of those guys that can rip off the legs of his competitors, especially during a longer climb up some mountain. In other words, an especially strong racer that usually makes his peers suffer during a race - and suffer a lot!
Dennis and I have often joked in our race reports about various "mutants" that we have both observed. In fact, two in particular happened to show up for one of our races, at the Giro di San Francisco - you can read my own report here and Dennis' right here.
Those pair of mutants I referred to in my race report are Kevin Metcalfe and Don Langley. Between the two of them, they win a lot of races, to be sure. And Kevin, in particular, is what I'd call a "super-mutant" - he's 46 years old, but you'd think he was fresh out of college - he has quite the racing palmares (that's like your resume in the bike racing world) - just check out Kevin's results over the last dozen years!
Kevin has also participated in the annual Mt Diablo Challenge hillclimb that is held the first Sunday of every October - and has usually placed in the top 2 or 3, with a time of about 47+ minutes - that's averaging more than 13.5 mph up an 11-mile climb that gains about 3400 feet of climbing - amazing!
Also, Kevin just placed 6th in the recent Masters World TT Championships held in Austria - he did the 12.5-mile course that gains 1400 feet in just 25:40, an average speed of 29.0 mph!! And he was only about 30 seconds away from 1st place! That's almost as fast as the pros go when they do time-trials in events like the Tour de France - truly a "super-mutant", as you can see!
As you can tell, I very much admire cyclists like Kevin Metcalfe - I'm only 7 years older than him, but I'm nowhere close to matching his abilities in the mountains - even accounting for my slightly advanced age.
So Kevin's a "mutant" (or, "super-mutant", whatever) - and so it amused me to no end when I happened to come across a race report that he wrote in the AMD Discovery Masters Team blog about a race he did this year - the Patterson Pass Road Race. Kevin normally races in the open 45+ races (meaning open to any category - and it's usually a bunch of Cat 1 and Cat 2 racers, as well as former Pros, who have simply gotten a little older - but not too much slower!). But for the Patterson Pass Road Race, Kevin decided to race with the Pro/1/2 crowd - it's just like the open 45+ crowd, but includes mostly the younger guys (the guys that *will* race in the open 45+ races, once they get old enough - like in 20 years!).
And why was I so amused when reading his race report for the Patterson Pass race? Well, here is a paragraph he wrote near the beginning of his report (you can read his full report right here):
"At the start line there were many Giant Strawberries including pro triathlete Chris Lieto. Also on the line was one of my old Sacramento team mates Mike Sayers and two of his BMC guys. And the usual crowd of mutants bent on making me suffer."
So I just had to laugh to myself - here's a guy that I consider a "super-mutant" - and he's complaining about the guys that *he* considers to be "mutants".
So I guess it's all relative, after all.
But, I'd still like to be known to my peers as a "mutant" one day...
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Bikecology, Bob Jackson, and Ron Cooper
Sometimes, it's interesting how your life is actually a lot more intertwined with someone else's life - even though neither one of you realizes it at the time. But more on that later...
I started this blog soon after my friend, Dennis Pedersen, started his blog ( you can read his musings here ). Dennis is one of the few cyclists on my team, the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club (SCCCC), who likes to do road races - the SCCCC is really more of a cyclocross club, judging by their focus on those kinds of races. In fact, Dennis will now be doing a lot his road races for a new team he just joined, The Bicycle Trip. Maybe I'll get a chance to join him one day, after I improve my climbing next year (I'll devote a separate article to this one day).
Although I've only known Dennis for a relatively short time, I've noticed that he and I have a lot in common, mostly bike-related, of course. He started actively racing road bikes in the last two or three years, and I just started racing road again in the last two or three months, although I originally raced road bikes way back in the mid-1970s for a couple of years.
And, Dennis is quite passionate about training and racing, which is something that I've rediscovered in myself these last couple of years (And that is why next year will entail a full racing schedule for me - my wife, Becky, doesn't know that yet - but my passion for bike riding/racing is no secret to her - and she and my kids have started to show a lot more interest in supporting my "bad habit", as they like to think of it)....
So I was reading one of Dennis' recent posts, entitled My Cycling History and was quite amused when I saw him make a reference to a catalog for a bike store that he used to read ( because, as he pointed out, it was all he could afford back in those days! ).
Well, the catalog he mentioned was for a bike store called Bikecology - and it amused me for a very simple reason: I worked there for a couple of years, as a part-time job while putting myself through school at UCLA - and I think I just saw Dennis smile, assuming he's reading it right now (right, Dennis?).
And, I was even more amused when Dennis made a reference to the Bob Jackson bike that he dreamed of owning one day, but was way too expensive for him at the time. Well, we sold Bob Jackson bikes at Bikecology, as well as another English-built custom bike, Ron Cooper. They were both great bikes - and I, too, dreamed of the day when I could afford one of those cool bikes - I had a relatively mid-range Nishiki at the time ( it was all that I could afford, being a poor college student, of course ). Here's a cool link I found that compared these two great bikes: http://www.veloworks.com/roncooper/cooper1976.html.
Well, since I worked as a part-time mechanic at Bikecology, I was presented a unique opportunity one day. One of our customers had ordered a black Ron Cooper frame and when it arrived at our shop ( on Santa Monica Blvd. ), the manager of the shop noticed there was a very minor ding in the top tube of the frame (probably happened after it left England, during shipping to our store). When he showed it to the customer, they didn't like the ding and said they would wait until a replacement frame could be sent from England. The ding was not critical, in terms of the integrity of the frame - it was just a small cosmetic thing.
Now my manager, a really strong cyclist named Manny, knew I was just getting into road racing and asked me if I would be interested in buying the "damaged" frame from him - at a very good discount from the normal wholesale price. Really? Wooooooohooooo!!! I had (barely) enough in my bank account to buy just the frame, which just happened to be the size I needed. And Manny was kind enough to let me build up the bike after work, and even loaned me the money to purchase a lot of the high-end Suntour components I used to outfit my new bike - Campy was just way too expensive!
I was so excited about the prospect of having this incredible racing machine - and promptly went out to train even harder with my racing buddy, Danny Escalzo. He and I had accidentally gotten involved in road racing when we inadvertently joined a famous training ride in the local area - the Sunday Death Ride, which was a lot like any of the big group training rides that happen every weekend here in the Bay Area (like the Spectrum Ride or the Crow's Nest Ride on Saturday mornings).
Danny and I were out for one of our fun Sunday rides, riding from where we lived near UCLA down to Highway 1 (via Sunset Blvd), then turning north on Highway 1 to head up towards Oxnard and back (about a 100 mile ride). After riding for a couple of miles along Highway 1, we were suddenly passed by a huge pack of riders - at least 60 or 70 that day - and quickly hopped onto the back of the pack to ride with them. It turned out to be that famous Sunday Death Ride (which we had never heard about, since we weren't into racing at that point) - and after successfully staying with the pack all the way up to the turnaround point (which was at a little mini-market somewhere near Leo Carrillo State Beach) and then back to Santa Monica, we were invited by a guy named Maury to join his club, the North Hollywood Wheelmen.
So we did. And thus began my passion with racing road bikes - on the coolest racing bike I could ever imagine!
I entered a lot of road races and criteriums with my black Ron Cooper bike back in those fun college days during the mid-1970s. It was a truly magical time and passed all too quickly.
It's too bad I wandered away from the bike racing world after I graduated from UCLA and came up here to the Bay Area to start my career. But, at least I have a chance to enjoy those times once again, racing my new '08 Trek Madone (a black one, no less!) with my new club, Team Santa Cruz ( SCCCC ) - and hopefully, getting to employ some sort of team tactics with Dennis and a few others on both SCCCC and Team Bicycle Trip.
It's so interesting to see how lives become intertwined sometimes...and in the most unexpected ways, too! I hadn't thought about Bikecology and my first real racing bike, that Ron Cooper, for a very long time...
Thanks, Dennis!
I started this blog soon after my friend, Dennis Pedersen, started his blog ( you can read his musings here ). Dennis is one of the few cyclists on my team, the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club (SCCCC), who likes to do road races - the SCCCC is really more of a cyclocross club, judging by their focus on those kinds of races. In fact, Dennis will now be doing a lot his road races for a new team he just joined, The Bicycle Trip. Maybe I'll get a chance to join him one day, after I improve my climbing next year (I'll devote a separate article to this one day).
Although I've only known Dennis for a relatively short time, I've noticed that he and I have a lot in common, mostly bike-related, of course. He started actively racing road bikes in the last two or three years, and I just started racing road again in the last two or three months, although I originally raced road bikes way back in the mid-1970s for a couple of years.
And, Dennis is quite passionate about training and racing, which is something that I've rediscovered in myself these last couple of years (And that is why next year will entail a full racing schedule for me - my wife, Becky, doesn't know that yet - but my passion for bike riding/racing is no secret to her - and she and my kids have started to show a lot more interest in supporting my "bad habit", as they like to think of it)....
So I was reading one of Dennis' recent posts, entitled My Cycling History and was quite amused when I saw him make a reference to a catalog for a bike store that he used to read ( because, as he pointed out, it was all he could afford back in those days! ).
Well, the catalog he mentioned was for a bike store called Bikecology - and it amused me for a very simple reason: I worked there for a couple of years, as a part-time job while putting myself through school at UCLA - and I think I just saw Dennis smile, assuming he's reading it right now (right, Dennis?).
And, I was even more amused when Dennis made a reference to the Bob Jackson bike that he dreamed of owning one day, but was way too expensive for him at the time. Well, we sold Bob Jackson bikes at Bikecology, as well as another English-built custom bike, Ron Cooper. They were both great bikes - and I, too, dreamed of the day when I could afford one of those cool bikes - I had a relatively mid-range Nishiki at the time ( it was all that I could afford, being a poor college student, of course ). Here's a cool link I found that compared these two great bikes: http://www.veloworks.com/roncooper/cooper1976.html.
Well, since I worked as a part-time mechanic at Bikecology, I was presented a unique opportunity one day. One of our customers had ordered a black Ron Cooper frame and when it arrived at our shop ( on Santa Monica Blvd. ), the manager of the shop noticed there was a very minor ding in the top tube of the frame (probably happened after it left England, during shipping to our store). When he showed it to the customer, they didn't like the ding and said they would wait until a replacement frame could be sent from England. The ding was not critical, in terms of the integrity of the frame - it was just a small cosmetic thing.
Now my manager, a really strong cyclist named Manny, knew I was just getting into road racing and asked me if I would be interested in buying the "damaged" frame from him - at a very good discount from the normal wholesale price. Really? Wooooooohooooo!!! I had (barely) enough in my bank account to buy just the frame, which just happened to be the size I needed. And Manny was kind enough to let me build up the bike after work, and even loaned me the money to purchase a lot of the high-end Suntour components I used to outfit my new bike - Campy was just way too expensive!
I was so excited about the prospect of having this incredible racing machine - and promptly went out to train even harder with my racing buddy, Danny Escalzo. He and I had accidentally gotten involved in road racing when we inadvertently joined a famous training ride in the local area - the Sunday Death Ride, which was a lot like any of the big group training rides that happen every weekend here in the Bay Area (like the Spectrum Ride or the Crow's Nest Ride on Saturday mornings).
Danny and I were out for one of our fun Sunday rides, riding from where we lived near UCLA down to Highway 1 (via Sunset Blvd), then turning north on Highway 1 to head up towards Oxnard and back (about a 100 mile ride). After riding for a couple of miles along Highway 1, we were suddenly passed by a huge pack of riders - at least 60 or 70 that day - and quickly hopped onto the back of the pack to ride with them. It turned out to be that famous Sunday Death Ride (which we had never heard about, since we weren't into racing at that point) - and after successfully staying with the pack all the way up to the turnaround point (which was at a little mini-market somewhere near Leo Carrillo State Beach) and then back to Santa Monica, we were invited by a guy named Maury to join his club, the North Hollywood Wheelmen.
So we did. And thus began my passion with racing road bikes - on the coolest racing bike I could ever imagine!
I entered a lot of road races and criteriums with my black Ron Cooper bike back in those fun college days during the mid-1970s. It was a truly magical time and passed all too quickly.
It's too bad I wandered away from the bike racing world after I graduated from UCLA and came up here to the Bay Area to start my career. But, at least I have a chance to enjoy those times once again, racing my new '08 Trek Madone (a black one, no less!) with my new club, Team Santa Cruz ( SCCCC ) - and hopefully, getting to employ some sort of team tactics with Dennis and a few others on both SCCCC and Team Bicycle Trip.
It's so interesting to see how lives become intertwined sometimes...and in the most unexpected ways, too! I hadn't thought about Bikecology and my first real racing bike, that Ron Cooper, for a very long time...
Thanks, Dennis!
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Did I Actually Beat These Guys?
From my earlier posts, you might know that I did my first
road race in 30 years a few weeks ago - the San Ardo RR
( you can read about it here ).
One of the things I like to do for my races is scope out
the competition, of course - and with everything getting
blasted out onto the web these days, it's not all that hard
to do if you race bicycles.
Some of the promoters of various races use BikeReg.com or
SportsBaseOnline.com to register the entrants - and both of
those websites allow you to look at a list of all the current
registered cyclists for the different race categories - how
nice!
So, you can look at the list of names in your race, and then
go to usacycling.org to check out their racing palmares.
Having looked at a lot of names over the past few months
( starting about the time I got interested in racing bikes
again ), I happened to become familiar with a number of racers -
not by face, mind you - like everything else on the web these
days, just virtually. And occasionally, I get to actually
meet some of these individuals at the races I'm now starting
to attend ( or the training rides - like those Noon Goon rides
I do out of Palo Alto a few times during the weekdays ).
So I happened to be browsing through the race results for
my San Ardo race ( you can see for yourself here ) and suddenly,
I saw 2 names that popped out at me - Frederick Stamm and
John Novitsky - and I noticed that I had actually placed
ahead of both of those guys! I got 16th, Frederick got 21st,
and John got 26th.
So what's the big deal about that?
Well, first of all, I could have easily placed a lot higher -
top 10 for sure, and top 5 maybe - but I had made a really
dumb tactical error towards the end of the race (duh!).
But more importantly, I had actually beaten both those guys -
and these are guys I had dreamed of one day beating, mostly
because they are both strong riders that regularly do quite
well in road races and hillclimb events - climbing hills is
my one main weakness that I intend to work on this next year -
but these guys can climb quite well, especially considering
that they are about my age (John is 49 and Frederick is 55 -
and I'm 53).
John Novitsky can time-trial really well, too - he beat just
about everybody in the Beat-the-Clock Canada Road time trials
this last year ( check out the results page here ).
And you can check out John's racing palmares and see his
accomplishments in some of the races he's done over the
last few years - impressive!
I got to know Frederick Stamm's name because of the
Low Key Hillclimb Series that was held last year
( it was originally held about 10 or 11 years ago for a
couple of years ) - and Frederick consistently placed quite
well on the hillclimbs - especially considering that he's
55 years old! I plan on doing the climbing series this year -
it's coming up soon! - and I always thought it would be nice
if I could eventually climb as well as Frederick Stamm,
among others.
And he has an impressive racing palmares, too - as you
can see by checking out his racing results over the last few
years. So I thought it would be cool to someday be able to
compete with him in a race.
And now, I see that in my first road race in 30 years, I actually
beat both these guys! - woooohoooo!!!
Now, the San Ardo race didn't exactly play to their strengths -
in fact, one reason I picked that race as my first road race in
30 years was precisely because it wasn't too hilly - just a lot
of rollers and a long flat stretch on the backside of the course.
But still...how cool is that? Maybe I'll have a chance to be more
competitive next year - especially if I get some assistance in my
training from Dennis Pedersen and the new team he just joined,
Bicycle Trip.
I can't wait to see what happens next year with my racing...
road race in 30 years a few weeks ago - the San Ardo RR
( you can read about it here ).
One of the things I like to do for my races is scope out
the competition, of course - and with everything getting
blasted out onto the web these days, it's not all that hard
to do if you race bicycles.
Some of the promoters of various races use BikeReg.com or
SportsBaseOnline.com to register the entrants - and both of
those websites allow you to look at a list of all the current
registered cyclists for the different race categories - how
nice!
So, you can look at the list of names in your race, and then
go to usacycling.org to check out their racing palmares.
Having looked at a lot of names over the past few months
( starting about the time I got interested in racing bikes
again ), I happened to become familiar with a number of racers -
not by face, mind you - like everything else on the web these
days, just virtually. And occasionally, I get to actually
meet some of these individuals at the races I'm now starting
to attend ( or the training rides - like those Noon Goon rides
I do out of Palo Alto a few times during the weekdays ).
So I happened to be browsing through the race results for
my San Ardo race ( you can see for yourself here ) and suddenly,
I saw 2 names that popped out at me - Frederick Stamm and
John Novitsky - and I noticed that I had actually placed
ahead of both of those guys! I got 16th, Frederick got 21st,
and John got 26th.
So what's the big deal about that?
Well, first of all, I could have easily placed a lot higher -
top 10 for sure, and top 5 maybe - but I had made a really
dumb tactical error towards the end of the race (duh!).
But more importantly, I had actually beaten both those guys -
and these are guys I had dreamed of one day beating, mostly
because they are both strong riders that regularly do quite
well in road races and hillclimb events - climbing hills is
my one main weakness that I intend to work on this next year -
but these guys can climb quite well, especially considering
that they are about my age (John is 49 and Frederick is 55 -
and I'm 53).
John Novitsky can time-trial really well, too - he beat just
about everybody in the Beat-the-Clock Canada Road time trials
this last year ( check out the results page here ).
And you can check out John's racing palmares and see his
accomplishments in some of the races he's done over the
last few years - impressive!
I got to know Frederick Stamm's name because of the
Low Key Hillclimb Series that was held last year
( it was originally held about 10 or 11 years ago for a
couple of years ) - and Frederick consistently placed quite
well on the hillclimbs - especially considering that he's
55 years old! I plan on doing the climbing series this year -
it's coming up soon! - and I always thought it would be nice
if I could eventually climb as well as Frederick Stamm,
among others.
And he has an impressive racing palmares, too - as you
can see by checking out his racing results over the last few
years. So I thought it would be cool to someday be able to
compete with him in a race.
And now, I see that in my first road race in 30 years, I actually
beat both these guys! - woooohoooo!!!
Now, the San Ardo race didn't exactly play to their strengths -
in fact, one reason I picked that race as my first road race in
30 years was precisely because it wasn't too hilly - just a lot
of rollers and a long flat stretch on the backside of the course.
But still...how cool is that? Maybe I'll have a chance to be more
competitive next year - especially if I get some assistance in my
training from Dennis Pedersen and the new team he just joined,
Bicycle Trip.
I can't wait to see what happens next year with my racing...
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
I (finally!) Got Dennis His Video Up On YouTube
Several weeks ago, I did the Timpani Criterium (you can check
out my race report for all the gory details) - and I got there early,
mostly to videotape the Cat 4 race, where my teammate,
Dennis Pedersen, was trying to place at least 5th (in order to
upgrade into Cat 3 before the end of this racing season).
Well, Dennis got 2nd place (congrats, Dennis!) - and I told him I
caught it all on videotape - he told me he had never seen himself
racing on video, so I promised to get the video up on YouTube
ASAP.
Then I managed to "misplace" the magic USB cable you need to
pull the video off the camcorder and onto your PC - oops! And,
I got busy with the usual stuff that engulfs your daily life - every
once in awhile, Dennis would query me, "Hey - how about that
video, Steve?" ....uh, any day now, Dennis...
In the meantime, I enlisted the aid of my son, Mitchell, to tape
our Giro di San Francisco crit (you can read the coverage of
that disaster of a race, if you want), as well as my somewhat
comical redemption at the Benicia Town Race (details can be
found here).
Side note: Dennis just sent me an e-mail to a link of some
nice guy that took pictures at our Benicia Town Race - that
picture you see above shows me in my blue SCCCC kit (on the
right side of the photo). I'm even smiling - this was most
likely just before my seatpost slipped down to my top tube
and hampered the rest of my race (but, I finished, anyway!).
Back to my story: I had just about given up finding that
damn cable and was about to buy a new USB cable for the
camcorder when I got lucky and found the missing cable -
wooohooo!! That night, I pulled off the video for that
Timpani crit race - and now, Dennis - here it is, for
posterity's sake:
Timpani Criterium Cat 4 Race on YouTube
And with that, I removed one of those monkeys that's been
riding on my back... :)
I would have pulled off the other videos, too - but our internet
connection really sucked last night - it took an amazingly long
time just to upload that one video. We'll try again tonight for
those other videos...
Enjoy the show, Dennis!
Monday, September 10, 2007
Noon Goon "Race" Report
So here I sit, creating the first entry of my first blog - and I'm
asking myself, "Why would anyone waste their time creating
a blog, knowing full well that virtually nobody will ever read
your awesome insights into all things that constitute your life?"
Okay, so my Mom will probably read my blog - and I'll
probably read it - several times over, just to make sure it is
grammatically correct - but nobody else really cares, right?
I guess this is just one way to record some of the minutia that
consumes your day...maybe my kids will discover this blog
one day, when I'm too old and fragile to communicate with
anyone - and they'll at least get a little glimpse of my life
back in my younger, healthier days!
In my case, that minutia will probably have something to do
with one of my great passions these days, biking! And hence,
you will get to read about the "musings of a cyclotic" - I don't
know what inspired me to think of "cyclotic", but it seemed to
fit, for a variety of reasons.
Today's topic? Gee - could it have anything to do with bikes?
Okay, so one of the things I do these days is train - I got back
into bike racing recently - and it's a total blast! It takes me
back to my college days, when I used to race bikes with a lot of
passion - and some relative success, too!
One of the training rides I do during the weekdays is the Palo Alto
Noon Ride - it leaves from the same spot (Old Page Mill Rd),
at the same time (12:00 Noon), every day during the week,
all year round. I suppose especially nasty weather days might
reduce the number of participants, but most days there will be
anywhere from 10 to 30 cyclists, most of them amateur bike racers
like me, just getting out for a little noon-time training ride - the
rides usually only last about an hour - maybe a little longer on
certain days - but it's a *fast* hour or so. And they are just training
rides, but more often than not, they are really unsanctioned bike
races - and so today, I present to you a typical "race report", so you
can see what consititues one of my typical noon-time training rides...
I'll often refer to my fellow cyclists on these rides as the Noon Goons -
it sounds derogatory, but it's actually an affectionate reference to
a bunch of guys (and gals!) that I truly respect - I think each and
every one of them understands the hard work it takes to reach the
level where you can do one of these rides and survive to the end -
I honestly believe every one of the Noon Goons is a special person,
with that unique understanding of something quite extraordinary -
riding a bike at the extreme physical limits of your abilities. This
blog is probably more a testament to these great cyclists - they're
all winners, in my book - even the ones that inevitably get dropped
at some point during the ride - 'cause you just *know* they're
going to come back again one day - and kick your ass!
==========================================================================
Noon Goon Race - Monday Edition, Palo Alto / Woodside, CA USA, 9/10/2007
Normally, the Monday edition of the Noon Ride out of Palo Alto is
what we like to refer to as a 'recovery ride' - just a bunch of friendly
amateur racers out for a little noon-time spin to help flush out the
lactic acid that built up from the previous weekend's races.
And, in this case, *some* of us had actually raced on the previous
weekend - I, for one, had done the Benicia Town Race just the day
before, on Sunday morning - it was a somewhat hilly crit - not quite
as intense as the Cat's Hill crit, but it did register a respectable
1100 feet of climbing in the 16-mile race - I had done the 35+ 4/5
race, which lasted almost exactly 40 minutes - you can see my race
report here for the gory details:
http://www.santacruzcycling.org/teamsc/2007/racereport/#992007SteveRosen
So the Benicia Town Race was a relatively intense effort for the 40
minutes that it lasted, and Monday's Noon Goon ride *should* have
been a nice, relaxing, 'recovery' ride. And, in fact, that is exactly
how it started out - it wasn't clear that too many people had raced
last weekend - I think only a couple of us had actually raced up at
Benicia - but the Monday ride can go both ways on any given week -
sometimes it's easy and mellow (averaging about 20 mph) - and other
weeks, it gets fast and nasty (averaging more than 22 mph). And you
have to remember, those average speeds include a *very* easy
rollout for the first few miles (down Old Page Mill to Page Mill, then
a right on Arastradero and over to Alpine Rd), as well as a few
'biking stops' at stop signs and signals. In fact, the pack usually rolls
through most of the stop signs in a very responsible manner - and
almost always stops completely at a signal with a red light (though
I've personally witnessed a couple of exceptions - arrgghh!!).
This particular Monday looked like it was going to be one of those
'nice' Mondays - a true recovery ride, with no hard efforts or any
attempts to simulate a real race. It was a fairly large pack, too -
probably about 30 cyclists (normally, Mondays will only have 15 to
20 show up). People were calmly chatting as we rolled down
Old Page Mill to Page Mill, then turned right onto Arastradero
and climbed easily up the Arastradero hills, on our way over to
Alpine Rd.
Sometimes, you can get a hint of things to come, based on how the
Arastradero hills are climbed - and today, it was very mellow, which
I now realize was the calm before the storm!
As we turned onto Alpine Rd, a couple of guys broke off the front
and started hammering their way up to Portola Rd. Now, when this
happens, the pack usually reacts right away and the breakaway gets
chased down within moments - it's very rare - almost never the case -
for a breakaway to take off and stay away for the rest of the ride.
When these two guys broke off the front, the pack just smiled and
said, "Goodbye! - see you next week!" - and continued to roll easily
up Alpine Rd - ah yes, this was going to be a very 'nice' day, indeed!
The pack was saying they didn't care if a couple of hammer-heads
wanted to impress themselves for the next hour or so.
But then something happened - a half dozen others near the front
decided after another mile or so to go for the breakaway duo, who
by now had already turned the corner and were speeding down
Portola Rd - and these 6 or 7 guys *really* put on the hurt,
pushing *very* hard in that last 1/2 mile before you turn right
at Portola Rd.
So, this seemed to be the official beginning of "the race" - it looks
like the first 4 miles from the start area was just a little promenade
zone - we could have had a race motorcycle out in front, keeping us
under control until that decisive moment on Alpine Rd.
Now, it looks like there were 2 camps in the crowd - one camp (like
me) wanted a nice, 'easy' day - and the other camp said, "Race time!
- Let's go!" ... and since I happened to be up near the front of the
pack when this all erupted, I got swept up in the "race" camp - and
we were off! My heartrate quickly shot up to time-trial pace (about
160 bpm) - and then it went into the dreaded "red zone" - about
167 bpm, which I can do for short distances, but not for the next
hour straight!
As we approached the turn at Portola Rd, I saw Yukie Nakamura
of team Tibco blast off from the front - she was going to bridge up to
the breakaway group of 6 or 7 that had already decided to go after
the "dynamic duo" that were well down Portola Rd by that time.
Yukie is a fairly regular participant in the Noon Goon rides - she's a
very strong woman, who mostly does the Cat 1/2/3 women's races
and has been racing for a long time - just check out her racing
palmares:
http://www.usacycling.org/results/index.php?compid=179928&all=1
Yukie can easily beat me on a hill - she's light and strong - an
excellent strength-to-weight ratio - typical of those little mountain
goats - but she can bridge gaps, too - and she had just blasted off
to catch the group that was chasing the lead duo.
At this point, I had to make a decision - do I fade back and just
hang with the "Let's go easy today" camp - or do I join the race?
Well, before I had made up my mind, my legs made an instantaneous
decision - maybe I just wanted to play a little game and see if I
could bridge up to Yukie, who was well on her way to bridging up
to those 6 or 7 guys that were trying to reel in the initial breakaway.
And suddenly, here I was, sprinting like a madman to catch up to
Yukie, which I did - and then we worked together to latch onto the
main group of 6 or 7 - and then all of us worked real hard (including
me!) to reel in the original breakaway - we were *flying* down
Portola Rd - and when we got those 2 guys in sight, they were dead
ducks - we caught them just before you hit the Portola Rd / Sandhill
Rd split - and as we split off to the left to stay on Portola Rd, we
were all together - about 10 or 12 of us, since another couple of guys
had decided to bridge up to Yukie and I as we joined the 6 or 7 that
we were initially chasing on Portola Rd.
The pace relaxed a little bit as we continued on Portola Rd, past
the Mtn Home split and then over towards Hwy 84 (Woodside Rd) -
I decided to pull the pack up to Woodside Rd and upped the pace
quite a bit as we headed over towards Tripp Rd. Somewhere on
Woodside Rd, before we got to Tripp, a few other guys took over
duties and continued to push a strong pace, right onto Tripp, heading
towards Kings Mtn Rd.
At Kings Mtn, we turned right (as usual) and started to pick up the
pace again as we headed into "The Maze", which is just a few little
country roads (Manuella, Albion, and Olive Hill) that allow you to
wind your way over to Canada Rd without seeing too many cars or
people.
"The Maze" is always an interesting part of the Noon Goon ride, as
there is a traditional sprint up the Albion hill, to where it meets
Olive Hill Rd - this is the first of two traditional sprints on the
regular Noon Goon Monday ride - the other one being the end of
the ride, on Foothill, just before we get back to Page Mill Rd.
As usual, a big surge happened in "The Maze" and everyone sprinted
like wild dogs up Albion - I decided to conserve a little energy and not
contest the sprint - I just followed Yukie up the hill - there were
several guys that were much stronger sprinters on an uphill than
either of us!
The 12 of us (not sure of the exact count, but it was something
like that) were clearly far away from the rest of the pack, who
had obviously decided not to chase us down - or if they were, they
weren't succeeding! Actually, they might have been trying - but
we were pushing a pretty strong pace for most of our ride.
When we got down to Canada Rd and Woodside Rd (where the
infamous Roberts Market is located), we made a rolling 'stop' and
headed up to Whiskey Hill Rd, where the pace stayed fairly mellow -
everyone knew to conserve a little energy for the Sandhill climb -
it's just a 1/2 mile or so - and not very steep - but if you are climbing
it at 18 to 21 mph, it can feel pretty tough! And today was no
exception - the climb up Sandhill started out pretty mellow, but the
pace intensified quite a bit as we got closer to the top (typical in a
race - the surge over the top of a climb).
This is where I experienced something truly fun - I was climbing
okay, but had let a small gap open up as we pushed the speed up to
a 20 mph pace on the hill - I just can't climb quite that strong -
at least not for very long! But suddenly, a "hand of god" came
swooping down from out of the skies and I felt this sudden new
source of energy pushing me up the hill - it was a friendly Cat 1
guy (I'm guessing at his category - I just know he was a lot stronger
than me!) that was shoving me along to close down the gap! What
a rush! I said "Thanks!" and proceeded to quickly close down the
small gap, dragging the Cat 1 guy (and those behind him) with me...
what fun! And what a nice thing to do, too! I suppose he realized
that I was in a little over my head with this group - and he saw that
I had been doing my fair share of the work earlier - so he was just
making sure I stayed in contact with our breakaway group as we
crested Sandhill and started the fun plunge down towards Juniper
Serra.
As we descended down towards Juniper Serra, I had recovered
well enough to lead the group for the last 1/2 mile and into the right
turn onto Alpine Rd (but only for a 1/2 block, since you then turn
left onto Juniper Serra).
When we got onto Juniper Serra, the pace quickly picked up strong
again - and we motored along towards Foothill. At one point, we
had to stop for a red light, which we all did - and then went right
back into "race" mode as we headed for the final sprint, just before
you get to Page Mill Rd.
As we approached the last couple of hundred meters, everyone went
into "sprint" mode, but I decided to just ease up and coast on in -
it had been a fun day, and I was truly toast! No sprint for me today...
And, about 3 or 4 minutes later, the rest of the pack came sprinting
down Foothill - it was fun realizing that I had participated in a
true breakaway group that succeeded to the end of the ride - a rare
thing for the Noon Goon rides! What fun!
Here are some general stats for my ride today:
22.1 mph - Average speed (including our easy rollout and stops)
46.6 mph - Maximum speed (now *that* is pretty darn fast!)
147 bpm - Average heartrate (zone 4.4 for me)
20.24 mi - Distance
1328 ft - Total climbing
54:58 - Total time for the ride - a new record!
Normally, a Monday Noon Goon ride is about 1 hour long - and the
average speed is usually about 20 mph or so. This was a full 5
minutes faster - pretty fast for a Monday ride!
If you want to see just how hard this "race" was today, just check
out my recording of the ride:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/3918684
In retrospect, although my legs were asking for a 'recovery' ride,
I'm glad I decided to torture them and go for the 'race' instead -
it was good training, both physically - and mentally!
asking myself, "Why would anyone waste their time creating
a blog, knowing full well that virtually nobody will ever read
your awesome insights into all things that constitute your life?"
Okay, so my Mom will probably read my blog - and I'll
probably read it - several times over, just to make sure it is
grammatically correct - but nobody else really cares, right?
I guess this is just one way to record some of the minutia that
consumes your day...maybe my kids will discover this blog
one day, when I'm too old and fragile to communicate with
anyone - and they'll at least get a little glimpse of my life
back in my younger, healthier days!
In my case, that minutia will probably have something to do
with one of my great passions these days, biking! And hence,
you will get to read about the "musings of a cyclotic" - I don't
know what inspired me to think of "cyclotic", but it seemed to
fit, for a variety of reasons.
Today's topic? Gee - could it have anything to do with bikes?
Okay, so one of the things I do these days is train - I got back
into bike racing recently - and it's a total blast! It takes me
back to my college days, when I used to race bikes with a lot of
passion - and some relative success, too!
One of the training rides I do during the weekdays is the Palo Alto
Noon Ride - it leaves from the same spot (Old Page Mill Rd),
at the same time (12:00 Noon), every day during the week,
all year round. I suppose especially nasty weather days might
reduce the number of participants, but most days there will be
anywhere from 10 to 30 cyclists, most of them amateur bike racers
like me, just getting out for a little noon-time training ride - the
rides usually only last about an hour - maybe a little longer on
certain days - but it's a *fast* hour or so. And they are just training
rides, but more often than not, they are really unsanctioned bike
races - and so today, I present to you a typical "race report", so you
can see what consititues one of my typical noon-time training rides...
I'll often refer to my fellow cyclists on these rides as the Noon Goons -
it sounds derogatory, but it's actually an affectionate reference to
a bunch of guys (and gals!) that I truly respect - I think each and
every one of them understands the hard work it takes to reach the
level where you can do one of these rides and survive to the end -
I honestly believe every one of the Noon Goons is a special person,
with that unique understanding of something quite extraordinary -
riding a bike at the extreme physical limits of your abilities. This
blog is probably more a testament to these great cyclists - they're
all winners, in my book - even the ones that inevitably get dropped
at some point during the ride - 'cause you just *know* they're
going to come back again one day - and kick your ass!
==========================================================================
Noon Goon Race - Monday Edition, Palo Alto / Woodside, CA USA, 9/10/2007
Normally, the Monday edition of the Noon Ride out of Palo Alto is
what we like to refer to as a 'recovery ride' - just a bunch of friendly
amateur racers out for a little noon-time spin to help flush out the
lactic acid that built up from the previous weekend's races.
And, in this case, *some* of us had actually raced on the previous
weekend - I, for one, had done the Benicia Town Race just the day
before, on Sunday morning - it was a somewhat hilly crit - not quite
as intense as the Cat's Hill crit, but it did register a respectable
1100 feet of climbing in the 16-mile race - I had done the 35+ 4/5
race, which lasted almost exactly 40 minutes - you can see my race
report here for the gory details:
http://www.santacruzcycling.org/teamsc/2007/racereport/#992007SteveRosen
So the Benicia Town Race was a relatively intense effort for the 40
minutes that it lasted, and Monday's Noon Goon ride *should* have
been a nice, relaxing, 'recovery' ride. And, in fact, that is exactly
how it started out - it wasn't clear that too many people had raced
last weekend - I think only a couple of us had actually raced up at
Benicia - but the Monday ride can go both ways on any given week -
sometimes it's easy and mellow (averaging about 20 mph) - and other
weeks, it gets fast and nasty (averaging more than 22 mph). And you
have to remember, those average speeds include a *very* easy
rollout for the first few miles (down Old Page Mill to Page Mill, then
a right on Arastradero and over to Alpine Rd), as well as a few
'biking stops' at stop signs and signals. In fact, the pack usually rolls
through most of the stop signs in a very responsible manner - and
almost always stops completely at a signal with a red light (though
I've personally witnessed a couple of exceptions - arrgghh!!).
This particular Monday looked like it was going to be one of those
'nice' Mondays - a true recovery ride, with no hard efforts or any
attempts to simulate a real race. It was a fairly large pack, too -
probably about 30 cyclists (normally, Mondays will only have 15 to
20 show up). People were calmly chatting as we rolled down
Old Page Mill to Page Mill, then turned right onto Arastradero
and climbed easily up the Arastradero hills, on our way over to
Alpine Rd.
Sometimes, you can get a hint of things to come, based on how the
Arastradero hills are climbed - and today, it was very mellow, which
I now realize was the calm before the storm!
As we turned onto Alpine Rd, a couple of guys broke off the front
and started hammering their way up to Portola Rd. Now, when this
happens, the pack usually reacts right away and the breakaway gets
chased down within moments - it's very rare - almost never the case -
for a breakaway to take off and stay away for the rest of the ride.
When these two guys broke off the front, the pack just smiled and
said, "Goodbye! - see you next week!" - and continued to roll easily
up Alpine Rd - ah yes, this was going to be a very 'nice' day, indeed!
The pack was saying they didn't care if a couple of hammer-heads
wanted to impress themselves for the next hour or so.
But then something happened - a half dozen others near the front
decided after another mile or so to go for the breakaway duo, who
by now had already turned the corner and were speeding down
Portola Rd - and these 6 or 7 guys *really* put on the hurt,
pushing *very* hard in that last 1/2 mile before you turn right
at Portola Rd.
So, this seemed to be the official beginning of "the race" - it looks
like the first 4 miles from the start area was just a little promenade
zone - we could have had a race motorcycle out in front, keeping us
under control until that decisive moment on Alpine Rd.
Now, it looks like there were 2 camps in the crowd - one camp (like
me) wanted a nice, 'easy' day - and the other camp said, "Race time!
- Let's go!" ... and since I happened to be up near the front of the
pack when this all erupted, I got swept up in the "race" camp - and
we were off! My heartrate quickly shot up to time-trial pace (about
160 bpm) - and then it went into the dreaded "red zone" - about
167 bpm, which I can do for short distances, but not for the next
hour straight!
As we approached the turn at Portola Rd, I saw Yukie Nakamura
of team Tibco blast off from the front - she was going to bridge up to
the breakaway group of 6 or 7 that had already decided to go after
the "dynamic duo" that were well down Portola Rd by that time.
Yukie is a fairly regular participant in the Noon Goon rides - she's a
very strong woman, who mostly does the Cat 1/2/3 women's races
and has been racing for a long time - just check out her racing
palmares:
http://www.usacycling.org/results/index.php?compid=179928&all=1
Yukie can easily beat me on a hill - she's light and strong - an
excellent strength-to-weight ratio - typical of those little mountain
goats - but she can bridge gaps, too - and she had just blasted off
to catch the group that was chasing the lead duo.
At this point, I had to make a decision - do I fade back and just
hang with the "Let's go easy today" camp - or do I join the race?
Well, before I had made up my mind, my legs made an instantaneous
decision - maybe I just wanted to play a little game and see if I
could bridge up to Yukie, who was well on her way to bridging up
to those 6 or 7 guys that were trying to reel in the initial breakaway.
And suddenly, here I was, sprinting like a madman to catch up to
Yukie, which I did - and then we worked together to latch onto the
main group of 6 or 7 - and then all of us worked real hard (including
me!) to reel in the original breakaway - we were *flying* down
Portola Rd - and when we got those 2 guys in sight, they were dead
ducks - we caught them just before you hit the Portola Rd / Sandhill
Rd split - and as we split off to the left to stay on Portola Rd, we
were all together - about 10 or 12 of us, since another couple of guys
had decided to bridge up to Yukie and I as we joined the 6 or 7 that
we were initially chasing on Portola Rd.
The pace relaxed a little bit as we continued on Portola Rd, past
the Mtn Home split and then over towards Hwy 84 (Woodside Rd) -
I decided to pull the pack up to Woodside Rd and upped the pace
quite a bit as we headed over towards Tripp Rd. Somewhere on
Woodside Rd, before we got to Tripp, a few other guys took over
duties and continued to push a strong pace, right onto Tripp, heading
towards Kings Mtn Rd.
At Kings Mtn, we turned right (as usual) and started to pick up the
pace again as we headed into "The Maze", which is just a few little
country roads (Manuella, Albion, and Olive Hill) that allow you to
wind your way over to Canada Rd without seeing too many cars or
people.
"The Maze" is always an interesting part of the Noon Goon ride, as
there is a traditional sprint up the Albion hill, to where it meets
Olive Hill Rd - this is the first of two traditional sprints on the
regular Noon Goon Monday ride - the other one being the end of
the ride, on Foothill, just before we get back to Page Mill Rd.
As usual, a big surge happened in "The Maze" and everyone sprinted
like wild dogs up Albion - I decided to conserve a little energy and not
contest the sprint - I just followed Yukie up the hill - there were
several guys that were much stronger sprinters on an uphill than
either of us!
The 12 of us (not sure of the exact count, but it was something
like that) were clearly far away from the rest of the pack, who
had obviously decided not to chase us down - or if they were, they
weren't succeeding! Actually, they might have been trying - but
we were pushing a pretty strong pace for most of our ride.
When we got down to Canada Rd and Woodside Rd (where the
infamous Roberts Market is located), we made a rolling 'stop' and
headed up to Whiskey Hill Rd, where the pace stayed fairly mellow -
everyone knew to conserve a little energy for the Sandhill climb -
it's just a 1/2 mile or so - and not very steep - but if you are climbing
it at 18 to 21 mph, it can feel pretty tough! And today was no
exception - the climb up Sandhill started out pretty mellow, but the
pace intensified quite a bit as we got closer to the top (typical in a
race - the surge over the top of a climb).
This is where I experienced something truly fun - I was climbing
okay, but had let a small gap open up as we pushed the speed up to
a 20 mph pace on the hill - I just can't climb quite that strong -
at least not for very long! But suddenly, a "hand of god" came
swooping down from out of the skies and I felt this sudden new
source of energy pushing me up the hill - it was a friendly Cat 1
guy (I'm guessing at his category - I just know he was a lot stronger
than me!) that was shoving me along to close down the gap! What
a rush! I said "Thanks!" and proceeded to quickly close down the
small gap, dragging the Cat 1 guy (and those behind him) with me...
what fun! And what a nice thing to do, too! I suppose he realized
that I was in a little over my head with this group - and he saw that
I had been doing my fair share of the work earlier - so he was just
making sure I stayed in contact with our breakaway group as we
crested Sandhill and started the fun plunge down towards Juniper
Serra.
As we descended down towards Juniper Serra, I had recovered
well enough to lead the group for the last 1/2 mile and into the right
turn onto Alpine Rd (but only for a 1/2 block, since you then turn
left onto Juniper Serra).
When we got onto Juniper Serra, the pace quickly picked up strong
again - and we motored along towards Foothill. At one point, we
had to stop for a red light, which we all did - and then went right
back into "race" mode as we headed for the final sprint, just before
you get to Page Mill Rd.
As we approached the last couple of hundred meters, everyone went
into "sprint" mode, but I decided to just ease up and coast on in -
it had been a fun day, and I was truly toast! No sprint for me today...
And, about 3 or 4 minutes later, the rest of the pack came sprinting
down Foothill - it was fun realizing that I had participated in a
true breakaway group that succeeded to the end of the ride - a rare
thing for the Noon Goon rides! What fun!
Here are some general stats for my ride today:
22.1 mph - Average speed (including our easy rollout and stops)
46.6 mph - Maximum speed (now *that* is pretty darn fast!)
147 bpm - Average heartrate (zone 4.4 for me)
20.24 mi - Distance
1328 ft - Total climbing
54:58 - Total time for the ride - a new record!
Normally, a Monday Noon Goon ride is about 1 hour long - and the
average speed is usually about 20 mph or so. This was a full 5
minutes faster - pretty fast for a Monday ride!
If you want to see just how hard this "race" was today, just check
out my recording of the ride:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/3918684
In retrospect, although my legs were asking for a 'recovery' ride,
I'm glad I decided to torture them and go for the 'race' instead -
it was good training, both physically - and mentally!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
