Categories: Health, Hoodoo 500, Training Log
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Seems I might have finally found the (near) perfect bike rack for the car. For the Furnace Creek 508, we used my two bike hitch mounted Yakima bike rack. This is the type where the bikes hang suspended by the top tube. The front fork was free to rotate so we had to secure the wheel after mounting the bikes. With the new carbon bike frames becoming increasingly thin to get the weight down, I have grown concerned about hanging the bike from the top tube.

While in Montana recently (no sales tax) we went to REI where they had their Yakima bike racks on sale. We picked up the Yakima Hold-Up rack, the same my son John had purchased earlier. I got the model for the 2 in. receiver since I want to use on our van for future use and plan to use on the Hoodoo 500 this August.

With this new rack the bike is supported from the wheels and a single arm that clamps down on the front tire.  Nothing touches the frame.  It is very easy and quick to make a bike change.  When not in use, the rack folds up, out of the way.  Anne is also pleased that the color matches the color of our van!

With this model you can buy an extension that holds an additional two bikes.  That would allow you to haul four bikes on the back.  I have another so called four bike Yakima rack that hangs the bikes from the top tube but I never could get four bikes on it.  Also the new rack works great with mountain bikes, which have a sloping top tube and wider tires.

Categories: Cycling Equipment, Hoodoo 500
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I had a good week of training for the Mt. Tam Double and the Hoodoo 500.  On Wednesday I did a 138 mile ride, my longest ride of the year, and climbed 9,000 feet that day.

It was the most miles biked in a week so far this year and the most feet climbed.

Also looking at the accumulated training on week 12 of my 19 week program, I am ahead of plan and ahead of what I did for training for the Furnace Creek 508.

This coming week will be less since I will be traveling and also want to get some recovery days in.

Categories: Hoodoo 500, Training Log
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Tomorrow I WILL NOT BIKE.  Tomorrow I WILL NOT BIKE. I have to keep repeating this to myself because I definitely need a day off.  It has now been 13 consecutive days biking, several days with double workouts, running and biking or two bike rides. During those 13 days I racked up nearly 700 miles. This chart, from my Hoodoo 500 training program shows the miles in each week. I am ahead of my training program and need some recovery.  Tomorrow I WILL NOT BIKE!

Yesterday after a 44 mile ride I was feeling ragged, my right calf muscle was still hurting and now my left ankle started to hurt. I thought I should have taken the day off. Today, after a 85 mile ride I was actually felling fine with no joint or muscle problems like the prior two days.  With that it is easy to start thinking I don’t need any recovery and can keep going. But I will say it one more time, tomorrow I WILL NOT BIKE!

Categories: Training Log
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Unlike the prior few years, I decided to take a longer break from the ultra distance events over the winter. No Death Valley Double, no Solvang Double,  not even a Davis Double. I had already decided no more Devil Mountain Doubles. Although an extended period of lower activity can help prevent burnout, starting in May, I realized I needed to increase my training for the Hoodoo 500 event that is scheduled at the end of August.

Need for a Training Program

Training plans for these type of events are not easily found. In 2007 I attempted to do the Devil Mountain Double for the first time, but that was right after running the Boston Marathon. Although I finished, I realized I needed a cycling specific training plan, so I developed one for the Furnace Creek 508 in 2007 and refined for subsequent major challenges. The older I become, the more I need to have a good training program and need to track my progress against my plan.  It not only helps me to properly prepare but also gives me the confidence to finish and so far I have been able avoid the dreaded DNF (did not finish).

Avoid Junk Miles

I learned from running marathons that you can not just go out and run a bunch of miles and expect to do well.  Although total mileage may be one factor, it is not the only factor and not even the most important factor.  When I studied marathon training I realized that there is something called junk miles, those are the miles that you run just to get your total mileage up.    When training to run a marathon with the hopes of qualifying to run the Boston Marathon, I actually reduced my weekly mileage.  Instead I added in speed work and also the long weekly runs at a faster pace.

Speed Work

Many might think that speed work is of little value when it comes to endurance events but that is due to a lack of understand.  I see many endurance cyclists that ride about the same pace on all their rides and just focus on riding a bunch of miles.  Chris Carmichael wrote in the June 2010 edition of Bicycling Magazine “When you’re an endurance athlete, one key adaptation you want is an increase in the size and number of mitochondria in your muscle cells.  These cellular power plants process fat and carbs into energy, and as their density increase so does the amount of aerobic energy you can send to working muscles … Research shows that spending more than about 60 minutes at at time at a constant intensity doesn’t have much impact on mitrochondrial density.  But the evidence is clear that shorter, harder workouts do have that effect – and hence improve endurance performance – for athletes at all fitness levels.”

This week I did two speed workouts.  On Tuesday I did my standard interval workout, with 7 minutes of riding hard, trying to get my heart rate into the red zone, followed by 3.5 to 4 minutes of easy recovery.  I repeat that 4 or 5 times.

Since this is a circular course it somewhat eliminates the affect of wind on the totals.  This table shows a summary of how I did compared with prior times.  On Tuesday I had rode 84 miles the prior day and ran 6 miles that morning before the interval workout and it shows.

Today I did a very fast paced ride of moderate distance.     After doing a couple mile warmup, I ride a 38 miles course with a combination of flats, hills and rollers, with a total climb of 1500 feet.   I vary my effort along the course, attacking the hills and rollers.   I was able to get my average speed up to 17.5 mph, about as fast as I have ever done this course in a time trail fashion.

The third type of speed workout I will be adding in is hill repeats.  I have a hill that takes about 7 minutes to climb and about half that long to descend.  I do 4 to 5 repeats, climbing as fast as I can, then recover on the descent.  The goal of these type of speed workouts is to increase your lactate threshold so you can go faster in an endurance event.  If you can finish faster, with the same level of effort, it is much easier on your body.

Weekly and Accumulated Training

I plot out my training program, showing my actual values against my plan and also compared with training for some similar events.  I track the longest weekly ride, weekly climbing, weekly total miles, accumulate miles and accumulated climbing over the training program.  These are some of the charts.  After 6 weeks into the training plan I am on track but the tough training is yet ahead.

Categories: Hoodoo 500, Training Log
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While most cyclists might dread the hills, I seem to be the opposite. When I am with a fast group of guys I can barely hang on, especially if there is a headwind.  Once we reach the hill, my heart rate will actually go down and I may even go ahead of much of the pack.

In trying to understand why this is the case, I have calculated the power requirements.  If I had a power meter, I guess I could measure it directly, but calculating it will work fine.  I am short and relatively lightweight.  I would like to compare myself  to a bigger guy, say someone who is 6 ft. 2 in. tall and weighs 200 lbs, compared with my 5 ft. 6 in. and 140 lbs.  I have run the power required on different situations and put them in a table below.  I will assume a 20 lb. bike in both cases.

To make the comparison easier to follow, let’s assume both riders can climb a 10% grade at the same rate, and that rate is their maximum power output.  If we calculate the power required for each rider to accomplish this, we can then see how much reserve power is left for different scenarios.  If we are riding together on a flat road, with no wind, at 23 mph, I need to put out 91% of my maximum power output, while Mr. Big only needs to use 73%.  If we now have a 15 mph headwind and travel at 15 mph, I have to increase my power to 96% of my maximum, and am dying trying to keep up.  Mr. Big only needs to go to 79%.  We know that human physiology is not linear and the closer one gets to their maximum ability the harder it becomes to achieve even a small increase in output.

Of course we could look at things a bit different.  Using the above table, let’s say both riders, traveling at 15 mph with a 15 mph headwind (on Malech) are putting out 95% of their maximum capacity when they hit the hill with a 10% grade.  In that case I would be able to climb at 8 mph by putting out 100%, while the big guy will have to drop his speed because his 100% would be 315 watts which means he can only climb the hill at 6.7 mph.  If the hill is Metcalf, which averages a 10% grade, that means I can reach the top in 13:20 (about my PR) but Mr. Big will need 16 minutes.

Now you know why I hate flats and love the hills.

Categories: Training Log
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After a few days of wonderful weather, the temperatures had turned to the cooler side and there was some threat of rain.  So this morning we decided to go for a run instead of bike.  The original plan was to go 6 miles, but after 4 miles into the run, Anne thought she might want to do 8, so that is what we did.  I still felt like I needed some more exercise.  Since the weather was now a bit warmer and no rain yet, it sounded like a good chance to do my interval training.

When I would train for marathons, I liked to do weekly speed work, either a tempo run or intervals.  While I might do quarter mile repeats when getting ready for a 10K distance race, for the marathon I found mile repeats worked well for me.  I could only do about 4 of them, since that meant 4 miles running well over my lactate threshold.

For cycling I patterned a similar workout.  Since it took me about 6:45 to 7:00 minutes to run the mile repeats, I duplicated that with 7 minutes flat out on the bike, followed by an easy 4 minutes.  I choose a relatively flat course that included a couple miles of warm-up from our house and then a straight shot, with no need for stop signs or traffic lights during each of the 7 minute intervals.  The blue sections on the map are the intervals done at speed and the red sections the recovery portions.  From the map it would as if I could fit in a 5th interval at the end, but there are too many stop lights and I am way too tired to try a 5th one.  It seems as if all I can do is ride the 4.5 miles back home.

You can see the four intervals, followed by the recovery period from this heart rate curve.  I tried to get into Zone 5 on each interval (for myself that means 167 bpm or higher), sometime I was able to do except for the 4th interval where the 8 mile run and the prior 3 intervals were finally taking their toll.  At some point your legs and can’t push the heart as much as the heart can deliver.   I have my Garmin Edge 500 setup to show the heart rate zone I am in, which works well for this type of workout.

Using a circular course allows me to average the 4 segments so as to somewhat cancel the effect of the wind.  This allows a comparison between different dates.  I have kept this table at the bottom to show those.  With the 8 mile run before, I was not able to quite do the same average speed.  There was also a strong headwind on some sections, a penalty you never quite get back on the other sections.   Since this is for training, the actual speed is not as important as getting my heart rate up sufficient to exceed my lactate threshold, with a short recovery and then a repeat.  This is the best way to improve one’s lactate threshold.

Categories: Speed Workout
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It seems like months since I have been on a mountain bike so I was glad when the weekly MTB rides at Harvey Bear Ranch started up again.  HBR is close by and easy to get to and the trails, although somewhat steep in places, are not that difficult.

About 6 of the “Nightriders” showed up for the ride.  It was great weather, even though we are still in March.

I took my new Garmin Edge 500 on the ride and was able to later download the data and get a map of where I went.  I had to cut the ride short today because it was my birthday and we were going out to dinner.

I uploaded the data file to a website called Strava.  You can see all the details here.  It lets you name some of the climbs you discover with the Garmin GPS.  I needed to figure out the name of the major climb we did, so I found this map of Harvey Bear Ranch and saw the name was Harvey Bear Trail.  Click the image below to download the full Harvey Bear Ranch map.

Here is a short video I took.

Categories: Mountain Biking
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I have a course where I do interval training on the bike and have kept track of some of the past training. We were headed out on the tandem for a ride today and Anne said she could not be gone too long. That was the clue to do a speed workout so we rode the tandem and did the same interval training I have done before on my single bike. I was anxious to see how the times would be on the tandem. The intervals consist of four segments of 7 minutes, at maximum speed, followed by about 3.5 minutes of recovery.

It turns out we did very well, averaging 22.2 mph for the 4 sections and I was able to get my heart rate up to 167-171 on each of the legs.  Anne took her heart rate up to 154.   We were back home in no time and still had a good workout.

Categories: Speed Workout
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One of the traditional rides on Thanksgiving morning is to make the 19 mile climb up Mt. Hamilton. There were two separate club rides up the hill that day, but I wanted an extra challenge so I joined in the race sponsored by the Low Key Hill Climb series.  Not exactly “low key”, but neither a sanctioned race.

Starting near sea level, the finish is at over 4,000 feet, the highest elevation for any local climb.  At the top there is the famous Mt. Hamilton Observatory.  With a maximum grade of about 6%, the road leading up is never real steep.  To allow the movement of the heavy equipment to build the observatory many years ago, they had to keep the grade from being too excessive.  Still, with over 18 miles of racing, mostly all up hill, it is a challenge indeed.

There was a very large turnout for the race, the most I have seen at any Low Key Hill Climb race.  I arrived around 8:30 when registration was open and we all started soon after 9:30 am.  The temperature had warmed up by then so I took off my jacket before the start and carried it for the later descent.  I started a ways back in the pack of about 200 cyclists, not wanting to get in the way of the real fast riders.  That was a bit of a mistake because I had to go around a lot of riders in the first half mile.  But soon I settled down to a fast, but constant rhythm.  I noted that my heart rate was hovering around 170 and I started to worry that maybe I was burning myself up.  This is above my Lactate Threshold so I would not be able to hold this for the 90 plus minutes of the race.  But I felt fine so I kept holding the pace and  continued to pass a few more riders.

There are two short down hill sections on the course, which allowed for some recovery.

photo by Adam Tow

When I was within 3 miles of the finish, I was surprised I had been able to not only keep my heart rate up, but was feeling strong enough to pickup the pace further and start to pace some additional riders who seemed to be suffering from the effect of the long climb.

I crossed the finish line at the parking lot of the Observatory with a total time of 96:46.  This is a bit less than my official time of 97:03 because I did not start my watch until I reached the intersection while the front of the pact was actually positioned beyond that point when the official clock started.  Although this was not my very best time, it was a minute faster than the same race last year, so I was happy with that.

When I returned home and downloaded the data from my heart rate monitor I was surprised that for the entire climb I averaged a heart rate of 168, including the downhill sections.  That means my Lactate Threshold is something above that, which is remarkable for someone nearly 62 years old.  My maximum heart rate during the climb was 176, close to my max heart rate. You can see this on this graph (click to enlarge).

When they posted the results I was 86th place out of 152 men and  it appears I had the fastest time for anyone over 60 years of age.  It is a bit difficult to be sure because this is a low key event and some people make up their own categories, but most use something related to their age.  They have a scoring system where you get some percentage of the median time.  For this race I got a score of 97.80 since I was slightly slower than the median male rider.  When I did the Montebello hill climb race last month, and set a new PR, I scored a 102.15.

My biking is not quite up to last year’s level in either total miles or feet of climbing.  Last year in the fall I did both the Everest Challenge and the Furnace Creek 508 races so I didn’t think I would do as well this year on the Mt. Hamilton race.  Even being a year older and with fewer feet of climbing, I still shaved over a minute off my time from last year.

It was a fun event.  I was surprised I was able to hold my heart rate at such a high level for so long.  I think I might have been able to push even harder but it was Thanksgiving and I wanted to have energy left to eat that big meal.  Since I burned over 1,600 calories on the race, I had no guilt eating that afternoon.

Categories: Cycling Racing
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