Change in the Weather

The first real chill of the season rolled in last night. I beat the storm by a few hours to get in my first ride in almost 2 weeks. Speaking of a change in the weather, the Occupy Wall St people in Oakland shut down the port yesterday, the 5th largest in the US. Everyone of those shipping containers represents thousands of US jobs gone to China. I wish them luck, and since CCR was a Bay Area band I thought this video doubly appropriate.



I did a very hard ride up to the Rescue Firestation on the 16th last month, and between the dehydration, and getting a bit too Paleo on my recovery meals, I had a long flair-up of diverticulitis. My usual ride time is around 4:15, although I have some old pre-Garmin stats from April, 2009 done in 3:35.

That's not quite apples-to-apples though, as shut-off times at stops are a little different, so I was really happy when my first long ride of the year came in at 3:45 for 60 miles and 5,200ft of climbing. (RideWithGPS's mapping service still doesn't know about the Folsom Lake Crossing Bridge, so adds 300ft erroneously) I was able to get the whole ride in with the Garmin set to 1-second update mode, so trust this is my best, most accurate trace ever.

Rescue Firestation ride. A horned devil of a climbing route. Throw in a climb over the ElDorado Hills and you get a real ball-buster I call "The Grim Reaper"

My time to RFS was withing seconds of my usual time, but the time on the return leg averaged over 4mph faster. I think I'm capable of breaking 3:30 on this ride, but have yet to do so. Failing to carbo load properly the night before, I was pretty sluggish for the first  20 miles or so. Reason for hope!

This was the first long ride away from the city since my crash, and it went quite well, but I seem to have cracked a rib or something after hitting a really savage bump that's developed on the ARPT descending from Beals. My PBS Forte' carbon bars also buckled under the aerobars, and my main bars rotated down about 35 degrees.

That said, it was thrilling to get back out there last night, and since my new bars showed up this morning, I'll be wrenching while it's raining. I went with the Ritchey SuperLogic Evo bars from Excel Sports, as they are advertised as sturdy enough to support clip-on aerobars. Techie Tuesday fodder for sure.

I'm enjoying reading Friel's Paleo Diet for Athletes, but it is disappointing in places in its lack of rigor. There's a lot of good info on sports nutrition, and even some great recipes, but I'm having trouble eating that much meat and giving up milk. His argument against dairy is just pathetic, and I luvs my milk (although I am drinking 2% now to get more fat in my diet).

With the cool weather, it's a great day to make a big pot of chili. Using what I learned from Friel, I am using grass-fed beef, buffalo, and 99% lean ground turkey breast. Turkey breast has almost no fat, is a higher quality protein than chicken or fish (although fish as other properties that make it preferable), and is about $6 a pound.

I'll have to try my microwaved bell pepper, red onion and ruby red grapefruit juice marinated chicken breast with cranberry juice and turkey breast substituted. I'll use lots of good, healthy olive oil when reducing the veggies. A great way to swap healthy oil for animal fat.

Hope you are all coping well, and enjoying the change in the weather.
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Getting In A Ride Is Like Pulling Teeth

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It's been 30 hours since I let my mouth butcher have her way with my mouth, and have to say, it went very well. I was able to make due with Advil, Aleve, and half doses of pain meds, in a cocktail that included some Amoxicillin. Mashed potatoes and ice cream are starting to get old, but I am very happy to have this procedure done.

If the Amoxicillin will kindly not rip my gut up too bad I should be good to go as soon as the rainy weather passes. Nice that its doing its raining while I am on bike restriction (or any vigorous exercise). Thank you mother nature!

We are gong to get about an inch and a half this weekend, and 4 ft of snow in the mountains, so lots of my fellow bikers are up at the ski resorts as I write this. Hope they are having a ball. The cycling cardio is a HUGE help when having fun in the very thin air at 8-10,000 ft, and one of the biggest reasons I started cycling again 3 yrs ago this coming March.

I've done a slow ride up to Beals, a fast ride up to Old Folsom, and a very solid ride up to Beals on Thursday, so not quite getting in my 100 miles a week, especially with the rain intruding, but staying healthy and fit. In fact, the ride Thursday evening was kind of against the periodontist's recommendation, but I have yet to find a doctor, of any stripe, that gets endurance sports.

HammerinWheels has done some really great rides - some even epic - the last 2 months, and I have been sitting them out. In part this was due to my dental health spilling over into my general health, but in part due to insecurities about doing these long, and hard rides.Given my steady progress this year, even though focused on shorter rides and TTs, I need to challenge myself with a 100k length ride and get this monkey off my back.

Most of the riders doing these rides are new to the club, while many of the riders who were staples on these rides when I joined are no longer riding, or not on these hard rides. As a result, I have become an unknown in my own club, and would like to reestablish myself as one of the better, stronger riders again. There's only one way to do that - ride some tough rides and finish well.

When I got my new Sidi shoes last week I also got a coupon from Competitive Cyclist for 20% off of any apparel item, so I finally pulled the trigger on a PI convertible jacket/vest. I really like the design, as the sleeves are attached by a yoke that zips and Velcros to the vest - like a cape - so you can unzip the sleeves and still wear them.

A nice feature of this design is that you won't end up losing a sleeve, since they are attached to the yoke. This 'cape' folds (or rolls) up into a very small package that stores in the Napoleon Pocket in front - or anywhere else you'd like to put it. I'm hoping it will give me needed rain protection without making me sweat to death. Having tried it on at REI, I think it will work very well.

So as part of my plan to get this distance/duration monkey off my back, I am going to take my new RED Elite Barrier Convertible jacket for a ride to Rescue. Yup, I've just publicly committed to this ride, so come Tues or Wed, depending on the status of my implant (titanium! whoot!), I'm off for a nice 60 miler, and if I feel well, I may stretch that to 75. Time to get'er done!

PS: For mountain biking, I am really liking the new Brown color option.

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The Beauty of Standards

I did my standard training ride to Rescue yesterday, and as promised, with my Garmin Edge 305 set to 1-second record mode. It is such a core training ride for me that I wanted to get the best possible trace so I know how it compares to other organized rides or challenges I might want to train for. The great thing about standards, at least for training, is that you can compare your performance over time and tell where you are doing well and where you need work.

I had a little trouble with the Garmin in that it didn't quite work as expected. First and foremost, toggling the timer on and off manually, and even power-cycling the device, I was not able to force my trace into history and thereby get around the 3:30 minute recording time limit when recording in 1-second mode. This is just pissing me off. What an idiotic design limitation in an era when gigs of solid-state memory sell for a few bucks. I then had to listen to MotionBased bitch about having too much detail. Well, deal with it, because I want all the resolution I can get for my hard-earned money. Buy more disk space and a few more servers, and deal with it already!

I will likely delete the trace from yesterday, because the complimentary MotionBased subscription only allows you to save the last 10 rides. My trace this time ended up flawed as I forgot to restart the timer after power-cycling the device at the Rescue Fire station. I rode for about a mile and a third before I noticed I wasn't getting any grade info - one of the side-effects of having no GPS trace. When I look at the trace I get a straight line across the base of a pretty good sized hill, and am not sure what MotionBased did with this.

Did it understand that this was an O&B route and re-route around the error? I don't know. I do know that my device's 3,800 ft of climb became 6,200 ft on MotionBased. If MB is correct, I am a lot closer to my goal ride than I thought, and it explains why my Party Pardee ride was so fast - even on a day when Big-D was taking some snap out of my legs.

I also learned that you can sub-divide your rides into laps, which should really be thought of as segments, not laps, because they are really just sub-divisions of the ride, with one important exception. The exception is that when you hit the lap button on an O&B it will start a new lap for you at that exact point on the return leg. Since I didn't know this, I manually lapped only to have it auto-lap too, creating silly, annoying little laps of less than a minute in duration.

The Garmin also recorded some motionless time, as my auto-timer shutoff is still set for 2.2 mph, and when the GPS signal got weak it would "move" the bike around enough to fool itself into thinking I was actually riding. I have reset the wheel size from Auto - which I believe causes it to ignore the wheel sensor in favor of the GPS track - to manual, and entered the correct wheel size. I hope this fixes the ghost motion problem.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I love the Garmin, and think it is very well done, easier to use than my "dumb" Sigma bike computer was, but being a software engineer, I can think of ways to improve it, and may well do so (at least the software) as a programming exercise.

My ride did unearthed a chink in my nutrition. One I have talked about here often enough, so really just a matter of preparation. Because of the heat I had to hydrate a lot more. Drinking that much was only possible by diluting my (Acai spiked) Gatorade to the point where I was not getting enough electrolytes. Unfortunately I didn't have either Hammer Endurolytes nor Power Electrolytes foil sticks along. What saved me was I had a 4X concentrate of spiked Gatorade in my back bottle and could simply make lots of weak Gatorade at watering holes.

It worked - barely - but it worked. I had put 2 foils of Electrolytes, which is 4 servings, in my concentrate, but at least one more would have been much better. I also have the Hammer Endurolytes, but just forgot to bring them along. The value of standards, in this case of having a standard nutrition protocol, is every ride is another opportunity to stress-test your protocol and find weaknesses and work-arounds that become critical on event rides.

So, my Rescue O&B, done in a slow 4 hours, with the modified return route using the new Johnny Cash bridge, appears to be about 62 miles and 6,200 ft of climb. A pretty sucky time, but my goal was to ride in the heat in preparation for the Mt Hamilton ride, which was blistering hot last year. Nutrition was 2 Power Smoothie Bars, ~64 oz of spiked Gatorade, and ~40 oz of water. I got home with lots of 4X concentrate left, but was planning on a longer ride, so as expected.