Doge

Big bummer. My kid crashed just before Nationals. It really screws the rider up - and the power. Getting meaningful data from power being sick and crashing - is not really that easy.
I think you are dealing with a role and goal definition more than anything. Reading power output is a rather small part of training and coaching. It sounds like you do not have a coach - rather a trainer.
Are they asking about your sleep, diet, stress too? Power is popular and useful, but its just one thing of many.

Doge

That may also be a good topic to discuss with a coach.

Heathpack 

Hmm, I guess what I am saying is that I expect a coach to set up & execute a training plan, yes, but to also be on top of how I am responding to the training, especially when there is a very short time left before the event. Being on top of things to me means being aware of what I am saying, being aware of what the data is saying, and being aware of what my performance is saying. I just don't see how you're really on top of things if you're looking at the data once a week. Anyway, I'm just repeating myself now, I need to actually talk to the guy and take it from there.

Heathpack 

??? The type of cycling I do & the fact that there is no off season? He knows that. He knows the next goal after this one, and the semi-game plan for the goals after that. It's a continuous succession until July: Dec, Feb, April, May & July. And then maybe Sept, Oct, and Nov or Dec. No offseason, so I've been very clear about the goal events, I need him to be accounting for that in my training.

mattm

@Heathpack I'm sure you've considered this option already but... what about self-coaching?

If you know enough to know that doing lots of intervals when at -60 TSB may not be the best, maybe it's time to take things into your own hands. That is not to say that this is all it takes to be a coach, of course..

Then you could spend your monthly coaching sum on a car or something! And you would be guaranteed that your coach (you) looks at your power daily, and adjusts the plan accordingly, etc.

Nobody is in touch with how you feel better than you, after all.

Self-coaching works for some, so thought I'd mention it.

Heathpack 

Well that's sort of what I have been doing prior to this, since this time last year I always had a training plan that I came up with myself. This summer was hard though, I was doing a lot of hill climbing, that is more complicated to train for and in retrospect I was doing it wrong. It turns out the coach is way better at it than I am. But still I managed to get myself pretty far. This time last year my longest ever ride was 60 miles. Now I think I have something like 9 or 10 hundred plus mile rides under my belt, three of them with 10,000 ft climbing. I don't even prepare in any way now for a century ride, its just another Sunday ride. But I want to get faster especially up the hills. So far the coach has been great for that.

I mentioned upthread that I'm a veterinarian, but I'm actually a veterinary neurologist/neurosurgeon. All the time I see some pretty straightforward (to me) case that some other vet has been floundering with, sometimes for years. I just look at the situation and wonder what the confusion is- clearly we need to do a, b, then c, it is so obvious. But in reality, its not obvious, it just happens to be easy for me to know exactly what to do because I have the specialized training and a lot of experience. So I'm a big believer in expertise, its the most efficient way to proceed in many cases. I'll willing to pay for it if I can find it.

Ygduf

I advocate self coaching for all my athletes.

Ygduf

How long have you been riding/training? Sorry if it's buried above somewhere that I didn't see.

Heathpack 

Riding about a year and a half. Training one year.

Ygduf

Do you want unsolicited advice, or no? What were you doing "wrong", in retrospect?

I can't race for ****, but climbing is one area where I out-perform my body type by miles.

Heathpack 

In retrospect, I was riding everything too easy. I can see that now that I have the power meters. Everything was just a slow paced up up up hill ride. Too much of that but nothing that ever intense enough to improve strength and muscular endurance. Lots of volume but it was all the same ride. I thought I was doing different rides but I was actually doing everything the exact same way

Ygduf

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9D...ew?usp=sharing

basically, mix 20MP efforts with enough longer rides to build your heart/lungs.

Good luck. Being so fresh you can keep improving for years to come, and the harder & more consistently you work, the harder the training you'll be able to sustain. It's tons of fun, just sleep a lot and eat well.

spdntrxi

yes you are... I've done some of the same climbs as you.. you are twice as fast as I.. we weigh the same... I suck at climbing.

mattm

Oh please. You're better than 95% of people that race!

Must be all that coaching I've been givin' ya.. out of all my athletes, your my favorite.

big chainring 

Mary Jane and the Ramones were my coaches. Gabba gabba hey!

bigfred 

You continue to view this as "wrong"? I continue to believe that you did most of your first year "right", by focusing on going out and building a decent base, learning to spin, developing neuromuscular patterns and generally preparing your body for what was to come.

Had you jumped right in with a "focused" and "higher intensity" training plan it is very possible that you could have injured yourself or developed bad habits.

You may not have been varying things by as much as you could have. But, at some point you did start to recognize that strength and muscular endurance were your limiting factors and started to investigate how to improve those. That is what has brought you to this point.

There used to be an old standard about simply "riding" for 2,000 miles before engaging in ANY kind of formal training. How far offf that were you?

tetonrider

if you are paying your coach for a service that you are not receiving, seems like you should bring that up with him or her. looks like you came here to find out whether you had a reasonable expectation for daily file analysis. not sure if your question has been answered.

as mattm notes, some people like to be self-coached; others want something more. data analysis is the easiest part of coaching. some athletes enjoy it and have the time for it, so why not consider it, if this is you? no one here knows your interests, aptitudes, available time, disposable cash, how lofty your goals are, how aggressively you want to pursue them, how efficient you need to be with your training.

(it's hard but you should consider putting some context around the posts, e.g., just picking mattm's situation as his posts are recent, but he's seems to be riding 17-21 hours a week these days. not sure if you have that kind of time, O.P., but if you do and you are new to your sport, just doing anything will lead to improvement. most masters athletes with jobs, kids, other interest/responsibilities don't meet that criteria.

in the ski industry some people never bother to get an instructor and others use them exclusively. in some cases, we call it 'rent-a-friend.' there's a whole spectrum of what people want from their hobby.

it's not clear to me but should be clear to you whether you are paying your coach for results, motivation/cheerleading, strategy, file analysis, or some combination thereof, but once you decide you should have what you need to determine if that coach, or if coaching in general, works for you.

Heathpack 

My interest is in endurance cycling right now, I was hoping a coach could help me identify whatever aptitude I might have if it is something different than that. Available time is three days per week (my days off) plus another 4 hours per week on week days. Right now I'm riding around 15 hours per week, last summer it was 17-18. I have the disposable income to pay for a coach, but I don't want to waste my money.

My general goal is to do any ride I want to on any day & make it look easy. I am very meticulous about preparing for my event rides. After my double century, my next goal is a flattish (~3000 ft) century with a time goal. Then after that it will probably be a series of KOM type climbing centuries (100-120 miles, 10000 ft) in late spring following by the Death Ride (134 miles, 15000 ft) in July. There is a chance that I will defer those climbing rides until next year and go for a series of double centuries next year instead, it will depend on how my upcoming double goes. If I do the climbing rides and am still enjoying cycling, I might try to squeeze in a California Triple Crown, which is three double centuries, I would have time to get that done as well.

I would like to pursue these goals as efficiently as possible because it does not make sense to me to be inefficient.

Of the things you list that a person would want from a coach, I would want everything except cheerleading/motivation, I don't need that. I am very self-motivated. It seemed very natural to me that hiring a coach made perfect sense but if it's the norm that your coach only looks at your data once a week, it might not be for me. I am a pretty detail oriented person by nature of my professional training, important things being missed for a week just does not sit well with me.

tetonrider

sorry...my questions were rhetorical; your exact goals don't really matter (to me), i was just trying to give you some things to examine so you could make your own decision.

putting coaching, cycling, endurance sports aside, when a buyer's expectations do not match that of the seller/service provider, that's a relationship that is doomed to fail. sounds like that may be what happened here -- but it's not clear.

if your coach did promise you something and didn't deliver, then either take it up with him/her, or just cut your losses.

sorry if this might offend, but it sounds like there might be a bit of game-playing--you noticed something and instead of bringing it up you are hoping someone else pointed it out. we're only hearing one side. what seems important is that YOU feel like your needs are not being met, or at least you have questions about it.

my bet is that you might find it hard for anyone to meet your needs, but there is no harm in trying. it is your $ and your time.

[IMO, "daily analysis" is something that would sell great to someone new but is of marginal benefit. timely analysis of quality sessions (not every day on the bike is a day of work), is another matter.]

Heathpack 

No offense taken, there was no game playing. As I mentioned previously, I did not notice the sustained high HR until the following day. At the time my assumption was he was reviewing the data as I sent it to him. So my WTF? moment was that I believed he had reviewed the data and not taken note of the elevated HR. Then when I asked him about it, I learned he only reviewed the data once a week.

The coach's side of the story as I have gotten it via text message (still have not talked to him, tried to set up a time but just got an email back asking how I am feeling) is that he was planning on looking at the data Tuesday-ish, which is his normal thing, and he did not think the crash was serious, in large part because I rode 50 miles post-crash, so it was not on his radar to look at it ahead of schedule.

tetonrider

which brings us back to the start. no one seems to find this data too strange (yes, esp if you continued to ride 50 miles after a crash, it was likely not what folks in this forum might classify as "serious").

as i see it, either you are comfortable with how you are spending your money or not.

sounds like you may want a level of hand-holding that your coach does not deliver -- and for a time you (apparently falsely) believed you were getting it so things were OK but now that you know you are not you are a bit outraged. i think you've got a legit beef (it's your money, so any way you think about spending it is fair). just not sure at this point what anyone else can do or say.

you've gotten opinions that you should save your money, opinions that suggest that daily review may not be necessary, and more. how can anyone help you further?

if i bake you some cookies that you are thrilled with but then later tell you i used @gsteinb's wife's gluten-free mix, do you ask for your gluten back or do you rethink what you require out of a cookie? i don't need your answer, but the philosophy may dictate whether you should stick with your coach or jump ship (to another coach or self-coach as mattm suggests).

Heathpack 

Hmm, it may seem to you that nothing useful has come from this thread, that it has just gone in circles. But to me it has been useful in that it has helped me to understand that a cycling coach does not actually seem be what I thought it was, I thought it would be someone who would help you manage your overall cycling game plan with a degree of attentiveness appropriate to your specific circumstance at the time- ie looking more closely if something out of the ordinary is happening. It seems like really all you can expect is exactly what is specifically stated when you sign up. In my case data review per coach's website is supposed to be "unlimited" in contrast to his remote coaching plan in which data review is "monthly". So if I were to look for another coach, I could try to pin that down, in advance, what exactly "unlimited" means if not you look at my data when I send it to you. That is a lesson learned from this thread.

I will give it some thought, self coaching vs looking for someone else vs continuing with this guy once I have a chance to talk with him.

And BTW, what makes a crash "serious"? I guess to me it would be a potentially life threatening consequence. Looking back through my Garmin data, I have over 300 rides with this HR monitor and never a HR value over 186, which is my max HR. I have worn it on that exact route, in wind, and in flapping jerseys. So I'm actually no longer so sure the elevated HR was a glitch. That's the only reason I consider this crash to have been "serious". I recognize that I did not break multiple bones or sustain head trauma or wind up in the hospital. But I may well have contused my heart and my HR monitor may have picked up a period of cardiac arrhythmia. I'm not being alarmist, in fact I'm a little bit in denial over it, because I honestly really don't want this to be so, it will mean I should really try to see a cardiologist before my event, which will be logistically difficult and there's a chance he'll tell me no-go on my ride. I totally don't realize any more what lay people do not know, so for me the implication of the HR anomaly leaps out as a thing of very obvious significance but I see now that most cycling people would not see instantly crash with chest impact + HR anomaly the next day = potentially serious.

Lol on the cookie analogy. More apt perhaps would be I have celiac disease and I assumed you would bake me gluten-free cookies, but you did not. Although I found the cookies delicious, they caused me harm, and I send you a text saying effectively WTF and you text me back that you only make gluten-free cookies on Tuesday and then imply that I need my hand held overly much because I am trying to preserve my own well being. Or something to that effect.

Seriously this thread can be done, you are probably right that it's usefulness is done. If I come to a definitive conclusion I will post back & let you all know.

tetonrider

How could we know anything about your agreement with your coach when you just let info trickle out in drive and drabs?

that aside, your coach is probably not a cardiologist and you are probably not an Olympic athlete (sorry...neither am I) who really needs real-time data analysis for every single ride with associated plan modifications. I know it feels like we need that, but a good coach (or individual if self coached) gets the forest through the trees. Anything beyond this is me or less a need for hand-holding...and it is ok to need hand-holding. You might need require more than you think, so it is simply advisable to find a coach willing to give that to you for the price you wish to pay.

And, yeah, what you are describing does not sound like someone who would do as well self-coached...but your situation does also sound like it would be a challenge to match with a coach. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

See a cardiologist if you really think your heart was out of wack. They'll basically give you an HRM with a data recorder to wear for a while and see if you can trigger an event again. Otherwise, I see lots of questionable hr data with garmin straps (certain ones are worse than others) and garmin recording devices.

wens

Does g's wife have a good gluten free pie crust recipe? Last one I tried wasn't so good.

shovelhd

I tried some gluten free tortilla chips yesterday. They were awful.

OP your situation is complex with several facets. Your coach may or may not be a good match for you but you won't know until you have an honest, open, frank conversation with him. Be very clear about your expectations and make sure you fully understand what he is capable of meeting. Decide from there.

Your situation with the crash and elevated heart rate is not something I would burden a coach with. I would go straight to a doctor, but you were reluctant to do so because you may not want to hear what they have to say. I think you need to resolve that situation on your own and keep your coach up to date.

Your expectations for analysis frequency may be driven by what your profession demands of you. Your patients may need to be checked on frequently as they recover from injury or surgery, and you might expect the same from your coach. I think checking and analyzing power files daily is unrealistic. If this is what you expect then make that clear during your conversation.