RE: the discussion about @valygrl's TT: That's why I love this forum. All the support you could ever hope for and in my case a good butt-chewing when that's what you need. I've said it before and I'll say it again, thanks everyone who chimes in for their patience, expertise, and keeping it civil. Love how we can disagree without being disagreeable.

This morning was sprint workout on TT bike at Fiesta Island (not Zwift). I was scheduled to do this workout on the trainer but the last time I did a similar workout, I pulled my glute / back / hamstring or whatever muscle that is finally better. Besides being the Devil's tool, the trainer may be jinxed.

Sprinters warmup...first lap on Fiesta slowly increasing power and cadence. Then 2x7 second jumps. Note, I only used ATP-PC system and avoided going anaerobic. Hung out for 15 minutes at the car.

Next is 4x30" all out sprints with 2' RBI easy spinning. Note that this workout is not about reloading ATP - PC system with 20' recovery but is more about strength and endurance at 30".

I must admit I measured efforts 1 and 2 but killed 3 and 4. They were not a power record per se with the last one being the best. Also, these were seated in the TT position and not standing or in the bull horns. I have the best 30 second power in the 500 meters when coupled with a standing start in race gears. If I throw out all my 500 meter races, the last effort may have been a PR.

Nice to feel all peaky, @Hermes, isn't it?


I went out for 2 hours on the TT bike this am. I did the three 5-min 114% intervals that I was supposed to do on Thursday but missed my target on two of em. These are hard in the new position, breathing thing. I actually did 112% on the last interval, it was a 3% downhill grade. Partly I was tired, partly I scared myself a little going so fast, and partly I had to deal with sketchy pavement and not swinging too wide 'round the turns.


:)

Also:


Typically for a TT interval, my HR will rise over the first 3-4 min and then hit a max around 165 and then just sit there.


First two intervals today, that's exactly what happened.


Third interval, HR stayed in the 128-138 bpm range the entire 5 min. I can't recall that ever happening before, I'll have to look at other downhill efforts at high (for me) power output. Maybe it was an issue with my HRM strap but its rare I have issues with that and HR behaved as expected for the rest of the ride.


Hmm that's weird.

The last few days have been weird. First I had to deal with Tropical Storm Cindy, which messed up a day of riding. My back has only today started returning to normal, though when I've been able to ride it wasn't an issue; getting up from a chair and walking was another matter. No real efforts on the bike, just a couple of days of JRA at endurance pace. Last Monday I walked three miles on the treadmill - I wasn't going to run, and it was hot and muggy and I decided I could be bored in the AC instead. Today was supposed to be a group ride, but that got rained out too. Sheesh. I had to work today, and of course, the rain stopped soon after we opened the store.

Got some good news yesterday. I met with the radiological oncologist who treated me for prostate cancer. The desired outcome with radiation treatment but no hormone treatment is a PSA of <2 within 24 months after treatment. My PSA came back at 1.86, 20 months after treatment. I'll take it. :)

Small group ride tomorrow. It'll be with two of the stronger guys around and whoever else shows up. I'll be treating it as a two-hour motorpacing workout.

@F16F22 - :)

Today, I went to the track to show support for the 21 women who showed for the Beginners Session up there. One of the bay area teams, SheSpoke Racing (I LOVE their kits!) facilitated that. They have a very active membership, all women, and they are just terrific. I only did the 30 lap warmup, which was a little bit frustrating with 30 people in it of various skills and abilities. On the last lap, I was sitting second wheel, so I popped around first wheel and took a flyer for the lap. The supervisor didn't like that very much. I did, though.

Tomorrow, I'm racing a crit up in the Bay Area with my team. We actually have a plan! The trouble is the field is really small, only nine pre-regged. And the course, in downtown Burlingame (it's my PenVelo Team race), is quite technical. The plan is to get me to the end and in contention so I can use my sprint...against women half my age. Well, it's a plan, and at least we have one. It'll be fun, no matter what.

The next several days will be quite busy. Monday is off, and then I'm planning three days at the track. Tuesday is an advanced session, Wednesday is mass start racing with the 4/5 women (something about a possible Keirin?), and Thursday is a sprint session with My People.

I had to cancel LAVRA for next month, work got in the way. That's the main reason I'm slamming track sessions next week. I'll go into a "soft period" for a week or so after that.

@revchuck, good news on the medical stuff. :)

@sarals, you are gonna be so tired. That good kind of happy tired. Good luck with your races.

@revchuck It is great to hear about your PSA test results. Congrats.
@Heathpack Breathing in the lower position is hard for me as well.

Yes its a known phenomenon, we'll see how it goes. Somehow my sense is that I went through this in the old position too, although I don't think I was an in-tune to recognizing what made something hard previously. I was more likely then to just generically think "that was hard!". Now I am more likely to notice- "that was hard but it wasn't too bad in the legs, really it was the lungs that were struggling."


Did you look at my ride in Strava yesterday with the HR thing? Its weird, you can pick out the 3rd interval in my data by looking at the power data, the corresponding HR does not compute.

I do not have access to the details of your Strava data. I can see your summary page. As you know, I do not post much if anything public via Stava. If I use Stava, it is a private post. One day your info just disappeared.

On breathing and bike position, when setting up a track bike for mass start racing, the seat to bar drop is adjusted so that in the drops the back is not flat. The best aero position is obtained by bending the elbows. If one is off the front then one bends the elbows to get a lower CdA. Generally, one is not in that position very long. When one is sitting in, one is the drops or sometimes on the tops. There is no hood position at the track.

When you watch a Madison race, the racers resting above the stayers line are more upright trying to take in more O2 per breath.

IMO, power is proportional to the hip angle and varies from athlete to athlete. Adaptation may occur allowing more long and short term power at more aero positions. And I speculate that age is a factor along with flexibility and body. One could argue that with enough time, one could adapt to the optimized aero position. That may or may not be true for all athletes.

According to John Howard, besides the obvious impact of aging to posture and joint and muscle flexibility, the internals begin to deteriorate meaning that the chest cavity is less flexible and one cannot get as much air in the lungs. So one needs to work on chest cavity and lung expansion.

Optimization is never ending for masters. Let's turn that into an advantage in that if one does the work, then one has a competitive advantage. Aging is a good thing.

When we lived in NorCal, my house was 1 mile from the Burlingame Crit. Each year, I would would walk down and watch the racing. I never raced it.

@Hermes, you either unfollowed me on Strava at some point or else I inadvertently blocked you. It seems to me you had two Strava personas at some point, maybe I blocked one thinking it was a ghost account. Weird that I would do that though because an inactive account is no skin off my nose.

I did a group ride this morning. When I saw which strong guys showed up, I knew it would be more a motorpacing workout than a group ride. It started out fairly easy but ramped up before too long. The strong guys were content to pull most of the way; I did a four-ish minute pull an hour into the ride that's easy to see on the graph due to the HR spike. I was doing pretty well until the guys up front decided to get froggy and pushed the speed over 30 mph (slight tailwind). A gap opened in front of me that I couldn't close and that was all she wrote. A gap also opened behind me and I ended up in no-man's-land between the strong guys and the others on the ride. I stayed with the fast guys for 1h37 and rode for another hour to get back to the start point. Good stuff. My TSB went from +37 to +9 in one ride, might get to zero after tomorrow's workout.

4x8" Power Starts and 4x8" Stomps at absolute full power tomorrow within about a 2h45 endurance pace ride. Tuesday is a rest day, though I might cheat and do the TNW. Wednesday and Thursday are swimming drills and laps in the pool, Friday is sprints, Saturday is the group ride, and Sunday is ~3 hours at endurance pace. It's good to be back at it.

@revchuck, it seems to me you're one of those "strong guys"... :)

@Hermes, Burlingame is a terrific course. It's super fun and fast. It would have been MORE fun a few years ago, though...

<blush>

:thumb:

Two more sessions at VSC in the books. Monday was standing starts in the start gate, I did 6 and Tuesday was flying 100 meters. 98 gear inches is starting to feel normal.

I had a great tuneup fit session with JM but we did not do any aero testing. UCI took away the equipment he wanted me to try. Boo. This is part of the problem aero testing at VSC or doing it on your own which is lack of equipment to test and compare. And of course, ERO would have to charge more if they kept an inventory of helmets and other stuff to test.

However, JM checked my fit against UCI requirements for both sprint and time trial and made a couple of minor tweaks. As a final check on my sprint setup, JM had me do a flying 200 on the track so he could see me on the bike.

It strikes me as very odd that these helmet and skinsuit manufacturers (and to a lesser extent other manufacturers of 'fast bike equipment') would not give ERO a complete set of helmets and skinsuits in all sizes available. Maybe two in each size for the skinsuits with the deal being if you test in one, you have to launder it and send it back. Really? The people doing aerotesting are the people who will buy anything that is even marginally faster. Want to sell helmets? Make them available to people for testing. Duh.


Same thing happened to me when I was considering buying the Giro Aerohead TT helmet- JM had a prototype for me to try on so that I could get in the pre-order queue if it fit, this was back before it was available for purchase. Then two days before my fitting, they demanded it back and he had to ship it off. Stupid, even though in the end I bought the helmet- I could have easily gone out and bought something else or done aerotesting and found something that worked for me.

These are specialty items and they sell everything they make. Could they sell more if there was more promotion via wind tunnels and ERO and equal service providers, maybe. I do not think they want to staff for that activity and take the risk. And why have to prove the offering is superior if everyone already thinks it is?

Funny conversation at LBS this past weekend: Part time employee, who is a friend of mine, is leaving because he got a new job. I ask him about it and it turns out he's going to work for a helmet manufacturer. He starts telling me more about it and how they're working on a TT helmet but had to redesign it because it was low visibility when people were in aero position.


(Aside he proceeds to explain to me in great detail how TT helmets have reduced visibility because of head position, which he then acts out for me. I nod knowingly, but this doesn't stop him, he proceeds to tell me how when they come down too far on your forehead it can be hard to see, they need to redesign the helmet to not sit as low on the forehead. I try to reply that I know exactly what he's talking about because I train in my road helmet for better protection, but he talks over me to explain it again. Lol, thanks for the most-thorough mansplainin'. You know I ride a TT bike quite frequently, right?)


Anyway, I mention that I'm going to be doing more aerotesting with @Racer Ex and if they get a prototype helmet done in time and they have one in either of our sizes, I might be able to get some testing done, if they want the data. He gets a little panicky and back-pedaly, tells me he can't just give me a helmet. I try to tell him that I don't want a helmet, I was expressing a willingness to test it. He then goes on to tell me how wind tunnel testing is way better, yada yada yada.


Never mind.


Interesting. I get it that the market is small. Maybe it doesn't make sense to make your stuff available for testing. But it seems to me that free data has got to be worth something, letting ERO clients generate it for you just seems like a win to me.


Shrug.

You were talking to a worker bee. Funny!

One of the people I used to work with was fond of saying "daddy told me if it's free, take two"

:)

@Heathpack

Many people are not interested in facts or the subtleties by which facts are generated and change with different conditions. Case in point, one of the younger racers asked me what the fastest aero helmet was and wanted an on the spot answer. He did not want a one has to test to determine answer.

I tested at the time that the Bambino helmet came out. JM told me he could not wait to see me test a bambino. Well, it was too small but could work with some long term pain and my test results showed it was not the best. No Bambino for Hermes and saved $540. FWIW, the smaller the helmet the better. I could go into the formulas to show why that is true but suffice it to say that ones head without a helmet has the smallest frontal area. If one turtles the uncovered head, then the frontal area is reduced more. If one puts on a helmet, then the shape, surface and venting have to make up for the added size.

So one way for a helmet manufacturer to get better CdA number is to make the helmet smaller or do not offer larger helmets.

My wife was riding the track doing 3x20' efforts. JM and I walk out of the studio and I ask him if he thought she should come in for a check. He said, god no. She is perfect. I would not change a thing. I think JM has learned that sometimes if it is not broke, do not fix it.

I had a breathe right nose strip on. Sometimes I wear these. Another racer asks me if I am into nose breathing. He suggested that I try the turbos that insert in the nose. He then informs me that he tapes his mouth shut at night so that he can only breathe through his nose.:eek: I wore the breathe right strips at night until one morning, I took it off and tore off some skin.:cry: That was the end of the night use.

As a final thought to all this musing, when I did my aero testing, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement on sharing test results. ERO may have changed the policy.

Haha or you could just get the best CdA numbers by aero testing your helmet in a wind tunnel on a dummy that you can put in whatever position works best, regardless of whether that is humanly viable. ;)


I don't remember signing anything at all when I went in for the aerotesting, I might have but I don't remember. But one of the reasons I told LBS employee that if he got me a helmet, I "might" be able to get some testing done is because I wasn't sure if the other involved parties would want the info shared. It would be something that I'd ask everyone involved before promising anything. But I am someone who really believes that people are entitled to keeping their business their business and sharing what they want. Its the reason most of my FB pics are either of myself or of some landscape/animal/inanimate object- let other people have control of what info about themselves they want shared, including anything to do with aero testing.