Originally Posted by
rubiksoval
That's interesting. I don't really get sore after rides anymore. I get deep-down fatigue, and I get to the point where my legs feel like blocks of wood, but nothing like the DOMS I get if I were to go sprint down the street or go hiking or carry a bunch of stuff around all day (things I'm not used to).
But even when I first started riding, I can't ever in my life think of a time when my core was sore. Not even in mountain biking. Hands would be sore, and whatever body part hit a tree or something, but nothing in my torso.
I'm trying to remember that far back . ..
I do distinctly remember in my teens and early 20s going on ski vacations and only being sore the first three days, then not again the rest of the season. I didn't start bike training until I was 50, but I must have started hitting the gym in my late 50s for some reason, probably trying not to get dropped on every hill or maybe not cramping anymore when chasing the fast boys up the zillionth hill of the day. Worked though.
I've been riding almost every day since mid-September but I was starting from about zero after not riding all summer due to saddle sore caused sciatica. So every week is a little harder except for easy weeks and also a little different. My legs and lats are a little sore today because yesterday was my 2nd attempt at an hour of power. Legs and HR were OK but I couldn't get my breathing regulated. I was breathing too much and hyperventilated before I even got to 30'.
Core: I agree except for now my back gets sore, which might be because of no gym + age. Riding makes it less sore, so that's good. I've never done these long roller rides before - I used to never ride them for more than an hour. But like they say, rollers make you smooth because there's no bike momentum like on the road. One has to supply pedal force all the way around the circle, so my hip flexors took a while to get conditioned to 2 hours of that.
I probably wouldn't notice Powercranks, I'm already there. Way back when, there was that rider who did extensive Powercrank testing and found they didn't do anything. His article was used by Powercrank opponents to poo-poo them. I don't think anyone noticed that the reason they didn't help this rider was because he had already been pedaling as though he were using them for a long time. So there's that. On long rides, I work hard at pedaling with a force just below the pain threshold. The way to do that is to never contract any one muscle all that much, yet still get up the road at 18. So reducing peak pedal force is a big deal. I've been working on that for a long time.
The kinda crazy thing is that I was by far the best sprinter in our group of 100 or so riders, even though I was 10 years older than most of them. I tried to coach a couple of them who wanted to get faster on hill sprints, but they couldn't pull up hard enough, while I could lift the back wheel off the road if I wasn't careful. I still don't really understand. It seems like one could just push down harder, but maybe most road cyclists don't have the quad strength to equal pushing down and pulling up at the same time?