TBAKEL

The drugs do work the only problem is most druggies are burnt out by 75 miles so the trick is to spot them early and if you are lucky you can hop from one druggies’ wheel to another and if they are spread out enough over the ride you may have a wheel to suck for nearly all 75 miles. The last 25 you suck the wheels of tandems.

How to spot a druggie - first their bike skills suck, what they did not spend in training they have spent jacking their systems up chemically so a druggie normally has a lot of upper body motion and a low rate of spin at the pedals. In a druggies’ mind the bike and the drugs do it all, the legs and lungs are secondary, so not only look for poor riding style, look for poor riding style on a very expensive bike. Also listen carefully to the talk around you, druggies always complain and watch for the GOO packs being sucked down like beer.

Now spotting and hopping druggies wheels is only a strategy in executing sub 5 hour centuries. You have to be in shape, ride smoothly and efficiently, and be in a mental condition to suck wheels of low skill druggie riders who have no clue how to ride in a pack and you need to be able to do this for up to 4 hours. In order to do this you must do what a druggie does not do……………………… train.

Now understand that your 50 years or older, Cat 1 or 2 is probably not going to happen until the next life so train to ride distance and ride to enjoy the training. Here is a system I was taught in 1974 by my time trial and pursuit coach and is the system I still use to this day, the only difference is that I use to race two weekends a month during the summer / fall portion of the schedule, now I ride centuries and aim for sub 5 hour 100 mile rides. Each portion of schedule has a skill goal, a conditioning goal, and a fun goal. To ride well over many years the mind and body both need to enjoy the experience.

Spring training should be 14 weeks riding a non freewheeling fixed gear with a 44 tooth chain ring and a 18 tooth cog. A fixed gear is the fastest why to condition yourself and develop a smoother power delivery.

The Skill goal is to smooth out your power deliverance to the rear wheel until nothing above the waist is moving and you are comfortable at 90 rpm “running on pedals”. The Conditioning goal is to reestablish the bike as part of your life style and build thighs and lungs and to learn to enjoy riding. The Fun goal is to learn / practice track stands, wheel hops, 90s, 180s, and pedal kicks when stopped at lights or stop signs (makes stopping more fun and you can entertain the traffic around you) and take your jersey off over your head while riding hands off.

These fun skills will come to good use on summer and fall rides when you want to drop a pack of druggies, just wait until they are *****ing about how hard the pace is and then sit up pull your jersey off over your head and announce that you finally feel warmed up. Druggies will shell out the back like bricks. At stop lights when druggies are dragging and *****ing, hang a track stand and then very slowly hop the bike around 180, pedal kick the front wheel up and spin 180 and set the front wheel down, hold the track stand and announce that you are bored. You will not make many friends this way but lets face it, who needs druggies for friends (if they are drugging on the bike they have issues off) and if you are ridding a century out of state you will not be seeing the losers again anyway.

The schedule:

Spring:
Weeks 1-2, 1 hour every day for 14 days
Weeks 3-4, 1.5 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 5-6, 2 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 7-8, 2.5 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 9-10, 3 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 11-12, 3.5 hours every day for 14 days
Weeks 13-14, 4.0 hours every day for 14 days

Don’t worry about heart rate or miles, time in the saddle is all that counts. Weeks 11 through 14 will be rough but the muscle and mental conditioning this schedule builds is fantastic. Hopefully you can ride to and from work which really helps you get the time in.

Ride according to how you feel, if you are not into a hard ride, ride easy, you will soon find out that the weather does not give a crap for how you feel anyway so over the 14 weeks you will learn to ride through the mental issues.

Ride alone. This is one very important rule for riding alone means you deal with your own issues and you do all the work yourself to overcome those issues. Riding distance is not a team effort, it is a solo effort, so learn to enjoy the ride, the time, the weather, and the pain,…………………………. alone.

Diet is harder to figure out, billions of books have been written and you can read them but your body doesn’t care about what someone else says, I found that my body craves the foods that provide it the best recovery so I feed it what gives it a rush.

The only performance enhancing drug you should use is sleep in fact I try to overdose on it as much as possible.

The tallest hurdle to overcome in the 14 weeks will be you and that silly thing called your mind, we were given the ability to reason but I found that in respect to grinding out time in the saddle on a rainy cold day the ability to reason is of little use for had I used this ability I would not be riding.

Next years spring training will not be any easier but each successive summer and fall riding season will get even better.

Summer and Fall

Skill goal – transition smooth power delivery to geared freewheel bike. Conditioning goal - maintain Spring Condition level yet ease up on the “biker” lifestyle after all it is spring and summer and the opposite sex does look good on a bike but not as good as they do at the beach. Rest days are for skate boarding, surfing, messing about the house and dating your spouse. Fun goal – ride different routes, even rails to trails. Again no heart rate monitors, no mileage tracking, just time in the saddle over different routs and make it fun.

Monday – 2 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 18 tooth cog
Tuesday – 3 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 16 tooth cog
Wednesday – 4 hours geared bike
Thursday -3 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 16 tooth cog
Friday - 2 hours fixed gear 44 tooth chainring, 18 tooth cog

Saturday - rest day or organized ride on the geared bike. If you have an organized ride on Sunday, don’t ride on Saturday

Sunday – if Saturday was a rest day, organized ride on the geared bike. If you rode on Saturday don’t ride on Sunday

If there are no organized rides on Saturday or Sunday have fun off the bike both days, sex is always a good alternative to the bike and with lots of foreplay you can make it an endurance sport and with repetition you can count it as anaerobic interval training.

Early in the season I tend to use 25 and 50 mile rides as my organized Saturday or Sunday rides. I tend to ride one a month. I don’t care for bike clubs so my organized rides are those conducted to raise money for charities and the like. Come fall I focus on 100 mile rides (centuries) and have ridden centuries in Oklahoma, Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, Rode Island, Connecticut and Wisconsin. This is my competitive time of the year and I have a lot of fun, normally I ride 4 centuries each fall.

Winter – FUN time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, concerts, theater, plays, holidays, trials riding and rollers.

Concerts, theater, plays, and holiday events give you time with your spouse (significant other for those who are not married). The goal is to focus on someone else in your life and make the bike a very distant second. My wife says this period is when I focus (drive her nuts) on her so that she will be more than happy for me to start spring training.

Rollers will improve the smoothness of your power delivery and when you are able to hold 90 rpm at the pedals and pull your jersey off over your head, go for the rolling mount where you ride up along side the rollers and hop the bike up on to them and start spinning and when you are done hop off. Practice this someplace in the house where you have room to fall! This took me years to master and yet my first rolling mount or dismount each winter usually results in the worst fall of the season

Trials riding is fun, you can pick up an old trials bike pretty cheap, the frames are built strong and will last forever, learning to track stand and hop the bike up onto a picnic table and other things your spouse will frown upon is a lot of fun, it is however how I broke a collarbone. If you have a reasonable sized back yard you can trials even on really cold days and be close enough to warmth that frost bite should not be an issue. You can trials anywhere, a trials bike is one of the best bikes to take on winter business trips. While the druggies are sitting in the hotel bar you can be practicing wheel hops and 180’s on the hotel landscaping.

I ride the rollers whenever I feel like it and I trials whenever there is nothing going on around the house or my spouse is off running solo.

TBakel 53 years old

BlazingPedals

You are very funny! Not to mention incredibly bigoted. You must live on your bike. My yearly riding schedule looks something like:

May-April: 1 ride per week, on weekend, 2-3 hrs total
May-mid June: 2-3 rides per week, 5 hrs total
mid-June-Aug: 4-5 rides per week, 10-12 hrs total*
Sept: 2 rides per week, 4-5 hrs total*
Oct: 1 ride per week, 2-3 hrs total
Nov-Mar - 1 ride per month 2 hrs max

* There may be a few multi-day tours thrown in, which would boost the days/hours ridden for a week or two.

Bicycling is a main activity for me in the warm months, but it's not my life. My riding stops when the cold rains come in the fall, and don't start again until the snow has melted in the spring. And I don't ride a trainer or rollers because that's not riding a bike in my book. Or, to put it another way, I ride because I like to ride and I HATE riding indoors!

I ride about one sub-5 century per year; the rest of them (usually 6-12 centuries) I ride with my club and don't care how quickly or slowly I get done. If I trained 4 hours per day every day, I probably wouldn't slow down in the last 25 miles of a century; but I don't, so I do. It has nothing to do with drugs.

Also, if you're trying to do a sub-5 as a personal achievement, then drafting off anyone, even a doper, is verboten. If you suck a draft, it's not you doing the work, and it stops being your accomplishment. It makes you a poseur.

TBAKEL

I agree with you on all points but I had to work drugs into improving my performance and because I dont and never have drugged I thought through how drugs could and have helped me in the past. I then watched one of the GT catch and release ads and thought wait a minute as a former Time Trialer and Pursuiter when I now find a bike in front of me what do I do, I chase it down, suck the wheel till I recover or the rider shells out the bike and then I time trial to the next rider.

My first century 1 year after I stopped racing was in La Jolla California and two friends of mine one blind and one a Cat 1 who both rode a tandem in the special olympics on the track and medaled said that they were going to ride with one other special olympic tandem and go sub four. I met their friends and they told me that I could suck on until the one long climb where I was to breakaway to the 75 mile rest stop refill their bottles and meet them and hop back on. Your basic domestic sort of thing. Had a blast and went 03:21 but I never said solo.

I dont know when all the drug stuff started with my age group, but it even hit the track. When I turned 50 I stopped racing and the shedule I give above was only used my first year with a coach (1974) the second year with him my last 8 weeks of spring training were 1000 miles each 4 weeks for a total of 2000 miles in two months. Trust me some of my competitors were putting in 1000 mile weeks in their last month of spring training, but I had to work. My 51st year I repeated the schedule I gave above and I now repeat it each year. Now I would agree with you that when I was racing that I did not have a life off the bike but now not having kids about and a wife who has been into yoga and street skating/racing for years and feels that my riding is my yoga, I think I have a pretty good balance of bike and life.

My first shock with casual riding came when I joined a club. I really dont care if you do or dont drug, just shut up and ride and dont complain when you get dropped, I trained alone for so many years and a TT or a pursuit is a solo sport so I was not used to all the complaining done on a group ride. On a solo training ride when I would run into one of my friends I raced against we would ride togather for some time and the only thing we talked about were skill issues like standing starts and different postion set ups for aero bars or equipment issues such as carbon virsus steel and such. One time in the rain Jerry Woodwrap (sp I hope I didnt butcher his name), the world pursuit champion in the 40 to 45 age group, helped me practice standing starts. The only time I remember Jerry complaining about anything was the price of a top of the line chain and he still wasnt getting anymore miles out of it than a cheap one. I met English national champion Clive Davis on ride up the Palles Verdes switch backs. I pulled up along side him said good morning and he asked me if this was the correct route to the topless beach! I said no, he said bloody h*ll and then asked me why two blokes would ride such a hill for no benefit. We laughed and he dropped me.

I was proud of myself last year when I climbed from desert level to our campsite on the top of Mesa Verde Colorado and had danced on the pedals the whole way. I smoked Eagle Creek Canyon from Glenwood Springs Colorado to the very end of the bike path only to be out done by my younger (4yrs) wife who cruised up on 5 wheel racing roller blades. Her decent was crazy to watch. Zion National Park was where we had our best climb she on racing blades and me on the bike. I danced up to the tunnel stopped and watched her climbing past 3 cyclists. Her decent was epic, she tucked and got a lot of air. She nor I use drugs or Goo or any of that crap, we have just maintained our conditioning.

So I apologize if I come across as a biggot when what I was really trying for was dark and mysterious.

Troy

The Weak Link

The only time I've been accused of being a druggie is when I posted a couple of times after taking Ambien. The posts were pretty weird. I admit it.

Otherwise taking them to go faster on a bicycle when there's no monetary pay-off involved seems rather foolish.

Kurt Erlenbach

I took EPO while doing chemo, and it was great. Bumping up the hematocrit from 20 to 35 is a good thing.

Velo Dog

Jesus, man, take the Viagra and stay home. You're taking this WAY too seriously.

Cleave

Hello Troy,

Do I know you? Jerry Woodruff was in my club when he won the worlds sometime during the 1990s. The other Viagra post was completely tongue-in-cheek regarding an article that was serious. Your posts certainly have valid points but I think they are somewhat misplaced in this forum.

However, I am sure that there are 50+ racers who take performance enhancing drugs -- why is beyond my sense of amateur competition and sportsmanship.

Anyway this group is generally pretty laid back and rejoices in the fact that at 50+ you can still have a great time riding your bike.

Maybe I'll see you on the roads of SoCal.

jcm

Huh? What the...

The only thing I take before and during a ride is Ibuprophen. Intravenously - from a camel back... After, it's a cold frothy beer.

Trekke

The only advantage I see with taking Viagra is if I am having sex at the 50 mile mark. Ok and then maybe at the 75 too...

Louis

jcm

Yeah. And what about that Four Hour Problem?

Roody

TBAKEL-- Wow, it sounds like you have a great life. And a great wife! Thanks for taking the time to share some of your cycling stories and training knowledge with us.

BengeBoy 

Very tough trade-off here:

+1 for learning fun things my spouse would frown on
-1 for breaking collarbone

Rowan

Forget about him, I want to see his wife in action!!!!!!!!!

(And I mean on the blades...)

Glades2

I would be worried about taking any prescription or OTC medication to enhance my riding skills, since some (or more than some) can increase the heart attack risk...

Those "super energy" drinks worry me, since they contain a lot of caffine...

Just stick with water or gatoraide - juice isn't good on a long ride since that can cause heartburn (in folks our age), and, so, best to keep the intake simple, but, remember to drink enough...

BlazingPedals

Well, yeah, ... At first I took the viagra/drugs stuff as humor, but then the rest of the post was pretty serious. Threw me off. I'm still wondering about 'spring training' consisting of 14 weeks of fixie. That would take me from snow melt to August.

Roody

Howdy neighbor,

I'm thinking I would start in March--before snow melt--but when it's warmer and there's more daylight. After all, he said something about one objective being to learn to deal with and enjoy riding in the weather. And we do have a lot of weather around here on late winter/early spring. Shorter rides would be in the colder weather. By the time you got to the 4-hour rides the weather would be lovely.

I don't have a fixie, but I could put my geared bike in a similar combination and force myself to ride high cadence with no coasting. I like the rigor andsimplicity of the spring training plan--at least on paper.

Maybe TBEKEL can indicate if he thinks using a geared bike would be effective.

Tom Bombadil

I did a little research on those 5- and 6-Hour Energy Drinks. They play up on the fact that they contain large amounts of B-vitamins and imply much of the energy boost comes from them. This is based on the fact that things like B12 can help one overcome fatigue if you are deficient in it.

One of those drinks has 8333% of the recommended daily dosage of B12. Your body would get rid of almost all of that. There is research data that suggests taking B12 orally does help those with B12 deficiencies, but over the long term, you only need to take a large dose about once a month. For the vast majority of people, the B6 & B12 in these drinks will do nothing for them.

From what I could find, 95% or more of the energy boost that one feels from these drinks comes from the caffeine and sugar. One could take a No-Doze or whatever caffeine pill and eat a candy bar and have the same effect.

I find it interesting how these companies play up the "healthy" angle to these drinks, when in reality, they are not healthy for you.

Roody

Probably a better effect. The fat in the candy bar gives it a lower Glycemic Index, so the energy will last a lot longer.

A cup of coffee with milk in it is better than the no-doz, IMO. Caffeine is probably the most effective performance enhancer--and it's safe and legal.

TBAKEL

I was living at King Harbor from 90 to 95 and trained with Jerry at Domingez Hills Velodrome. I admit my post was a little over the top. I normally just cruize through the postings and have a good read. I had read some postings in the 50+ group about what should be used to enhance performance when climbing and the such and just blew them off.

However

The day after Thanksgiving I rode a 25 mile fund raiser on my Strida-5 (a little folding bike), I had to stop at a few places after the ride and did not care to have a bike on top our CRV so I just threw the Strida in the trunk of my wife's car and headed off to the ride.

The reception I got from "real riders on real bikes" was less than kind, little things like "do you think you can really ride that thing 25 miles" and such. The ride was hilly and a Strida-5 is a free wheel belt drive fixed that is geared at 56 inches so climbing is not hard at all on this bike. For the entire ride I was being challenged on the hills and I out climbed most challengers. I did not care for all the complaining that was going on around me and the comments like "you know its a bad day when you can't out climb a freak on a piece of crap bike" and the riders complaining seemed to be mostly in my age group.

Afer the ride while throwing the Strida in the trunk I was asked by a rider my age what I take to climb so well. I said "Miles" and the response was "where do you buy that?" My answer "On the street."

Had I been on my normal 44-18 fixed road bike I wouldnt of been back with these guys, but 25 miles does not seem worth the effort of transporting a full sized bike, next year I wont be so lazy.

Sorry for venting in this forum.

Is Jerry still riding? He was always very kind to me and taught me a lot. He also beat me every time we were head to head.

Troy Bakel

Retro Grouch 

It doesn't sound to me like you're the kind of guy who needs Viagra to boost his performance.

Velo Fellow

With a fresh blast of Viagra, I would find it too hard to sit on my saddle for any length of time. Perhaps slotted would help.

JanMM

That's pretty funny.

chipcom 

Apparently so! Dude, step away from the needle, you don't need to dope to hang in BF (but it helps).

Cleave

Hi,

I don't really know if Jerry is still riding. I haven't seen him at Eldo or the local crit circuit in at least two years. I used to work with his ex-wife but I haven't seen her in over a year too.