OTP's coach - a 10 lb difference is huge. Still can't figure out what he was getting at...

Hermes - that's an amazing journey. Congrats to you and your wife on your accomplishments. Just hanging in there with the Belarus coaches is a feat, for sure. I can't imagine it getting any more intense than that.

Thanks for providing that background Hermes - gives us perspective for when you talk about different workouts and such.

The upcoming trip to Sonoma is ending up during the week, and I'm flying (no bike), as I'm timing it for my son's birthday. But I'm planning another trip this summer where I'll drive out with my bike (and dog . My thought is to go through LA to ride with with Ex (and maybe Cleave?), then head up to the Bay area to hopefully ride with you and the Diva (and maybe Sara?), and to do the beginners spin around the track.

This thread just keeps getting better and better. That was awesome, Hermes.

BTW I am of Russian descent, so if we ever ride together, I'll be sure to yell at you.

AzT, I'd love to ride with you - just let me know, and let's hope that it's a weekend that I'm not working!

This IS an amazing thread. I've learned more in the past two days than I have in two years. Thank you, fellas!

Hermes, my boyfriend is Russian. If we ride together, I'll have him yell at you in Russian!

AJ - the photo - looking great, young man!!! fatty? Riiiiiiight...

Now - off I go to the Wildflower Triathlon. This will be the last competitive run I do until October (and maybe not then). Plus, it's a huge party!

Well, since it is storytelling time, here's mine.

I was fairly athletic as a kid, but pretty much dropped out of competitive sports when in my late teens. It was the late sixties, early seventies, and I was too cool for all that stuff. So cool that I could easily have got into a lot of trouble with drink and/or drugs, but fortunately some little voice of self-preservation kept me just this side of the line, and eventually I grew up.

I'd always ridden a bike. I even took an interest in pro racing. But I didn't know anybody who raced bikes, there was no club locally - or at least none I knew of - so cycling stayed purely recreational for me. Until I started work, that is. I was living in London, I wasnt making much money, and it occurred to me that commuting by bike was both free, and faster than taking the tube. So That's what I did through my twenties. I used the bike to go everywhere, including, sometimes, to visit my parents almost 300 miles away; though to be fair, I did take three days for the journey. The bike was just part of my life. I was fit.

But life got in the way, for a while. In my early thirties my career started to take off, I got into some positions that made demands that were incompatible with the bike commuting, I basically put the bike away for fifteen years and, worse, for about 35 lbs. I was pushing fifty when I realised I was fat and unfit, and fortunately met a guy at work who was, is, a fanatical cyclist and an ex track sprinter of some quality. Almost made the English national team back in the day. Anyway, he encouraged me to get back on the bike, so I bought a tourer and started commuting again. Six months later he and I cycled across the north of England, 140 hilly miles in two days. Three months after that he helped me pick out a road bike. Since then I have done a fair few endurance events and a lot of tours, including a two-month 2500-mile monster in Canada and New England last year. And throughout that time my buddy has been telling me I should go racing. I dismissed him. Fifty-something still overweight men don't make themselves look ridiculous by getting the crap kicked out of them by young men on crit courses.

But last autumn I helped him run a training camp in Spain for budding racers. He was coaching, I was just helping out, being a responsible adult, acting as Lanterne Rouge in case some of the kids got dropped on the rides, that sort of thing. But one of the kids asked me " do you race?" and when I said no, asked why not? And I couldn't think of an answer that didn't sound lame. So I came home and took out a licence.

It has been an eye-opener, all my years of watching races, and riding non-competitively, failed utterly to prepare me for the sheer intensity of it. And I find that my bike-handling skills aren't as good as they seemed when under less pressure. But I'm going to get better. It'll take a while, but I have nothing but time.

In general, 1 pound = 1.2 watts on an 8% climb. So 10 pounds = 12 watts. So if you carry 10 pounds extra on the bike in any form, you will have to produce 12 watts more. Typically, the club racer can make 250 watts on a climb. So carrying an extra 10 pounds means that he would have to make 262 watts or 4.8% more to have the same speed. What you may not know yet is how hard it is to raise your power 10 watts for a longer period of time.

So each pound of weight is very important in endurance sports. If you are heavy, you are dead on arrival at most races where there are climbs. The competition is so good it is a bad idea to give them at 12 watt advantage before the race begins.

Chasm54: I remember reading that post about the trip to Spain. Well, let it to the juniors to get the juices flowing.

I'm pretty confident you knew I was joking. I'm equally sure you didn't have to open a book or pull up a chart to quote those numbers. I understand the price that is paid to carry around too much weight. In reality, it's likely I could find 5 lbs to get rid of. 10 would be a bit of a stretch.

Yes, this is a great thread. Glad to be along for the ride..

Thanks for the kudos on the write up. I miss those guys since we had a lot of great times together.

Keep us posted on the date.

Best of luck in your triathlon Sara. You will do great!

OMG, that's Patrick Gellineau?!?!?! I raced with him in the 1970s and he seemed like he was a lot older than I. I'll tell my story in a bit.

The SoCal Master who is winning the most right now just posted that he reached his target weight for the season <145 lb after weighing 163 lb in November. He going after ANOTHER national championship jersey in Bend in September. I've known him since 1980. (I know a lot of fast guys and gals.)

I am trouble keeping the weight off that I lost in the first 3 months of this year. I feel bad enough without any lectures. I really need to exhibit more willpower when it comes to eating. My gluten-free periods do help me lose weight but my wife isn't crazy about accommodating my "special" meals permanently. I will definitely be gluten-free for a couple of months leading up to nationals.

AzTR, just let me know when. If you're here over a weekend I'm sure there will be a crit that you can do for "fun."

Sara, have fun at Wildflower and leave it all on the road.

OK. First, it is great to see so many new Masters racers showing up in this thread. I'd offer training advice but I am not nearly as scientific as the others though I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Garmin power meter pedals. If I get those then I will put some of my engineering background to use with all of this science.

I started racing in 1974 as a 17 year-old Junior on Long Island. Racing there at that time was pretty amazing. The NY, NJ, and CT area was one of the hubs for bicycle racing in the US at that time and there were a lot of foreign accents in the peloton (not counting the Jersey accents). I got into bicycle racing because I couldn't afford a go-kart. I was and still am a huge motorsports fan. I have a recording of the last V-8 Supercars race playing in the background right now. Bicycle racing was affordable and I fell in love with the notion of the sport when I saw the team pursuit during coverage of the Munich Olympics in 1972. I convinced a few friends to do team pursuit with me in a huge parking lot at a nearby community park. We would ride around the parking lot for what must have been hours on long summer nights. Anyway, this Italian-American guy, Tony Simonetti, saw us one day and took us under his wing. Tony started racing in the 1920s and was still racing through the 1970s. He taught us how to draft properly, do intervals, sprint in a straight line, and ride rollers among many other things. I was a below average racer as a Junior but started getting faster as a Senior (as we were called back then).

I reached my current height when I was in the 9th grade. When I started racing I weighed something like 115 lbs. I had enough muscle mass when I weighed 125 lbs to be a good hill climber and I dreamed of being a stage racer. My last full season on the east coast (1978) I got a minor sponsorship offer from Citius Austro-Daimler (maybe shovelhd remembers them) as a Cat 3. I got a kit, shoes, and tires. I was very flattered given how small the sport was back then.

Anyway, I finished college and moved to SoCal to start my career as an aerospace engineer. Since I was single and only needed to go on one date per year I had plenty of time to train and race. I was consistently a top 10 finisher in road races but there was a 50-50 chance that I would get dropped in a criterium. Around 1985 I had enough points to move up to Cat 2 but I had done enough Cat 1/2/3 races to know that I'd be spending my time getting dropped in crits and being a mid-packer in road races. Cat 3 is where I've stayed.

I finally got married and was a father of young children in the 1990s so my riding and racing were at a minimum. I actually missed a complete season in 1995 when our 2nd son came along and I also managed to gain 15-20 lbs during that decade. Until 2000, I was racing just a few times a year and every race I did my main goal was to not get dropped. Sometimes I succeeded.

2001 was kind of a turning point because that's when I started training with Roger Young. Still it took me several years to get back to the point where I was doing more than just hanging on in SoCal crit fields since I was still going to soccer, Little League, cross country, and track on weeknights and weekends. However, it was amazing how much I improved with 8 hours of training per week. So now we get to the last 3 years. All of a sudden my eldest could drive and then he moved out of our house to go to college (long story actually) and our youngest is driving too. I miss doing some of the kid stuff but now I can train and race more -- a lot more as far as the racing goes.

As far as winning goes, I've never won a big race. I've won a number of small races (like Tuesday night world championship races) but in March I got my first top 10 on a weekend race since the 1980s. I do have some targets for this year and if I can get my act together I'll be getting some personal coaching from Roger Young.

However, winning has not been my primary motivation for racing. I like pushing myself physically and I like riding fast. One thing about the 1990s was I realized that while I love cycling in general I love going fast on a bicycle even more and I don't have the motivation to be this fit if I'm not racing.

So another massive weekend is in front of me. I'm doing the Cruz Gran Fondo tomorrow which benefits Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach. Sunday, I'm doing the Piru 20 Km TT mostly to make sure my TT bike is working well and to make sure my new helmet works OK because next Saturday is our district ITT championships which Racer Ex is doing on a tandem. As an aside, the Cruz Gran Fondo means Tony Cruz, recently retired pro bike racer. His daughter goes to high school with my youngest and I see Tony and his wife at times during school functions. I also race Masters with Tony's father. I told you I know a lot of fast guys.

Oh, and last but not least, Hermes, this week's intervals that you delineated were not a lot of fun on the track. The group I was trying to stay near was doing Z3 at 30 MPH and I had mistakenly set up my bike with an 84" gear. I fixed that for the 2nd set by going up to an 88" gear.

Everyone have a safe and fast weekend.

Um... yikes.

Swim ride and run fast, Sara!

That is without a doubt Pat Gellineau. Team Squiggle out of NYC. Check the results from the crit. He will top 10 in Masters races and top 20 in Cat3. If you raced in NYC and on LI in the 80's, you might have raced with Pat.

I do remember Austro-Daimler. Unfortunately I do not remember how good they were as by then I was racing P/1/2. The first club I raced for was the Boston Road Club, sponsored by International Bicycle Center in Boston. The next year, I was recruited to ride for the Mass Bay Road Club, sponsored by Fuji. I spent four years with them. Finally, I was recruited to be the lead rider on a new team, the Boston Velo Team, sponsored by The Bicycle Exchange in Cambridge and Basso. I still have my kits from the era. Maybe I should post some pics. That would bring you back. I wish I still had that Basso. What a great Italian bike that was. Full SR. They gave me the frame kit, minus the pantographed parts, and sold me the group at cost.

Do you remember Tony Chastain from Stow, VT? He's next to me in my avatar pic. Cat1, which was so rare back then.

Good luck Sarals, Cleave, and anyone else racing this weekend. Ride fast and stay safe.

I'm doing an M55+/M65+ mixed field criterium followed immediately by an M45+ criterium on Sunday. I have a shot at winning them both if I conserve. This will be an exercise in power management more than anything. Then I'm taking the next two weekends off of racing. After 14 races in the last 8 weeks, it's time for a break.

Well, my productivity will be in the dumper in the mornings for a while.

???? Constipated?

Giro. The race, not the sandwich.

Yeah, I'm organising my schedule so I can catch most of it. Looks a pretty open race this year.

Cleave: I loved your writeup and nicely done. I have had the opportunity to ride and race with Cleave on the road and at the track. He is the real deal. A great bike handler, a great wheel to follow and stupid fast. My only comment is that he shows up on his home course to take MEA and me on a climbing ride with a 53/39 11/23. I thought to myself, this is going to be hard.

Well, z3 at Rog's session is supposed to be race pace. BTW, Rog loves 30 mph and thinks that is the low end of race pace. I suspect that pace will pick up as the trackies get more form.

I agree with the other points, but the guy is an absolutely horrible wheel to follow, in the same way that MEA is.

One of my problems at the end of our state RR was that I had stupidly just never thought of changing the cassette on my Zipps for that race, and went with 53/39 and 12/25. That was fine until the final climb when I was already red-lined. DOH!

I did a 20' power test this morning, after a TT leg opener yesterday. I fully expected to break my PR, and did, coming in at 318w (3w above what I targeted). That puts me at 3.72 w/Kg. My Cat1/40+ teammate just tested at 4.45, and he has a 1,700w kick. Kids... whatcha gonna do, huh? He also rides the most aero S5 that has probably ever been put together. I think the Di2 battery is inside the HT, and the computer is tucked behind the stem. Owning a wind tunnel has its advantages.

We're basing my training going forward on a 293w FTP, and that "feels right" to me.

Track workout on my TT bike. 100 m jumps, standing starts and 4 minute efforts

An easy 30mi, a couple of short 850W openers. Ready to race.