Aren't wives great? They get right to the point. Good luck on the bike.

Great to see you're back on the bike, Racer Ex! I hope it all falls nicely into place.

Awesome!

I'll say! So is Ex's wife!

The post-Rouge Roubaix mourning period is over. :) My TSS from last week was an abso-friggin'-lutely HUGE 158.

Nose returns to grindstone this week. Wednesday I get two iterations of three minutes at 90%, three at 100%, three at 105% and one more as hard as I can go, five minutes RBI. Friday I get to do a Carmichael field test on the TT bike - two, three mile TTs with seven minutes RBI. Next week I have a couple of days of O/Us, with the constant being two minutes at threshold for the under and a minute all out for the over. That's gonna hurt like a half a dozen mutha foggers. :lol: I'm pretty sure it also addresses one of my major weaknesses. Looking forward to it!

:thumb:

@revchuck Glad you are off of suicide watch and we can give you back your shoestrings and belt. When I was playing a lot of golf and playing in tournaments, many times we would have to put golfers on suicide watch after a round. Finesse sports are worse than endurance sports for feeling bad after a result that does not match expectation.

As a general observation of training over the years and working with different coaches and my own personal experience, the most valuable training effort is the go very hard and then go hard and do it again and again. The peloton does not offer RBIs. The entire concept of training endurance is to ride along with the pack. The key to scoring (or not being dropped or placing at the end) comes done to the ability to burn lactate when your body is flooded with it. Hence, go very hard and then go hard. The hard effort floods the muscles with lactate and practicing going hard at a lower power level causes adaptation to burn lactate as fuel and process it in the liver. An RBI is great for training pursuit. Do a flying 2k pursuit effort at race pace and then recovery until you can do another one. Or do a kilo and rest until you can do another one. But for mass start races, rest is not in the cards.

@revchuck - welcome back. @Hermes - Could you expound on what you wrote with %FTP and time example? I'm still new at this garbage. Last night I just went hard for a couple hours (work stress) then finished with a 1 mile 7.6% climb. Ended up with TSS 171 and an IF of 0.92

The IFs and TSS are interesting but training for any sport is about specificity to get good at it. That is why I have used a coach since I started racing in 2007 and do not rely on books, recipes, manuals and etc.

IMO, we are all great athletes on this forum. However, that is not enough. Racing in an elite field and being competitive means defining limiters and working on them, identifying competitive advantages and then setting goals and picking racing where one has a competitive advantage.

When I used to run 10Ks with large fields, one lines up at the marker identifying the miles/minute that you plan to run. However, at the front, were 50 racers with numbers on their chest from 1 to 50 that are going to contest the podium and top 10. The rest of us were going for PRs and finishes. I would be in the top 1/3 hooray.

Now I go to an event and race against 10 guys of which 5 have won at nationals or worlds. That is going to take a different level of training and focus.

Also, we all produce power using three systems - aerobic, glycolytic and the ATP-PC. That is all there is. And each athlete will have a genetic predisposition for one of the three or two of the three. Getting the training right to optimize those systems for events takes experience and the athlete knowing strengths and weaknesses.

So the short answer is I pay to get proprietary training optimized for me and I use third parties that have deep understanding of racing and training at national levels of competition for mass start, timed and team events. I focus on doing the work and having fun.

Last year, I used my old Ruskie coach. He loved trainer intervals and his favorite was 3x20 where the first 10 minutes was tempo and then 2' z5, 3' z3, 1' z6, 3' z4, 2' z3. The next set was with him on the rollers where he would call out specific cadence and power targets for two to three minutes and just try to push me as hard as I could go. I would then go back and do another 20 minute standard set. Never underestimate the value of having a Russian yelling in your ear to ride harder.

I do not propose that is the what others should do. However, it definitely made a difference when I rode with the faster guys since I had the capability to go really hard and then go hard some more with enough endurance to keep it up for a couple of hours. Is that great TT training? Not really.

And this year, I am using a different coach and like the progress and training so far.

This is a great post.

Great post!
So much wisdom from the folks here.

Rode for a bit over an hour today. Plan had been to take the dog for a 40 minute walk every morning (burn a few calories) then ride in the afternoon, but my right foot has developed a nasty sore spot just aft of the ball. Does't bother me much on the bike, but walking around it's pretty annoying.

The back improves a little every day. No drops yet but hoods are fine, and I've been testing it a little on some seated climbs. Glimmers here and there.

Good news, Ex. Slow and easy...for now. ;)

In other news, first test on the TT bike today, wondering how it will turn out.

LT test yesterday, at my computrainer class. PR. team training camp starts today. :) :)

Ex, did you take the dog along on your ride?

Have fun valygrl.

I see this advice from time to time, to put some sort of floor on the rest-between-efforts part of a workout. What do you consider a reasonable floor? I recall seeing some research that said there is very little anaerobic recharging (or whatever the right terminology is) that occurs when riding threshold; are you saying that is something that can be trained? Or is the floor more like Z2/3, just hard enough to not be relaxing?

Well, I was going to do a test on the TT bike today...when I ride before work, I upload the ride from the computer at work. My Garmin is still hooked up to that computer. Grrrr...

Caveat emptor... I have zero credentials in physiology and I just ride these things. This year, I have not had any prescribed workouts for the aerobic or glycolytic systems that did A'xZ intervals 5minute RBI between intervals. My interval sequences are longer in duration and the lower power is typically not lower than 90% FTP. The idea is to learn to process and reburn lactate while building VO2 and FTP. For me, the first 30 seconds coming off of a high effort and then doing the lower effort is the hardest part. I also do a lot of long constant power tempo and time trials. I do not do anything that is not related to race pace.

For ATP-PC work such as standing starts, then one standing start followed complete recovery.

IMO, the ability to recover after a VO2 effort at higher a power is trainable and desirable in mass start racing and track events such as team pursuit.

And IMO, the wild card to training is the mental aspect. I believe in metabolic training and using measured metrics such as FTP to base workouts. However, I also firmly believe we are capable of much more than we think by the proper mental focus and mental toughness as well as the ability to totally relax when on the bike when doing difficult efforts to allow the brain to let go and provide its secret sauces that no physiologist knows exists.

I am in SoCal and did a track training session at Velo Sports Center last night. Great session and quite frankly one of the more difficult.

60 lap warmup followed by a motor burnout. I was in a 90.6 (27 nominal) and aerobars.

As usual, Roger Young runs the session and I like these as an adjunct to my regular workouts. We never know what Roger is going to come up for the 3 hour.

The first efforts were 4 standing starts shutting down on the back stretch before turn three. Two pursuit and two full power kilo or 500 meters with complete recovery between efforts. Roger was doing videos and critiquing technique. I had the Vector pedals on and typically was hitting 850 watts on the back stretch but at high rpm which is the key metric.

Then we had to discuss with him what our target lap times were to the race on Sunday. We had 10 racers in his group today. We each had different goals and some were stupid fast - not mine. However, the goal was execution each lap perfectly. So we had to roll up to the start line and do a standing start and hit a target start lap. Roger would call out splits. After the start lap, we had two laps to hit our target rolling lap time. If we did not hit it in two laps we had to do another lap. So this was effectively, at 750 meter with a standing start at pursuit race pace.

I hit my targets and got a "good" from Rog and only had to do three laps. Others were not so fortunate.

We did a complete recovery and then Roger set up the next effort. This was just mean.

Roger would be on the motor and he put a junior woman from Team USA on the motor. Her job was to stay on the motor. The rest of us lined up behind her. Roger set the motor at 26.7 mph on the relief line. Our job was to ride on the motor and when he called out over the PA, the next racer behind the junior would drop to the pole lane and do three laps at the target pursuit pace we had just worked on. Roger called out lap times from the motor over the PA.

After you completed the three laps you ride up track at the top of the track and waited for the motor and get back on the end. So we got to do 2 sets of 3 laps of race pace.

I was spinning 102 rpm (26.7 mph) and it was hard. We were out on the track for 20 minutes. And when you got to the motor, there was the junior there so it was still hard.

When it was my turn, I hit my target lap times but as one can imagine, my power was about 150% FTP at race pace. I did the 750 meters and shot up to the top of the track. it takes a more power there to maintain speed to keep from slipping. Now I am tired, breathing hard and waiting for the motor. As it goes by, I need another big slug of power to get back on the end of the line and spin up to 102 rpm. Now, I feel like crap and think, I am not going to make it.

This is where the mental aspect comes in for me. If I start thinking I am not going to make it. I will not. I just tried to relax and breathe and spin. I could not change gears and my legs just needed one pedal revolution of rest. Well, they were not going to get it. I recovered at 102 rpm and higher power and started to feel okay. I made it through the line and did my next pursuit effort. I hit all the numbers. End of session.

My legs were totally cooked but my TSS was 82. I felt like it was more like 802. Metabolically, the starts, pursuits and the effing 20 minutes @ 102 rpm with the pursuit efforts kicked my ass. YMMV.

@Hermes, excellent post.

I'm no expert in physiology, although I probably know a little more about it than you do. I think your post brings up a great point, something that is mostly ignored when cyclists talk about training. Everyone focuses on muscle and cardiovascular output, which are no doubt huge pieces of the puzzle. The neurology of it seems to be mostly ignored and maybe this is my professional bias, but the neurology is central to it all.

Very simply, the cerebral cortex is arranged in chains of neurons- neuron 1 stimulates neuron 2 which stimulates neuron 3 which in turn sends to output to make something happen. Neuron 3 also sends out a branch which loops back to neuron 1 to keep the chain firing, thereby forming a circuit. This circuit is designed to reverberate, ie fire repeatedly, and the more times it fires, the more facilitated the circuit becomes, which means it is easier to fire this circuit in the future. Everything about that synapse, the connection between the neurons in the chain, gets ramped up, accentuated. This is what practice gets you- the more times you do something, the better you get at it. There is a lot of repetition in training and mostly that is thought of in its effect on muscle and the cardiovascular system. But there is a huge effect on the wiring of the brain too and when your brain becomes wired to do something, it starts to get easier and then because you've mastered the easier thing, you can now tackle the harder thing. So I think you're 100% right about the idea that training should be specific. From a brain perspective, the more you do the thing you want to get good at, the faster you will get good at it- ie the more effective your training will be. That's how the brain works.

The other big thing that the brain does with motor activity is that it plans and executes and most importantly modulates everything. The brain "allows" your body to do what it knows you can safely do without harming yourself, it makes things happen in what it thinks is the "normal" way. The reality is that your brain plays is safe and keeps your body from doing lots of things that it could otherwise do. So in training, its also helpful to expose yourself to adverse physiologic conditions- like your last lap in the example above. Put yourself in that situation, know your brain is going to tell you to stop and do it anyway. Next time your brain is more likely to accept that you are not going to die from your effort and it will start to allow more and more. Yes, you are getting better at dealing with or metabolizing metabolic waste at a muscle level. Yes, your heart gets stronger and can push more blood around to clear the metabolic waste. But the experience of that lap (or whatever) for the brain may be the real reason to push through it. In theory, anyway.

Those things I describe are not really the traditional "mental" aspects of the sport- that is more about changing the context under which all of the above happens. Very very important too, of course, has a profound influence on things like motivation and desire. I'm not sure, but I think some of the mental stuff is trainable/susceptible to over-training, some is innate. I know for me, for example, I might do something that at the time I find very difficult on the bike, while I'm doing it I might really not like it. But right after its over, I'm immediately thinking how great it was and wanting to do it again. This is nothing intentional on my part, it just seems to be how my brain works. But other times I am explicitly managing my own mental state- when I rode that double, for example, I remember telling myself at mile 140, "well, whatever else happens today, this ride is a success, I've got a new PB distance". Its a little thing but it made every additional mile an accomplishment, easy to keep going in that context.

All of this is of course purely how I look at training, based on my understanding of neurology, and I could be wrong about a lot of it. But having some of these ideas floating around helps me to make decisions when I'm on the bike- how should I ride this? is it productive or counterproductive to keep going? Etc. Sometimes what might be the best call for your muscles is not the best call for your brain and vice versa.

I think you are both right on the money. Practice makes it easier and not just physically. There is such a thing as mental adaptation just like with muscles. Call it the suffer threshold if you will. For me it is variable and that is not a bad thing. There are times to pull the plug. Knowing when it is appropriate to do so is highly individual and situation dependent. However training your mind and body to push through pain is essential in racing. It's more than waiting for the adrenaline. When I'm doing VO2 intervals in my basement on the trainer it is awfully easy to want to say "screw this". If I'm struggling mightily after several tries, power is dropping, and I feel like crap then I'm better off calling it a bad day and hitting it hard again next time. But I can't do this if I know I didn't give it everything I had up to that point. You have to be honest with yourself.

Guys that win races riding away solo have one or two things in common. They either are stronger and smarter than everyone else in the field, or they are willing to crush themselves while the field watches and waits for them to blow up. The physically strongest rider doesn't always win in this manner, but the mentally strongest almost always does.

It's such a fine line.

Very interesting post. I'm pretty much an ignoramus where physiology is concerned, but in my experience there are all sorts of facets to this - the muscular, the neuromuscular, the subconcious inhibition and the conscious inhibition.

The muscular is reasonably easy to understand and train, it's what we usually think of as training - building aerobic capacity etc. And the neuromuscular isn't mental, really, it's working on speed routines. However, it interacts with what I've described as the "subconscious inhibition". For example, when I first bought a fixed gear I found it really difficult to spin down hills at more than around 130 rpm. This seemed to be partly physical/neuromuscular - my muscles simply weren't trained to fire that fast - but partly mental, in that my brain was effectively stepping in to stop me doing something that felt dangerous or potentially damaging. Repetition and gradually increasing intensity seems to sort that out. Then there is conscious inhibition - the negative thought "I can't do this" during the middle third of an interval session (it's always the middle third that is hard for me, for some reason) or the overwhelming desire to reach for the brakes on a fast downhill curve. This seems to respond to a conscious override - "I know I can do this, I've done it before, I can afford to relax" - and to a learned ability to stay in the moment, to avoid undermining one's own confidence by dwelling on what is to come. The more often you push the envelope, the bigger the envelope becomes, mentally as well as physically. That's how it seems to me, anyway.

Thanks HP for the neuro explanation. That was very well written and clear.

Last year, I did some flying kilos at VSC with Roger leading me on the motor. The goal was for Roger to wind me up for three laps and I do the fourth lap by myself maintaining speed. I had done this type of effort at Hellyer (333) but not on the 250 with the 45 degree banking. Roger said the key to maintaining the speed was relaxation. The more I relaxed the faster I would go.

As I remember, I maintained 38 mph on the back stretch on my own after the motor windup. So on top of mental will there is the opposite of letting go. Allowing the brain to accomplish what it wants to do.

Holy crap. That's friggin fast.

aerobars.