I watched that last night... and the first thing that came to mind was...

Maybe, just maybe, ole Chris could have wiped up the field if he did interval and altitude training...

I think I remember this from reading Joe Friel, but I always thought that the value of intervals was not only the hard efforts, per se, but the repeated hard efforts separated by breaks that are too short for complete recovery. It may be that a regular, maybe hilly, ride will give you the repeated hard efforts, but less likely that they will come at the right, well, intervals.

How would one be able to tell what the right intervals were?

I seem to recall Andy Coggan arguing on the old Wattage forum that the amount of recovery time between intervals was not significant. But that was maybe 20 years ago.

Hmmm. Do you recall what he meant by "not significant?" Surely if the off were half the length of the on there'd be less recovery than if the off were twice the length of the on (for a given on).

I am not in any way an expert, but here are some quotes that are similar to things I dimly remember from past reading that gave me the impression of the importance of what Friel calls the 'recovery interval", the time between hard efforts.

https://joefrieltraining.com/intervals-part-4/


https://www.triathlete.com/training/...ise-intervals/

But I may have the wrong impression....




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One quarter of the preceding work interval?

For comparison, the original Tabata HIIT protocol was 8 reps of 20 seconds at 170% of VO2Max power (roughly, twice FTP) followed by 10 seconds of recovery. That's pretty hard, and the recovery (such as it was) was half of the work interval.

Maybe so, but the key discussion point is whether the duration of the recovery interval is an important consideration when designing an interval regimen. What that duration should be is another matter, and definitely well beyond my expertise. But again, returning to my original entry into this discussion, I do wonder whether an outdoor ride in which there are, say, interspersed hard efforts when the hills happen to be encountered, would have the same effectiveness as a structured ride (indoors and outdoors) in which the hard efforts are spaced at some strategic....interval.

I occasionally wonder exactly the opposite thing: whether regularly spaced hard efforts properly mimic the demands of riding in the hills, or racing.

In an attenuated way, I sorta kinda have a dog in this fight, though the dog is small and not very loud. My main research area over the years has been particular types of renewal theory. A simple way to explain renewal theory is that it describes how you use things up and how they get renewed or replenished. So that's one way to think about energy expenditure and renewal during cycling.

I'm pretty vague on the details after all these years, but it think Andy was responding to the question of which interval recovery length was optimal. Andy's reply was essentially "long recovery, short recovery, or no recovery -- the training stimulus is the same."

Ah, this sounds vaguely familiar. Could it have come up during a discussion about whether rides with the same TSS had the same training effect, even if the TSS had been accumulated in different ways (this was part of a intensity-duration trade-off discussion)? Andy had/has a lot of faith in his particular normalization.

That seems familiar. I kind of tuned out of the discussion after Andy advised not to drink anything during intervals, because you would just vomit it up.

Andy also said that if you don't see a drop of blood on your chamois after a TT, you didn't go hard enough. I think that may have been when I decided I wasn't cut out for TT'ing.

I appreciate Chris Horner for his insight into how the pro game is played, and his enthusiasm. But when it comes to training, diet, etc., I think Chris Horner is basically talking about what worked for Chris Horner. The guy is a freak of nature, looks 20 years younger than his actual age -- although he's never really looked young due to premature balding. Which may be related to a naturally high testosterone level, which kinda goes with the whole freak of nature thing. Even if you don't believe he was squeaky clean when he won the Vuelta, it was still a phenomenal achievement for a 41 year old who'd spent most of his career as a domestique.

Anyway, I watched those recent diet videos and can't say I disagree because whatever he did worked well for him.

And I'm not training for anything anymore and gave up chasing KOMs a couple of years ago after too many injuries and illnesses. So I've switched from gels (which have nearly doubled in price since 2019) to dollar store donuts. At my level, sugar is sugar. I never had any digestive problems with cane or beet sugar or maltodextrin. I did get gassy from sugar alcohols so I avoid snacks with that stuff. But for the past couple of years I can't ride longer than 90 minutes without excruciating neck pain and don't need any snacks for an hour to hour and a half. I might use some electrolytes in the water bottle in summer, or something with a little caffeine in winter if I haven't had coffee yet. But my best efforts are maybe 60% of where I was in 2021 before a bout with COVID drained my body. I'm not going hard enough to need snacks for a typical workout ride around my neighborhood.

Today's Chris Horner news...

He's not a fan of all the gizmos and gadgets... an BS claims about watts saved from this or that part... from the cycling industry marketing machine...

He is saying basically - save your money, the stuff won't do anything for you.

Refreshing words...

Has Chris been hanging out with Grant Petersen?

Probably a stupid question, but I've always wondered about the pros drinking bottles of coke on rides. Do they crack them open the night before so that they're flat when it comes time to actually drink them or do they somehow deal with the carbonation while riding? Carbonation definitely would slow down how fast I could drink it.

In college, my buddy's then-girlfriend (currently, his ex-wife) would shotgun beers.

Interesting. My former coach, who was Horner's teammate and credits Horner with teaching him how to train, utilizes a lot of intervals in his training.

Back in my early days I would grab a coke at the next to last rest stop and put it in my bottle. It would be pretty flat near the end of the ride.

My mix was a can of coke, shot of whiskey and a dissolved advil or two. Read about it somewhere in an old biking mag - it was called rocket fuel.

Actually, that's a good question. I do remember hearing how pros would drink a flat coke for some pep. So how do the pros do it? Maybe someone is in the back of the car shaking the hell out of them:roflmao2:



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Careful, most small dogs are annoying.

Todays Horner advice:

Don't ride if you are sick with the pukes...

Yeah, don't think that will ever be a problem Chris...!!