Friday, March 1, 2024

RIP Coach Hughes

 


A few days ago, I stumbled across the obituary of Coach John Hughes. As readers of this blog know, Coach Hughes was, of all the fine coaches out there, the coach I chose to follow. I never met him or even communicated with him, I just read his books and articles. 

I discovered Hughes on the Google group randon, a group devoted to randonneuring (long distance challenge bicycle rides.) I liked what he said there and so purchased the book he co-wrote with Dan Kehlenbach, "Distance Cycling." My first reaction to "Distance Cycling" was lukewarm at best - I gave it three out of five stars on Goodreads. Over time, however, it grew on me until it became the only training book I used. From the references in 'Distance Cycling" I discovered Hughes' publications on Road Bike Rider website and eventually those publications replaced "Distance Cycling" as my primary reference for bicycle training.

What was it about Coach Hughes which made me select him from amongst the truly amazing collection of coach-authors I might have followed, Coach Joe Friel as one major example? He certainly was not the most polished, the most authoritative, nor the most cutting edge. Most of his advice he took from other coaches, Joe Friel for one, a fact I know because he meticulously referenced the ideas he used. I am a scientist, and Joe Friel (for example) tries to make his training advice as scientific as possible, something Coach Hughes did not do. One of the first thing that attracted me to Coach Hughes was the breadth of his advice. At the time I discovered him, he was one of the few coaches to provide advice for randonneuring, a sport I had just taken up. Actually, the very first thing that caught my eye, back when I discovered Hughes on randon, the thing that persuaded me to purchase "Distance Cycling", was his advice for older cyclists, a group that very much included me. There are plenty of books with titles like  "Cycling Past Fifty". but none of them seemed to describe cyclists like me, only Coach Hughes managed to do that. This brings me to the second and perhaps more important reason I followed John Hughes. For Coach Hughes, cycling was personal and totally real. He and I were very close in age (he was about three months older than I and yes I get the implications of that for my mortality) and my favorite of his articles were those about himself, the practical impacts of aging, mistakes he had made, and the consequences of those mistakes. What I loved about those articles was how honest, real, and slightly sad they were. The final thing that drew me to Hughes was his flexibility and humility. One of his favorite expressions was "Remember, everyone is an experiment of one." By that he meant that every cyclist needs to decide for themselves which pieces of training advice work for them and which just don't.

So, is it time for me to find a new coach? I don't see why. I think there is enough wisdom in Hughes collected works to last me for however long I have left. That said, I will miss you John Hughes, it will be lonelier out there on the road knowing you no longer are with us. 


Thursday, February 15, 2024

Blogger's Block

The Zombie, failing for the third time to complete a blog post.

I tend to write my blog posts ahead of when I need them. At present, I have twelve draft posts at various stages of completion. As a new month comes around, I pick a draft that seems the most ready and complete it for that month. In between, I work on various of these drafts as ideas come to me. Sometimes one of these drafts reaches final form before the beginning of a month such that all I have to do is post it. Almost as easy, sometimes when I turn my attention to an unfinished draft, it comes together pretty much the way I expected it to when I started it. However, as I have mentioned on this blog before, one of the ways I think is to write, and that means that sometimes I pick a draft to finish for the month and as I try to complete it, it goes sideways. That is exactly as it should be, that is what it means to think by writing. From a practical point of view, sometimes that is fine but sometimes it is a challenge. Sometimes I simply follow the post where it wants to go and that is what gets posted. Sometimes, however, I cannot do that, either because completing that post would take more time than I have or because what I learn as I write is that the idea that inspired that draft was flawed and I end up discarding it. In that case, I move on to one of my other drafts. In the case of this month's post, I repeated that process three times. At that point, almost half way through the month in which the post was to appear, I decided my inability to complete any of my draft posts had to itself become the post; I have to blog about the fact that I have Blogger's Block.

Why do I have Blogger's Block? A while back, I posted that when I have trouble blogging, that often reflects a problem with my cycling and that certainly could be true this time, both in the long term and in the short term. Long term, I have found it harder to maintain a consistent and sufficient riding schedule ever since my move to Emerald Hills in 2020. I think the hills around my new home, the COVID pandemic, and my advancing age all factor into this. In the short term, I am just now coming out of a month long slump caused by a combination of a nasty norovirus infection, bad weather, and discouragement. However, in addition to whatever impact my cycling problems had on my ability to complete a blog post, I think there was a conceptual issue which also got in the way. That conceptual issue is that I don't understand how to quantitate the impact of Intensity on both my Fatigue and on my Fitness. (Intensity is how "hard" I ride, e.g. how fast.) I know Intensity matters, I just don't know how much. I think that every time I tried to finish a post, I ran into this issue and got stuck. 

What are the twelve draft blog posts I have queued up and why can't I complete any of them? Here are their tentative titles:

  1. Perverse Incentives
  2. Perspective
  3. Heart Rate: A Sanity Check
  4. Using the Banister Model Before and During Training
  5. Displaying Fatigue, Fitness, Form, and Load
  6. I Am Old
  7. The Metric Revisited
  8. Current Status of My Bikes
  9. Not Door to Door
  10. 50,000 Miles ... and Now What?
  11. Hughes ToDos
  12. Ideas
Drafts 1 through 5 are all somehow tied up with the issue of Intensity. I suspect some of these will be dropped or merged as I work through my thoughts on this issue. (If I fail to work through my thoughts, then they all five will be dropped.) Drafts 6 and 7 are at early stages of development and I am not yet convinced there is enough there to generate a blog post. Drafts 8 through 10 are waiting on events. When these events happen, I will be able to complete these posts. Drafts 11 and 12 are not really drafts at all, but collections of ideas. In summary, I think that before the end of March, I am going to have to come to terms with my confusion about Intensity if I want to have something to post.

In my despair at my Blogger's Block, I asked myself is if it is time to stop posting, to close down or at least freeze this blog? I hope not! Draft number 10, "50,000 Miles ... and Now What?" is one post I am very excited about, I just have to reach 50,000 miles of riding to be able to post it. There is another post I am excited about that isn't on the list. 2024 is the year of my 75th birthday. To me, this is a big deal, three quarters of a century old! Never in my life have I done a birthday ride, a ride where the length of the ride in miles is equal to my age. Knowing myself, a 75 mile ride would be a big challenge, but possible if I don't have any bad luck (e.g. illness), if I keep it as easy as possible (e.g. flat), and if I prepare diligently. The reason it is not on my list is that I am superstitious enough that I fear jinxing the ride if I were to be so presumptuous as to create a draft post about it before it is completed. Besides completing the ride, to make it to that post I would have to come up with four or five more posts before then. Can I do that? Here's hoping!

Monday, January 1, 2024

Training Advice for the Berkeley Wheelmen of 1970

 

I happen to be revisiting the Berkeley Wheelmen Newsletters I blogged about a few years ago and stumbled across the following article on training. This article was published in the June 1970 issue, Volume 5 Number 6. I was struck with how modern it seemed, as well as how simple, and wanted to share it with my readers. Obviously, this training plan, written for college age competitive cyclists, is of questionable relevance to me, a non-competitive old man.

The figure above was at the top of the first page of that newsletter and was drawn by my friend and roommate, Paul Rail, a very gifted artist.



 LONG TERM ATHLETIC TRAINING
By Eric Johnson

A lot of atheletes believe that the harder one trains the better condition or performance he will attain. This is true for a short time only; the duration of this effect being dependent on the physical type, age, years of training and the native ability of the athelete. Most are willing to acknowledge that the rider can drain himself, but few seem to avoid it. I think that through proper training, nutrition, and a keen awareness of the body's response, overtraining can be avoided and superior performances can be achieved. Here are some basic guidelines for a long term training program.

To best avoid overtraining an athelete should devise a conditioning program that incorporates a maximum of variety. During most of the year he should train at a level which stimulates, not forces, development of his body. This type of training is called base training. It should include one day a week of training at a racing pace but concentrate on long rides at moderate pace. This combination should eliminate the tendency to slow down in the off season. Base training builds energy reserves from which a rider can draw during the racing season.

Base training effects are long lasting, slow to achieve and. difficult to maximize. When correctly carried out base training produces abundant health and energy without sore muscles, fatigue and other bummers. Building a base is a natural consequence of riding over a period of years, however the idea is to maximize the increase of basic speed. This is not done by training hard all year, but by training consistently at the fastest level your body can sustain without fatigue, sore muscles and illness. Almost as important is the regularity of training, daily at best. Heart and lungs, the controlling factors of base training, respond best to controlled daily exercise.

The natural compliment to base training is "sharpening" training. Sharpening is what really counts for the races. It involves hard, fast, long regular workouts. These workouts should be varied including hills, flats, rollers, anything you can think of to extend your muscles, heart and lungs. This training must also be done carefully; fully aware of how the body is responding. A good diet is extremely important and must be strictly adhered to. Weight loss should be avoided as it tends to weaken the body. This sharpening can only be done effectively for a few months once or twice a year. If kept up too long sharpening will result in slower performances due to overextending or using up the energy reserves you built up by base training. If you realize when your maximum sharpening has been achieved and at that point ease up on your training you will not dull before the end of the season.

In conclusion, always remember that the sophistication of training methods has produced four minute miles and Tour de France champions. It is more important to design your training program in terms of years rather than specific races or seasons. This involves year round training most of which is base training promoting the maximum develipment of the whole body. Only a few months a year can be devoted to the sharpening of muscles because this requires more than the body can endure over extended periods. Formally designing a year round training program may be a valuable asset for the Berkeley Wheelmen. If by consensus a flexible program is developed, new riders can be properly trained and seasoned racers can achieve their best performances.


Monday, December 4, 2023

Coach Hughes and Zone 3

 

The figure above shows the Training Zones used by Coach John Hughes, the coach I more or less follow. What are Training Zones? It is obvious that it matters for a cyclist’s training how hard they exert themselves on a training ride. The same ride is harder if a cyclist completes it in 60 minutes by riding it as fast as they can as compared to if they take it easy and finish it in 80 minutes. This characteristic of a workout is named Intensity. The three most common ways Intensity is measured are:

  1. Subjectively, how hard a ride feels, a metric named Relative Perceived Exertion, labeled RPE on the above figure.
  2. How many watts of power as measured by a power meter in the bicycle's drive train, a metric labeled Power on the above diagram.
  3. How fast the athlete's heart is beating, labeled Heart Rate on the above figure.

As is shown in this figure, Coach Hughes believes that these measures are more or less interchangeable.

Although Intensity is a continuous value, for reasons of convenience Intensity is usually divided into discrete Training Zones. Different coaches divide Intensity into different numbers of zones and place the boundaries between zones at different points on the Intensity scale. Also, these boundaries have to be customized to the individual cyclist. Coach Hughes does so by defining the boundaries in terms of measured values for each cyclist, % LT and % FTP for heart rate and power, respectively. (RPE, being subjective, is automatically customized.) I won’t talk about power in this post, you can google the words “FTP power cycling” and find more than you would ever want to know about this topic. I track my intensity by RPE and Heart Rate, so that is what I will discuss. % LT (under Heart Rate in the figure) is short for Percent Lactate Threshold. Coach Hughes defines 100% LT as the heart rate measured during a one hour time trial. The boundary between Zone 4 and Zone 5 is defined to be 100% LT, and then Coach Hughes defines all other boundaries as fixed percentages of that value.

Besides following Coach Hughes, I’ve been trying to follow the principles of Polarized Training. Although Polarized Training has been interpreted differently by different people at different times, my current understanding of it is based on recent podcasts featuring the exercise scientist Dr. Stephen Seiler, the person who invented the term. Dr. Seiler says that Polarized Training means that 80% of training rides should be done below the aerobic threshold and that only 20% should be above it. When I started writing this blog, I believed that the aerobic threshold was the boundary of Training Zones 2 and 3 on Coach Hughes training zones so that if four of my rides each week were in Zone 1 or Zone 2 and if the fifth were ridden in a higher zone I would be following the principles of Polarized Training. Coach Hughes would appear to be a supporter of Polarized Training (see for example his article on Road Bike Rider entitled “Anti-Aging: The 80/20 Principle.”.) What inspired me to write this post is that, given Hughes’ support of Polarized Training and my belief that the aerobic threshold lay at the boundary between Zone 2 and Zone 3, I could not understand why Coach Hughes sometimes recommended riding above that boundary, in Zone 3, during the 80% of rides that ought to be ridden below the aerobic threshold. There are two possible explanations: either Coach Hughes’ zones are not designed such that an athlete’s aerobic threshold is at the boundary between Zone 2 and Zone 3 or Coach Hughes’ training plans do not always follow the principles of Polarized Training. 

How do Coach Hughes Training Zones map onto the aerobic threshold of Polarized Training? To answer this question I once again turned to Dr. Seiler. Dr. Seiler uses a three zone system where the zones are named Low Intensity, Threshold Intensity, and High Intensity. These zones are defined by blood lactate concentration. Low Intensity is where Dr. Seiler says 80% of training rides should be ridden. The two boundaries between Seiler’s three zones are the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. Seiler would say that neither Power nor Heart Rate can be used to locate these boundaries, he would argue that only blood lactate levels can do that, though Power and Heart Rate can be used as proxies after an athlete has calibrated them against lactate. Because both the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds increase with training, this calibration needs to be repeated periodically. 

Unfortunately, most athletes, including me, don’t have access to the facilities needed for blood lactate measurements so we have to estimate these values some other way. Having said that aerobic threshold can only be determined by blood lactate, when interviewed in one podcast, Dr. Seiler did allow that for “many” athletes, their aerobic threshold would be somewhere near 80% of their maximum heart rate, which for me, translates into 144 beats per minute. Other coaches make different estimates. Coach Hughes does not explicitly offer an estimate of his own.

Besides just guessing at the translation between aerobic threshold and heart rate, there are other ways of estimating the aerobic threshold. One is to measure the ratio of oxygen inhaled and CO2 exhaled, a test as difficult as the blood lactate test. An easy test is the talk test - the aerobic threshold is the boundary between where an athlete can talk normally and where talking becomes erratic due to the need to breathe more deeply and often. Using the talk test, I estimate my aerobic threshold to be no more than 130 heartbeats per minute, quite a bit lower than the 144 bpm estimated from my maximum heart rate. Could it be that I am not one of the “many” athletes to which Seiler refers? It certainly could! Dr. Seiler mostly works with college age, elite athletes. I am much less talented, much less fit, and much older than those athletes. It is interesting in that context that the Polar Watch Company, maker of one of the most popular and respected sports watches, says specifically that the more fit you are, the higher the percentage of maximum heart rate your aerobic threshold will map to. For me, the range they gave ran from 108 bpm to 153 bpm assuming low fitness to high fitness, respectively. In that context, it seems quite plausible that if Seiler quotes a typical aerobic threshold of 144 bpm, mine would be below 130. This underlines Seiler’s original point that an athlete’s aerobic threshold should not be determined from their heart rate.

So at long last we have the foundation to ask the question “Why does Coach Hughes recommend Zone 3 training as part of the low Intensity training that the Polarized theory says should constitute 80% of workouts?” If my aerobic threshold were 144 bpm, what Dr. Seiler says is the case for “many” athletes, that would lie in Coach Hughes Zone 3. Thus, it would make sense for Coach Hughes to recommend Zone 3 training as part of the Low Intensity workouts that are critical for Polarized Training. If it is the 130 bpm I estimate from the talk test, then those Low Intensity workouts should be limited to Zones 1 and 2. Interestingly, Coach Hughes explicitly endorses the talk test as the boundary between Zones 2 and 3 when using RPE to determine training zones. There are two implications of that. First, it contradicts Coach Hughes’ implicit suggestion that the zones he defines using RPE, Heart Rate, and Power align - they do not necessarily do so. The second implication follows from the fact that for an athlete who uses the talk test to define their training zones, it must follow that by recommending Zone 3 as part of Low Intensity riding, he necessarily violates the principles of Polarized Training. 

Where does all of this leave me? There are many things I like about the advice of Coach Hughes but his inconsistency is not one of them. In my last post, I discussed a weekly training plan from Coach Hughes. This plan includes four rides in Zone 1 or Zone 2 and one ride in Zone 3. This schedule is entirely consistent with Dr. Seiler’s Polarized Training ideas. In the post before that, I described Coach Hughes-derived annual training plan. That schedule includes five or six rides a week. Two of those rides are in Zone 1, which is fine from Dr. Seiler’s perspective, but one is a mixture of Zone 2 and Zone 3, and the last two to three are all in Zone 3 or higher, too Intense a schedule according to Dr. Seiler. Should I follow the advice of Coach Hughes, Dr. Seiler, or try to figure things out on my own? In fact, I am figuring things out on my own, using the advice of both Coach Hughes and Dr. Seiler, and writing this post has significantly helped me do that. 


Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Finishing My 2023 Cycling Season

Last post I blogged about an annual training schedule I derived from the writings of the coach I follow, Coach John Hughes. Never in my life, not during my first cycling career (1963-1978), nor during my second cycling career (2008-Present), have I ever followed an annual schedule. Either I have ridden however suited me at the moment or more recently, I have had a pretty regular weekly schedule and from that, used a short training plan, 5 to 10 weeks long, to prepare for an event. However, I have at long last started to think about an annual schedule and even prepared a plan for one that, in theory, I could use during my 2024 cycling season. I did that because almost all coaches suggest following an annual schedule and I thought I might be missing something by not doing so. However, I am not ready to start following such a schedule, at least without a lot more thought. Thus, I anticipate at least one more blog post on that topic. As for this post, it covers a more immediate question: what kind of weekly schedule should I be riding right now?

My starting model for such a schedule also comes from Coach Hughes, a schedule I blogged about back in 2022 and which is diagramed at the top of this post. This schedule is actually three related weekly schedules of varying difficulty. The idea is an athlete picks a level of difficulty and then rides that same schedule each week until there is a reason to change. Each of these weekly schedules was made up of rides which varied both in Volume (how many minutes the ride lasts) and in Intensity (how hard to “push”, e.g. how fast to ride). In that earlier post I added a fourth “level” of Intensity I called Mixed Intensity to communicate that many of my rides were not ridden at the uniform intensities that Hughes called for, but at a mixture of Intensities. I also added a description of what I was riding at the time, labeled “My 2022”. How does what I am doing now, labeled “My 2023”, compare to what I was doing in 2022 and why did I make the changes I made?

One big change I made, important for comparing 2022 to 2023, is that I replaced two Mixed Intensity rides of 2022 with Zone 2 rides and the third Mixed Intensity ride with a Zone 3 ride. I am going to talk about why I made those changes later in the post, but for now I just want to talk about the consequences of doing so.

Back in 2022 when I first wrote about this schedule of Hughes, my cycling was going pretty well. In contrast, 2023 has been a rough year for my cycling due to problems with my back, problems that have gotten better but which are not gone. As I was planning the “My 2023” schedule, one of my main concerns was to make sure it had an appropriate level of difficulty, to not make it so hard that it drove me into overtraining. With that in mind, it may seem surprising that my minutes per week of riding is significantly higher in 2023 than in 2022. This may be the result of a mistake in planning on my part; it is far from sure that I have found the right amount of riding for my current situation. However, in addition to that possibility, there is another explanation for that increase. Look at the Saturday ride. It was 160 minutes in 2022 and is 195 minutes in 2023. Those two rides cover the exact same 33 mile long route (Alpine-Cañada) so the reason for the difference in Volume (minutes) is that in 2023, I am riding the same route more slowly (in Zone 2 rather than at Mixed Intensity). Thus, when comparing minutes, it seems like I have increased the difficulty of my riding when common sense says that I have done the opposite, that I have decreased it. It is to deal with these kinds of anomalies that I started tracking my weekly Load in addition to my weekly Volume (minutes). Load takes into account how long the ride lasts in minutes but also takes into account Intensity, how fast or hard I rode during those minutes. My estimated Load for the 2022 schedule is about 720 and for 2023 about 520, the 2023 schedule is, by this measure, easier. There are many reasons (which I will not cover in this post) to be skeptical about these Load estimates and in any case I am not the person in 2023 that I was in 2022 so even if my 2023 Load is lower than 2022, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have found the right amount of cycling, an amount that will avoid overtraining, I have to listen to my body to determine that. But as I have posted before, my body cannot propose a training schedule, it can only tell me if the schedule I am riding is too hard. That raises the question of how I arrived at this schedule, and in particular, why I decided to substitute Zone 2 for Mixed Intensity.

I started riding Zone 2 rides because I finally figured out how to do so and because so many coaches promised I could build more endurance with less fatigue by restricting 80% of my riding to Zones 1 and 2. The way I was able to complete the rides available to me in my current, very hilly neighborhood is by acquiring a new heart rate monitor, my TranyaGo sports watch, and by thinking through why my rides always seemed to contain some Zone 3 riding. Once I understood that, I was able to modify how I approached these problematic parts of my rides to bring them down into Zone 2. This gave me the two Zone 2 rides on Coach Hughes schedule, including the weekly long ride. But how long should that long ride be? Without going into a lot of detail, I have concluded that I can be ready for a Metric Century (a 100 kilometer, 62 mile long ride) if my longest training ride is 45 miles long and if the next longest ride, ridden two weeks earlier, is 33 miles long. My Alpine-Cañada ride is 33 miles long. It  is a ride that I have been able to complete fairly easily, so I thought if I could handle a weekly schedule with that as my long ride I could be ready for a Metric Century with only two week’s notice. For my second longest ride of the week I picked another Zone 2 ride that I have found I can do pretty easily, my 17 mile long Cañada ride. The Hughes schedule also includes two Zone 1 rides which I can easily do on my trainer. This left me only the Zone 3 ride to figure out. I plan to write a whole blog post about Coach Hughes’ unusual enthusiasm for training in Zone 3 and the various ways he suggests doing that but for now, I am completing this fifth ride by simply not holding back as I do for my Zone 2 rides. I believe this serves the purpose and my TranyaGo agrees.

So how is this working out? I can't say for sure. Although I started this schedule eight weeks ago, I have only managed to complete it three of those weeks and therein lies a story. One week contained a conflict which prevented me from completing the schedule, three weeks I had outside stresses that left me too tired to complete the schedule, and finally, and there were three weeks during which my son asked me to ride with him. (The numbers don't add up because I rode with my son on some of the same weeks I was also stressed.) The rides my son wanted to do were not even close to anything on my schedule but, to me, the opportunity to spend time with my son trumped the importance of riding my new schedule. What I can say is the weeks I rode my schedule seemed hard to the point where I wondered if they were too hard. My plan was to keep riding that schedule to see if it got easier as I got into shape or if it continued to get harder due to fatigue buildup but these interruptions kept me from doing that. The way I am thinking about that schedule now is that it is aspirational, it is what I attempt to do knowing that life will sometimes get in the way. Even when I do not complete the schedule, it gives me a framework for what rides to do on the days I am able to do them.

There is so much I didn’t have room for in this post: Coach Hughes’ views on Zone 3, why the way I calculate the Load of a ride might be suspect, and dealing with the effect of the disruptions of life on my cycling, just for example. I hope to address at least some of these in future posts, stay tuned. 


Sunday, October 1, 2023

Annual Schedule for Century Riders



The middle 20 weeks of an annual training schedule for a cyclist who wants to ride Centuries (100 mile long bike rides) during their Main Season. I constructed this schedule based on my reading of "Intensity Training: Using Relative Perceived Exertion, a Heart Rate Monitor or Power Meter to Maximize Training Effectiveness" by John Hughes and the references to other of his books present therein. The pace at which that these rides should be ridden is given by their color code, a key to which is in the upper right corner. Zone 1 is an easy, recovery pace. Zone 2 is a pace that can be maintained all day. Zone 3 is a pace that can be maintained for hours. Sweet Spot is a pace at the upper end of Zone 3 and the lower end of Zone 4. The first 10 weeks of this schedule are similar to most stand-alone Century training schedules except that the Century Ride itself (the Event) would come at Week 11 (<= Normal Event Week) in such standalone schedules but comes at Week 20 in this annual schedule.


The spiral is a powerful metaphor for one way to build understanding. A spiral is very much like a circle but whereas going around in circles is a waste of time, spiraling towards an understanding, while similarly revisiting the same issues again and again, provides increasing understanding of those issues with each turn of the spiral. In that spirit, I am going to re-review an eBook by the coach I currently follow, Coach John Hughes, "Intensity Training: Using Relative Perceived Exertion, a Heart Rate Monitor or Power Meter to Maximize Training Effectiveness" (hereafter referred to as Intensity Training.) I first reviewed this book almost five years ago. 

When I restarted cycling in 2008, I chose my rides without a lot of theory behind that choice. I just picked a length of ride based on what I had been riding recently. On average, that produced an upward trajectory: “Of course I can complete a 40 mile ride, I did a 35 mile ride last week.” However, when I first tried to train for a 200K (126 mile) ride with the Houston Randonneurs, that very casual system broke down. As I have previously blogged, my wife came to my rescue by getting me "The Complete Book of Long Distance Cycling.” From that book I learned to increase the length of my longest weekly ride by 10% a week and to work up to a longest training ride of between 67% and 75% of the length of the event for which I was training. To this day, I believe these are the two most important things I needed to know about training for a long ride. That said, I think I can do better. Even back in 2012 I had three questions: 

  1. What level of fitness do I need to reach before starting a training program for a Century?
  2. How fast should the rides in a Century program be ridden, especially during the weekly ride ominously labeled “brisk?” 
  3. Having finished an event, what do I do to get ready for the next event? How do I fit the very focused schedule I had just completed into a year around cycling routine? 

When I reviewed Intensity Training five years ago it was to answer the second question, how fast should I be riding during each of my weekly rides? In this post I am revisiting that same book to attempt to answer the first and third questions, how much fitness do I need to have to begin such a program and how do I fit a training plan focused on one long ride into my year-round cycling schedule? As it happens, I stumbled across surprising information relevant to the second question as well, but I will save discussion of that for a future post.

Hughes divides the year into four training periods: 

  1. Pre-season: Reduce Fatigue, Improve Heath and General Fitness  (2-3 months)
  2. Base Period: Increase Endurance  (3-4 months)
  3. Build Period: Increase Power  (1-2 months)
  4. Main Season: Achieve Goals (3-6 months long)

(This division is very similar to those provided by most other coaches.) Hughes also recommends taking a week off between each of these seasons and taking two to four weeks off at the end of the Main Season before starting over the next year by circling back to Pre-season.

Intensity Training provides mostly general, conceptual advice for these four seasons, it lacks the examples I find so helpful. However, it links to four other of Hughes’ eBooks promising that the examples I was looking for would be found therein. So I purchased and read those four books. They did not provide all the examples I wanted and I still have some questions but, between them, they did help a lot and the result is the figure at the top of the post where, as best I could, I integrated all the information I could find to develop an example annual schedule for a cyclist who goals are to complete Century (100 mile long) rides. The most useful example came from “Spring Training: 10 Weeks to Summer Fitness” (hereafter referred to as Spring Training). In it is a plan for preparing for a Century. Ten years ago I wrote a post comparing four different plans for preparing for a Century. The plan in Spring Training was similar to every other Century training plan I have ever looked at with one exception: the actual Century ride is not part of the plan. What can that mean?

The topic of the eBook Spring Training is the Base period of training. Before the Base period comes the Pre-season period, described in the eBook “Productive Off-Season Training for Health and Recreational Riders” (hereafter referred to as Off-Season Training.) Spring Training says that in order to complete the Century training plan, a cyclist should have reached a total of 10 to 12 hours per week of training in the Pre-season period. I’m not going to go into detail on the Pre-season training plan here (I actually have a lot of thoughts about that but will save those for a future post) but briefly, a Pre-season training plan includes not only cycling but significant amounts of strength training and flexibility training as well so that 10 hours of total training includes about 6 hours per week of cycling, thus answering my first question, “What level of fitness does a cyclist need to reach before starting a training program for a Century?

After the Base period comes the Build period. Intensity Training does not provide a link to a book about the Build period, so the best I could do is note that it is a minimum of four weeks long and that it features an increase in higher intensity training, and based on that, I guessed what it might look like and inserted that after the training plan from Spring Training. At last we come to the Main Season period. Is that where we finally get to do our Century ride? Intensity Training provides links to two books covering the Main Season, “Your Best Season Ever, Part 1: How to plan and get the most out of your training” and “Your Best Season Ever, Part 2: Peaking for Your Event.” Part 1 did not include anything I was able to use to construct my example. Part 2, which I will refer to as Peaking did, and what it did provide was surprising, at least to me. What it did is to delay the Century ride by six more weeks! This is eleven weeks between the longest training ride and the Century as compared to one to two weeks for every other plan I have ever seen. My first thought was that the fitness so painfully developed working up to that longest ride must surely be lost, at least in part, during that long delay. Although it is a dogma in the cycling community that endurance lasts longer than power, could it be that endurance would really last that long? As of the time of this writing, I simply don’t know, this will have to be a question for the future.

We have now reached the Century ride and the end of the example at the top of this Post. Sadly, we still have not reached the end of a year round cycling schedule. Allowing 3 months for the Pre-season period and a one month break at the end of the Main Season period, we have 3 months of the Main Season left. I confess I am guessing a bit here, but as best I can tell we should take off a week after the Century ride, and then do four more weeks of peaking and two more weeks of tapering before attempting a second Century. If we repeated this one more time, we might just have time for a third Century. However, according to the books I used to prepare this post, that’s probably pushing it, planning for two Century rides a year is probably about right for most riders.The leftover weeks can be used to work around the fact that Century rides are scheduled when they are scheduled not where they fit in best with our schedules. I’m not quite sure what kind of riding should be used to fill in the gaps, yet another question for the future.

I’d like to conclude with one final point: the figure at the top of the post is just one example of what Coach Hughes suggests. (Actually, it is my best guess as to what Hughes suggests. Any mistakes in it are mine, not his.) He would be the first to say that each cyclist should alter it to fit their unique interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Having read ten of Coach Hughes books, I am struck by how the same question is answered in so many different ways in different parts of Hughes’ body of work. This could be interpreted as inconsistency, but I prefer to interpret it as flexibility, that it is Coach Hughes’ way of saying “...or you could try it this way or that way or…” Even given that, I find the example I constructed very helpful, it is much easier for me to look at it and swap different ideas in and out of it than to try to convert general principles into concrete action plans on the fly.


Friday, September 1, 2023

Getting Enough Zone 2 Time

My heart rate during a recent 110 minute ride on my Cañada route. The space between the two white, horizontal lines is Zone 2. This is my best effort to date at completing that ride in Zone 2.


In my last post, I described the belief of many coaches and exercise scientists that I should be riding 80% of my rides at an easy pace, heart rate Zones 1 and 2, and that 20% of my rides should include appropriate amounts of riding faster, in heart rate Zones 3, 4, and 5, a rule called the 80:20 rule. For example, I ride five days a week and according to this 80:20 rule, four of those rides should be limited  to Zones 1 and 2 and one should contain more intense riding in Zones 3, 4, and 5. If you have not read my last post, you might find it worth reading first.

Do my recent rides conform to the 80:20 rule? These days, my riding is almost entirely on two "routes", my Cañada route and rides on the trainer I set up in my bedroom. It is useful to divide my rides on the Cañada route into three groups: slow, medium, and fast. The ride whose heart rate profile is shown at the top of this post is an example of a slow ride. These rides stay fairly well within Zone 2. If I don't pay any attention to how fast I am riding and just ride the way that feels most natural, that is a medium ride and is about 50% in Zone 2 and 50% in Zone 3. A heart rate profile of such a ride is shown in my previous post. Finally, if I really push in order to set a personal best on that route, that is a fast ride. Below is a heart rate profile of such a ride:

In this figure, the three white, horizontal lines delineate both Zone 2 and Zone 3. Very little of this ride is in Zone 2, much of it is in Zone 3, and a significant amount extends into Zone 4 with even a little bit in Zone 5. 

Similarly, I have found three different kinds of rides I am willing to do on my trainer. (The main determinant of what I will willing to do on the trainer is that it is quite boring so ride length is limited to 30 minutes.) I can ride for 30 minutes in Zone 1, a ride I find fairly pleasant and which I often do as a warmup for the resistance training my physical therapist has prescribed for my bad back. Alternatively, I can do a 30 minute ride in Zone 2. This is less fun. On the road, I find Zone 2 quite easy but on the trainer it is a push and so the 30 minutes seems even longer. Finally, I can do a version of the Gillen et al. High Intensity Interval Workout that I talk about so much. That includes two minutes total (6 x 20 second intervals) at the high end of Zone 5 and 28 minutes at Zone 1. Interestingly, this is less boring and thus less of a slog than the Zone 2 ride but not as pleasant than the Zone 1 ride. The first two rides count towards the 80% in the 80:20 rule and the third counts towards the 20%. I will discuss how I count the different Cañada rides below.

Which of the above rides should I be riding? To answer that question, I have to go into more detail on the 80:20 rule. That rule is based on some assumptions. One assumption is that, on average, a high intensity (20%) ride lasts about half as long as a low intensity (80%) ride (e.g. in minutes, the 80:20 rule becomes the 90:10 rule.) Second, a high intensity ride consists of warmup before the high intensity intervals, recovery periods between the high intensity intervals, and a cool down after the high intensity intervals, so only a fraction of the minutes of that ride are done at high intensity, the rest are done at low intensity. The fraction of high and low intensity depends on many things, importantly, on how "high" the "high" intensity is. All high intensity rides have warmup and cool down periods of 15 minutes each but the number of intervals, length of the intervals, and recovery time between the intervals varies significantly. As detailed above, a Zone 5 ride may consist of only 10% Zone 5 minutes compared to a Zone 3 ride which can consist of as much as 75% Zone 3 minutes.

There is one more complication, any rides I do have to be rides I can actually do on the roads around where I live. One big aspect of this is the hills that I am always complaining about. It is much easier to ride up hills at high Intensity (Zones 3, 4, and 5) and much harder to do so at low Intensity (Zones 1 and 2). Thus, it is unfortunate that the Cañada route has its biggest hills at the beginning and the end of the ride just where I should be warming up and cooling down.

Given all the above, how do my "slow, medium, and fast" Cañada rides fit into an 80:20 compliant training schedule? The slow rides are very good Zone 2 rides, contributing to the 80% side of the 80:20 rule. Both the medium and fast versions of the Cañada ride share the problem of lacking the 15 minutes of warm up and cool down they should have. This could be fixed in the medium ride by being more attentive to when I ride slow and when I ride fast. The fast version of the ride doesn't leave room for warmup and cool down, I would have to do a slower version of that ride to fix that. Assuming I did both those things, the medium version of that ride would be a 75 minute Zone 3 ride with an extra 15 minutes of Zone 2 riding and the fast ride would become a 90 minute Zone 3 ride.

Assuming I will be doing two trainer rides and three Cañada rides a week, what kinds of schedules could I put together? To satisfy the 80:20 rule, all schedules will consist of four rides in Zones 1 or 2 and one ride at higher intensity. All trainer rides will be 30 minutes long, a Zone 2 Cañada ride will be 110 minutes long and a Zone 3 Cañada ride will be 90 minutes long. One schedule would consist of three Zone 2 Cañada rides, one Zone 1 trainer ride, and one interval session on the trainer. On a minute basis, this would be 92% Zone 1 + Zone 2 and 8% at high intensity, a bit low on the minutes of high intensity riding. Also, the coach I follow, Coach Hughes, thinks that, for a rider like me, Zone 3 riding is important and this schedule lacks any Zone 3 riding. A different schedule would be two Trainer rides in Zone 1, two Cañada rides ridden slow to be in Zone 2, and one Cañada ride ridden at medium speed so as to contain  a 75 minute Zone 3 ride. On a minute basis, this would be 79% Zone 1 and Zone 2 and 21% at intensities higher than Zone 2, much higher than the 10% suggested by Dr. Seiler. On the other hand, I don't think Dr. Seiler's 90:10 minute rule contemplated Zone 3 riding, I think it assumed that the higher intensity riding would be in Zones 4 or 5. Since a Zone 3 ride is longer in minutes than a Zone 5 ride, it may be OK that my Zone 3 ride is more than 10% of my total riding. Finally, for reasons I hope to discuss in a future post, I hope to reintroduce some longer Zone 2 rides into my schedule which would have the effect on improving that ratio.

As my final point I would like to talk about how I have been actually riding and why that has deviated so far from the ideal described above. As I blogged about a few months ago, beginning at the end of May of this year, my general feeling of wellbeing declined significantly. The first impact of that is that I went four days with no bike rides at all. As a reaction to that, I figured anything was better than nothing so began doing short, easy rides on my trainer. That lasted for about five weeks at which point I began feeling a bit better and restarted rides on the road, mostly on my Cañada route. Although the Load of a Zone 2 (slow) ride on that route is less than that of a mixed (medium)  Zone 2 + Zone 3 ride, it does take more attention and focus, so in the interest of doing the best I could, I decided to "just ride" which resulted in way more Zone 3 riding than the 80:20 rule would recommend. I would argue that, all things considered, this was a reasonable course of behavior, that these were good reasons for ignoring the 80:20 rule. However, there were also some bad reasons that contributed to this behavior that I think are worth discussing.

The first bad reason for going above Zone 2 during my Cañada rides had to do with the bike I use for those rides, my Bianchi Volpe, my bike with the lowest gears and my only bike with a "triple", three gears on the front. Triples are known for poor shifting which is why they are so rare despite the wider range of gears they provide. Thus, shifting through the nine gears on the back is much more convenient than shifting through the three on the front so the way I tend to use the gears on this bike is to leave the front gear set, depending on the general geography of the road (uphill, downhill, flat) and to do most of my minute to minute adjusting using the rear gears. I have to also admit that there is an element of ego as well, I take pride in the fact that I can easily make it up the long Jefferson climb at the end of the ride in the middle gear in the front, that I don't "need" to shift into the low gear. However, once I realized I was doing this and started shifting into that low gear for the Jefferson climb, I was able to maintain my heart rate in Zone 2 during that climb, something I had not been able to do before.

The second bad reason for going above Zone 2 is similarly related to ego. I have recently switched to using Load rather than Minutes as the metric for the amount of riding I have been doing. I did that primarily to avoid generating more Load than I realized as a result of riding too fast, but very quickly it became a competitive game to see how high a Load score I could get for the week. The best way to increase that Load score was to ride my Cañada rides faster. Rather than using the Load measurement as intended, to help me stick to a well designed training plan, I was using it as a goal resulting in it doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do. Having realized that, I am much more careful about how I think about my weekly Load score.

I have one more Cañada ride scheduled for this week. The previous two have been quite good Zone 2 rides, giving me the opportunity to experiment with this third ride as a better Zone 3 ride, one with 15 minutes of warmup at the beginning and 15 minutes of cool down at the end. Stay tuned to see how I do.