Do As I Do, Not As I Say

Author "Coach John Hughes"

John Hughes is my current favorite author of training books for cyclists. Thus, it caught my attention when I learned he had published a new article on Road Bike Rider entitled "I’m 70! Yikes!!! Lessons from my Journey Through Life". Because I like Hughes and because I too had just reached 70, I looked forward to his article with enthusiasm. As I read it, I became even more enthusiastic because I found that what he said rang very true to me. Here are two especially relevant excerpts:

"Ride, don’t train. I don’t own a heart rate monitor, power meter or sophisticated bike computer. My friend John E. and I ride year-round in Colorado and we have two rules: no passing anyone and always stop for a meal. This means we’re always riding at a conversational pace. Of course, if it’s frigid we may just ride to the café, have breakfast and ride back.

Ride less, recover more. In my 30s and 40s I could put in big miles with only a couple of recovery days a week. Now I rarely ride more than 100 miles in a week with only one or two climbing rides."

Like most authors, Hughes promotes his work, so his (free) article contained a link to one of his latest (not free) eBooks: Anti-Aging: 12 Ways You Can Slow the Aging Process

Based on my enthusiasm for the article, I purchased the book. But when I read it, I was disappointed. Why is that? What I liked about the Hughes article was that the overall tone and impression it gave was realistic - it spoke to the limitations I am living with these days. What disappointed me about his book was the overall tone and impression it gave was the same panglossian "rah rah" pep talk that every training book I have ever read has, that you can do anything you put your mind to. Mind you, if you read the book carefully, that is not strictly what it says, but that is certainly the impression I got from reading it, and I bet I am far from alone in getting that false impression. So what is it that I wanted the book to say? If I were to write a training book (a task for which I am completely unqualified) it would include the following:

1. You may not know what you are capable of as a cyclist. If you are a beginner, you almost certainly don't know. You may be capable of more than you think. However - and this is really important - you may be capable of less!
2. The most important thing you have to master as an athlete-in-training is how to listen to your body. Your body will tell you when you reach your limits, but only if you listen.
3. None of the training plans in this book are meant for you. We put them in here firstly as illustrations and examples of what training plans look like and how and why they are constructed, and secondly because we have found these particular plans work adequately for a reasonably large percentage of cyclists. However: If you are better than the average cyclist, these plans will not take you to your full potential - you can handle a more challenging plan that will take you to a higher level of performance. Much more importantly, if you happen to have less stamina or training capacity than the cyclists for whom they are intended, these plans will be too hard for you, and if you try to follow them, you will end up getting worse, not better because...
4. ...it is much, much better to train too little than too much.
5. So, every training plan in this book starts with an introduction describing the minimum cycling experience that the typical user of that plan would have and then, emphasize the signals that your body might give you at various points in the plan that the plan is too hard for you, that you should try a different plan and perhaps even chose a different goal.

If I am right, why are virtually all training books written in the same way, a way which I find objectionable? I think there are two reasons:

1. Nobody likes a downer. You sell a lot more training books by emphasizing all the amazing things you can do by following the plans in the book rather than by warning the reader that depending on your specific situation, none of that might be possible.
2. Arguably, one of the most important functions of a coach in encouragement. From that perspective, it makes no sense to write a training book any other way than the way they are written now. Sure, there will be some people for whom the book simply doesn't work, but a realistic book that took that into account would by necessity lack the rah-rah aspect and thus would be useful for nobody. Or nobody but me.

Two final reasons I found the book disappointing:

1. The book I was hoping for was "How to train on a bicycle when you are 70." What this book is is "How to train when you are 20-50 so you can live to be 90: a bicycle is neither sufficient nor necessary and you may even be better off without one." More specifically, a lot of this book was a representation of the American College of Sports Medicine's recommendations.
2. A large fraction of the book is taken up with "stories" from individual cyclists, what we in the biomedical research community disparagingly refer to as anecdotes. I haven't measured this, but by eye, my guess is that these anecdotes, which I find utterly useless, take up over half the book.

So did I find the book worthless, am I sorry I spent $15 on it? Quite to the contrary, I definitely found several pearls of wisdom in this book, more than enough to justify what I paid. What I found useful in this book was a mix of two kinds of ideas:

• Ideas I already knew or believed, but for which it was nice to get confirmation.
• Ideas that were new to me. 

Unsurprisingly, the line between these two is not always clear. In my division below, sometimes it was hard to know into which category to put an idea. In general, even if I knew most of an idea, if there was some part that was truly a revelation to me, I put it under new ideas.

Ideas I Already Knew, but for which I Appreciated Confirmation:

• Overreaching and overtraining are the result of an accumulation of ALL FORMS of stress, i.e., multiple hard workouts *PLUS* non-training stresses: "How much stress you can handle depends on the presence of other stressors in your life. Some stressors can be reduced, e.g., by getting enough sleep or a good diet. Some stressors can be managed, e.g., the stress of constantly having too much to do. Some stressors can’t be managed, but you can deal with the consequences by reducing training stress."
• Every rider should take at least one day a week off the bike.
• You want to be fully recovered before the next hard day.
• During a hard workout, you should always stop while feeling as if you could have done more that you could have ridden another 10 miles or you could have done one more interval.
• It is much easier to avoid overtraining than to recover. When in doubt about how much or how hard to exercise, listen to your body and do less.
• Of the different types of exercise, cardiorespiratory exercise is the most important. Always include cardio in your weekly exercise. [This is in the context of the 5 kinds of exercise recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine for a healthy old age, Cardiorespiratory Exercise, Resistance (Strength) Exercise, Flexibility Exercise, Balance Exercise, and Weight-bearing Exercise.]

Ideas Partly or Entirely New to Me:

• For Older Riders working up to a longer ride (e.g. a century), it might make sense to have every other week be an easy week.
• The weekly long ride should not be more than half the total weekly riding. 
• Compared to riders in their 20s and 30s who can handle three or four hard training days a week, riders over 60 usually can only handle one or two hard training days a week.
• The key indicator [of overtraining] is declining performance. ...If you’re not riding as fast or climbing as well for several days, for example, watch out! The other key indicator is your mood. We all have a day here and there when we blow off a workout. But if you think, “I really don’t want to train!” for several days, watch out! ... You may have heard that these are indicators of overtraining: a change in morning heart rate, or a change in body weight, or a change in how fast your heart rate drops after a hard effort. However, research shows that there is little correlation between any of these and overtraining."
• [Training for a long ride, e.g. a metric century] "If you were in your 50s, had been riding for about 10 years and your annual volume was over 5,000 miles (8,000 km), you probably could ramp up faster at 15% per week. If you were in your 70s, had been riding fewer years and/or your annual volume was less than 3,000 miles (5,000 km), you should ramp more slowly -- at about 5% per week."
• I had rejected periodization as a training strategy I wanted to use. Hughes presented periodization in a new way that inspired me to give it another look.
• Some benefits of cardiorespiratory exercise only occur in older subjects if they do vigorous rather than moderate cardiorespiratory exercise. This is not true for younger subjects. This was a totally unexpected assertion, one which I want to investigate more critically, and if true, will definitely change how I ride my bike!
• "Cycling is easy on your joints because it is not weight bearing and, for that reason, you need to supplement it with weight-bearing exercise ... Recent studies of post-menopausal women indicate that walking does not prevent bone loss because it doesn’t overload the body more than the skeleton is already accustomed to carrying." [I had known that I ought to be supplementing my cycling with weight training and probably stretching, but weight bearing was a new one for me.]

So does any of this change how I am riding? Yes it does. I am currently training for the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century, and for a variety of reasons, felt that I should try a different training schedule than what I had been using recently and I have incorporated a number of ideas from this book into this new schedule. I plan to blog about this in detail in a future post. Stay tuned.