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. 

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. 

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

What's Magic About Zone 2?

To my eye, Zone 2 exercise is having a moment. The picture at the top of this post is a snapshot of what a recent Google search turned up. Briefly, Zone 2 refers to aerobic exercise done at a fairly easy level of effort, at low Intensity, a slow bike ride for example. Zone 2 typically assumes a five zone system for measuring Intensity. Zone 1 is used for recovery, Zone 2 is a pace an athlete can maintain all day, and Zones 3 through 5 indicate increasing levels of Intensity until at the top of the scale an athlete is sprinting as fast as they can, a level of effort they can only maintain for seconds. Some common ways of measuring Intensity are heart rate, power, how hard it feels (relative perceived exertion), or concentration of lactate in the blood. For a variety of reasons, these measures are divided into discrete ranges of values called Intensity Zones. I use heart rate to measure Intensity and for me, Zone 2 is the range of heart rates between 110 and 135 beats per minute.

As I frequently note, I have simplified my cycling life by focusing on a single coach, Coach John Hughes. Similarly, I mostly follow just one exercise scientist, Dr. Stephen Seiler. Seiler is most known as the father of polarized training. Casually, polarized training has come to mean that one should train at low Intensity (Zone 2) or very high Intensity (Zone 4 or 5) with nothing in between. In my opinion, "easy or hard with nothing in between" was never a good description of Dr. Seiler's ideas and has become an even worse description as Dr. Seiler has refined his understanding of polarized training. The one sentence summary of polarized training that I would give is that one should spend 80% of one's training sessions riding at low intensity (Zones 1 or 2) and 20% at higher intensity. That is, if one trains 5 days a week, 4 of those days should be low intensity and 1 at higher intensity. But what is low intensity? What is higher intensity? Is there a region of intensity in between those two one should avoid? Dr. Seiler is frequently interviewed by podcasters, making it easy to follow the evolution of his thinking, and recently he was interviewed on the 'Inside Exercise' podcast. 

So what was new in this podcast? The most exciting thing to me was that Seiler explicitly stated that polarized training is not about avoiding middle intensity but about spending lots of time at low intensity. I had gotten the impression from previous podcasts that this is what he believed but this podcast was the clearest statement of this idea that I have come across to date.

A second point Seiler made was that the 80 and the 20 in the 80:20 rule referred to the percent of sessions done at low intensity. He explicitly noted that higher intensity sessions are, in general, shorter in duration than low intensity sessions so that if one expressed this rule in terms of time instead of number of sessions, it might be a 90:10 rule. I would take this even further. The bulk of a typical high intensity session is spent warming up, cooling down, or recovering from high intensity efforts. The Gillen et al. interval session I talk about a lot is 90% Zone 1 and only 10% Zone 5. Thus, if one rides five days a week and four of those rides are in Zone 2 and one of those rides is a high intensity interval session as recommended by the 80:20 rule and if the interval session is half as long as the Zone 2 rides as Seiler suggests, and if the Zone 5 ride is only 10% Zone 5 riding as in the case of the Gillen et al. session, the amount of time spent in Zone 5 is only 1% of the total time spent riding.

What is the unique value of the low intensity rides that are supposed to make up 80% of the rides athletes do? Dr. Seiler explained this as a cost benefit issue. Every ride generates a signal to to the body causing it to improve fitness. But it is also the case that every ride generates fatigue. For the same amount of fitness provided, higher intensity rides produce more fatigue than low intensity rides. Thus, for an athlete who is able to train for long hours, whose training is limited by fatigue rather than time, they can get more benefit from low intensity rides. Why, then do any high intensity rides at all? Because high intensity rides provide specific benefits that cannot be provided by low intensity rides.

I still have a number of questions about Zone 2 training, one which is relevant to this post. That is, is it the total amount of Zone 2 riding that is valuable, or is it necessary that a Zone 2 ride be "pure", to not contain any riding of higher intensity? The most radical version of the purity argument I have come across is that one short sprint at the end of a ride is enough to undo all the value of a long Zone 2 ride. Seiler has made remarks suggesting he agrees with some version of this, but I eagerly await clarification, perhaps on a future podcast.

Dr. Seiler works mostly with top athletes who devote many hours to training. He notes that the same rules may not apply to more casual athletes. I think about that and wonder if an amateur athlete with many work and home responsibilities whose training is limited by how much time they have rather than fatigue might benefit from more high intensity exercise. Interestingly, if this is correct, I am more in the category of the top athletes in that regard. Being retired, I have lots of time. Being old, I have very little energy and become fatigued quickly. Thus, for me, prioritizing low intensity riding would seem to be extremely important. How successful have I been at doing at doing that? Not very, as it turns out. The problem is that where I live is hilly, and I find it difficult to avoid going above Zone 2 on a hilly ride.

I have talked about the hilly ride problem before and have even claimed to have solved it. Here is an example of a ride I did on my Cañada route about a year ago where I did a pretty good job not going above Zone 2:

The two horizontal white lines indicate the boundaries of Zone 2. Here is a more recent ride on the same route where I didn't do as well:

I plan to write a future post on the factors that determine whether I can stay in Zone 2 or not but for this post I want to focus on this question:  does the difference between the above two rides matter? If the strict version of the purity argument were true, even the first ride might not be good enough, those peaks in Intensity that go above Zone 2 at the end of the ride might cancel the benefit of all the Zone 2 riding that came before. At the other extreme, if all that matters is the total amount of time I ride in Zone 2, perhaps even the second ride provides significant Zone 2 benefits. Even if the latter hypothesis is correct, it is still the case that I could get more benefit by doing more rides like the first one and so I have been thinking about how I might do that.

Cycling Career Saved

 

My last post was about how my back problems had negatively impacted my cycling. It concluded with the question "Is this the end of my second cycling career?" Although I continue to suffer from my back problems and although it continues to impact my ability to get things done, the good news is that I have managed to restart my cycling - my second cycling career has been saved. However, I am still not back to normal. In particular, despite the fact that I have drafts written for three or four future posts, I haven't had the energy to complete any of them, so decided that I shouild write a quick, short update as to how I am doing, and here it is.

Two posts ago I described a new approach to tracking my riding over time, converting the heart rate data from my TranyaGo Sports Watch into Load and then using the Banister model to estimate my Fitness, Fatigue, and Form. As shown in the graph at the top of this post, I have been tracking this for about a year now. The green line at the bottom of the graph shows the Load of each individual ride, a combination of how long the ride is in minutes and an Intensity value calculated from my average heart rate during the ride. The blue line is the Banister estimate of my underlying Fitness, a good estimate of my training progress. The yellow line is the Banister estimate of my Form, how I actually feel given both my level of Fitness and the Fatigue that resulted from the training I did to develop that Fitness. I do not separately plot Fatigue as I have not found it helpful to do so. I watch the yellow line to make sure I am not training too much and the blue line to see if I am making progress.

So now to the topic at hand. The space between the red lines on the graph above delineates the time interval that led to the dire predictions of my last post. The good news is that since then, my riding has returned to a more normal level. My Fitness is not back to where it was before this break in my cycling, but it is on target to get there.

Looking at the graph reveals that this was not the only time interval during the last year where my Fitness decreased significantly. What made this one different? It was that each of the previous decreases had an explanation, something transitory that, when it went away should allow me to regain my Fitness. Back in October, the decrease resulted from the normal, planned recovery after a Metric Century. In November, it was a case of the flu. In March it was extreme weather.  By contrast, the slump indicated by the red lines in the graph above seemed to come out of nowhere. When I finally came up with an hypothesis to explain it (issues related to my back) there didn't seem to be any reason to think they would go away. Finally, it was the largest slump of the year.

But the slump did end, my cycling did recover. What changed?

1. As noted in my last post, I reduced the strength building exercises for my back from seven days a week to four days a week. (I consulted with my therapist before doing so.)
2. I think those strength building exercises have worked and as a result that the same exercises are making me less tired.
3. Similarly, my physical therapy is working so that I experience less back pain than I used to. I think the pain itself caused fatigue, so reducing that pain increased my energy levels as well.

As I said above, I am still not back to normal. If you look carefully at the graph at the top of the post, there is a short relapse in my cycling during my most recent six weeks. All it took to create this relapse was a modest increase in my babysitting and an overnight house guest. I am much more fragile than I used to be. However, I now have hope, I can see a path forward.

Physical Therapy Is Exercise

A couple of months ago I published a post entitled "Riding Under the Weather", a reference to both atmospheric conditions as well as to feeling less than terrific. The feeling less than terrific part of that has become worse recently, and I felt that was worth another post. The primary manifestation of the current "feeling less than terrific" is a severe lack of energy such that I find it difficult to do much of anything. As a result of that, my cycling has been drastically reduced and I wanted to use this post to explain how that happened.

To what do I attribute this lack of energy? In the first place, periods of low energy are something I have experienced on and off for most of my life, but I must say the current one seems like more than just that. A recent change in my life is that my lower back problems (including sciatica), which started about ten years ago, recently got much worse to the point I contacted my doctor for help. So far, I have done two things to help with my back pain and sciatica, a daily medication to help control the pain and weekly sessions with a physical therapist. These seem to have helped, reducing the pain from intolerable to annoying. However, I wonder if some combination of the problem and the cures might be contributing to my lack of energy. One possibility is that low energy might be a side effect of the pain medication. A second possibility is that the pain itself creates fatigue. A third, the one I am going to concentrate on in this post, is that the exercises I am doing at the behest of my physical therapist might be using up some of the energy that I had formerly been able to devote to cycling.

The picture at the top of the post is of the physical therapy office that I have been going to once a week. This is my first time doing physical therapy so when I started back in February I had no idea what to expect. It turns out the core of the program is exercise. The staff evaluated me, worked with me to develop a set of exercises that are consistent with my needs and capabilities, taught me to do the exercises using proper form, got me started doing those exercises at home, and when that was all done, I graduated: I stopped coming into the office, instead doing the exercises at home on my own. I admit that I was skeptical that this would work, but while physical therapy hasn't cured my back, it has definitely made it better to the point I may be able to live with it. But guess what, the exercises responsible for that benefit, like all exercise, generates fatigue. 

My physical therapy didn't affect my cycling at first, and I'm guessing there are two reasons for that. The first is that my physical therapists, as part of the process of assessing me and developing a plan, started out slow and worked their way up in terms of volume and intensity of exercise. Eventually we reached a point where we decided that I couldn't easily do much more, and that is where I have been for a couple of months now. Thus, the exercise I was doing at the beginning of my physical therapy was relatively modest such that it didn't noticeably affect my cycling. The second reason that it was only recently that my physical therapy interfered with my cycling is that fatigue builds up over time. An experience I have had several times since I restarted cycling fifteen years ago is that if I increase my training, it is only six weeks or so later that I realize if I have increased it to a level beyond that which I can sustain. I think that is what happened with my physical therapy exercise. While I was developing my program, I was focused on its difficulty only in the context how much of that exercise I could do by itself, not thinking about any impact it might have on my overall exercise, e.g. the combination of physical therapy and cycling. It was only after my body started telling me that I could not sustain that combination of exercises that I realized what was going on.

How badly did this affect my cycling? The effect was devastating; it has been more than four weeks since I have done an outdoor bike ride. I still ride, but my rides are thirty minutes on my indoor trainer. I have been trying to do them six days a week in Zone 2 (moderate difficulty), but even that has been too much. I am supposed to do my physical therapy exercises seven days a week. I have been doing a trainer ride just before to warm up. But some days, I am so tired I can do neither of these. Some days, I hop on the trainer and find that a Zone 2 ride is more than I can handle, settling for a Zone 1 (easy) ride instead. All of this supports the idea that my fatigue is real.

What can I do about this unfortunate situation? At my last office session before "graduation", I spoke with my senior therapist  and between us we came up with a plan. He divided my therapy exercises into two groups, flexibility and mobility exercises and strength building exercises. He suggested I do my flexibility and mobility exercises seven days a week as before, but that I reduce my strength building exercises to four days a week, doing them on days where I do not have a physically difficult day. I have little control over some things that can make a day physically difficult, things like babysitting, family activities, and the like. However, it has occurred to me that, absent any of these, I could make up to three days a week "hard" by going back to doing longer, outdoor rides on those days. In addition to adjusting my physical therapy, I have upcoming doctors appointments about my back, and working with my doctors could open up other options. Will these approaches work, or is this the end of my second cycling career? Stay tuned to find out. 

My Fatigue, Fitness, and Form

In my last post I argued that using the average heart rate of a ride as measured by my TranyaGo heart rate monitor to calculate Load would be a better way to estimate how much riding I have been doing than using just the length of the ride in minutes (which is what I had been doing). In the month since that post, my experience continues to support that conclusion. A few weeks ago, when I had just started ramping back up from a lull in my training caused by bad weather, I was feeling very tired towards the end of the week at a point where my schedule called for one more ride. So, listening to my body suggested skipping that ride. However, communication from my body is not always reliable and my training plan seemed reasonable; normally, I try to ride between 300 and 400 minutes a week and I was at only 257 minutes. However, when I looked at my Load for that week, it was actually quite high due to the fact that some of the rides that week had been ridden fairly fast. Putting that all together, I decided to skip the ride, a decision I would not have reached without the Load data. Of course it is impossible to know with certainty if that was the right decision, but my intuition tells me that it was. In this post, I am going to discuss extending that one more step: would it be an additional improvement to explicitly track the accumulation of Fatigue over time using the model of Banister?

Banister’s model is a tool for using Load data to predict Fitness, Fatigue, and Form. I blogged about this model back in 2021. It is similar to the TrainingPeaks software used by many cyclists. Unlike TrainingPeaks, the Banister model is not available as a package, I implemented from the description in Banisters paper in a spreadsheet. I could have just purchased the TrainingPeaks software but I chose to implement the Banister model instead because I understand it, it is fully customizable, it was designed to be used with heart rate data whereas the TrainingPeaks software was initially designed to use Power data from a power meter, and because the Banister model is free. The figure at the top of this post illustrates the application of Banister’s model to my average heart-rate derived Load data that I have collected since I purchased my TranyaGo.

What are Load, Fitness, Fatigue, and Form? Load is how hard a ride is, which is a combination of both how intensely I ride (e.g. how fast, how hilly, etc.) and how long I ride (e.g. how many minutes.) Fatigue is how tired I am as a result of all the rides I have been doing. Obviously, a ride I did yesterday has more impact on today’s Fatigue than a ride I did six weeks ago, but they both have some impact. Fitness is kind of a hidden quantity. It is how strong I would be if I had no Fatigue. Form is how strong I actually am given both my Fitness and my Fatigue: Form = Fitness - Fatigue. 

Besides assuming that the overall model is correct, Banister’s model as published assumes the values for four parameters; how much a given amount of Load adds to Fitness, how much a given amount of Load adds to Fatigue, how quickly an athlete recovers from Fatigue, and how quickly an athlete loses Fitness. In that original publication, Banister assumes that both Fitness and Fatigue decrease exponentially over time and that Fatigue is reduced by half after about 10 days and that Fitness is reduced by half after about 30 days. It also assumes that one unit of Load initially increases Fatigue twice as much as it increases Fitness. The combination of all these assumptions is that initially, a ride reduces an athlete’s Form (e.g. they cannot ride as fast or as long) but over time, Fatigue decreases faster than Fitness so that an athlete’s Form will increase to a new, higher level. This is exactly what is predicted by virtually every coach and exercise scientist, this is arguably the central dogma of exercise. What is open to debate, however, is how fast and by how much, things that are determined by the model and the values of the parameters used by the model. The figure at the top of this post uses the values of these parameters initially published by Banister.

Way back in 2018, years before I blogged about the Banister model, I blogged about a paper, Busso et al., that I now realize was based on the Banister model. It extended that model in that it considered the four parameters discussed above not as fixed, but as variable depending on the exercise program. I am skeptical about that latter claim but I was interested in the general ranges for these variables they came up with. More or less arbitrarily I picked values within these ranges, values that were different than those assumed by Banister. The parameters for Fitness did not change much, but for Fatigue, the Busso et al. value for impact of Load on Fatigue was 1.3 times that for Fitness as opposed by the value of 2 proposed by Banister, and the time for Fatigue to decrease to half was 7 days as opposed to the 10 days proposed by Banister. I replotted my data with these new values as is shown below:

Changing the parameters made a big difference. I am not so concerned with the differences in the absolute values of Fitness, Form and Fatigue, I don’t think those are meaningful, I am more interested in the differences in the shapes of the curves, in particular, that for Form for the past two months. During the first half of this period, my cycling was interrupted by some extremely bad weather and the result is that Fitness, Form, and Fatigue all fell. This is true both when I use the Banister parameters and when I use the Busso et al. parameters. During the second half, the weather improved and I was able to increase my cycling back to what I had been doing. This increased both Fitness and Fatigue as expected but depending on how much it affects each of these, Form, my actual ability to ride, could increase, decrease, or stay the same. When I use the Banister parameters, it decreases. When I use the Busso et al. parameters, it increases. My somewhat subjective observation of my cycling ability is in between those two, I would say it is staying about the same with maybe a slight increase overall. These differences matter. If my Form is increasing, it means I can increase the amount of training I do by riding longer and/or faster. If it is decreasing it means I am training too much and should cut back. If it is staying about the same, then I am doing about as much training as I can sustainably manage and should continue at this level of training for now. So what should I do?

When I started this experiment, I did so thinking it would be a way to use Fatigue to track the effect of Load over time by allowing me to consider the effect of rides done before the current week while including the fact that the longer ago a ride was, the less impact it would have today. I thought that tracking Fitness and Form would not be useful. When I looked at the output, I realized that Form was a much better indicator of what I was interested in than Fatigue, that Fitness was also of some value, but that Fatigue, what I had assumed would be the most useful, turned out to be of no apparent value in and of itself. (Obviously, it is an essential part of the model, necessary for the calculation of Form.) I also realised that a graphical view of Form and Fitness were much more useful than a numeric ones. Because I had the good fortune to have come across two different papers using the Banister model, the original one by Banister where the model was introduced and a later one by Busso et al. that used different values for the parameters, I realized how important tuning the values of these parameters to me specifically will be. What I plan to do is to try different values of parameters until I get an output that matches how I feel. This will not be exact because how I feel is both subjective and dependent on things other than my training (illness, emotional stress, and non-cycling activities, for example.) So why then not just rely on how I feel? If I can tune the Banister model to my current physiology, it will give me a systematic, objective estimate of where I am in my training cycle, an estimate I can use along with my subjective feelings and my pre-existing training plan to help me decide whether to skip a planned ride, substitute an easier ride, ride as planned, or do more than I planned thus investing in my store of Fitness.

Improved Training Load Estimate

One of the most important concepts I have learned during my 73 years on Earth is that "Best is the Enemy of Good." That is, I should not skip doing something good because there might be something else that is even better but which I would not actually do. In this post, I am going to describe how I am thinking about using the average heart rate I measure for a ride to better estimate the Intensity of that ride even knowing that is not a perfect measure.

Let me start by redefining some terms I use often on this blog: Volume, Intensity, and Load. Volume is how long I ride measured in minutes. Intensity is how hard I ride. A ride might be harder because I am going uphill or riding fast, for example. One way of measuring Intensity is by measuring my heart rate. When I am riding hard, my heart beats faster. Load puts those two things together, Load = Volume x Intensity. Load increases both Fitness and Fatigue, terms which I won’t define because I won’t be using them much in this post and because they mean what you probably think they mean. My final point is that although Intensity can be measured by heart rate, Intensity and heart rate are not linearly related. That is, doubling heart rate more than doubles Intensity. I have blogged about this before so won’t belabor it here, but will  just mention that at present the relationship between heart rate and Intensity I believe applies to me is that Intensity = 0.00065 x e^{(0.06 x heart-rate)}; Intensity increases exponentially with heart rate. 

In July of 2022 I began routinely using my TranyaGo heart rate monitor to track my rides. The data I have available from this device is not as useful as the data that was available from the Garmin heart rate monitor that I used from 2012 through 2017, but realistically, I was not going to replace that Garmin heart rate monitor after it failed but I did purchase and have been using the TranyaGo, so what can I do with the data that it provides? What I want to do with the TranyaGo data is to improve how I track the Load generated by my various rides and thus the Fatigue generated. This would allow me to avoid both undertraining and overtraining and thereby reach a level of Fitness which approaches optimal. Realistically, it turns out the only two pieces of information TranyaGo provides that I can use for that purpose is my average heart rate of the ride and a graph of my heart rate over the course of the ride. That graph is useful to get a rough, subjective, visual impression of how the ride went, but to date I have not been able to use that graph quantitatively, meaning that the only information I can use to estimate Intensity and thus Load is my average heart rate.

Nobody I am aware of has tried to use average heart rate to calculate Load so I had to come up with a way of doing that on my own. The usual way of estimating Load is to divide up Intensity into Zones, associate each Zone with an Intensity, measure how much time (Volume) during a ride is in each Zone, and multiply each of those Intensities times each of those times and sum them together to get the Load of a ride. The way I have used average heart rate to calculate Load is to not use Zones at all but to assign an Intensity to each individual heart rate. For example, an average heart rate of 100 beat per minute corresponds to an Intensity of 0.26, 101 to 0.28, 140 to 2.89, and so forth. I then multiply that Intensity times the total number of minutes in the ride to get an estimate of Load. How does my way of estimating Load compare to the traditional way? Under some circumstances they are reasonably close while under others they differ enormously.

Let’s start with the case where my estimate of Load is way off. Consider the paper Gillen et al., a paper I have blogged about repeatedly. That paper claims that a workout consisting of three 20 second intervals ridden as fast as possible has the same benefits as a workout consisting of 45 minutes cycling at a heart rate 70% of one’s maximum heart rate (Hughes Zone 2.) Both workouts include 2 minutes of warmup and 3 minutes of cool down ridden at an easy pace (Hughes Zone 1) and the three intervals are separated by 2 minute recovery periods ridden at an easy pace. I am currently estimating the Intensities of the seven Hughes Heart Rate Zones as 0.25 for Zone 1, 1 for Zone 2, 3.5 for Zone 3, 7 for Zone 4, 13 for Zone 5, 24 for Zone 6, and 32 for Zone 7. Using those numbers, the Gillen et al. interval workout has an calculated average Heart Rate of 99. From the equation above, that corresponds to an Intensity of 0.25. The total length of the ride is 10 minutes, giving a Load of 2.5. This is very different from the value of 45 given in Gillen et al. However, calculating this the usual way,  minute by minute using Zones, leads to an estimated Load of 34, both a value much closer than that claimed by Gillen et al. and very different that the estimate from average heart rate. Clearly, my average heart rate method is not useful for measuring the Load of an interval session. As it happens, heart rate produces inaccurate estimates for interval sessions no matter how you do the calculations and so coaches recommend calculating the Intensity of an interval session based on theory rather than heart rate, which is what I did above.

Now consider a case where my estimate and the traditional estimate produce similar values. Shortly after I moved to California, I used my Garmin Heart Rate monitor to measure one last ride. As a result, I have the data needed to compare the Load estimated by average heart rate to the traditional approach.  Using the traditional approach, the total Load of that ride would be calculated as 170. Using my average heart rate approach gives a total Load of 215, certainly not exactly the same, but in the same ballpark. Moreover, what is important is not absolute Intensity (there is no such thing) but relative Intensity, comparing one ride to another. Because the error introduced by my average heart rate approach is similar for similar rides, this will have little effect on that all important relative value. Besides, the alternative is to ignore Intensity altogether when calculating Load, what I am effectively doing when I only track how long a ride is in minutes. Thus, I believe that despite the limitation of only having average heart rate data, using that to track Load is an improvement over what I have been doing up until now. Fortunately, the type of ride for which my method works fairly well turns out to be the type of ride I do most frequently.

So at last we can turn to the figure at the top of this post. This graph shows the minutes (Volume) and Load of 34 recent rides ridden over 45 days. During this period of time, I did only two kinds of rides, a 30 minute ride on my trainer or an approximately 100 minute ride on my Cañada route. Thus, there are only 3 values for Volume; 0 minutes, 30 minutes, and approximately 100 minutes. Load gives a different picture. I have circled some illustrations of that. The first pair of circles (going left to right) shows three rides that are almost identical in Volume but significantly different in Load. That is because they were ridden at different speeds. Of course these different speeds affected the Volume of the rides, a fast ride might take less than 100 minutes while a slow ride would take more, and if you look carefully at the graph, that is apparent, but both because Heart Rate goes up faster than speed, and because Load is exponentially related to heart rate, that small different in Volume translates to a much larger difference in Load.

The second pair of circles illustrates the impact of varying how I do my trainer ride. Usually I use trainer rides as recovery rides, riding them in Zone 1. In the circled example, I decided to ride a version of the Gillen et al. training session. Rather than doing the three sprints used by Gillen et al. I did a total of six 20 second sprints each separated from the next by two minutes in Zone 1. With warmup and cool down, this was still a 30 minute ride and thus does not stand out at all on the graph of Volume. As noted above, I could not use average heart rate data to calculate Load so I did a theoretical estimate assuming 2 minutes in Zone 7 and 28 minutes in Zone 1. When I did that, the Load was much higher than for a recovery ride on the trainer, which is as expected.

The third set of circles illustrates how little Load is produced by my recovery rides. A recovery ride is visually very different from no ride at all on the Volume graph but almost undetectable on the Load graph.

Back in 2017 when I had first moved to California, I blogged that I was going to switch from tracking how many miles I rode to tracking how many minutes I rode because I believed minutes was a better estimate of how much exercise I was getting in the hills of California. I think it is clear from the data presented in this post that Load would be an even better estimate. That said, my attempt to use average heart rate to estimate Intensity is very much a work in progress. Although I am using my TranyaGo to routinely track heart rate on my rides, I have yet to integrate that with my routine training data in a way I can use it to manage my training. I will continue to blog about this as I figure out how best to do that.

Riding Under the Weather

Most comprehensive training plans provided by coaches assume a training season. In the winter, the athlete does not ride. Once the weather is good enough for riding, they go through an increasing progression of training phases. An important reason for this seasonality is that winter weather makes cycling difficult to impossible in many parts of the country. Because virtually all my cycling has been done in Texas and California where winter weather is quite compatible with cycling, I always assumed that this seasonality did not apply to me. Consistent with that, the randonneuring club I belonged to in Texas did have a year around riding schedule. However, when I look back at my training data accumulated since my move to California, I see a pretty clear pattern of reduced cycling in December and January, so maybe my recent cycling is more seasonal than I realized. Why is that? I think there are three reasons:
1) I ride more when I am training for an event like a group ride, and as I have previously blogged,  these occur in a very seasonal pattern.
2) Winter is the rainy season in California. It is also colder, though certainly not cold by national standards. I confess that both of those discourage me from riding.
3) Like most people, I am more likely to get some kind of viral infection in the winter. Thus the deliberately ambiguous title to this post, Under the Weather, refers both to the actual weather (rain) and feeling less than terrific for any of a multitude of reasons. 

When and why do I feel less than terrific, and what impact does that have on my training? Illness, such as the usual seasonal viral infections (cold, flu, etc.) are one obvious cause of feeling less than terrific. I don’t ride at all when I am actually sick, but even after my symptoms are mostly gone, I continue to feel under the weather and that affects my riding. There are other things that also make me feel under the weather, things like stress, lack of sleep, etc. Recently, my back problems, which I first blogged about way back in 2013, have gotten worse at the same time I have had some dental problems and these have left me feeling under the weather. Whatever the cause, when I feel under the weather I have been compromising between not riding at all and attempting to keep up my full schedule by riding a bit less and a bit slower. In short, how much or how hard I ride ranges from not riding at all when I have a fever or other overt symptoms of an illness to riding easier and shorter rides when I don’t have an actual illness but am feeling under the weather to riding as far and as fast as I can when I am feeling great.

Back when I lived in San Carlos, I would take it easy by riding my Neighborhood route rather than my Alpine route. When I first moved to Emerald Hills, I had trouble finding an easy route like that Neighborhood route to ride at times when I am feeling under the weather. During the first winter after that move, in December of 2020, I set up a trainer in my bedroom to both provide an easy ride and a ride that I could do in bad weather. One limitation of that trainer is that it is incredibly boring; I found that a 30 minute ride is the longest I can tolerate on a regular basis.

Riding less is both easy to do and easy to quantitate, I can do fewer rides or shorter rides and accumulate fewer minutes of riding per week. Riding less-hard is easy to understand in theory but is harder to quantitate. Sure, my Neighborhood ride felt easier than my Alpine ride, but how much easier, and how did that compare to rides on my Trainer? In July of 2022 I began using my TranyaGo heart rate monitor to track my rides. I have already posted about this twice and I plan to post about this again but very briefly I have been able to use the TranyaGo to measure that Intensity. What are the units of Intensity? Coaches use Training Zones to quantitate Intensity. Different coaches use different training zones. The coach I follow, Coach John Hughes, uses seven zones named 1 through 6 and a seventh zone named “Sprint.” Zone 1 rides are the easiest and Sprint is the hardest. Besides coaches, the medical community is interested in Intensity and uses a three zone system with Zones named Light, Moderate, and Vigorous. Each of these zones can be associated with a heart rate and that is where my TranyaGo comes into the picture, it allows me to associate each ride with a Zone and thus a quantitative measure of Intensity.

Recently, my two most common rides have been on my trainer and on the Cañada route . Either of these can be ridden at a range of Intensities but most commonly, I ride the Trainer at a heart rate that makes it a Zone 1 ride on the Coach Hughes scale while at the same time as a Moderate Zone on the medical scale, and the Cañada ride as a Hughes Zone 2 ride. The Cañada ride is almost entirely on very low traffic, safe-feeling, roads that go through beautiful scenery and this has become my most common ride on the road. The main limitation of this ride is that it is relatively short, 17 miles and about 95 minutes long. Plus, if I did nothing but that ride, it would inevitably become boring, so when I am feeling up to it, I do the occasional longer ride as well. My pattern has become to ride on my trainer three days a week, on the Cañada route two days a week, and to vary the sixth ride each week based on how I am feeling and what I am trying to accomplish. As noted above, when I am actually ill I don’t ride at all and if I am feeling really tired or the weather is really bad I might do only trainer rides but my typical range is the above, varying my training load with that sixth ride each week, going from a fourth trainer ride to a third Cañada ride to a 22 mile/120 minute Alpine ride to a 33 mile/170 minute Alpine-Cañada ride to a 45 mile/240 minute Stephens-Alpine ride. 

What kinds of things am I trying to accomplish and how does that affect my training schedule? As always, I have two general goals, maintaining my health and keeping fit so that I can quickly prepare for a Metric Century or other group ride when one becomes available, maintaining my health being the more important of the two. From the perspective of preparing for group rides, the training pattern I have described above is rather strange in the number of Trainer rides it includes, not so much that they are on the Trainer but the kinds of rides I choose to do on the trainer, that is, short Zone 1 rides. In the context of the training literature in general and Coach John Hughes in particular, these are called Recovery Rides, rides that don’t build fitness but rather facilitate the recovery from harder rides. In that context, three or four such rides a week is unheard of, no coach I have ever encountered recommends more than two recovery rides a week (some recommend none) and Coach Hughes recommends at least one but no more than two such rides a week. Why am I doing so many? It is in service to reaching my Health goals during a week when I am feeling under the weather, it is a low stress way to accumulate the 300 minutes of Moderate-Intensity exercise a week the medical community recommends.

How are these extra “recovery” rides on my Trainer affecting my training? I don’t know, and I haven’t found any coach who has addressed this, but my guess is that two of these a week are helpful and the effects of the third or fourth are small. Because, according to the medical community, these third and fourth rides are beneficial to my health, it seems at least possible that they marginally help my fitness as well.

One final point concerns the recommendation of all coaches that it is important to train at a range of different Intensities. If I take everything above literally, my cycling would include only Intensities of Zone 1 and Zone 2. Coach Hughes recommends that all riders include some Zone 3 riding in their schedule and suggests higher intensities are beneficial to most riders as well. In the first place, my “pure” Zone 2 rides are not all that pure, truth be told, at least some of each ride ends up being at higher intensity. But to the extent my training goes according to plan, I should plan to add in some higher intensity riding. Shortly after I started using my TranyaGo, I felt like pushing on an Alpine ride and ended up riding it entirely in Zone 3. Quite some time ago, I blogged about the Tamarack Sprint, a way I can do Zone 6 rides. Finally, I have been trying some Sprint Intervals on my trainer. Including more rides like these in my schedule is something I hope to do going forward.

Heart Rate Zone Definitions

The main purpose of this post is to make explicit something that has been implicit in some of my recent posts, that the definition of heart rate training zones I have been using has changed recently. What are heart rate zones? Very briefly, the faster I ride, the higher my heart rate, making heart rate a measure of the Intensity of my rides. Coaches want their athletes to train at a range of different Intensities, with a specific amount of time spent at each Intensity. Traditionally, the continuous range of Intensities is divided up into zones, for example, 130 to 140 heart beats per minute (bpm) equals Zone 2, 140 to 150 equals Zone 3, etc. Different coaches have different zone definitions. Furthermore, zone definitions are athlete specific as well. Coaches define heart rate zones as percentages of the athletes maximum heart rate or anaerobic threshold heart rate, for example. I am estimating my maximum heart rate as 180 bpm and my anaerobic threshold heart rate as 160 bpm and all the heart rate numbers in this post are relative to those estimates. Thus, nobody but me should use the heart rate bpm values in this post unless their maximum and anaerobic threshold heart rates are the same as mine.

When I first got my Garmin Heart Rate monitor back in 2012, I started using a set of zones which were fairly similar to those recommended by Coach Joe Friel, my favorite coach of the time and, mostly due to inertia, continued to use those zones until fairly recently. Those are the zones named Zombie Zones in the chart at the top of this post. Way back in January of 2019 I reviewed the eBook by Coach John Hughes, “Intensity Training for Cyclists” and noted that the training zones in this book were different from what I had been using. For a variety of reasons, some of which I will discuss below, I did not act on that observation immediately but I did think about it and now, four years later, those are the zones I am using. In the chart at the top of this post, these zones are named Hughes Zones.

The context in which I first looked at the Hughes zones was the preparation of my post, Deconstructing 100K per month.  In that post, I was attempting to map the mixed-zone riding I was doing in the hills of California, my Alpine ride, to the training plan given in “Distance Cycling” by John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach. For that analysis, I continued to use my old Zombie Zones, and using those zones, came up with the amount of time spent in each zone shown in the chart at the top of the post. Using those zone distributions I concluded that my Alpine ride gave a mix of Zone 2 and Zone 3 which was a good match for the training plan I was using from Hughes and Kehlenbach. But as I continued to think about the Hughes book, I started to wonder how those distributions would change if I had used the Hughes zones, and as is shown in that chart, they changed significantly. Using the Hughes zone distributions, the Alpine ride provided much more Zone 3 riding and much less Zone 2 riding than the plan I was trying to approximate. But which of those two zone systems is the proper one to use? As of today, my thinking is neither of them. The Hughes and Kehlenbach book contains a third set of zone definitions that lie somewhere between the Zombie Zones and the Hughes Zones. A principle I have come up with is that there is probably some interplay between the different zone systems used by different coaches and their training recommendations such that one should be consistent about using the zones and recommendations from the same coach. So, if the goal of this post were to revise my 100K plan (which it is not) I would do so using the Hughes and Kehlenbach zones. But if that revision is not the goal of this post, what is, and how did I end up selecting the Hughes zones?

Over the years, I had collected about a dozen different zone definitions. One reason I didn’t immediately switch to the Hughes zones when I first came across them in 2019 was that it was not obvious why I should select these zones as opposed to any of the others. Since then, there have been three significant changes that have affected my training. The first is my move into a home in a hillier neighborhood, a change that I believe resulted in overtraining, chronic fatigue, and poor performance. The second, a response to the first, is that I have resumed using a heart rate monitor after riding without one for five years. The third has been an evolution in my thinking about training. My current training is based on my personal experience combined with a personalized application of ideas of Coach John Hughes. Given this evolution, rather than trying to adapt training plans from Hughes and Kehlenbach to the hills in which I ride, I am more likely to invent training plans based on the ideas of Coach Hughes. Thus, in order to be consistent, I have adopted the Hughes Zones.

I’d like to introduce one last complication before ending. When it comes to riding for health, although I certainly listen to Coach John Hughes, there are a set of recommendations from the medical community to which I give priority, their advice to engage in at least 150 minutes and ideally 300 minutes of Moderate Intensity aerobic exercise or at least 75 minutes and ideally  150 minutes of Vigorous Intensity aerobic exercise a week, in any combination. That is, 200 minutes of Moderate Intensity combined with 50 minutes of Vigorous Intensity exercise in a week counts as meeting the ideal recommendation. But what counts as Moderate or Vigorous Intensity? The Mayo Clinic has provided a definition of these in terms of heart rate; Moderate Intensity (for me) is a heart rate between 90 and 125 bpm and Vigorous Intensity between 126 and 153 bpm. (I have no idea how the medical community would have me count the cycling I do at heart rates above 153 bpm.) Whatever training plans I come up with, I try to make sure that they at least meet the ideal recommendations of the Medical Community. In future posts, I will describe how I am planning on using the new heart rate training zones described in this post to help me design future training plans. Stay tuned.