The Cyclist's Training Bible

Any of you who happen to be following my blog posts in chronological order may find today's post incongruous. A few weeks ago, I reached a crisis of faith where I decided that I need to reevaluate what I am trying to accomplish in cycling and concluded that I could not plan my future training until I decide what kind of cycling I can and want to do, and here I am reviewing a book about training. Chalk it up to inertia. I ordered this book and started reading it before I suspended my training. Besides, I assume I will resume training at some point, and I hope what I learn from this book will be useful when I do. That said, this post addresses the questions of why I ordered this book in particular and to what extent it met my expectations.

Picking a coach, whether it be a personal trainer or a book author, must be based on trust. Sure, you can and should evaluate any training plan based on your personal experience with that plan, but it takes a big investment in time before you have enough results to evaluate, so you want to have a fairly high level of confidence in any routine before you try it. Based on my unscientific perusal of the web, Joe Friel seems to be one of the most highly rated, if not the most highly rated writer of training books, so right off the bat, there is reason to consider trusting his advice. Besides, I have already read two of his books and I am a regular reader of his blog, and I like what I have read. One final factor that gives me confidence in Joe Friel is his transparency, he explains why he recommends what he does. As I have previously noted, I am a card carrying member of the medical establishment, and many coaches are not. Joe Friel does reference the medical establishment on occasion but notes that the medical establishment has little to say on many of the issues of importance to athletes, a characterization I reluctantly accept. In the absence of their advice, Joe Friel bases his recommendations on years of personal experience coaching a wide range of athletes, data not at the level of a double blind clinical trial, but credible information nonetheless.

Why after reading two of Joe Friel's books (and his blog) would I want to read a third? Does it take Joe Friel three books to say what some others say on a single web page? (Joe Friel actually lists 13 books he has published on his blog.) The first of the previous two books I read was "Total Heart Rate Training" which I got after I first started using a heart rate monitor. That book answered a number of the questions that came up as I started using this tool. Regular readers of this blog know that another issue with which I struggle is the effects of aging on training, so the next of Joe Friel's books I read was "Cycling Past 50" which I found less useful. After reading it, I questioned the value of reading any more of Joe Friel's books. However, as I continued to think about training and follow Joe Friel's blog, I decided to read "The Cyclist's Training Bible" in the hope that it would pull together a lot of Joe Friel's ideas in an organized way which might help me better to understand them.

I purchased "The Cyclist's Training Bible" from Amazon, and one of the more useful features of the Amazon website are user comments. The two biggest criticisms of this book in those comments are 1) that it is focused on serious racers and thus had little to offer other kinds of cyclists and 2) that it is much too long and technical. I was recently accused by one of my readers of "way overanalyzing things." Mea Culpa! That's me. As a result of this personality, I was undaunted by the accusation of excessive technicality. On the other hand, the limited application of this book to racing cyclists is a problem for me; I currently have no expectation of ever participating in a bicycle race. What I didn't expect until I got the book is that it isn't a book on how to train, it is a reference book to provide information to help in the development of training plans. Expect to spend a lot of time and do a lot of work to go from this book to a list of training rides for next season.

Finally, I note that this book is (implicitly) targeted to younger riders (e.g. those less than 40 or 50 years old) although Chapter 14 does contain a little information on adjusting the routines for different kinds of riders, such as older riders. This last point has recently become less of an issue as Joe Friel (who himself is approaching 70 years of age) has posted a series of detailed updates for older riders organized by the various phases in Joe Friel's periodized training plan: Prep Phase, Base Phase, Additional Comments on Base Phase, Build Phase, Peak Phase, Race Week, and Transition.) Unfortunately, these updates don't completely solve the aging issue for me as they are directed towards the athlete who has raced their entire life and do not address someone trying to (re)enter the sport beginning at an older age.

The 18 chapters, 4 appendices, and 330 large pages (the book is oversized) is a lot of material, and to use it requires a lot of effort on the part of the athlete. And yet, on November 20 of 2008, Joe Friel says on his blog: "In my Training Bible books I laid out very specific training protocols that the self-coached athlete can follow to simplify the process because they generally work at some level for everyone. But do you know how often I follow those same, exact protocols with the athletes I coach? Never. Why? Because I’ve been doing this long enough now that I am aware of lots of variations and how they might best be combined for a given athlete’s unique situation. I don’t expect the self-coached athlete with no background in sport science to understand or even see all of the alternatives any more than I would understand anything beyond basic accounting practices while my accountant could see multiple issues and solutions." So, according to Friel, this massive tome is the Cliff Notes version.

In order to provide a fair review of "The Cyclist's Training Bible", I need to acknowledge that I purchased it knowing I was not in the target audience. Later in this review I will discuss what useful in formation I have been able to obtain from this book despite being outside the target audience, but before doing that, I will pretend that I am interested in bicycle racing and assess its value based on that fiction.

Value of "The Cyclist's Training Bible" for the Bicycle Racer

Joe Friel starts this book with the following exhortation: "Talk is cheap. It's easy to have big dreams and set high goals before the racing starts. But the true test of a commitment to better racing results is not in the talking, but in the doing. It doesn't start with the first race of the season-its all the things you do today to get stronger, faster, and more enduring. Real commitment means 365 days a year and 24 hours a day." In my opinion, the potential user of this book should take these words very seriously. This defines the target audience for this book, if this is not you, you might want to look elsewhere for advice.

To evaluate this book, I went through it, making up plausible but fictitious results for the various tests in this book and then proceeded forward to develop a training plan based on those fictions. These are my reactions from having done so:

1. My first reaction was confusion. I think some of that comes from the complexity of what the book is trying to convey, but I have the feeling it could have been organized differently to make it easier to follow.
2. I found that it was essential to read the entire book word for word, and only then to try to develop a training plan from it.
3. When I did, the training plan I developed seemed physically very taxing to me, I doubt that I could successfully follow it. I suspect that what this means is that at this point in my life, it is unrealistic for me to attempt bicycle racing.
4. If I were attempting to follow this book to train for bicycle racing, I would most likely invest in a power meter (ca. $1,000.) More generally, because this book is directed towards serious bicycle racers, it makes the reasonable assumption that one should be willing to invest in this enterprise.
5. I think many people attempting to use this book will, at some point, wonder if it doesn't make more sense to invest in a personal trainer.
6. I think there is no doubt that I have not spent nearly enough time with this book to give it anything like a fair evaluation.

Having argued that this is a book for serious racers, I don't want to overstate that position. Friel acknowledges that most of us are not professional bicycle racers (or even coaches), that we have a job and we have a life. What his book really does to provide a model for understanding cause and effect. Given real world constraints of how much you can train, this book tells you what is the best training to do to maximize your performance, and if you are thinking about increasing or decreasing that amount of training, what the consequences of that change will likely be, not in absolute terms of course, that depends on too many factors, the particular gifts of the athlete probably most importantly, but in relative terms. I think if you are serious about bicycle racing (at whatever level), and if you are the kind of person who finds the effort of working through a complex book like this appealing, time spent with this book (and I predict it will be a lot of time spread over more than one season) will be time well spent.

What Value  "The Cyclist's Training Bible" has for Me

Given how customizable the training plans in "The Cyclist's Training Bible" are, could I customize them for a brevet rather than a race? Having considered this seriously, I have to answer, almost certainly not. There are just too many differences between the specific subset of bicycle races Joe Friel considers and brevet riding to make this possible. Just as one quick and simple example, if we equate a brevet with a race, Friel's training advice is that one's longest training ride should be as long as the race. That obviously cannot work for a 1200K brevet. Training for randonneuring by necessity requires a strategy that allows you to ride brevets that are much longer than any of your training rides.

That said, I am not sorry I purchased this book. If nothing else, I am glad to know what everyone is talking about. Given the prominence of this book, I feel like I needed to read it even if I had learned nothing useful from it. In that case, I would have been able to ignore it without concern I was missing something important. That is not the case, however. I'm not sure I have encountered anything in this book that I have not already ready somewhere else (I have been doing a lot of reading) but often what I read explained, extended or confirmed something important. As noted above, I feel like I am far from having plumbed its depths, and even so, here are some useful ideas I have picked up so far:

1. The second training regimen I tried was that promulgated in the "The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing" by Philip Maffetone. In that book, Philip Maffetone recommends training at a rather mysterious maximum aerobic training heart rate and using an associated Maximum Aerobic Performance (MAF) test. To my delight, Joe Friel also uses the term maximum aerobic heart rate which appears to be the same thing, and as I had inferred, it corresponds to heart rate zone 2. Further, he validates the use of a test which turns out to be the same thing as a MAF test. This confirmation dramatically increases my confidence in this approach.
2. In the chapter on keeping a training diary, Friel suggests you track "morning warnings"; such as your subjective estimation of the quality of your night's sleep and changes in your heart rate before getting up. This tracks closely with suggestions made to me by a reader, Iron Rider. Besides confirming the value of this approach (which I am now trying to use), Friel suggests some refinements that might make it a more reliable indicator.
3. Similarly, Friel argues that it is almost always a mistake to train if your legs feel tired. I had suspected this was true, but having that confirmed will give me more confidence that I am not being lazy when I moderate my training as a result.
4. Friel argues that it takes 3 to 7 years to determine a rider's potential. Riders who start out having poor performance and/or poor response to training sometimes end up being the best riders in the long run. I don't know if that applies to someone as old as I am, but it is something to consider.
5. Because of my personality and my schedule, I tend to ride by myself rather than with a club. It was gratifying to have Friel state that riding alone provides, in most cases, a better training experience.
6. In comments back and forth between me and Iron Rider, the issue of how to estimate the difficulty of a training routine arose. Friel opines that the best way to estimate that (which he strongly recommends one records) is by cumulative workload, which can best be estimated using a power meter and sophisticated software (which I do not have) but also can be estimated subjectively. This is something I hope to try going forward to get a better handle on regulating my training.
7. Although Friel validates the MAF test, he notes that, as I have observed, its results can be highly variable due to environmental and other factors, and that this variability can hide the training effects you are testing for. His solution is, once again, a power meter and sophisticated software. Whether or not it makes sense for me to invest in these tools, the confirmation that the variability I observe is to be expected is very useful to know.
8. Many coaches, including Friel, recommend weight training as a component of a training plan. That said, it was interesting to me when Friel wrote "If you only have a few hours to train each week...weight workouts are the first ones to omit." I probably will run out of will power before I run out of time, but it is still useful to know how to prioritize.

I have been doing a lot of reading lately, "The Cyclist's Training Bible" being just one book of several. I am trying to create a mental model of the reality of training that I can use to understand my limitations and how I can work around them so I can continue to enjoy the benefits of cycling. In that context, I feel like the time (and money) invested in the "Training Bible" has been well spent.

Cycling Skyline Drive

My son and I ready to depart for our ride

Although I retired from my biomedical informatics faculty position at a local medical school two years ago, I still try to keep my hand in by running my consulting company and by volunteering in my specialty. To that end, I spent last week at the headquarters of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists in Alexandria, Virginia, as part of the advisory board for a major new software product they are developing, CancerLinQ. Alexandria is in the Washington DC area where my son and daughter-in-law live, so I imposed on their hospitality and stayed over an extra day. For years, my son has been wanting to show me one of his favorite bicycle rides, Skyline Drive, and so he took a day off of work and we spent it riding together. My daughter-in-law did not have the luxury of ditching work so I was able to borrow her bike. I got to their apartment the afternoon before the ride, and my son had left a book out for me to look at: "Bicycling the Blue Ridge: A Guide to the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway." This book describes these two connected roads, which together span the length of Shenandoah National Park, as the perfect cycling road. The next morning, we drove the hour and a half to the beginning of Skyline Drive and rode what is probably the hardest 40 miles I have ridden since restarting cycling in 2008.

What made this ride so difficult for an aging Houstonian like me were the hills. Though not of the scale of the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Nevadas, Shenandoah National Park lies in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachians, which sports some impressive climbs of its own, devastating coming from the flatlands of Houston and well beyond anything I have ridden in Texas. This is despite the fact that we cheated a little by driving up the first big climb before starting. The two red arrows on the diagram below indicate where we started our ride (on the left) and where we turned around to return to our start:

The highest elevation of our ride (the green peak between the red arrows) was Hogback Overlook at 3385 feet. We initially were mislead by some confusing signage (picture of my son), but eventually found the true high point (picture of me.)

Not everyone agrees with the sanguine assessment of "Bicycling the Blue Ridge", some find the winding narrow road, absence of shoulders, and distracted drivers intimidating. The saving grace is that this is a scenic road in a national park, the speed limit is 35 miles per hour, and drivers are told to be alert for cyclists. On the other hand, although Virginia state law explicitly allows bicycles to ride two abreast when conditions warrant, park rules do not; we were stopped by a ranger and given a written warning for doing so. This is a picture of what the roads looked like:

On the east coast, the turning of the leaves in the fall is quite spectacular and in some places the time of peak foliage is the biggest tourist draw of the year. We were just past peak foliage in the park, but it was still quite spectacular in the valleys visible from the road. Had we been riding on the weekend, the traffic might have made our ride most unpleasant. As it was, we had a relatively quiet ride whilst still being able to view the foliage:

For another take on this ride, there is a great ride report on the bicycle touring website Crazy Guy on a Bike. This is a terrific website, by the way, if you have any interest in bicycle touring.

For some time, my son has been trying to talk me out of randonneuring, at least at the level of rides like Paris-Brest-Paris. My son and daughter-in-law both expressed concern at my recent exhaustion, and suggested I take a break from training. Originally, I had been planning a 200K brevet for the weekend after this ride. The brevet had been on my calendar for quite some time, but when the trip to DC came up and my son suggested this ride I had thought about doing both. I realized this would be challenging and after some soul searching realized that a ride with my son was more important to me than a brevet, that I would do this ride and then if I was too tired for the brevet, so be it. Of course, I abandoned the brevet well before this ride, so the question was moot. Perhaps somewhere in this story is a clue as to what my cycling career should look like going forward.

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MAF Test Results

For those new to this blog, each week I had been posting an update of my training results as measured by a MAF test; see my previous posts for explanations of my aerobic training program, MAF tests, and the graph I had been posting. As of today, I am suspending posting of these results. As I noted in my last post, I am currently unsure of the goal of my training and until I resolve that, cannot design a training program and do not know what role, if any, MAF tests should play.

Training for a Failed Brevet

In my last post, I reported that I was unable to complete the training for a 200K brevet in November of this year. That result was unexpected and affects how I think about my training. In this post, I will discuss the training I did leading up to that failure, explain why I think the explanation of that failure does not lie in the details of my training, and the implications of that failure for my cycling going forward.

I am very interesting in training and get new ideas from books, websites, and the comments I get on this blog. One series of comments that was particularly interesting was from a reader identified as "Iron Rider." Iron Rider uses and champions a training program he developed called "Recovery Based Training." His program is based on the premises that it is best to train when fully recovered and that being fully recovered is associated with a lower resting heart rate. Key to this program is figuring out how to reliably measure your lowest heart rate each day.

Iron Rider had two suggestions for me:

1. Figure out how to measure a true resting heart rate and to train hard only on days when that was not elevated (recovery based training).
2. Looking at my training plan, he wondered if one of my standard rides, the MAF test, was a harder ride than I thought. I do this ride at a heart rate of 130 to 140 beats per minute, which Iron Rider noted would be expected to be at the high end of the aerobic range for a man my age. 

I considered Iron Rider's points very seriously, and to address them I did three things:

1) Based on Iron Rider's suggestion that I was training too hard, and on comparison of various training programs, I changed my training program from what I had been doing, which is rather unconventional, to a more conventional program, one I believed would be less stressful. The table below diagrams my training:

To the left of the table are the dates of the first day of each week. Across the top of the table are the days of the week. To the right of the table is summary data for the week; number of rides taken that week and the total number of miles ridden. Within each cell I indicate what ride was done that day. (A white cell means no ride.) This table has been normalized to move rides within a week so that all long rides are shown on Friday and most or all brisk rides are shown on Wednesday, etc. independent of when that ride was actually done, to make the table easier to look at. The number in each cell of the table is the length of that ride in miles. The color code, shown below, indicates the kind of ride each ride was. MAF Tests are ridden wearing a heart rate monitor and kept strictly within Zone 2. Brisk Rides are often intervals with the fast part of the interval being ridden in Zone 5. Long Rides are typically ridden without a heart rate monitor but, based on perceived effort and spot tests with a heart rate monitor, are mostly ridden in Zone 2. Similarly, Pace Rides are ridden mostly in Zone 2 and Zone 3. Based on perceived effort, easy rides are ridden in Zone 1. The red line across the table between 8/12 and 8/19 indicates when I changed my training program. Comparing the two programs, the first is similar to what I used to prepare for my brevet on May 18 and the second is a more conventional program. The new training program adds brisk rides but  involves fewer miles per week. All training programs I have tried include one long ride each week that gradually gets longer as I approach a brevet, reaching a maximum of 90 miles. Thus, for all programs (including this new one) the number of miles varies significantly week to week, but for any given length of long ride, the weekly total will be less in my new program.

To be clear, Iron Rider did not recommend my new training program, he only suggested that riding three or four MAF tests in a row might be too much. Arguably, the logic for changing my training program was premature at best. In fact, a case could be made that this change is responsible for my inability to prepare for a November brevet; that the training program that came before was similar to the one that successfully prepared me for a brevet in May, and that I should have stuck with what worked. I do not believe that is the case, however. Whether the new or the old training program is better I cannot say, but I find it implausible that the new one was so much worse as to make the difference between success and failure. In addition, there were other differences between my training for my May brevet and my training for my November brevet. The training program to prepare for the May brevet began six months after the previous brevet, for the November brevet one week after the previous brevet. The training program for the May brevet began after a one month break from training followed by base training, that for the November brevet started immediately with base training. I think it is much more likely that these two differences are responsible for the different results than how many MAF tests I rode each week or whether or not I included a brisk ride.

2) I figured out how to measure my true resting heart rate. In the graph below, the values in blue are the heart rate measure when I measure when I take my blood pressure. This is done after dressing and walking down stairs. The red values are my heart rate measured before getting out of bed. The red values are lower and more consistent. If I measure my blood pressure two or three times in a row, the values for my heart rate often vary by five or more beats per minute. If I measure my resting heart rate two or three times in a row, the values agree within a beat or two. Thus, I believe the red values represent my true resting heart rate.

In the graph above, the four red arrows at the bottom of the graph represent the last four successful "long" rides I completed. The week after the successful 80 mile ride, I felt very tired and I took a week off. The following week I felt even more tired but I attempted a 90 mile ride anyway. At the end of 37 miles I felt utterly drained and abandoned the ride and thus my plans for a November brevet. The missed ride and the unsuccessful ride are marked by black arrows. The first thing I note is that there is no simple pattern to my resting heart rate, it goes up and down quite dramatically day to day. However, as I continue to look at the data, I see a hint of a multi-day pattern. As I reach my subjective exhaustion, it looks like my resting heart rate, if anything, is reduced on average, not elevated. The thin black lines are a least squares trend line fitted to the true resting heart rate (red) and blood pressure heart rate (blue.) I now think the blood pressure heart rate, which neither increased nor declined, is not useful, and do not expect to be discussing it in the future. The true resting heart rate, though not as easily interpretable as I had hoped, does seem to have some consistency:

1. Statistically, over the course of the time I have been measuring it, during which I experienced exhaustion and overtraining, it declined. 
2. Perhaps more interesting, the six days that my resting heart rate was less than 60 beats per minute all occurred after my 72 mile long ride, five after the 80 mile ride. 

Assuming the decrease in resting heart rate is real, not a statistical coincidence, the surprising fact is that in contrast to the increase in resting heart rate predicted by Iron Rider, I am experiencing a decrease in resting heart rate in response to over-training. In retrospect, I should not have been surprised. As I previously posted, Joe Friel claims that, for young riders, over-training is indicated by an increase in resting heart rate, whereas in old riders (me), it is indicated by a decrease. I plan to continue to collect my resting heart rate, looking to see if a decrease in this rate might prove to be a useful warning sign of over-training.

One confounding variable affecting my resting heart rate is not shown on the graph above. On occasion, I have been known to enjoy a wee dram with my wife in the evening after dinner. On the following mornings, my resting heart rate is often significantly increased. At first, I was afraid this was suggesting I needed to give up this indulgence. However, since I am now thinking that a decrease in resting heart rate is bad and an increase is good, perhaps this is saying the opposite? I don't really believe that, common sense tells me that alcoholic beverages should be an infrequent indulgence, but I find the result amusing nonetheless.

3) Iron Rider wondered if my MAF Test rides (indicated in purple) were more difficult than I realized. If so, doing two or three of them in a row, as I had been doing, might produce too much stress. This hinges on what heart rate zone these rides are being ridden in, at the low end of aerobic training as I had supposed, or at the high end of aerobic as Iron Rider suggested. Heart rate zones can be defined relative to one's heart rate at lactate threshold, so in order to answer this question, I directly measured my lactate threshold heart rate. I did so using a procedure given by Joe Friel in "Total Heart Rate Training"; I completed a 30 minute time trial by riding as fast as I could for 30 minutes. For the last 20 minutes of that ride, I measured my average heart rate. The notion is that, for the first 10 minutes, it is possible to ride anaerobically, at a faster speed than can be supported by the rate that oxygen can be delivered to the muscles, but thereafter, it is not possible to ride anaerobically. The line between aerobic and anaerobic exercise is referred to as the lactate threshold because anaerobic exercise by necessity generates excess lactate. It is possible for this technique to underestimate the heart rate at lactate threshold if the rider (me) does not go "all out" during the time trial, but it is not possible to overestimate that heart rate. Long story short, I measured my heart rate at lactate threshold, it was 160 beats per minute as I expected, and thus my heart rate zones are what I thought they were; my MAF test rides are ridden in Zone 2, at the low end of the aerobic range.

Besides being a training ride, my MAF test rides are a metric to monitor training. When I started collecting MAF test results almost a year ago, something I hoped to get out of doing so was an indicator of overtraining. If training is going well, the speed ridden during a MAF test is expected to increase month by month. If the speed ridden during a MAF test fails to increase or even declines, that is supposed to be an indicator of overtraining. I have been posting the results of my MAF test results each week, and here is the data to date:

The blue dots (connected by blue lines) represents the results in miles per hour for a 45 minute ride on a closed track at a heart rate of 130 to 140 beats per second. The thinner red lines represent my "eyeball" fit (interpretation) of the data. The red arrow indicates the day of my May 18th brevet. My interpretation of this graph is that my training worked from when I started Philip Maffetone's aerobic training plan in December of 2012 up through my May, 2013 brevet, but that brevet pushed me into overtraining (a conclusion supported by my subjective feelings) from which I never recovered. At first I thought my lack of improvement was due to the absence of longer rides during the recovery period after my brevet. When I restarted long rides and my results still didn't improve, I concluded that I was stuck in an overtrained condition.

Conclusions

My current belief is that changes in my day to day training plan probably had little impact on my ability to prepare for a November brevet. My best guess as to the reason I was unable to prepare for that brevet is that I didn't recovered adequately from my brevet the previous May. What it would have taken to recover remains to be determined. I cannot, however, think of any plausible training plan that would have insured I could have ridden a second brevet in 2013.

So where does that leave me?

1. I no longer think it is possible I can ride Paris-Brest-Paris in 2015.
2. I no longer think it is possible for me to complete a Super-Brevet series of 200K, 300K, 400K, and 600K brevets in 2014.
3. I think it is extremely unlikely to impossible that I would be able to complete a 200K brevet by January of 2014 (the first step in the above series.)
4. I think there is every reason to expect that I could complete a 200K brevet in May of 2014, but it is very unclear how long it would take me to be ready for a brevet after that; it could be up to another year.
5. I don't have a lot of evidence that any of the above will change. It is very possible that opportunities for training to improve my randonneuring capabilities are limited at the same time as the sands of time are irrevocably reducing my abilities; this year could be the high point of my career as a randonneur.

Is one 200K brevet a year enough to keep me involved in randonneuring? Is there any chance I will ever be able to do significantly more than that? What alternatives to randonneuring do I have as a cyclist? I recently started reading Joe Friel's "The Cyclist's Training Bible" (which I will review in a future post) and that book talks a lot about plans and goals, the connection between them, and the distinction between goals that are too easy, unrealistically hard, and just right. Up until now, all my training plans have been based on a goal of completing a 1200K brevet as some point in the future or at least being able to regularly participate in brevets of various lengths. If that goal is unrealistic, I need to establish new goals before I can develop a new training plan or evaluate the one I have. Stay tuned.

Brevet Attempts: Two Successes, Two Failures

Once again, I am attempting to leaven a dry and picture-less blog post with irrelevant pictures. For this post, I selected some pictures of my participation in bike races in 1968, an upbeat topic to balance the downbeat topic of this post. I have been unable to reconstruct what race this picture shows, but I am the rider half-off the picture to the left in white with blue and red trim, version 2.0 of the Modesto Roadmen jersey. I am riding the Hetchins I purchased for my bike tour of Europe during the summer of 1967, repurposed for racing.

Last week, I abandoned my fourth brevet attempt. To date, attempts one and three succeeded, two and four failed. In both 2012 and 2013 I successfully prepared for a brevet in May, but then failed when I attempted to prepare for a second brevet in November. (All four attempts were for 200K brevets.) The two obvious and related questions are why did attempts two and four fail, and what do these failures suggest for the future?

For those new to this blog, a brevet is a non-competitive challenge ride conducted under the rules of randonneuring as sanctioned nationally by Randonneurs USA (RUSA) and internationally by Audax Club Parisien (APC). RUSA's FAQ on their website is an excellent first introduction to this sport. A 200K brevet is 200 kilometers or 124 miles long, must be completed in 13½ hours, and is the shortest of the sanctioned brevets. The most common lengths for brevets are 200, 300, 400, 600, and 1200 km. People who are good at this will do many brevets over the course of a year, typically one each month, a 200K/300K/400K/600K series each year, and may also do multiple 1200K brevets in a year, so what I am attempting is nothing exceptional to say the least.

What background to I have coming into randonneuring? From the ages of 14 through 21 I was a fairly serious cyclist, a less serious but regular cyclist from 21 to 30, and then from 30 to 60, essentially quit cycling and exercised sporadically at best. In 2008 I restarted cycling, became more serious by 2010, and since 2012 have been trying to break into the sport of randonneuring. This blog was created to document that attempt.

This is the start of a criterium held in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa in 1968. I can barely be seen just under the tree in the left ⅓ of the picture. Much more interesting is the gentleman officiating the race in a spiffy panama hat, at the far right of the picture. That would be the great Wally Gilbert, one of the top officials of the Northern California race scene and a great friend of the Modesto Roadmen. He and Bob Tetzlaff, a top level racer of the day, took us under their wing and got us signed up as an ABLA sanctioned club.

Why Did My Last Brevet Attempt Fail?

I have yet to start a brevet and fail to finish. When I say a brevet attempts failed, I mean that I was unable to complete the training regimen I designed to prepare for that brevet and so never registered for the event. Although I have varied my training for each of my four attempts, all four attempts required that I complete a series of weekly long rides of increasing length leading up to a ride of at least 90 miles before the brevet. In both failed attempts, I completed an 80 mile ride but was unable to complete a 90 mile ride. I do not know with certainty (and probably cannot know with certainty) why my last brevet attempt failed; there may, in fact, be a combination of reasons. However, I can suggest some possible reasons for this failure (hypotheses) and suggest which of these I find intuitively more likely.

In thinking about all the possible causes for this failure, the obvious first possibility to consider is that I lacked the will to succeed, that I gave up. There are many discussions on randonneuring websites of people who have or have not completed brevets provided as morality tales on how important it is not to give up too easily. Every ride will contain some moments that are easy and fun and some that are unpleasant indeed. If one abandons an attempt at the first sign of unpleasantness, one will miss out on the satisfaction of completing a ride, that satisfaction making the suffering along the way worthwhile. That said, both times I abandoned my 90 mile training ride, I did so in response to another shibboleth; "listen to your body". Both times my body was telling me it was exhausted; not that I couldn't finish the ride, but that it would cost me dearly to do so, leaving me weaker rather than stronger. If I were riding in a brevet, especially one that was important to me, I might push on with the understanding would make up for it later with a long rest before resuming training. However, feeling that way while training is a clear message to me that the time for a rest is now, not later. So for the moment at least, I will reject the hypothesis that I failed due to not trying hard enough.

That's me, front and center, in my Modesto Roadmen jersey, leading the pack in the 1968 Santa Cruz bike race. I remember this course well, it was one of the nicer courses. It did consist of multiple laps, but they were long laps which headed out into the country and then back through town. Parts of the course were along the ocean, and as you can see from the stairs in the center of the picture, the course was quite hilly.

Another hypothesis is that my failures are the result of illness, either something as benign as a mild infection or perhaps something more serious. I consider this hypothesis rather unlikely, and in any case, I'm about to have my annual physical so worrying about it would be a waste of time.

The two related hypotheses I think are most worth exploring are 1) that I am training incorrectly or 2) that more than one brevet a year is currently beyond my capabilities. These hypotheses are related because if more than one brevet a year is beyond my capabilities, then almost by definition, attempting to train for more than one brevet a year is training incorrectly. The training plans I am following are very conventional and are similar to those recommended by a number of coaches; I have not yet seen an actual coach recommend a significantly easier plan for training for a 100 mile or 200 kilometer ride than what I am doing. (The training needed to complete these two distances is generally considered to be similar.) That said, training plans need to be individualized, and not everyone can complete every training plan; the fact that I cannot complete a training plan generally recognized as necessary for a 200 kilometer ride more than once in a year suggests that as the (current) limit of my abilities.

In my next post, I will discuss recent changes I have made in my training, why I made them, what they tell me about my ability to go beyond one brevet a year, and where I might go from here.

To Patch or Not To Patch? That Is the Question.

Tubes with punctures, waiting to be patched

Early in my zombie-esque return to cycling, I was riding with my older son, a very accomplished cyclist, and he managed to surprise me. We were having something of a bad luck ride with lots of flat tires and he noticed a patch on one of my inner tubes. "That explains it," sez he, "patching tubes never works. You need a new tube." Both of my sons are very wise and I always listen to them carefully when they offer me advice. In this case, however, I was inclined to disagree based on both theoretical and experiential grounds. But as I said, I take them very seriously so I did some online research. As it turns out, the question of whether to patch bicycle tubes is quite controversial. Here is one example of a blog post followed by a discussion on this topic:

An extract from the Bike Noob Blog. I truncated the post and moved up a couple of illustrative comments.

Having given this topic serious reconsideration, I still come down in favor of patching. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I worked in a bike shop back in the 1960s. My boss and mentor, who I refer to as BB, firmly maintained that a properly applied patch was at least as strong as the original tube, an assertion I have seen repeated by other experts. That is my theoretical basis for patching tubes. Experientially, I don't know that I have ever seen a patch that I applied properly fail; the patched tube my son disdained was loosing air from a new hole some distance from any previous patch. That said, I both have had patches fail and chosen to discard tubes, and I thought I would add my experiences to the online dialogue on this topic.

A few months ago, I was doing my Braes Bayou ride when I encountered a former colleague sidelined by a flat tire. He was riding the old 27x1¼" tires with shraeder valves, whereas I was riding 700C tires with presta valves, so I was unable to offer him my spare tube, but I did offer to help him patch his tube so he could continue his ride to work rather than walk his bike home. The problematic word was "help." Presumably because he was embarrassed at needing my assistance, he insisted this be a collaborative project and so the patch was not applied with the care I believe is necessary for reliability. Consistent with that, when I spoke with him later, I found that the patch had failed (but not before getting him to work). Even when I am patching my own tube, I don't feel I can do as good a job by the side of the road as I can in my garage, so I always carry a spare tube (typically multiply-patched) as well as a patch kit. If I have a single flat, I replace the tube and patch the old one when I get home; the patch kit I carry covers the rare, multi-flat ride. If I am on a more serious ride (such as a brevet) I will carry two tubes to further reduce the need for roadside patching.

An example of a patch kit I carry. From top to bottom, left to right are Instructions, the box everything fits into, a tube of rubber cement, a grey piece of tubing of unknown function, sandpaper, and a collection of patches.

Implicit in the above is that if patching is to be successful, it must be done correctly. There are many descriptions of how to patch a tube by people much more expert than me, and in general, I find the instructions that come with many patch kits pretty accurate, so I won't try to repeat these instructions in detail, but just emphasize a few key points:

1. Use only bicycle tire tools to remove the tire from the rim so you can remove the tube. These tools have been designed not to damage the tube, something that is all too likely if you use a screwdriver or other makeshift tool. (This caution applies if you are patching OR replacing a tube.)
2. Somehow note or mark the tube and tire so that, once you find the hole in the tube, you can inspect the tire in that spot to find and remove what caused the hole. (Note that it is easy to flip the tube so that the tube and tire no longer align.) You actually want to carefully and thoroughly run your fingers along the entire inside of the tire looking for problems, but you want to concentrate on where the hole was. Often, the object will have fallen out so you never will be able to find it, but you want to be completely sure that is the case, because if you leave it in, you will get another flat.  This is probably the most troublesome step, in my experience, and once again, this is necessary whether you patch your tube or replace it.
3. Once you have removed the tube, carefully inflate it until it starts to swell a bit. Then, inspect it by running your hand over its surface or by running the tube next to your cheek (which is more sensitive than your hand) or by immersing it in water to find where the air is coming out. If you use water, carefully and thoroughly dry the tube. Mark the site of the hole, it will be difficult to find later.
4. Use sandpaper to thoroughly abrade a region around the hole larger than a patch. Apparently, bicycle tubes are produced by injection molding which causes two problems for patchers, a release agent used on the mold is left on the tube which will prevent the patch from adhering and the mold leaves seams which can prevent the patch from fully contacting the tube. There may be other reasons for abrading as well, and apparently it is important to keep the abraded site free of contaminants such as finger grease; don't touch the abraded spot. I find that it is impossible to remove the seams completely with sandpaper, but that the patches are flexible enough to work anyway. Some experts advise using a razorblade or X Acto knife to cut off the seam, others find this results in cutting holes in the tube. Because I feel like I would be in the latter camp, I have never tried this approach.
5. Apply enough rubber cement to cover the abraded area. Let the cement dry completely. I think not doing this is the most common mistake people make because it is counter-intuitive, and it is my impression that not letting the rubber cement dry completely will almost always result in a failed patch. It only takes a few minutes for the glue to dry, but do be sure it is completely dry by touching it around the outer edges (away from where the patch will be) to make sure it is not still sticky.
6. Carefully apply the patch centered over the hole. The dried rubber cement is now a contact adhesive, so you will only have once chance to get this right, the patch cannot be moved.

A marked hole in a tube about to be patched next to the permanent, silver Sharpie, my favorite tool for marking holes.

Not only do I wait until I get home to patch my tubes, I find it is more efficient to do a bunch of them at one time, so I let them pile up and keep a stock of patched tubes to replace those which are newly punctured. The little patch kits, like that shown above, are great as a backup to be carried on rides, but are frustratingly inefficient in the assembly line I use; they contain very few patches, the kit runs out of patches before the rubber cement is exhausted, and with the cost of the box, etc., they end up being fairly expensive per patch. Thus, I was very excited to discover that I could purchase patches in bulk packages of 100. However, I still needed the rest of the kit. I went to a teachers' supply store and picked up an old fashioned bottle of rubber cement and cut a few squares from ordinary workshop sandpaper I had lying around. Here is my production line patch kit:

Interestingly, the bulk patches I purchased are labelled "cold patch." The obvious contrast is to a "hot patch" which I remember from my youth in the 1960s. Hot patches used heat to vulcanize them to the tube being repaired rather than rubber cement. The bike shop where I worked had an electric device which clamped the patch to the tube and then heated it to create a bond. This device was too expensive for teenage riders like me, but later I found consumer grade hot patch kits at Western Auto that contained a simple, mechanical clamp and patches that consisted of a rubber patch attached to a small metal container containing a flammable compound. To use these, you clamped the patch where it was wanted, lit the compound, waited for it to burn out and cool, removed the clamp, and peeled the metal container off the tube leaving the patch. Apparently these have been taken off the consumer market, at least in the United States, due to the noxious fumes they generated and/or other safety considerations. There are contemporary alternatives to the rubber cement patches as well. The first are patches that use chemical vulcanization, apparently using an alternative to rubber cement which uses a different chemistry. I have no experience with these, but the few comments about them I read either compare them unfavorably to hot patches (by retrogrouches) or else argue that they are vastly superior to the rubber cement-based patches I use. The second are glueless patches which have adhesive on the back like tape. I have not tried these either, nor am I likely to. Virtually all the comments about them are negative. My guess is that a lot of people who believe that tube patching isn't reliable have experience with these patches. Apparently, they may not even be marketed as permanent patches, but rather just a way to get home.

Despite my best attempts to do patching correctly, there are times when I do get repetitive flats. Is my son right about patching being unreliable? I do not think so. Usually when I have a flat that will not go away, it is from one of two causes:

1. The object that caused the flat was still in the tire and I missed it.
2. The tube has gone bad. This usually happens around the valve stem, and usually I can identify this problem before trying to patch the tube.

People who choose not to patch tubes throw them away at the first puncture, of course. Those who do patch sometimes have limits on how many times they will patch a tube (see, for example, the first comment in the Bike Noob blog at the top of this post.) Because I believe properly applied patches in no way reduce the reliability of a tube, I do not ever discard tubes because they have too many patches. The times I discard tubes are when they have gone bad, as described above, or if they have a slow leak that I cannot find. (I am actually suspicious that slow leaks often represent a tube gone bad rather than a really small puncture.)  Up until now, I have not paid much attention to the brand or quality of tubes I buy. I pick up whatever the bike shop carries, or if I am placing a mail order for something else, whatever the mail order place is selling. I don't recall ever have been given a choice at either bike shop or mail order vendor between higher or lower quality tubes. Recently, I noted that Compass Bike Shop (a local bike shop if you live in Seattle, but a mail order vendor for me) is pushing expensive tubes from Schwalbe, a well-regarded manufacturer of high end bicycle tires with the claim that they are less likely to go bad. I am currently a bit low on tubes and so am tempted to order some of these. They are definitely more expensive than the tubes I have been buying and if they turn out to be less prone to going bad, this will make the economics of patching even more compelling.

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MAF Test Results

For those new to this blog, each week I am posting an update of my training results as measured by MAF tests; see my previous posts for explanations of my aerobic training program, MAF tests, and this graph.

I will be discussing my training results in detail in a future post. In my current training regimen, I am only doing one MAF test a week. Thus, there is not a lot new on the MAF test front since last week. That said, I continue to be perplexed by what is (not) happening with my MAF test results.

The Back Roads Century

The Back Roads Century is one of the premier cycling events in the mid-Atlantic region, and is also considered one of the most beautiful rides in America. - The Back Roads Century Website.

My wife and I frequently travel to Washington, D.C. on business, and because our son and daughter-in-law live there, we try to see them when we do. When we told them we would like to see them the weekend of September 22, they suggested that we ride the "Back Roads Century" together. Unfortunately, my wife could not because it conflicted with her business meeting, but the remaining three of us did.

Thank YOU, Potomac Peddlers, organizers of this ride! Unfortunately, I did not think to get a screenshot of the website until the event was over, but I think it still captures the beauty of the venue and professionalism of the event.

Although billed as a century, five routes of different lengths were offered: 25, 30, 50, 65, and 100 miles. All routes started and finished in the charming town of Berryville, in the northwest corner of Virginia. We opted for the 65 mile metric century:

There were 2,300 riders who attended this year's Back Roads Century, enough to nearly overwhelm the small town of Berryville. The morning of the event, highways leading into Berryville were backed up for miles with cars waiting to get into the parking. During the event, bicycles so crowded the roads that it was difficult for cars to pass. But all of this was managed with competence and grace by the volunteers and, in the end, rather than being a minus, this all contributed to the excitement.

The rest stops provided all the usual amenities, but in addition provided touches well above and beyond the usual. Case in point, the medieval musical group at our first rest stop at Burwell-Morgan Mill:

One special feature of the rest stops was that, in addition to the usual water, gatorade, bananas, oranges, and peanut butter sandwiches, some rest stops featured a unique snack specialty such as tomato sandwiches or Italian ices. The Burwell-Morgan Mill rest stop featured "fresh boiled potatoes:"

Both my son and daughter in law work in the government, and while at the first rest stop, they ran into a colleague of theirs, a completely unexpected but delightful encounter. He was also doing the 65 mile route, so the four of us chose to finish the ride together. As expected, my son and daughter-in-law had a lot in common with him and so the three of them had a lot to talk about. Less expected, so did I.  He had recently been high up in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House and I am a scientist. Not surprisingly, given where we met, he also turned out to be an avid cyclist. Between the two, he and I had plenty to talk about. To complete the participant pictures, I have added two more photographs which include me and my daughter in law.

Top, a friend of my son and daughter-in-law we met on the ride standing next to my son. Bottom left, my daughter in law and son. Bottom right, me and my son, wearing the matching Raulston Strokers jerseys he designed and had made.

The Fairview Church rest stop was roughly the half way point as well as the geographical high point of our ride. It featured food and drink, bicycle repair, and bathrooms; everything a cyclist en route could want. Depending on their very different speeds, cyclists came in and out over many hours. Furthermore, this particular rest stop was only used by those following the 65 mile route. Nonetheless, this moment in time snapshot suggests how busy it was and by implication the magnitude of the Back Roads Century.

Last, but certainly not least, is a photograph of the bike I rode. As usual, I rented this bike from the Big Wheel Bike Shop in Arlington, Virginia. The last time I got a bike from them, both the saddle and the handlebar height were a wee bit aggressive for my aging body. I had been reading on the Rivendell Bike Shop website about why I might want my handlebars high and how to achieve that. For the bikes Rivendell designs and sells, the answer is to get a larger frame size than normal. When I reserved my bike, I tried that strategy; I ordered a 54 cm frame rather than my usual 52. When I walked into the shop, the staff took one look at me and said "This is not happening, the bike you reserved is to big for you!" I explained my thinking and they explained that modern frames are not designed that way; a larger frame would have exactly the opposite effect of what I wanted. Not only did they give me a properly sized frame after I had ordered the wrong one, the bike they gave me was a better model than what I had paid for. As for the saddle, I brought my own well-broken in Brooks B17.

Although I managed to miss both of the life-defining cultural events of my youth, the Woodstock and Altamont music festivals, within the narrower world of cycling, I was fortunate enough to have attended three runnings of the Great Western Bike Rally. I feel like the Back Roads Century is on that scale, a significant event in the cycling world. I am so pleased that my son and daughter-in-law suggested we attend, and as a result, that I was able to experience this unique event. I would strongly recommend the Back Roads Century to any of you who might have the opportunity attend; you will not feel like your weekend was wasted.

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MAF Test Results

For those new to this blog, each week I am posting an update of my training results; see my previous posts for explanations of my aerobic training program, MAF tests, and this graph.

The plateau in my results continues, and as it does so, becomes more perplexing. I will be discussing this along with other training results in a future post.

Tour de Pink 2013

A few weeks ago, my wife and I rode in our third Tour de Pink. This charity ride raises money to provide mammograms for women who could not otherwise afford them, detecting breast cancer while it still can be cured. Both the entry fee as well as the donations riders are required to raise work to this admirable end.

We rode the Tour de Pink in 2011 before I started this blog, so it never got posted. We rode 47 miles that year. The ride in 2012 was interrupted by the death of a close friend, and the post I did on that ride was more about cycling around the ebb and flow of life than the ride itself, a 12 mile ride being all the situation would allow. This year, we rode 63 miles, a lifetime record for my wife. To catch up a bit, here are pictures of us from the last three years:

My wife, me, and our friend SN, at the 2011 Tour de Pink

Me and my wife at the 2012 Tour de Pink

Me and my wife at the 2013 Tour de Pink

The ride started at 7 am, dawn at this time of year in Texas. The start and finish were at the Texas A&M University Prairie View campus, about an hour northwest of Houston. There were lots of decoration and enthusiastic students cheering us on:

We rode our usual Surly Crosschecks, me with my big bag on the back to haul anything either of us might need along the way. I like propping the bikes up against each other like this, it saves finding a fence or other object against which to lean them or laying them flat on the ground, which I find kind of creepy.

Teams are a big part of this ride. In fact, in Houston's Texas Medical Center (the largest medical center in the world), a number of teams form just for this ride. The jerseys my wife and I are wearing (shown above) are for one such team, that for Houston's University of Texas Medical School. The riders below are one of the larger such teams, that from Methodist Hospital's Cancer Center:

Pink is the color of this ride, as reflected in the balloon-based sign announcing one of the rest stops:

The picture below shows one of the rest stops (called "Pit Stops" by the organizers) which are found every 10 miles or so along the route. Besides the usual bananas, oranges, and PB&J, his one featured fresh cooked mini-sausages - yum!

Almost certainly the biggest challenge for the Tour de Pink is the heat. To help combat that, all of the rest stops featured bandanas soaking in ice water. You take one out of the ice water, put it around your neck, and off you go to the next pit stop.

Another feature of the "pit stops" is bicycle repair stations manned by the local bicycle shops (LBSs). This one is run by "my" LBP, West End Bikes:

The next picture is of rider wearing one of the iced-bandanas, perusing a copy of the route map, with special attention directed toward the difference between "You Are Here" and "Finish." The various routes have stayed the same for at least the last three years, and last year I posted a scan of the route map.

And finally, the one feature no pit stop can do without, especially for us older riders:

My wife was very well prepared for this ride, the longest bike ride of her life but no preparation can completely protect you from heat. Wisely, she has decided to cap future rides at 60-some miles, but to train for speed so that she can finish before it gets too hot. All and all, a truly wonderful experience, thanks to the organizers' enthusiasm and preparedness. Thanks, gang!

MAF Test Results

I have no new MAF test results since my last post, so there is nothing to report this week.