What Does Decoupling Mean?

This graph, taken from my Garmin cycle computer, recorded on the Rice Track, probably is recording something other than classic decoupling, except perhaps at the very end. Note the relatively constant reduction of speed at a constant heart rate over the entire time of the hour and a half ride. This is something I almost always observe, but it probably reflects something other than decoupling because it happens too soon; classic decoupling normally appears after a couple of hours of riding. The fall off in speed seems to accelerate at the very end of the ride, which might be decoupling. I do not know what the relatively constant fall off in speed vs heart rate is, but one guess is that it is due to heat. This ride, like many of my rides, starts early in the morning to avoid the heat, and the temperature rises significantly over the course of the ride.

A frustration I have reading the training literature is that it seems that nobody puts all the facts together in logical order in one place. I feel like I pick up a fact here, a fact there, and it is only months later that I can start putting all the pieces together and make sense of it. Such is the case with decoupling. A brief description of decoupling is as follows: My heart rate is normally determined by the intensity at which I exercise. If I ride my bicycle on a flat course (e.g. the Rice Track) with no wind, the faster I ride, the higher my heart rate is. If I ride at a steady speed, my heart rate stays constant, at least for a while. However, after some period of time at that steady pace, my heart rate will start to increase. This phenomenon is called decoupling. How quickly decoupling occurs is used as a measure of endurance. The longer I can ride before my heart rate increases, the more endurance I have. But, despite having read a number of well respected training manuals, it is only now, after years of research, I feel like I am beginning to get a sense of what causes it.

There a lot of indicators I can use while training to let me know if I am training at my intended level of intensity. I can monitor how I feel; if my legs feel sore or if I am breathing heavily, for example. This is sometimes referred to as Relative Perceived Exertion (RPE). I can monitor my speed using my Garmin cycle computer. Of course, the meaning of that speed is influenced by many factors: whether I are going uphill or downhill, the intensity and direction of the wind, and which bicycle I ride to name but a few. I could remove many of these variables by using the output of a power meter instead of speed to measure how much effort I am expending, but power meters cost more than I am willing to spend (in the ballpark of $1,000). And finally, I can monitor my heart rate.

Speed and heart rate are two different ways to measure the intensity of a ride. Both are affected by issues other than the intensity of the ride, so can be misleading. However, in both cases, if I stay aware of these other factors, I can allow for them and avoid being misled. Because heart rate and speed reflect somewhat different things, more information can be gathered by comparing them than by looking at either one by itself. In fact, I have used comparison of speed and heart rate many times on this blog. That is, after all, what a MAF test is. After warming up, I ride on the Rice Track which is flat and contains no traffic or stops, keeping my heart rate between 130 to 140 beats per minute, and measure my average speed over 45 minutes. If I am off the bike for two months or so, I return to a low level of fitness and that speed may be as low as 12 miles per hour. If I am at my peak fitness, that speed can be over 16 miles per hour. Another way I have used this comparison is to note not just the average speed, but how that average changes over time; is the average speed for the second half of a ride significantly slower than for the first, for example? If they are almost the same, then heart rate and speed are coupled. If they are significantly different, then heart rate and speed are decoupled. What would cause these two factors to become decoupled over the course of a ride?

Answering this question is difficult. It would seem that muscle fatigue must be involved, but much less is known about muscle fatigue than I would have expected. As recently as 2010, the our whole understanding of what limits aerobic exercise was turned upside down (European Journal of Applied Physiology (2010) Volume 109 Pages 763-770; explanation here.) I hope to return to this topic later, but for now, I suggest we consider some aspects of muscle fatigue to be an observation without explanation, it happens and we don't know why. However, one part of muscle fatigue is well understood, and that one is important; glycogen depletion. To to explain how this contributes to decoupling, I have to talk about two¹ different kinds of muscle fibers, fast twitch and slow twitch,and the fuels that they can use.

The names fast twitch and slow twitch refer to technical aspects of the electrophysiology of these different kinds of muscle fibers; it is only coincidence that fast twitch muscle fibers are used when I ride fast, and slow twitch when I ride slow. Fast twitch muscle fibers are very strong but tire quickly. They are used in a sprint, for example. Slow twitch muscle fibers are relatively weak, but can keep going for hours. They are used in a long bike ride. Both fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers can use glucose as a fuel. This glucose can either come from glycogen stored in the muscle fiber itself or from the blood, which mostly comes from food I eat. However, the glucose from glycogen can be provided much more quickly than glucose from blood; no matter how much I eat, I will have to slow down when my muscle glycogen is gone. In addition to glucose, slow twitch muscle fibers can use fat as fuel. (Fast twitch muscle fibers cannot use fat, they can only use glucose.) Again, this is a slower process and turns out not to be all that directly relevant to decoupling, but does have an indirect effect, discussed at the end of this post. The final, key point is that glycogen cannot be shared between muscle fibers. When fast twitch fibers run out of glycogen, they cannot borrow from slow twitch fibers, and vice versa.

It turns out that the rate of availability of different kinds of fuels is a major contributor to decoupling. If I am riding at a relatively slow pace, it will primarily be my slow twitch muscle fibers pushing the pedals. However, after a couple of hours, the glycogen in my slow twitch muscle fibers will be used up. These fibers can continue working using blood glucose or fat, but not at the same rate; fast twitch muscle fibers will have to make up the difference. The problem is, fast twitch muscle fibers are stronger but less efficient than slow twitch muscle fibers; my heart will have to beat faster to accomplish the same amount of work, resulting in decoupling.

I had always assumed that there are mechanisms for fatigue of slow twitch muscle fibers other than glycogen exhaustion, but truth be told, I do not know if there are or are not. However, if there are, they should play an almost identical role in decoupling as glycogen exhaustion. Once slow twitch muscles loose their ability to function at the same level, fast twitch fibers will be called upon to pick up the slack and their lower efficiency will result in decoupling.

The above explains "classic" decoupling, where after some period of riding, heart beat rises with no increase in effort. There are other situations where heartbeat is higher than expected for a given level of exercise. Three conditions, besides fatigue, that can cause this are emotional upset, dehydration, and heat. Heat turns out to be very important, as is the correct response to the decoupling created by heat. If one is competing in a race and attempts to maintain constant speed under conditions of high heat, one will "run out of steam" by the end of the race. Rather, one should maintain constant heart rate and allow speed to drop.

If "classic" decoupling is a measure of endurance, and endurance is something I am trying to train, what are the changes in my physiology that occur during training to improve my endurance, to delay decoupling? I'm think it is highly likely that these effects are not yet completely understood, but here are two that I think are fairly well established. First, the amount of glycogen stored in my slow twitch muscle fibers will increase. This will allow me to ride for a longer period of time before that glycogen is exhausted and decoupling begins. Second, my slow twitch muscle fibers will become "better" at using fat as a fuel. Fat will never be able to completely substitute for glycogen, but the more efficiently it can be used, the more it will slow down the use of glycogen, making it last longer.

So who cares? I do, but not because I expect any of this to improve my fitness. I care because I am curious. I like to understand why my body behaves the way it does when I ride and when I train. That said, I firmly believe that our current understanding of normal muscle physiology is woefully lacking, and that as a result, we are far from being able to design a training routine based on theoretical considerations. That is why I am such a fan of coaches like Joe Friel. I think the years of experience that the best coaches have provide a much better basis for designing a training program than the kinds of theoretical understandings discussed in this post. Finally, I think for the kind of cycling I want to do and the goals that I have, training is not all that complicated; "just ride" is probably pretty good advice. Still, trying to figure this stuff out, while not all that useful, I find to be a great deal of fun.

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1) There are more than two kinds of muscle fibers, there are at least three, but my simplified explanation is adequate for this post.

Bike Lame

Clearly, this is social commentary, but what is it saying? That bikes are lame, they shouldn't be on this road? That bike lanes are lame? That the absence of a bike lane on this road is lame? Who knows? This photo was taken just outside of the town of Point Reyes Station in California.

There is a heated debate within the cycling community about the best infrastructure to support cycling. Some argue for the construction of bike lanes and bike paths, so that we can have a protected space where we can ride without having to contend with automobiles. Others within our community feel this is a tragic mistake; that bike lanes and bike paths actually make us less safe, that we should ride in the same lanes as motor vehicles. What most of us agree on is that where bike lanes do not exist (e.g. most places), bicycles should be free to use the same roads as motorists, and that motorists should behave in ways that are safe and courteous. For example, most of us bemoan the passion with which many motorists feel that they need to immediately pass every cyclist they see; we wish they would show a little patience and to wait to pass until safe. That said, most of us cyclists are also motorists, and thus have the opportunity to see things from the other person's perspective. Thus was our recent experience when vacationing in Point Reyes, California.

Point Reyes is just north of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and what makes it so attractive is that in stark contrast to the teeming megapolis to the south, the Point Reyes area is very quiet and rural. To that end, it would make no sense to shatter it with high speed freeways, and thus the major freeway in the area, Highway 101, lies well to the east. What that means is that Point Reyes can only be accessed via narrow, winding, country roads. Point Reyes is a major tourist destination, encouraged in part by the location therein of Point Reyes National Seashore (a real treat!) On the one hand, it would be a shame if folks did not appreciate and use this beautiful recreation opportunity. On the other, the success of Point Reyes as a tourist destination means that these narrow, winding country roads are heavy with traffic; automobiles, of course, but a plethora of bicycles as well. Because of the circumstances of this visit, I traversed these roads by automobile only. And as much as I wanted to celebrate my fellow cyclists without reservation, I found myself in what seemed to be an insoluble dilemma. It goes like this:

The speed limit on many of these roads is 55 mph. Due to the hilly terrain, the roads go up and down as well as wind around the hills, and as a result, there is no legal place to pass; there are double yellow lines for mile after mile. Many of the roads have no shoulders whatsoever. And, as noted above, they are heavily travelled. So what happened when I encountered a cyclist? In theory, I should slow to the speed of the cyclist and follow them thereafter, for as many miles as necessary. If I had done that, I would have been the only driver to do so and would have, in my opinion, created a very dangerous situation. So, in practice, I did what everyone else did, the cyclists being full participants in this illegal and unsafe ballet. The cyclist would cringe as far to the right on the narrow road as possible. I would slow down as much as possible. I would pass, leaving as much room for the cyclist as I could while trying to cross over the double yellow line as little as possible. Although passing is unsafe and illegal everywhere as indicated by the double yellow lines, I would try to pass at the least unsafe place I could find. Having done all that, I probably passed closer to the cyclist than the law allows and I certainly crossed over the double yellow line in violation of the law. Post all the caustic comments you like, I am 100% convinced I had no other realistic choice, and certainly this is the community standard for these roads, agreed-upon by both the cyclists and the drivers.

Am I saying that cyclists do not belong on these roads? Absolutely not! And even if I did, I would be in conflict with the State of California which posts "share the road" signs on these roads, along with numbered bike route signs. I believe that some of the roads to which I refer are part of Adventure Cycling's routes, and this I find very discouraging. I have a long term dream of taking a tour of the United States using the Adventure Cycling routes, and now having seen what roads these routes use, I would be unwilling to ride on them. What I am saying is that all of us, the State of California, Adventure Cycling, the cyclists, the drivers, need to admit that we have created an impossible situation, and to develop and implement a realistic solution. Of course, this is not just a problem in California. I have cycled on roads here in Texas that have many of the same problems.

So what is the solution? It would be arrogant to think I had the answer, but I do have some thoughts. Being the scientist I am, my first reaction is always to gather more facts. Implicit in everything I have said so far is the assumption that it is dangerous to put bicycles moving at 10 to 20 mph in the same lane with automobiles moving at 55 mph, but is that true? My son, the Google data scientist, was with me on this trip and cited a study showing that when the speed limit on freeways was set too low, the mixture of drivers who drove at a faster but still safe speed with those drivers who felt compelled to follow the speed limit created more accidents than if the speed limit were raised so that everyone drove at the same, fast speed. When I looked into these studies, they were less than ideal. In addition, what may be true for motor vehicles moving at mixed speeds may or may not apply to a mixture of fast motor vehicles and slow bicycles; unbiased, well designed studies are needed, and they need to be extended to study what happens when bicycles and motor vehicles mix. Many related questions can be asked. To what extent does the risk of mixing slow bicycles and fast cars depend on the level of traffic? To what extent is risk reduced by a wide shoulder/bicycle lane? On roads where passing is dangerous, how effective would periodic pullouts be where slow traffic such as bicycles could temporarily pull out of traffic to allow faster vehicles to pass? What would be the optimum spacing of such pullouts? The cost of various options would have to be considered as well.

I follow Houston Critical Mass on Facebook, and there are voices there who believe the answer is to lower the speed limit. To be effective on the roads I am describing, I suspect that the speed limit would have to be lowered from the current 55 mph to something like 25 mph. Thinking about the situation around Point Reyes, this would certainly cause considerable consternation among the locals who have lived and worked in this area their whole lives and whose ability to function would be significantly degraded. But that aside, if this were to work, strict enforcemen would be essential or the new speed limits would be ignored. In anticipation of hard facts, my preferred solution is wide, paved shoulders. Whether these are shoulders or bike lines is to a large extent a matter of signage. Certainly motor vehicles should not drive on these shoulders, they should be reserved for emergencies (e.g. breakdowns) and for unpowered, slower vehicles such as bicycles. My intuition tells me that this would increase safety not only by providing a safe way for motor vehicles to pass bicycles but also providing a way to get broken down vehicles out of the traffic lane. What I do know for certain is that the status quo is unacceptable. What do you think?

Addendum: A few days after I posted this, my son and daughter in law posted about their experiences bicycling in China. One post in particular put the post above into perspective. Everything is relative; as dangerous as I found some of the roads in California, they are safety personified compared to what my son and daughter in law experienced in China.

Good Bye, Dad

Me, receiving the flag that had been covering Dad's casket, from one of the representatives of the United States Navy who honored Dad by participating in his funeral.

A recurring theme of this blog is that life is complicated and sometimes difficult, and that it often gets in the way of cycling. Over the last few years, I have spend a considerable amount of time in California taking care of my parents. Mom died before my first blog post, so her care did not receive much mention here. In contrast, visits to Dad were frequently mentioned¹. Sadly, I will never have the privilege of mentioning them again, because Dad died a few weeks ago. We had a lovely funeral service for him, beginning with a military burial at the Sacramento National Cemetery followed by a luncheon where we all shared stories about Dad. One of my stories concerned cycling, and I thought it would be appropriate to share it here.

How Dad Taught Me to Be a Bicycle Racer

My Dad was a gifted athlete. Despite being somewhat short, he was a highly successful basketball player in high school, in college, and in The Navy. That being the case, I always worried that it might have made him sad to have had as a son one of the most untalented athletes on the planet. Eventually, I did find my sport, bicycling, and even got to be rather good at it, but even that began somewhat inauspiciously.

The story starts when I was in elementary school. Most kids, when they get their first bike, ride for a few weeks with training wheels, not really using them, and quickly thereafter, head off down the road on two wheels. Not me. I wore out my training wheels, and when Dad finally had no choice but to take them off, all I could do with my bike was fall over. Dad's solution to that was to start me out at the beginning of our driveway, and to use a piece of chalk to mark the spot where I fell over. Thereafter, my goal became to get past that spot before falling over again, at which point, Dad would move the line and I would now attempt the surpass the new, harder goal. Despite the lack of promise this evidenced, Dad kept at it and eventually taught me to ride a bike.

Fast forward a few years to High School, and I had taken up bicycle racing. Despite the fact that this is perhaps the most boring sport on the planet to watch, Dad was an enthusiastic participant, driving me and the other members of The Modesto Roadmen all over Northern California to race. I remember him telling me "Never play by the other guy's rules." I had no idea what he was talking about at the time, but I now realize that bicycle racing is highly strategic and that the winner of a race is often the guy who makes the other riders ride his race.

If you know anything about bicycle racing, you know that falling off your bike is a big part of it. I remember one race where I was involved in a particularly nasty crash near the finish. Back in those days, we didn't wear the hard, plastic helmets of today, but thin strips of lightly padded leather, so I was pretty shook up and disoriented by the crash. By the time we got home, I had recovered and was able to tell Mom all about it. I regaled her with tales of abrasions and lacerations and finished with "...but after all that, I still would have been able to finish if some fat old man hadn't pulled me off the course!" At this point, Dad cleared his throat and said, with remarkable calm, "I pulled you off the course, David." He had been protecting me from being struck by the riders behind. Dad was not old then, though he eventually got old, and unlike me, Dad never got fat. However, he also never gave a thought to the unpromising material he had to work with, but gave of himself without reserve so that I might develop the love of a sport which I am still enjoying today, sixty years later.

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Footnotes:

1) Posts mentioning trips to California to care for Dad:

• Sep 27, 2014: Hanging It Up
• Jan 13, 2015: Faster, Higher, Stronger
• Mar 23, 2015: To BART and Back
• Jun 17, 2015: Training or Exercise?

The Billion Kilowatt Dam

Hoover Dam, an hydroelectric dam with a capacity of two billion kilowatts. Picture courtesy Wikipedia.

"High Hopes" is a song first popularized by Frank Sinatra, now a staple of childrens' television, that preaches the power of positive thinking. In the narrative of this song, a ram decides to knock down a hydroelectric dam roughly the size of Hoover Dam. Because he has "high hopes", he succeeds despite the apparent impossibility of the task; in the words of the song, "there goes a billion kilowatt dam." Being the dour and humorless person that I am, my thoughts immediately jump to an astonished and terrified ram in the spit second before he is crushed by the concrete fragments of the ruptured dam, the young children playing downstream from the dam, looking up to see the wall of water about to crush their fragile bodies into lifelessness, and the many lives that would certainly be lost as a consequence of the loss of a billion kilowatts of power from the power grid. I see the ram not as a hero, but as a terrorist.

But perhaps it is I, not the ram, who is the villain of this post. There is exactly zero chance that a ram could contribute to, much less cause, the failure of Hoover Dam; the young children in this post are at no risk from the ram.  On the other hand, they is at real risk of having me ruin a perfectly nice and life-affirming song for them. So what's my problem? It's not that I don't believe that positive thinking is a good thing. As a card carrying member of the medical research community, I am appropriately skeptical and ask for the same carefully controlled clinical trials documenting the power of positive thinking as I would for any prescription. That said, the evidence that people with a positive attitude are healthier than those who have a negative attitude has been pretty convincingly demonstrated. No less an authority than the Mayo Clinic has very specific recommendations for attempting to cultivate a positive mental attitude. Given that, does it make sense for the ram to have a positive attitude ("high hopes") and just go at the dam? And what does any of this have to do with cycling?

Where the life of the fictitious ram and my bicycling intersect is in the confusion I have had about what was realistic for me to accomplish in cycling. When I was in my cycling prime, back in the 1960s, I was not bad as a bicycle racer, but I was nothing special. I had fun, stayed with the pack in a lot of races, occasionally surprised the leaders by winning an intermediate sprint, but never became one of those leaders. I confess I was not all that diligent, however, so I don't really know what my potential was back then. Forty years later was a different story. I read books on training, followed them carefully, and prepared for a career as a randonneur¹, but it was not to be. I found I was capable of one 200K brevet a year, but that was about my limit. It wasn't just my age that was holding be back, there are plenty of randonneurs in their 60s and even there 70s. It may not even have anything to do with age; is actually possible that had I attempted randonneuring in my prime I would have discovered the same limitations. What is clearly true is that when I followed training plans that allowed others to complete a 200K, 300K, 400k, 600K brevet series and then complete a 1200K grand randonnée, I would find myself exhausted after the first ride. Can I prove that I could not have done more if I had tried harder? Of course not, that is not the kind of thing that can be proven, practically speaking anyway. Do I believe it with all my heart? I do.

So what is my point? My point is, might it be possible, and if so, might it be useful and/or fun to include in training plans indicators as to what the highest level of performance you can expect in that sport, the facets of that sport in which you might be most successful, and what other sports you might want to try? Not surprisingly, I believe that such indicators are possible, useful, and fun. In fact, I feel like Joe Friel's "Cyclist's Training Bible" has most of the pieces needed to do just that, they only need to be connected. I will discuss the science and practicalities of such indicators in future posts, I wish to reserve this post for a discussion of their desirability.

So, the bottom line is, supposing I am as brevet-challenged as I claim I am. Would I be better off knowing that, and living within my limitations, or would I be better off being like the dam-hating ram, trying and failing to be the brevet rider I never can be, over and over and over again? My gut tells me the former: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." What do you think?

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1) Randonnering is a kind of cycling where completing a distance within a fixed period of time is the challenge. This ranges from completing 200 kilometers (124 miles) in 13.5 miles to completing 1200 kilometers (about 750 miles) in 90 hours, just under 4 days.

Deconstructing the Bible

...The Cyclist's Training Bible that is. (After all, this is a cycling blog.)

Between my restart of cycling in 2008 and when I started preparing for a brevet in 2012, I did no formal training whatsoever. (See the bottom of the post for a definition of brevet, as well as other terms.) I rode where I could, when I could, trying to ride more miles at a faster pace than I had in the past, but that was it. I first started formal training in 2012 to prepare for my first 200 kilometer brevet. I based my training on "The Complete Book of Long-Distance Cycling." The training schedule therein called for one brisk day a week, but all they said about what brisk meant was "riding faster than your century speed" (the speed at which I would ride a 100 mile ride.) My brisk ride was to ride as fast as I could for an hour, which more or less meant a 17 mile ride. Over the three plus years between then and now, I have done a lot of reading about and experimenting with training. At the beginning of this process, I was skeptical about the value of brisk workouts; my impression was that what got me ready for my first brevet were the weekly long rides. More recently, I have come to appreciate the value of a brisk ride, especially during the brutal Houston summers when long rides are difficult to complete. However, that appreciation raises the question of what constitutes an effective brisk ride?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you might be wondering what I mean by "effective" about now. Effective for what? For months, I have been complaining that I had lost my focus, that I didn't know what I was training for. Ignore all that for the purposes of this post. Although life events have made it unlikely that I will be riding a brevet any time soon, I have been structuring my training based on the assumption that some day I will once again be attempting long rides. So, the training referred to in this post is training for long (100+ mile) rides.

Even before I began formal training, I rode some brisk rides on the Rice Track. In retrospect, I think I was more trying to figure out something to do with that track than thinking about training, but in any case, I hit upon the plan of riding 10 iterations of 1 fast lap, with each fast lap separated by a slow lap. Nobody recommended this particular pattern of intervals to me, I just made it up as something to try. After my first brevet, when I was experimenting with training, I tried, as my brisk ride, riding for 30 minutes as fast as possible; a 30 minute time trial. Joe Friel, author of The Cyclist's Training Bible (hereafter, The Bible) was the inspiration for that. He argued that heart rate training should be conducted in reference to one's lactate threshold, and the heart rate corresponding to lactate threshold could easily and accurately be determined by measuring one's average heart rate for the last 20 minutes of a 30 minute time trial. Thus, a training ride and a test ride became one and the same. Last summer, I spent some time riding with a friend who had his own ideas about training, and we did workouts consisting of a somewhat random mix of 1 minute, 3 minute, and longer intervals. When my friend stopped riding, my obsessive tendencies took over, and I converted this to a "pyramid" consisting of 1, 2, 3, 2, and 1 lap intervals. I suspect the details of how a brisk ride is done do not matter all that much, and John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach say as much in their book Distance Cycling:
"...one way of doing intensity work isn't better than another as long as you ride hard, get your heart rate up, and have a little fun..."
I suspect it doesn't matter, but I have this nagging feeling that if there is one wrong way to do it, a way that never even occurred to John and Dan, I might find it. Besides, during Houston's long, hot summer, I am trying to use brisk rides to partially substitute for the long rides, and maybe in this context it does matter. So I turned to my most trusted training author's definitive book, The Bible. When I previously blogged about The Bible, I concluded that, because I was so far from its target audience, it did not have much to offer me, but promised that I would keep an open mind. I also admitted in that post that this book was so vast I did not feel like I had mastered it, and further study suggests I was right. My progress in that endeavor is the subject of this post.

The Bible is written for bicycle racers (which I am not). A number of different strengths and skills are needed to win a bicycle race. You have to have Endurance to make it to the end of the race. You have to have Strength to keep up on the hills and mount an effective sprint at the end. And of course you have to be Fast. Joe Friel claims that these strengths can be summed up by three basic abilities; Endurance, Force, and Speed Skills, and three advanced abilities; Muscular Endurance, Anaerobic Endurance, and Power. I have no interest in sprinting, but I have an intense interest in Endurance and I do need to make it up any hills along the way, which requires Muscular Endurance. I probably have no need to ride anaerobically at all, but I do find it fun to be able to do this at the Rice Track, so Anaerobic Endurance seemed like something I might enjoy working on. I went back and looked at Joe's training suggestions as to how to increase these factors. In my first reading of The Bible, I gave the appendices short shrift; the length of the book had exhausted me by the time I got to them. That was a big mistake; the heart of this book is Appendix C, Workout Menu, in which Joe lists the specific training rides to be used to work on the various abilities. So this time I went to Appendix C to look for rides to work on Endurance, Muscular Endurance, and Anaerobic Endurance. Sadly, Joe says the only way to work on Endurance is long rides, so no help there. However, earlier in the book, he does suggest how I might make best use of my summer months; by using them for Reverse Linear Periodization.

Joe is a big fan of periodization. Bicycle racing is all about speed, so the normal cycle of periodization is to first build endurance, and then as the race season approaches, build speed on top of that. In his section on Periodization Alternatives, however, he talks about Reverse Linear Periodization, a model that "works best for athletes training for long, steady events such as century or even double-century rides." That's me! In the reverse linear periodization model, one first builds speed and then later builds endurance. This seems to be exactly what I am looking for. During the hot, summer months, I can work on speed, and then when the vagaries of life allow me to pursue longer rides, build endurance with a few, well chosen long rides.

So, at long last, this brings me to the point of the post. What training rides does Joe recommend for building speed (Muscular Endurance and Anaerobic Endurance)? To build Anaerobic Endurance, Joe recommends a pyramid of intervals, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, and 1 minute, a scaled-up version of my most common brisk ride. Given my dramatically lower capabilities compared to Joe's target audience, I feel like I am right on target for this one. For building Muscular Endurance, he recommends something equivalent to the 30 minute time trial , which I am already doing, but also something he calls Cruise Intervals; 3 to 5 repeats of 6 to 12 minute intervals ridden at the boundary between Zones 4 and 5, with 2 to 3 minutes in Zone 2 in between. Again, my athletic potential is way below Joe's target audience, I need to scale this back to something I might actually be able to do. Also, it is easier for me to keep track of the intervals if I convert "minutes" to "laps on the Rice Track". So, what I thought I might try is 3 intervals, with each interval being 6 laps long, with a two lap rest between each interval. Based on what I have come up with for doing my other brisk workouts, I would start with 15 minutes in Zone 2 to warm up, and when the intervals were done, continue riding in Zone 2 for a total ride time of 45 minutes. (This is in addition to another 20 minutes each way, ridden in Zone 1, to get to and from the Rice Track.) Will this be something I can manage? Will it help my speed and prepare me for long rides in the future? Stay tuned.

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Brevet: a long distance challenge ride, part of the sport of randonneuring. These come in distances of 200, 300, 400, 600, 1000, and 1200 kilometers, though only the shorter rides are an option for me. (These distances correspond to about 125, 185, 250, 370 and 750 miles.)

Century: A ride 100 miles (or for a Metric Century, 100 kilometers) in length.

Intervals: A training routine where you alternate between short, fast rides and easy rides during which you rest up for the next interval.

Time Trial: a bike ride where the rider rides alone to either ride a fixed distance as quickly as possible or ride as many miles as possible within a fixed time period.

Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3, Zone 4, and Zone 5: Levels of effort. I use my heart rate monitor to help me determine which Zone I am in. Zone 1 is very easy, Zone 2 fairly easy, Zone 3 somewhat hard, Zone 4 very hard, and Zone 5 is an all out sprint.

The Agony of an Indoor Trainer

My bike set up on the trainer so I can use the TV to try and fight trainer boredom. This did not work. Note that my trusty Surly is sporting fenders from the 1970s. Unlike the TV&Trainer, these work very well.

"...you have to consider the mental factor of riding indoors. Even the most mentally strong individuals, will eventually reach a breaking point when riding inside." O’Brien Forbes, Your Indoor Trainer: To Use but Not Abuse, TrainingPeaks.com.

Almost a year ago, I purchased a bicycle trainer. I blogged at the time:
So what am I doing about [my lack of enthusiasm for cycling in the summer]? ... I just bought myself a cycle trainer: I figure it is one more way to ride, a way not affected by weather. I have heard that these make the Rice Bike Track seem interesting by comparison so it is not a panacea, but I am hoping that every little bit helps.

So how is the cycle trainer working out? It has turned out to be far from useless, but equally far from what I hoped it would be. Since purchasing it, I have used it six times, my wife has used it once or twice, and my son used it quite a bit during his recent visit. (I will only be blogging about my uses.) Here are the problems:

1. It is unbelievably boring.
2. It is incredibly hot.

I purchased this trainer in response to my lack of enthusiasm for long rides during the hot, Houston summer. I was eager to try it out, so a few weeks after it arrived, in mid-July, I cranked up my air conditioning as low as it would go, and started riding. It was unbearably hot - hotter than if I just did a ride outside. The reason for this is that a bicycle ridden outside generates its own breeze that makes the temperature feel much cooler than it is; 70 degrees (Fahrenheit), indoors, on a trainer, felt hotter than 90 degrees, outdoors, in a cycling-generated breeze. I considered setting up a fan to generate an artificial breeze, but in the end, it was November before I tried the trainer again, this time, in the garage, with the doors open. The reason to ride the trainer then was that it was raining. If overheating was an issue for that ride, I did not record it in my training log. I rode again in January when it was raining and 40 degrees. This rather low temperature (for Houston) gave me the opportunity to experiment with temperature control. When I started warming up, I was quite cold, needing to wear sweatpants and a fleece jacket. As I increased my speed, my body temperature increased dramatically and I removed clothes until I was riding in shorts and a short sleeve jersey. When I slowed down at the end of the workout, my temperature dropped, and I found myself putting on the sweatpants and fleece again. To combat boredom, I played Toby Keith, which helped but did not completely eliminate the boredom.

I rode once more in January, but then it was March before I rode again. This time, I tried riding in front of the TV to see if I could create a tedium free ride. I am a huge TV addict, so I had a dream of turning my addiction into a force for good. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Although I did a relatively easy workout, the workout required enough of my attention so as to spoil the TV experience. I guess I will just have to rely on Toby Keith for boredom control. Although this ride was indoors, I opened doors and windows and relied on natural weather to keep the temperature down. The room was at about 65 degrees, which was much too hot, even for this easy workout. Later that month, I did a ride outdoors where it was 60 degrees, and noted this was about as hot as it could be for a reasonably comfortable ride on the trainer. From all these experiences, I estimate that at a moderate exertion level, my trainer is about 20 degrees warmer than the same ride on the road.

Kinds of Workouts

I have tried a couple of different kinds of workouts on the trainer. Of the six rides, two were moderately easy rides, holding my heart rate at the top of Zone 2, and four were some kind of intervals. For those that are interested in this kind of thing, I recorded my highest heart rate ever while on the trainer; 187 beats per minute. This is mostly interesting as a demonstration of how far my heart rate deviates from the average for a person my age (161 beats per minute), and, by example, how much people differ one from another.

Joe Friel recommends trainers as a good way to work on cadence, to learn how to spin the pedals as quickly as possible. To accomplish that, one would rider the trainer using a low gear and focus on pedal speed. This is something I hope to try in the future. Back when I was a kid, in the 1960s, there were not a lot of trainers around. Rather, people trained indoors using rollers:

Courtesy Wikipedia.

There are two major differences between rollers and a trainer:

1. A trainer supplies resistance to the rear wheel so that one can mimic the effort of a ride on the road and get a relatively normal workout. Rollers have very little resistance. They can be used to build rhythm and smoothness (and are good for warming up), but not for building strength.
2. A trainer holds the bike firmly in place, the rider has to do very little to keep the bike upright. On rollers, one is actually balancing the bike, just like on the road. It is actually a bit more difficult to stay upright on rollers than it is on the road because you are always at risk of steering off the sides of the rollers.

If I were to take Joe Friel's advice and work on my cadence, I would prefer to do so using rollers rather than my trainer. I simply find rollers more fun and natural feeling. Rollers are much less expensive than a trainer, less than $100 compared to over $300, so my wife notwithstanding, purchasing a set of rollers would be only a modest indulgence.

Trainer Review

The trainer I purchased, a Kinetic by Kurt Road Machine Fluid Trainer, comes highly recommended. I have had no troubles with the device and would happily recommend it to anyone. I do not find that it closely mimics riding on the road, rather, that it is an artificial-feeling experience. Specifically, riding on a trainer captures none of the joy of a bike ride. I do not know if other trainers would be better in this regard, but my intuition tells me that they would not. I think the whole concept of an indoor trainer "is what it is" and that this one does it as well as any, better than most.

Summary

I am not sorry that I purchased my trainer, but so far, it has been a pretty expensive way to get in a bit more training. It has been an utter failure as a solution to the problem for which I purchased it, a way to continue training during Houston's long, hot summers; I do not expect to use it again until well into next fall. That said, I hope to use it to solve a different problem. Next winter, I plan to use it when it is too cold or too wet to ride; to allow me to maintain a more even training schedule than I have managed during previous winters. Stay tuned to find out how that works.

Backwards

What's wrong with this picture? The rider is riding the Rice Track clockwise, that's what! Compare it to this picture from an earlier post:

I have the strong impression that my cycling record keeping was less reliable at the beginning of my restart than it is now. When I look back at my records from 2009, for example, I feel like there were a lot of rides that never got recorded. The upshot is that, although the first record I have of a ride on the Rice Track is in August of 2011, I am pretty sure that my first ride was in 2008 or 2009. I have this vague memory of wondering what the right direction to ride was, or if it mattered. I think I decided on counter-clockwise because that is what I saw another rider doing, but whether that was my first ride or later, I cannot recall. In any case, for at least four years, and probably a lot longer, I have been riding regularly on the Rice Track, and I had never seen anyone ride it clockwise. Until a few days ago.

Back when I first started riding the Rice Track, it was very lightly used; I would usually ride it alone. Over time, usage seems to have increased. It is still not at all busy, but more often than not, I encounter other riders. Also, usage on weekends is heavier than weekdays. All of that said, when I went out to the track last Saturday, given that I was arriving at 6:30 am, I assumed I would be the only rider out there. As I approached the track, I saw that was not to be. I first saw the other riders from afar, and assumed that my perspective was off. Although it seemed that they were riding clockwise, I assumed I must be confusing the far side of the track rather with the near. But as I drew closer, the terrible truth forced itself upon me; there were three riders on the track going around the wrong way! I hesitated for a moment, but quickly realized that trying to ride "against the flow" was madness, I simply had to join the crowd.

Circling the track the wrong way was remarkably disorienting. It also made me feel guilty and unclean. Often, I will be the "last rider left standing" on the track as most other riders seem to have shorter workouts than I do, so I schemed to reverse directions once the other riders left, but fate decreed otherwise. My hopes rose as first one rider left, and then another. The third rider, however, seemed to be as diligent as I, and kept circling. As he past me (most riders on the Rice Track pass me), I asked him "Why are we going around the track the wrong way?" "Well, that's the way they were riding when I got here" he replied. "In five years, I have never seen this happen" I said. "I have, once before" said he. Since it seemed he was sticking around, I figured that the next time he passed me, I would suggest a direction reversal, but then a revealing event happened: another rider joined us, and we were stuck once again. Clearly, once a direction is set, it will be maintained so long as new riders join the group quickly enough to prevent the track from ever being empty. Once again, three riders circled the track in the wrong direction, any opportunity for a correction was lost. Shortly after, yet another joined. The most recent joinee seemed particularly disoriented by the wrong way cycling, but after weaving around in the center of the track for a while, she gave in and joined the clockwise procession. One left and then there were three, and soon it was time for me to leave as well. As I was exiting the track, one of the remaining two chose to leave at the same time, so I stopped him, took a few pictures, and then as the last rider on the track (pictured at the top of the post) came around, we yelled at her: "The track is all yours. You can turn around now." And she did. Order was restored at last.

It is well known that I am compulsive. Is there any reason for me to think that my counter-clockwise preference is any different from my insistence that all dairy be on one shelf in our refrigerator or that coffee cups need to be arranged by color? I did some research, and the results were suggestive but not definitive. The Rice Track is not a velodrome (it has no banking on the corners) but I felt that if velodromes mandated counter-clockwise cycling, then I could argue that the Rice Track should be the same. The Wikipedia article on velodromes does not mention a required direction, nor does the UCI rules on track cycling. However, Google searching turned up the websites of velodrome after velodrome, all of them stating that riding was restricted to a counter-clockwise direction. So there.