Roadmen Reunion

All the former Modesto Roadmen who attended the 50th Reunion (plus one).

Back Row: Michael Haack*, Tom Woods, Roger Farschon, Stacy Dull, Paul Robinson.

Front Row: John Campopiano, Jeff Cowdrey, David Steffen, Eldon Rosenow.

* Michael Haack is not a former Modesto Roadmen, but former member of Mach Schnell, another club active in Modesto during the 1960's.

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the cycling I did back in the 1960s in Modesto, California, riding with a club called the Modesto Roadmen. I cannot remember when this club was founded, it could have been as early as 1963 or as late as 1965. I had my last contact with the Modesto Roadmen in 1969, at the Great Western Bicycle Rally. Last, that is, until I was telephoned by a fellow member, Paul Robinson, in 2008. It was Paul's telephone call that inspired me to restart cycling. (I believe it similarly inspired Paul.) Besides cycling, Paul's call also inspired me to reconnect with the former Modesto Roadmen. Over time, one by one, I managed to reconnect to nine or ten of them. As 2008 ground onwards towards 2016, a dream started to grow of having a 50th reunion. But if we don't know when the club was founded, how can there be a 50th reunion? Simple, by picking some Modesto Roadmen event that occurred in 1966 and build the reunion around that. There were two candidates, the first Mountain Loop, and the first running of the Tour de Graceada. The 50th anniversary of the first Mountain Loop came and went with no reunion, but not the 50th anniversary of the Tour de Graceada. The Tour de Graceada was the annual ABLA-sanctioned sponsored by the Modesto Roadmen. (ABLA is Amateur Bicycle League of America, predecessor to today's USA Cycling.) It was first held on September 11, 1966. So a plan was hatched. One of the former members, John Campopiano, lives a few blocks from the park around which the Tour de Graceada was held. He invited us all to meet at his house with our bikes, to take a symbolic lap or two around the park, and then hang out at his place for brunch and memories. And that is what we did, on September 11, 2016, 50 years to the day after the first running of the Tour de Graceada.

Some of us are married, some of us are not. At least one of us has a girlfriend. Yes, there were female members of the Modesto Roadmen (despite our sexist name), but sadly, we were unable to find any of them for the reunion. Of the four Significant Others attending, three are pictured below:

Left to right: Roger's wife, Jan; Tom's girlfriend, Joann; John's wife, Wendy. David's wife, Agi, is not pictured as she was the photographer. All photographs in this blog post were taken by her.

Once everyone had arrived, we all jumped on our bikes and rode the four blocks from John's house to Graceada Park, home of the Tour de Graceada. We really didn't have anything planned other than a symbolic lap or two around the park. We were on a wide range of bicycles and with wildly different levels of fitness. Right off the bat, Eldon and Mike took off at race pace. Some of us chased and others of us rode at a comfortable pace. How long would this go on? How would we decide? After four laps, people started pulling over at what had been the start/finish line and that was that. (Back when we were racing as juniors, we went around this 0.6 mile course 25 times.) I have assembled a collage of four pictures which captures all nine of of us:

All identifications refer to riders from left to right. In the upper left photo are Tom and Stacy. Tom was riding a magnificent Bianchi Team Issue from the 1960s that he borrowed from John. Stacy was riding his Peugot PX-10, converted from a racer to a commuter. In the upper right photo is David and Paul. David is riding his "California Bike", a 2009 Bianchi Volpe. Paul is riding a Trek identical to that used by Lance Armstrong to win the Tour de France. In the lower left photo are John, Roger, and Jeff. John is riding a Trek mountain bike so that Tom can ride his Bianchi. Roger is riding his truly magnificent custom touring bike that he bought back when he was still a Roadman. Jeff is riding a bike that I embarrassingly admit I did not pay that much attention to. I have to think it is not Jeff's bike, because these days, Jeff designs, builds, and rides recumbent bicycles. In the lower right photo are Mike and Eldon, each riding the high end road bikes that they are using in their very active cycling careers.

The Campopiano's put out a magnificent spread that kept all of us happily eating from 10:30 in the morning when we started arriving until at least 3 pm which is when I had to leave. Sadly, we did not think to photograph this largess, but you can get a peek in the following photo:

Wendy, our hostess, looks on as Tom fills his plate.

John had assembled a huge collection of Roadmen memorabilia, and I brought a few things of my own. I think the roadmen enjoyed this walk down memory lane, as seen below:

Left to right, Eldon, Paul, Jeff, Mike, John, David.

But probably the most fun of all was just the talking, memories of the Modesto Roadmen, what we had been up to for the past 50 years.

Left to right, John (in front), Paul (behind), Roger Stacy, David, Jeff.

Left to right, Mike and Roger.

An attendee I have yet to mention is Tom Duchscher. He was not a member of the Roadmen and was not invited to the reunion. However, he is an intense cycling enthusiast, a neighbor of John's, saw us riding around the park, and had just had his very high end road bike stolen and wanted to pass out his wanted posters so we could keep our eyes open for his bike. He entertained us all with an intensely detailed account of how, back in the 60s, he saved for years to purchase the Masi that one of his fellow cyclists recommended, found out there was a three year waiting list, purchased a Schwinn Paramount instead, thus launching a series of Paramount purchases in Modesto somehow enforcing a rule that no two could be the same color. But none of this is the most amazing thing he told us. Back in 2008, as I was trying to reconnect with former Roadmen, Paul told me that someone told him that Jeff was dead. We were all very sad, and I even wrote an eulogy for him on this blog (since deleted.) One of the first things that Duchscher announced when he walked in the door what that he was the source of that rumor! He had no recollection of where he heard it, so for now, the blame has to stop with him.

Left to right, Paul and Tom Duchscher

The final picture is chronologically out of order, but I felt belonged at the end. After the ride and before all the eating and talking described above, Paul had a wonderful idea. He suggested we take a moment to remember the people who had been critical to the success of the Modesto Roadmen, but who were no longer with us. These were adults (with one exception) who took time away from their lives to help the Modesto Roadmen purely out of the goodness of their hearts. I didn't take notes, so this list might not exactly match up with what we came up with then, but I guess that is OK. Henry Laws lived two houses down from me, took an interest in our club, and hooked us up with his connections to the City of Modesto power structure; without him, we never would have been able to put on the Tour de Graceada. He and his wife rode a Schwinn Twinn tandem bicycle. Bob Boranian owned Bob's Cyclery, the center of cycling in Modesto. He gave a number of us jobs working in his shop, drove us to events, and supported us in an uncountable number of other ways. (We are not 100% sure he has passed away, but even if not, he deserves the honor.) "The Coach", Mr. Van Holland, was a member of the Dutch underground during World War II and was a cycling enthusiast. One day, he saw us riding down the road and immediately started training us. Art Wilcox was the other member of the Mach Schnell bike club, besides Mike Haack. Sadly, Art died much before his time. Art and Mike, older than the Roadmen, got us started riding Mountain Loops and generally shared their cycling experience with us. When the Modesto Roadmen started racing, two members of the cycling establishment, Robert Tetzlaff and Walter Gimber, guided us through the process of becoming bicycle racers, once travelling from their homes in the bay area to Modesto to go on a ride with us to make sure we were doing it right. For these and all we have forgotten, thank you!

So that was it for the 50th anniversary of the Modesto Roadmen. See you all again in another 50 years.

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The Modesto Roadmen have a website. There are lots of pictures and other information there that I have not put onto this blog. Once I put the reunion up there, there will be a lot more there that what is here.

War on Zombies: Their Finest Hour

After three posts in July, I thought I might be on a roll, but then there was August with no posts at all. And now it is mid-September and the drought only now comes to an end. One reason for my paucity of posts is that a post I started at the end of July turned out to be much harder to write than I expected and is still "in preparation". (That post is finally nearing completion and will be posted Real Soon Now.) Also, That Which Must Not Be Named continues to be an issue, and there were a couple of out-of-town trips that prevented me from posting as well. Finally, there is the War On Zombies: it is not over, as this post documents.

My fellow Zombie and I flew back into Houston on a Wednesday. On Thursday morning, I rode over to the Rice Track for my morning ride. No joy in Mudville, as illustrated by the photo at the top of the post: Rice track is closed. All hail the coming of football season¹. So, I go for my backup ride. Riding through the Texas Medical Center, I hop onto the Braes Bayou Trail, head west on that trail, only to find that it has been closed as well:

The barrier closing the trail can be seen at the left side of the picture. The machinery responsible for that closure can be seen at the right.

They are building a parallel trail on the other side of the bayou and to join it to the existing trail, they have torn up a key piece in the middle of that existing trail, completely spoiling it as a place for me to ride. I have to confess at this point that I am being a bit disingenuous. I had driven by this construction a few days before, so it's closure was no surprise; I only rode out to this point on the trail to take the picture for this blog. I had actually had planned to ride east along the Bayou, rather than my usual west, but guess what? That direction is closed as well:

In the long run, this temporary closure is a huge win for Houston cyclists, me included. The reason for the detour is newly-poured concrete, creating a lovely new bit of trail where previously there had been a difficult and dangerous dirt stretch. Brays Bayou trail east from the Texas Medical Center to McGregor park is now complete (except for the stretch destroyed by flooding last spring that now needs to be repaired). Also, work is being done to extend that trail from McGregor Park all the way to the ship channel. When completed, this will be an exceptional venue for pedestrian and cyclist alike. This is what the new bit of trail looks like:

Finally, in an earlier post, I complained that an approximately 3 mile extension of the Braes Bayou trail along Keegan's Bayou, once opened, had been closed. The last time I rode out that way, the status of that extension was somewhat ambiguous, as can be seen in this photo:

The barrier has been moved to the side of the trail. Is it open? Is it closed? Given this ambiguous status, I decided to give myself the benefit of the doubt and ride it. As I neared the end of the extension, I encountered one barrier that seemed to resolve the ambiguity. Unlike all the other barriers, which had been pushed aside, this one still spanned the trail. Although unmarked going out, as I returned, I saw that the trail is indeed marked as closed:

Oh well, what has been done cannot be undone, and anyway, I learned something during my transgression. At the current end of the trail, there are clear signs of construction, promising to extend the trail past Highway 59, a current barrier to east-west cycling in Houston. Once completed, I think it will be possible to ride from the Braes Bayou path all the way to Terry Hershey and George Bush parks. This would require some street riding and only experience will show how rideable the available streets are. Up until now, I had wondered how this crossing would be effected, as it seemed that there was no place to put a trail. What seems to be happening is the construction of an engineering marvel, a hike and bike trail suspended off the side of the bayou:

This is all well and good for the future, but for the present, my two daily cycling routes, Rice Track and Braes Bayou are closed. What is a Zombie to do? Two routes I have used in the past are Terry Hershey-George Bush park and White Oak Bayou. Recent flooding has damaged the Terry Hershey-George Bush park trails, rendering them impassible:

From Facebook, posted by Randy LeBlanc to HTX Bike Social

In any case, the drive to Terry Hershey/George Bush park is too long for this to be a daily ride. The roads from White Oak Bayou to my house are too busy for me to ride during the week, but I figured I would give it a shot last weekend. And guess what happened? This:

The Hazard Street Bridge is under construction! Fortunately, this is not that big an issue, as the Hazard Street Bridge is one of six bridges crossing Highway 59. It is the one I prefer because it has the least traffic, but early on a Saturday morning, the next one down the line, The Woodhead Bridge, is tolerable. (In fact, Woodhead rather than Hazard is the designated bike route, though as I have posted before, I disagree with this assignment.) It has been awhile since I have been able to ride this trail on my own, so this was the first time I was able to explore a recent extension at the northern end of the trail. This new extension adds about 3 miles round trip to the ride. In addition, it (currently) terminates into another set of older trails that go along the backyards of neighborhood homes. These trails are extremely narrow and a bit in need of maintenance, but are more charming for that and add another 2 miles to the round trip. Here is a view, looking from the older trail back towards the new. This part of the older trail goes along the opposite side of the bayou, and connects to the new trail via a rather rickety-looking wooden pedestrian bridge:

I did not ride across the bridge (nor would I want to), it is not necessary to do so because the trails directly intersect farther along, but this bridge is nice to look at. Construction is also underway to extend the main trail both farther north and farther south along White Oak Bayou. In summary, the future looks rosy but the present looks bleak. At the moment, I have absolutely no idea where I can ride my bike tomorrow. Will the Zombie be returned to the cycling graveyard, or will he find a place to ride? Stay tuned.

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The Title) As noted in the text, I have an earlier post entitled "War on Zombies." Rather than title this one "War on Zombies 2" or "Another War on Zombies", I chose the append the title of the second volume of Winston Churchill's six volume history of World War II. It happens to be rather appropriate.

1) The Rice Bicycle Track is located in the middle of the main parking lot for their football stadium. This space is not needed most of the time, making it a perfect site for a bike track, but during football season, they periodically take down the track to generate more parking. When they take it down and for how long is entirely unpredictable, so I cannot plan around these trackless days.

Base Building for Cyclists

How many training books does a person need, especially if that person is old, fat, and has no intention of racing? Allow an old man his hobbies, goldarn it, I like to read training books. And surprisingly, I seem to learn something new, something I can use, from each one I read. "Base Building for Cyclists" (hereafter Base Building) was recommended to me by someone named jbithaca who commented on one of my blog posts. Jbithaca worried that I was doing too many rides that were too fast, so recommended this book to me as an antidote. At the time, I skimmed it and then set it aside to read later. In my last post, I reviewed a study comparing different training strategies, and in the course of writing that post, began to reconsider the intensity of some of my rides. This finally inspired me to go back and read this book. Based on that reading, I have some ideas for future blog posts that I expect will use this book as a reference, so thought it made sense to describe this book before doing so.

So what is this book? Like most training books, it is written for bicycle racers, the same audience for whom "The Cyclist's Training Bible" (hereafter The Bible) is written. In fact, Thomas Chapple, the author of Base Building, is an associate of Joe Friel, author of The Bible, and Joe wrote the Foreword to Base Building. Friel explains the relationship between these two books as follows: "I tried to explain [base training] in The Cyclist's Training Bible but somehow many cyclists failed to learn the lesson. In Base Building for Cyclists, Thomas Chapple devotes an entire book to the concept I tried to explain in one chapter." The assumption both of these books make is that the reader has already decided to devote a significant part of their life to winning a few bicycle races each year. The reader is assumed to have a life outside of bicycle racing, but in the context of these books, winning races is the goal. Thus, when judging training plans, the plan that better promotes a long and healthy life (for example) gets no credit for that¹, its virtue relative to other plans is judged only by the number of bicycle races won. A second assumption is that there is a bicycle racing season corresponding to the calendar year; that the races one wishes to win occur roughly at the same time each year, so that there in an annual cycle of preparing for the annual bicycle races, racing, and then recovering until the next year.

What is base training? For a bicycle racer who uses periodized training, the training season is commonly divided into four major phases; Base, Build, Peak, and Transition. Base is the longest of the four, lasting 8 to 32 weeks, or even longer. What is periodized training? It is an annual training plan where there are qualitative changes in the kind of training done over the course of an annual racing season.What is the rationale for periodized training? As best I understand, it is two-fold. The first rationale is that one can reach peaks of fitness that cannot be sustained. The goal of a periodized training plan is to reach such a peak at the time of a race one would most like to win. After that race, fitness will inevitably fall and will need to be rebuilt first by resting and then by a new cycle of periodized training before the next important race. The second rationale is that fitness is not a single thing, but a collection of traits; endurance, strength, and speed, for example. Some of these take a long time to develop, some can be developed more quickly. In general, endurance takes a long time to develop and speed can be developed quickly. Thus, to reach a peak of capabiity ("form") at the time of a bicycle race, one first develops endurance, and then quickly, before endurance fades, develops speed. Base training has many goals, but perhaps its primary purpose is to build endurance. To put this into context, the Build phase then builds speed, the Peak phase restores energy while maintaining endurance and speed, and the Transition phase is the recovery period after the race. Having given this description, if one looks at actual training plans like those presented in Base Building, one notes that they are more of a continuum than separate blocks of training. If one looks at them carefully, however, one notes that this continuum does in fact build from endurance to speed.

What does this book add to The Bible? At first glance, very little. You can and will develop essentially similar Base phase training plans using either book. (The advantage of The Bible is that you can then use the same book to develop plans for the remainder of the season.) I argue, however, that this is a naive conclusion. The best piece of advice my father gave me when I left for college was to always read multiple books on a subject, not just the textbook assigned for the course. Even though these books cover the same material, each has its own way of explaining it, and what I failed to understand from one I might learn from another. Such is the case with The Bible and Base Building; they are both teaching the same thing, but if you read both, you will end up with a better understanding. Besides, there are a few bits of information in Base Building not in The Bible, not so critical to its main mission, but of particular interest to me.

I am not a racer, does Base Building have any practical value for me? It does. My whole reason for reviewing Base Building is because I plan to use it as a reference for future posts. A quick list of some of these topics:

• Signs and symptoms of overtraining or improper training.
• How to juggle rides of different intensities in a training schedule.
• Fat burning vs carb burning during exercise.
• Weight training exercises that benefits cycling.
• Cycling skills that improve cycling efficiency.

Why should we believe what Base Building says? That is a very good question, especially in the context of my recent posts which have been very critical of careful scientific comparisons of different kinds of training. There is no science in Base Building, no comparisons, experiments or clinical trials - or is there? There is no explicit science in Base Building, but I know that Joe Friel reads the scientific literature on training. I don't know if Thomas Chapple does, but even if he does not, he is part of the same community as Joe Friel, and the results of scientific research certainly infuse that community, and so books like Base Building represent, to some degree, a review of the scientific literature on training. In addition to that, Friel and Chapple speak from experience. Experience certainly does not replace scientific certainty, but scientific certainty is rare, and in its absence, experience allows us to move forward with our lives. Thus, I still wait scientific confirmation of much that I take away from Base Building, but will use what I learn from Base Building while I wait.

Why did jbithaca recommend Base Building to me? Only jbithaca knows, of course, but if I had to guess, it is because the single clearest message of this book is that it is a mistake to train too fast too early. It is pretty clear that jbithaca thought I was training too fast. Does Base Building support jbithaca's concern? It turns out that is not as simple a question as it might first appear, and as of the time of this writing, I have not yet formulated my opinion on the matter. I expect to be addressing this in future posts. Stay tuned.

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1) I assume that Joe Friel, Thomas Chapple, and the serious bicycle racers who make up their readership all believe that bicycle racers are healthier than couch potatoes. Thus, everyone involved believes they are healthier as a result of their hobby. My point is that having adopted this hobby, they feel like the health issue is covered so that, when comparing training plans, enjoyment of the hobby, that is, winning bicycle races, is the thing. If my assumption is correct, I agree with them.

Polarized Training

Training programs tested in Stöggl and Sperlich: (A) high volume training (HVT), (B) threshold training (THR), (C) polarized training (POL), and (D) high intensity interval training (HIIT). LOW = low intensity workout; LT = medium-high intensity workout (near lactate threshold); FL = mixed intensity workout ("fartlek"); HIGH = high intensity workout; R = recovery day, no workout. The HVT, THR, and POL training blocks were repeated a total of three times. The HIIT training block was repeated twice, with one recovery week between the two blocks.

A few years ago, Joe Friel reviewed a scientific publication on his blog which purported to demonstrate the benefits of something called polarized training: "Polarized training has greater impact on key endurance variables than threshold, high intensity, or high volume training" by Thomas Stöggl and Billy Sperlich. (This publication is hereafter referred to as Stöggl and Sperlich). In today's post, I will review this publication, and in so doing, will attempt to avoid being the kind of "sadistic scientist who hurries to hunt down errors", but rather attempt to take a common sense approach to analyzing this study, to ascertain how much a reasonable person can take away from it about how best to train. Joe Friel thinks highly of this publication and I think highly of Joe Friel, and on that basis, I will make every effort to give this publication the benefit of the doubt.

Cognitive Bias

One of the most insidious sources of error in science is cognitive bias. Stephen J. Gould provides an excellent discussion of this trap in his book "The Mismeasure of Man" (which I highly recommend to scientists and non-scientists alike) but in short, as much as we scientists would like to pretend that we dispassionately consider each question with no preconception about what answer we get, very often, we have a preference for one answer over another. When that happens, it is well known that even when we are trying to be unbiased, we will be especially sensitive to any evidence that supports our preferred answer and relatively blind to evidence that contradicts it, and all of this is subconscious and thus very difficult to avoid. When I read the Joe Friel blog on this publication, I was frankly horrified; what it said about training went against everything I was doing. Thus, my preference is to find that the Stöggl and Sperlich publication is wrong. Consider this fair warning both to myself and my readers that this trap is set and waiting for me. I will proceed nonetheless, doing my best to give this publication fair consideration.

Science is hard. Exercise science is harder.

In my opinion, one of the most important sentences in Stöggl and Sperlich is the following:
"An experimental study is difficult to conduct in elite athletes because typically neither the athletes nor their coaches like to have the athletes’ training intensity, duration or frequency altered."
When considering the ideal experimental design we might like to have for a study such as this, fairness and common sense demand that we bear in mind the real world difficulties of carrying out such a study. Sometimes, we just have to be grateful for what we can get.

What Is Polarized Training?

At the most informal, intuitive level, there could be nothing simpler; polarized training means concentrating on very high intensity ("fast") and very low intensity ('slow") training, and avoiding everything in between. That said, turning this into a precise definition that can be used for hypothesis testing is not so easy. How fast is fast? How slow is slow? Is one to do no riding at speeds in between or just less than other training approaches? How much less?

Further complicating the issue are the different ways that intensity of effort ("fast" or "slow") are measured. Obviously, speed in miles per hour is not a useful measure of intensity; 25 miles per hour is an impossible speed for me but easy for a professional bicycle racer. Thus, other, more biological measures are used, such as heart rate, breathing volume, and the amount of lactic acid in the blood. Even for these, there can be person to person variability so that measurement is often expressed as the percentage of the highest value that person can achieve for that variable. Perhaps the most common way of measuring exercise intensity is heart rate. Heart rate intensity zones (typically, Zone 1 through Zone 5) are determined as a percentage of the maximum heart rate one can reach, or alternatively, of the heart rate at lactate threshold. Stöggl and Sperlich, on the other hand, use either the percentage of the maximum breathing volume (%VO2peak) or levels of blood lactate to define exercise intensity. This creates two problems for me. First, I lack the resources to measure my %VO2peak or my blood lactate. Second, there is not a direct correspondence between %VO2peak, blood lactate, and heart rate, nor is it clear which of the three is the better measure of effort. The thing I found most disturbing about Joe Friel's column is the assertion that LOW intensity rides should be ridden in Zone 1 rather than Zone 2. However, it is not at all clear to me when I read Stöggl and Sperlich that their LOW intensity exercise  corresponds to Zone 1 as Joe Friel says, or if it could correspond to Zone 2.

Overall Study Design

The participants were members of the Austrian national cross country ski, triathlon, running, or cycling teams. Training consisted of either running, cycling, or roller skiing. In the six months before the study, all participants had been engaged in an exercise program similar to HVT, consisting mostly of LOW (slow) workouts. However, their training also included up to two days of LT (medium fast) workouts a week, making it also similar to the THR training plan. The normal schedule for these participants was 5 days of training per week and they had been training for 8 to 20 years. In reviewing this study, the cautionary note that Joe Friel struck was that the relevance of this study to you depends very much on how similar you are to these participants. If, for example, you are a beginning athlete, you might do better using a different training plan than what scored best in this study.

The study started out with 48 participants, 12 assigned to each of the four training plans. Due to dropouts, the study finished (and reports the results from) 11 participants in the HVT plan, 8 participants in the THR plan, 12 participants in the POL plan, and 10 participants in the HIIT plan. The picture at the top of the post diagrams the four training programs compared in this study.

According to Stöggl and Sperlich, "Five key variables have been used as a benchmark to compare athletic performance in and between endurance athletes: (i) VO2peak (ii) velocity/power output at the lactate threshold (V/PLT) (iii) work economy (iv) peak running velocity or power output (V/Ppeak); and (v) time to exhaustion (TTE)." In some of my previous posts, I have discussed the problems that can occur if what you measure is not exactly the same as what you really want to know. These problems most definitely apply here, and I will discuss them in a general way at the end of this post, but for now, let's accept these measurements and see where that leads us.

What is the point?

The conclusion of Stöggl and Sperlich is that Polarized Training is better than High Volume Training, Lactate Threshold Training, or High Intensity Interval Training. Note that this is a much broader claim than the narrow conclusion that one of the specific training plans tested in this study is better than the other three. Rather, it says that when comparing any two training protocols, all things being equal, the polarized protocol will most likely be better. Does this study support that conclusion? I think not. I think this is a well designed and executed study, and that it convincingly supports the narrow conclusion but not the broad one. The protocol they designate at POL is almost certainly the best of the four tested, but it is not at all clear that it is best because it is polarized or that it is best for some other reason. Thus, it is not clear to me that polarized training is better in general.

What are other explanations for the results of Stöggl and Sperlich? The first two possibilities that jump to mind are:

1. Training can be too hard, too easy, or just right. Unsurprisingly, the best results are obtained when training is just right. How hard a training protocol is, is determined by both the volume of riding (how many hours) and the intensity of riding (how fast.) Both the volume and the intensity of the four training programs differ one from another. It could be that the POL training program was "just right" whereas the others were "too hard" or "too easy."
2. It is generally believed that there is value in varying one's training from time to time, that if one rides the same rides over and over, after a while, one will derive little benefit. The riders in this study had spent the previous six months doing some mix of the HVT and THR protocols. One or both of these protocols could have been "more of the same", and the benefit of the POL protocol may have been that it was something different. 

What's not the point?

These are points that Stöggl and Sperlich never claim to have demonstrated, but rather are the known and accepted limits of the study:

1. This Study Does Not Apply to Everyone. We have already discussed that even if you believe this study is correct for its participants, it may not be correct for you. That said, besides being talented and experienced athletes, these athletes were at a particular point in their training cycle; they had just come off of 6 months of a program that was predominantly HVT but which also included some THR. Thus, I do not find it surprising that they got more fitness by switching from HVT rather than participating in more of the same. Similarly, even if we assume that POV is the best protocol at this point in their training cycle, would more POV be the best strategy after the 9 weeks of POV done in this study was completed, or would changing to something else be better?
2. This Study Does Not Measure All Aspects of Fitness. Are all forms of fitness interchangeable? Alternatively, do the metrics used in this study cover all forms of fitness? I do not think the authors of this study would claim either of these statements to be true. Rather, they had to use some metric of fitness to compare their training protocols and selected a fairly broadly accepted and easy to measure set, hoping that they would be applicable to at least some sorts of real world fitness. Assume these metrics do a fairly good job of identifying a cyclist who will do well in a typical bicycle race. Does that mean that these same metrics would do as good a job identifying a sprinter, or a randonneur? I would not assume so.
3. This Study Does Not Evaluate All Effort Levels. Context: There has been an early version of the polarized training idea kicking around the training community for some time in the form of the "Zone 3 Syndrome" (see for example this website.) The notion is that Heart Rate Zone 3 (halfway between easy and hard) is the "grey zone"; too fast to build endurance, too slow to build speed. As usual, the discussion is more complicated than that, but I think it gets the essence. When I read Joe Friel's post, my horror came from the notion that the "grey zone" had been expanded from "Zone 3" to "Zone 2 AND Zone 3 AND Zone 4"; only training in Zone 1 and Zone 5 is worth doing. I argued above that it is not clear that the LOW intensity training in Stöggl and Sperlich is Zone 1, but out of respect for Joe Friel, let's assume it is. Even if we make that assumption, I do not think Stöggl and Sperlich supports such an extreme conclusion. If we assume low intensity training corresponds to heart rate Zone 1, that THR training corresponds to the top of Zone 4, and HIGH training corresponds to Zone 5, then this study never looks at any training protocols that contained any significant effort in Zone 2, Zone 3, or in the bottom half of Zone 4, so cannot speak to the value of exercise at these levels.

If You Can't Say Something Nice...

I'm afraid that despite my best efforts, this post reads like the output of the sadistic scientist I was trying not to be. Can't I find something of value in this study? Yes I can. The "polarized" training program worked; it was not worthless or harmful. If you are a talented, fit cyclist who has been riding long, slow miles, a training protocol that replaces some of your long, slow rides with high intensity intervals will probably do you more good than continuing with just long, slow rides.

The second lesson I take away from this paper is probably not something the authors intended and is very specific to me; this paper has forced me to confront my cognitive bias and to reconsider the value of exercise in Zone 1 versus Zone 2. I had stuck in my head the notion that Zone 1 was just for warm up, cool down, and recovery rides. Looking back at my collection of training books, it is clear that Zone 1 (along with Zone 2) is also recommended for building endurance. Many of the comments I have received on this blog have been to the effect that I might be doing my endurance training at too high an intensity. In the past, I have resisted this suggestion, but this study has caused me to reconsider. I don't yet know what impact this will have on my training; stay tuned to find out.

Dream Study

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how I would have done this study differently. In fact, I don't know if I could have made it much better. My objections to the study have much more to do with the difficulty of studying exercise than anything else. That said, let me toss out a few thoughts.

1. I would have skipped the HIIT training plan, I think it is too extreme.
2. I probably would have skipped the HVT training plan, not because I don't find it interesting, but rather that if I were limited to only four plans, HVT would not make the cut. Also, it is too similar to what the athletes were doing before the study, and thus may be doomed to fail.
3. I would have modified the THR plan by replacing the two shorter LT rides with one HIGH ride and one long LOW ride. This would have made it into a more mixed plan, one that covered the range of exercise intensities and more directly challenged the theory of polarized training by asking if POL is better than THR because of the absence of Zones 2 through 4 from POL, or because of the absence of Zone 5 from THR.
4. This leaves me with two more plans I can test. One of them would be just like the POL plan, but I would replace the two long LOW ride with rides in Zone 2 rather than in Zone 1. To make up for the extra load this would have put on the riders, I would reduce the length of the two shorter LOW rides. The purpose of this plan is to test the relative value of Zone 1 and Zone 2 rides.
5. My fourth plan would be just like POL except that I would replace the two short LOW rides with R (recovery) days, days with no riding. This would reduce the load of this plan, a disadvantage, but I think that disadvantage would be justified to test whether short Zone 1 rides have very much value. I would want to ask this question because the medical community has suggested that, for the purposes of building health (rather than fitness), they do not.

I am not a coach, so these might be terrible ideas that no experienced coach would ever suggest, and I would listen carefully to any coach who told me as much. In fact, I would most interested to hear a coach comment on the logic behind the details of the protocols selected by Stöggl and Sperlich. Of course, Joe Friel, an exceptionally experienced coach, did blog about this study, but he did not comment on the specifics of the exercise plans. In the absence of such objections, however, these are the plans I came up with to answer the questions I have. What do you think?

New Things Under the Sun

Please excuse the poor quality photo. The white patch in the tire with the black dot on the middle is a cut in the tread, the white being the tire casing and the black dot, the inner tube peeking through. Obviously, this is not a stable situation.

As I have previously posted, I believe there is value in periodically revisiting equipment reviews; it is often how a piece of equipment performs over time that determines its value. I have done this in the past for tires and my Garmin Edge 500 cycle computer and decided to do it again.

Garmin Edge 500

I have posted on this product several times since I first purchased it at the end of 2012, most recently in this post. My two major complaints about this product are that it occasionally loses data from a ride and that the strap for the heart rate monitor stops working after a few months. The data loss problem persists, it has gotten no better and no worse and I am living with it. This amounts to losing one ride every few months when I am riding about 5 days a week. Since the Garmin Edge 500 is no longer sold (the current model is the 520, two models newer) I am not sure this is still relevant, though I would be curious if newer models still have this problem. As to the strap problem, I have tried a variety of solutions. About two years ago, I tried replacing the "premium" heart rate monitor with the much cheaper "classic" monitor. The classic monitor is an integrated unit with the strap, you cannot replace just the strap, you have to replace the whole thing. On the other hand, the classic monitor costs about $25, whereas just the replacement strap for the premium monitor costs $35. (The premium monitor plus strap costs $60.) Appearances and advertising notwithstanding, the classic strap is every bit as comfortable as the premium strap. But the most important difference is longevity. The premium strap fails after about three months. After two years of use, the classic strap is still working. The classic strap has been discontinued by Garmin and I don't know what I will do if the one I have fails. Given the sad state of obsolescence that characterizes my Garmin, this will be the last time I review it.

Tires

In the six years I have had my Surly Crosscheck, I have tried seven different sets of tires. (I have not worn them all out, see below.) The tires I have used are as follows:

Tire	Width	Comment
Ritchey SpeedMax Comp	32	Original tires. Knobby. Not fun to ride.
Unknown	28	"Fine"
Specialized Armadillo	28	"Fine"
Grand Bois Extra Léger	32	Wonderful feel. Fast? Prone to flats.
Schwalbe Marathon Plus	28	Clunky and squirrelly. Hard to mount. No Flats!
Clement Strada LGG	28	Felt fast. Insecure when wet. Wore out quickly.
Schwalbe Marathon Plus	32	Rides fine, mounts fine, feels secure. No Flats?

My wife and I purchased matching Surly Crosschecks at the beginning of 2010 and they came with the Ritchey tires. I replaced mine almost immediately because I did not like the way they looked or the way they rode. My wife, who purchased her bike at the same time, wore hers out and then started using mine, until she switched to Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires to reduce the number of flats she was getting. I have no memory or record of what kind of tires the bike shop put on my bike except that they were skinnier than the Richies and had a slick (non-knobby) tread. They worked fine and I rode them for two years until they wore out. The shop then put on similar Specialized Armadillo tires, which again worked fine. For my second Brevet which I rode in May of 2013, I temporarily replaced the Specialized tires with the Grand Bois Extra Léger which randonneuring experts promised would be faster and more comfortable, especially in the somewhat fatter 32 mm width which I got. I have never been able to document that the Grand Bois ride faster than any other tire (and I have tested them fairly carefully under controlled conditions), but they sure feel better than anything else I have ever ridden. After the brevet, I put the Armadillos back on to "save" the Grand Bois for special occasions. When the Armadillos finally wore out, I replaced them with Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires because I read somewhere they were "rugged", and worry free appealed to me. Because I wanted "skinny" tires, I bought them in the 28 mm width. They were very hard to mount and did not have a nice feel on the road; they felt both slow and insecure when cornering. Nonetheless, they virtually never got flats, so I learned to forgive their sins. I probably would still be riding these tires, but my wife got tired of getting flats, I wanted to try some different tires, so I put my old 28 mm Marathon Plus tires on her bike, and decided it was foolish to keep saving the Grand Bois tires, so put those on mine. My wife had come to love her 32 mm tires and was somewhat concerned about riding 28 mm tires so I promised her that if she liked them, I would get her new ones in a 32 mm width. Within the first month of having the Grand Bois tires on my bike, I got two flats. At the same time, Lovely Bicycle reviewed Clement Strada LGG tires which she promised had a nice ride and which were flat resistant, so I bought those to replace the flat-prone Grand Bois. At first, I liked these very much, but shortly after I put them on, was riding on wet roads and fell. For the next six months, I didn't fall again, but often felt like I was about to fall, a very unpleasant sensation. On the other hand, I did not get any flats. Then, almost miraculously, the Clements started feeling more secure, presumably because they had "worn in" a bit. However, at the same time, I started getting flats. Not all that many, maybe one every three months or so, but I did find it demoralizing. Soon, I noticed a cut in the back tire which rendered it unusable. So what to do? These tires had lasted about half as long as I was used to, and I didn't like either the crashes at the beginning of their life nor the flats at the end. On the other hand, they felt almost as nice to ride as the Grand Bois and at their worst, flatted less. Nonetheless, I decided that the morale benefits of no flats outweighed a nice ride (plus, I still have the Grand Bois any time I want to ride them) so went back to the tried and true Marathon Plus. I got this set in the 32 mm width with the idea that I might swap with my wife so she could have the wider tires she wanted, but for a variety of reasons put them on my bike first. They have only been on a few months, but I have the following preliminary observations: 1) No flats yet. 2) These mounted much easier than my first set. Is this luck of the draw, has Schwalbe improved their product, or does the width make a difference? I have no idea. 3) Visibly, their width is barely distinguishable from the 28 mm Marathon Plus's on my wife's bike. When she saw them, she lost all interest in swapping tires with me. 4) They seem to handle, well, "fine". Nothing special, but not bad. We'll see about the flats, stay tuned.

For reasons I am not at liberty to discuss, I don't know when (or even if) I will be able to ride another brevet. If I did, would I put the Grand Bois tires back on, or would I ride it with my Marathon Plus tires? I think I would go with Marathon Plus. Although I love the feel of the Grand Bois, I hate worrying about flats. Yes, yes, I have read all the articles saying that I should simply get fast at repairing flats, they are inevitable and no big deal. "You should be able to repair a flat in 10 minutes" say the experts. Well maybe. I have a great deal of experience repairing flats as it happens, and have no objection to doing so at home, but despite all that experience, I do not like doing it on the road. Part of the reason is that I believe it is important to do it right and find that hard to do sitting in the dirt by the side of the road without access to my bike stand. One common problem that occurs when fixing flats is that the object that caused the flat may remain in the tire, and no sooner does one hit the road than one has another flat - from the same object! To avoid that, I find I have to take my time inspecting the tire and to inspect it in very good light. So what does this old man fussiness cost me? Again, I have not been able to measure the speed improvement I get when riding Grand Bois tires compared to Marathon Plus, but based on my attempts to do so, I find it hard to believe that it amounts to more than 0.2 miles per hour. My last (and longest) brevet was 130 miles long. Over 130 miles, 0.2 miles per hour amounts to a 12 minute slower finish. If I have one flat, and if I managed to fix it in an unrealistic 10 minutes, then I have only saved 2 minutes on the ride. On the other hand, I would expect to average fewer than one flat per brevet, and there is the fun factor to consider, but still, all things considered, the Marathon Plus tires come out ahead for me.

Tour de Pink

Every year since 2011, my wife and I have ridden the Tour de Pink. It has become the centerpiece of our cycling life together. Thus, it was with great sadness that I read the email from the organizers saying that last year's 2015 Tour de Pink was the last there would ever be, there will never be another. It seems that the plethora of breast cancer charities had doomed this ride. I discovered this ride back before I retired, and every year since 2011 had tried to ride it with some of my old colleagues. For one reason or another, it never happened, and now it never will. In my old age, the list of things I will never do again is getting longer and longer. Add one more to that list.

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The title of this post is a reference to the famous line from Ecclesiastes 1:9: "There is no new thing under the sun." It is just a different way to say "update", a word which I feel is both overused and off-putting.

Not Riding Around the Sea of Galilee

Our family recently took a trip to Israel. In addition to seeing the usual sites, my older son, who organized the trip, had the idea that we should bicycle around the Sea of Galilee. This "sea" is actually a lake, also known as Kinneret, Lake of Gennesaret, or Lake Tiberias (among other names.) It is famous among Christians as a site where many of the important events in Jesus' life took place, lending significant cultural color to the ride. This ride, about 35 miles long, was recommended to my older son by a friend of his who had ridden it a few years before, and gets good reviews on travel websites. Four of us decided to "attempt" this ride; me, my wife, my older son, and my younger son. I put the word "attempt" in quotes as none of us had any doubt but that the attempt would be successful; the distance was short enough that my wife, the weakest rider in the group, should have been able to complete it with no problem. Hah!

The four of us, me, my wife, my older son, and my younger son, in front of the hostel where we rented the bikes.

The travel websites described a traffic-free bike path that covered about 70% of the distance around the lake, with the remaining 30% being ridden on the road, and promised many places where bicycles could be rented. When we arrived in Tiberias, the largest city on the lake, we easily found a bicycle rental place, picked up four rather old and beat-up mountain bikes (all they had), purchased a trail map, and asked the guy who rented us the bikes about the trail. "Just ride down to the lake" he said, "follow the lake, no problem. But be sure to ride it clockwise!" Wrong in every respect, as it happened; he either didn't know what he was talking about and/or didn't care. We did look at the map before we left, and it did show a path along the lake. Getting to the lake was a bit more of a challenge than expected, compounded by completely wrong directions given by various people along the way; it seems Israelis love giving advice whether or not they know anything about the subject at hand. Despite that, we eventually found our way to the lake, and rather than a bicycle path, found beaches, hotels, fast food stalls, boat rentals, and the like. We did our best, travelling on streets and sidewalks next to the lake, until these all led us unavoidably back onto the main highway. That highway features high speed traffic heavy on the trucks, so that riding on it was not entirely pleasant and we kept looking for the promised path.

Eventually my older son found a path which seemed to match what the bike rental guy had told us to expect. It was clearly a designated path, with color coded trail markers. Once we got on it, however, we found it to be more of a hiking than a biking path. Some parts of it were OK, basically dirt roads, but other parts had impassible obstacles (at least to mountain bike novices like us) or loose dirt and sand which brought us to a complete stop, forcing us to walk the bikes. With practice, I got to where I could power my way through these stretches, but only at great expenditure of energy. My wife never could make it through them. Thus, a small number of miles ended up taking us way more hours than we had budgeted and left us a lot more tired than expected. At this point, the path ended. It is possible that, as before, we would be able to rejoin it after a brief ride on the highway. However, the day was already very hot and we were getting tired, so we finally did what we should have done much earlier, we looked at the map carefully. When we did so, we found that there was a completely different path around the lake, one which appeared to be the designated bike path all the travel websites had been talking about. In complete conflict with what the bike renter had told us, this path was some distance from the lake, up in the surrounding hills. To get to it from where we rented the bikes, we would have ridden, not towards but away from the lake, up into the surrounding hills. Realizing this, we crossed the highway, headed off through some farms into the hills, and after a bit of searching, found this other path, also well marked and color coded.

A portion of the map whose cover is at the top of the post. If you look just below the green number 1, you can see a blue highlighted route. That is what we think the correct bike route is. The red line along the shore is the highway which most people ride. Near the top of the picture, just to the left of the highway, you can just see a dotted route. That is the hiking trail on which we attempted to bike.

This was the moment of truth. So far, we had only completed an insignificant fraction of the distance around the lake. Should we turn right, and continue the journey, or turn left, and head back home with our tails between our legs? We chose the latter. Although some of us may have made it around, it was unlikely, given the heat and our exhaustion, that all four of us could. As fate would have it, this new trail was much better than the old; although dirt, it was hard packed and lacked the "beyond technical" features of our previous route. Would we have been able to complete the ride had we taken this path in the first place? This is uncertain at best. The main problem was that this trail travels some distance from the lake and weaves back and forth much more than the highway, so the 35 mile trip around the lake on the highway turns into an 88 mile trip around the lake on the trail. In the second place, even high quality dirt roads are more tiring to ride than pavement. Thirdly, being up in the hills, this route would have inevitably involved significant climbing. We were, however, able manage to drag ourselves home by refueling along the way with many glasses of the delicious, mint-rich Israeli lemonade.

Here we are, stopped by loose dirt and sand.

When we got back, my older son immediately emailed his friend, asking him to comment on our difficulties. His reply: "I rode the highway, dude." Riding the highway would have been somewhat unpleasant and perhaps even a bit dangerous due to the traffic, but on a road bike, the ride would have been the piece of cake we had anticipated, especially if we had started at dawn to avoid some of the heat and traffic. In my judgement, the inner route where we started riding is not a usable bike trail. The little we rode of the outer ride through the hills seemed doable but is very long and may contain unexpected challenges.

How did we mess up this ride so badly? In the first place, I believe that if I don't occasionally underestimate a ride, I am not being adventurous enough in my ride selection. In the second place, we all had a lovely time, saw the Sea of Galilee from an interesting perspective, and got plenty of exercise. Having said all these things, here are what I think to be the reasons:

1. We unknowingly conflated the advice of my son's friend and the travel websites so as to apply the friends endorsement not the the roads on which he rode, but on trails.
2. The travel websites seemed more informative than they were. They implied, at least to us, an easy to find, unambiguous, trail system. In fact, the trail system required some significant detective work to use, something which we were lulled into not doing.
3. The guy who rented us the bikes did us a huge disservice by confidently and insistently giving us advice that could not have been more wrong in every way. Because we believed his advice, we did not do our own due diligence.
4. None of us are experienced mountain bikers. It is my impression that mountain biking is considerably more difficult per mile than road biking. Because we did not have mountain biking experience, we did not correct for that difficulty.

If we had not made these mistakes, I am not sure what we would have done. We certainly would not have attempted 88 miles on dirt roads with the group we had. If we had studied the map ourselves, would we have nonetheless attempted the inner route? I would like to think we would not have, the map never suggested it as a viable route. Might we have attempted the roads? Perhaps. My son's friend rode them successfully, and there are lots of blog posts and the like on the internet of people doing so. And that makes an interesting point. The bike trail everyone raves about is not really an alternative to the road, but an entirely different ride; much longer, and much farther away from the lake. One can debate the relative virtues of lake vistas from the hills vs riding along the lakeshore, but one cannot say they are the same thing. To be perfectly honest, I suspect if we knew then what we know now, we might have never attempted the ride, and so perhaps we were well served by our ignorance.

Intervals and Common Sense

The 1969 Great Western Bike Rally, a celebration of moderate exercise.

"There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth." - Marie Curie

In my last post, I was a sadistic scientist. There were reasons I for that, but in this post, I'd like to take a more constructive, common-sense approach to understanding the relationship between different kinds of exercise and long term health. Specifically, I would like to address the following questions:

1. How sure are we that exercise improves long term health?
2. Is VO₂max a good biomarker for the impact of exercise on long term health?
3. Do the short term impacts of different exercise plans on VO₂max accurately predict their long term impacts on VO₂max?
4. What is the value of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)?

Last Time on the Zombie Cyclist:

In my last post, I discussed an excellent paper (Gillen et al.) which argued that three 20 second sprints produces the same long term health benefits as 45 minutes of moderate intensity cycling. I used that post to illustrate the limitations that go with a biomarker study (a study where you investigate not what you are interested in, but something easier to measure that you believe is linked to what you are interested in.) In the case of Gillen et al., what they were interested in were the relative long term health benefits of different exercise regimens. Unfortunately, these take decades to measure, so what they studied instead was the effect of different exercise regimens on VO₂max, glucose tolerance, and the mitochondrial content of muscle. They examined changes in these three different factors produced by 12 weeks carrying out one of three different exercise plans. The three plans were no exercise (the control group), 45 minutes of moderate intensity cycling done three times a week, and three workouts a week built around three 20 second "all out" sprints. Both exercise groups improved by about the same amount, leading them to conclude that the much shorter sprint workout was as good as the longer moderate exercise workout. At the end of that post, I stated that, based on rigorous scientific criteria, I found the paper interesting but not entirely convincing. As a scientist, my formal reservations about the conclusions of Gillen et al. were two-fold:
1) The three biomarkers chosen have not been demonstrated to be reliable proxies for long term health.
2) It has not been demonstrated that the results observed after 8 and 16 weeks of exercise will continue for the decades relevant to long term health.

My intuition tells me that the biomarkers chosen probably are a good stand-in for whatever effects of exercise contribute to long term health. However, I am less certain that the benefits of Gillen et al.'s specific exercise plans will continue long term. As I will argue below, I personally think more varied exercise plans might a be better long term plan.

Does Exercise Improve Long Term Health?

The influence of exercise on longevity and health has been extensively studied and the benefits appear to be substantial. Men in their 50's have a 42% chance of living to 85 if they exercise regularly compared to 23% if they don't. (For comparison, the numbers for not smoking are 37% vs 18% if you do and of not being obese are 35% vs 13% if you are.) Yes, yes, we have all heard about the curmudgeon who never exercises and drinks a quart of whisky and smokes two packs of cigarettes a day and is 97 years old; it can be done, 18% is not 0%. But there is no escaping the fact that your odds are a lot better if you take care of yourself. Such studies are (almost?) always observational, and so there is the theoretical possibility that the people who choose to exercise make that choice because they are different to begin with, that it is this pre-existing difference that is responsible for their longevity, and that they would have lived to a ripe old age even if they had not exercised. This is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Some people are healthier than others for a whole range of reasons. Healthier people live longer and feel better. Because they feel better, they might be more likely to exercise. This kind of ambiguity is present in all observational studies. That duly noted, I think the benefits of exercise are broadly accepted nonetheless, and that this acceptance is due to the large number of studies that have been done, the consistency of all the evidence, the substantial size of the effect, and the intrinsic plausibility of the conclusion. Thus, I will answer this question with a strong YES.

Is VO₂max a Good Biomarker for Exercise?

VO₂max varies enormously between people, but most of this difference is genetic. No matter how much you exercise, you can never catch up with someone who has "good genes." (The good news is that VO₂max is not the most important determinant of who is a fast cyclist, and the parameters that are, are more trainable.)

Most studies of exercise and aging work by assembling a group of people, determining how much they exercise, and then revisiting them some years later to see if they are still alive. There are two ways that "how much they exercise" is commonly determined. The first is to ask people. This is unreliable because people may not accurately remember or they may exaggerate. To get around these problems, the other way is to measure how much they have been exercising by measuring their VO₂max. Because VO₂max does increase with exercise, people who exercise will, on the average, have a higher VO₂max. But this is only true on the average. Because VO₂max is determined more by genetics than exercise, many people who exercise will have lower values for VO₂max than many people who do not. However, since the whole study is based on statistics, the group who has a higher average VO₂max will, on the average, have exercised more. The fact that VO₂max does work as a stand-in for exercise despite the problem of genetic variability raises an interesting question; what if what is important for longevity is VO₂max, not exercise? Because exercise increases VO₂max, it will increase longevity, but will people who inherit a high VO₂max but do not exercise live longer or shorter lives than those who exercise but have genetically low VO₂max? I don't know the answer to this question, nor do I even know if the answer is known.

The scientific community believes that the important variable is exercise with VO₂max being a biomarker for exercise, so for the remainder of this post, let's assume that is correct. What this may mean is that someone who inherits a high VO₂max does not live longer as a result. This then begs the question, does the VO₂max you get from high intensity interval training get you the same benefit as the VO₂max you get from exercising at a more moderate level for a longer time? Without being the least bit sadistic, I am at least somewhat skeptical that it does. Does that mean Gillen et al. is wrong, or at least unreliable? One of the most important ways scientists avoid being mislead is to look at the same question as many ways as possible, and that is one of several reasons I like Gillen et al.; they did look at the effect of HIIT on VO₂max but they also looked at the effect of HIIT on muscle mitochondria and on glucose tolerance. It is much less likely that they were mislead by all three of these biomarkers than by any one, making me significantly more enthusiastic about Gillen et al.'s conclusions.

Am I Sold on HIIT?

Yes and no. When I first started thinking about training five years ago, I was skeptical of the value of any kind of brisk training, intervals included. I now believe intervals, and short, fast (high intensity) intervals in particular are good for health and will improve my performance in most kinds of rides (group rides, long rides, etc.) Even five years ago, I rode intervals now and then because pretty much all training programs included them, but I was unenthusiastic and often skipped them. Going forward, I am going to make a real effort to include at least one set of intervals every week. Further, I had been favoring longer intervals and longer kinds of brisk rides (30 minute time trials) believing they were better for building endurance. I am now going to include shorter, faster intervals. A few weeks ago, for the first time, I tried 20 second intervals as describing in Gillen et al. and found I reached heart rates significantly higher than I usually do. I had been skeptical that such a short interval would last long enough to bring up my heart rate, but it turns out I was wrong.

So that is the yes part, what about the no? I am not prepared to replace all my other riding with high intensity intervals. Even if all I was interested in was health I would not do so. I believe that the mechanism by which exercise improves health is complex and that our understanding has just scratched the surface of that complexity. The exercise community has embraced the value of a diverse exercise program for millennia, and although I will always follow science when it successfully overturns tradition, I don't think the weight of scientific evidence about exercise and health is sufficient to do that here.

Conclusions

1. "The exercise program that you do is always superior to the one you don't do." - my younger son
2. If I were betting on the long term prospects of folks who do a small amount of very high intensity exercise versus a group that follows a more conventional moderate exercise program, I'm not sure how I would bet, but I definitely would bet against a third group that did no exercise at all.
3. If there was a fourth group who mixed it up, did some long, slow bike rides, did some sprints, lifted some weights, and did some yoga, I would bet on them over any of the above three groups.
4. I am who I am. I am probably not going to lift weights. I am definitely not going to do yoga. But I do plan to mix up my cycling; to ride long when I can, to ride intervals when I am inspired, and to keep doing 45 minute rides at a moderate level of intensity when I can think of nothing better to do. Do I think this is optimum? Nope. Do I think it is better than nothing? Yep. Do I think I will actually do it? I hope so.