Cycling Career Saved

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physical Therapy Is Exercise

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Fatigue, Fitness, and Form

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improved Training Load Estimate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding Under the Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heart Rate Zone Definitions

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

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

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

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

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

2019: A Very Good Year

In my second post after moving to California I described my new Go-To ride, a ride I would do when I couldn't think of anything better, a ride I later named my Alpine ride. Fairly quickly, I noticed that how fast I completed that ride seemed to be an indicator of my level of Form, where Form is a measure of my ability to ride fast and/or for long distances. Form is increased by Fitness but also decreased by Fatigue: Form = Fitness - Fatigue. About a year after developing the Alpine ride I was looking for a ride that was a bit longer and found an extension that added about 11 miles, taking it from 23 to 34 miles. When I moved from San Carlos to Emerald Hills in 2020, I was able to continue these two rides albeit with minor modifications that reduced their length to 22 and 33 miles. In 2021, I posted a statistical analysis that indicated that my average speed on all four of these rides was very similar such that I could average them all together for estimating my Form. The graph at the top of this post is my monthly average speed on those four rides from when I first moved to California and started doing them until mid-2021 when my riding changed such that my speed on those rides stopped being comparable, changes which I will explain at the end of this post.

In a follow-up to the post showing I could average my Alpine-Like rides  I compared my monthly average speed  to how many hours I trained each month. There was no measurable correlation between the two. Clearly, that can’t be true in an absolute sense, if I never trained, my performance would have to go down eventually, but the reason it seemed to be true is that I ride pretty regularly, so there aren’t big changes in my training from month to month and also because an increase in training will have two opposite effects; it will increase my Fitness but also will increase my Fatigue such that these opposite effects of training will, to some extent, cancel each other out. And yet, there have been significant month to month changes in my Form. The most noticeable thing about the graph at the top of this post is the big peak in my Form that occurred at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. The purpose of this post is to think about possible causes for that peak.

This is not the first post in which I wondered about that peak. In June of 2020, four months after that peak, I described  a wild goose chase I had followed. By chance, I had retrieved my Bianchi Volpe after an overhaul at my local bike shop, Veloro Bicycles, right before this peak in Form and so developed the false hypothesis that Veloro had somehow made this bike much faster. By the time I wrote the post I knew that was not the correct explanation, but all I had to offer as an alternative was “it must have been something I accidentally did right in my training.” Besides being uselessly vague, that was actually an invalid conclusion, characteristics of my bike and training are not the only possible explanations. As just one example, the overall state of my health could also be a factor. And finally, none of these explanations are exclusive. Perhaps I had a run of good luck in terms of avoiding colds and other illnesses, that perhaps Veloro did make my bike a bit faster, but that in addition, my training contributed, though as noted above, it wasn’t by simply spending more (or fewer) hours on the bike. What could be true is that the quality of my training improved, even though there was little change in quantity. One important variable is Intensity, how hard (e.g. fast) I ride. About a year ago, I blogged about how I might include measures of Intensity in the evaluation of my training and how my acquisition of my TranyaGo heart rate monitor might make this possible going forward. However,  that doesn’t help me looking back at that peak.

The new idea that inspired this post is that my peak of performance in 2019/2020 might be due more to the events I rode than the training I did for them. In the figure at the top of the post I have added colored stars to the graph, each star (but one) representing an event I rode. (The exception is the red star at the right side of the graph which represents the Art of Survival event which I did not ride because I was unable to complete the training for it.) Red represents the Art of Survival. Black represents the Death Ride. Yellow represents Golden Hills. Blue represents a local, solo metric century I rode. Note that the beginning of my peak of performance began with the first of these in 2019, The Art of Survival. I rode that event with my high school buddy, Roger, who is a much stronger cyclist than I, and I found it tremendously challenging. Fortunately, I recovered from that ride pretty quickly, which is where the good luck/health may have come in. I then trained very hard for the next event, the Death Ride, which was one of the most difficult rides of my life. I then had a couple of months of relatively light riding, in part because my son’s wedding occurred during that period, and then jumped into very focused training for the Golden Hills Metric Century. I did not suffer the exhaustion on that ride that I did for the Art of Survival and the Death Ride, but I did have 25 miles in the middle where I was keeping up with my much faster friends, Roger and Dave, and was riding as fast as I possibly could, so again, a real stretch. At that point I was feeling quite fatigued, but managed to complete a solo metric century a month later, at which point my fatigue, the weather, and family events conspired to reduce my cycling. In summary, each of these events produced an enormous amount of training Load that resulted in a tremendous amount of both Fitness and Fatigue. Once I allowed time for that Fatigue dissipate, this left me with a higher level of Form for the next event, and so on.

What did I learn from this very good year? First, I have to acknowledge that luck played a significant part in it. Besides having good health during that year, I also somehow managed to push my riding right up to the limit of my body’s capabilities without quite going over. However, one thing did occur to me that has the advantage of being something I might be able to use in the future: a good training strategy for me seems to be very intense efforts followed by a lower level of effort until I feel my fatigue is completely gone. This is contrary to my natural tendency to ride very regularly, not ignoring how I feel, but perhaps not giving those feelings as much attention as I should. I don’t yet know how I will incorporate this new hypothesis into my training, but it has given me something to think about.

So how and why did I change the way I ride my Alpine-Like rides such that I can no longer use them as a measurement of my Form? In May of 2021, I failed to complete the longest ride in my preparation for the Art of Survival Metric Century. I realized I was fighting Fatigue and cut back on my training. One way that I did that is that I consciously made the decision to ride my Alpine-Like rides more slowly, thus making them not comparable to my previous Alpine-Like rides. This decision was cemented about six months ago when I acquired my TranyaGo heart rate monitor. Previously, my Alpine-Like rides had been ridden about 50% in heart rate Zone 2, 50% in heart rate Zone 3. Now I make a conscious decision about what heart rate zone I want to complete the ride in, usually Zone 2, and use the heart rate monitor to enforce that decision. Finally, I am doing many fewer Alpine-Like rides than I used to because there is a new Go-To ride in town, the Cañada ride, which I strongly prefer. All of this has left me with no way to estimate my level of Fitness, something I am working to correct. Stay tuned to see what I come up with.