Think About It!

Human-Powered Health from solve on Vimeo.

Where has the time gone?

Wow, it’s been a long time. I haven’t forgotten you all, I just haven’t had time. Changes at work have caused a lot of extra stress and required more of my time. To keep the family and fitness part of my life in balance I’ve had to eliminate the extras. Sorry.

This past weekend I raced the Front Range 60, a 60 mile marathon mountain bike race here in town. A 10 mile loop raced 6 times. This would be the longest mountain bike race I’ve ever done and the longest single ride time I’ve spent in the saddle in the past couple of years, certainly the longest race.

My plan was… well, I didn’t really have a good plan. Having not race something like this before I had no idea what to expect from my body. I ended up felling pretty good that morning so I just let myself ride. I’m sure I was a little too fast the first few laps but I knew everyone would get tired as the race went on so if I could get in some time early, we’d just see how the last laps went. Maybe I could sustain those gains if I didn’t fade too bad.

The course was basically two parts, the eastern part that had two climbs of decent size followed by the western side with relatively flat fun little sweeping sections along a river. The wind was minimal and helped keep the dust away. The sun and temperature, for the first time this year, had us racing without extra layers. Nothing on the trail was overly technical making it fast. I ran my Kenda small block eight tires with about 30 psi pressure, making them pretty hard to minimize rolling resistance. The Cannondale Flash 29er was perfect for this loop. It was fast and the fork soaked up everything. I had no mechanical issues during the entire race.

In the end, I feel like I did well. I had a mid pack finish which wasn’t bad considering there are no categories other than age and I recognized some of the names of racers from faster categories in front of me. Where I feel I did well was with racers that are traditionally a little faster. Last year some of these racers put ten minutes on me in shorter races. I was expecting that they could put big time on me in this long race. This time however I was putting 5 to 10 minutes on them. Regardless, it was fun and I’ve been recovering this week. I'm just not starting to look forward to the next race.

I'll try to keep the blog updated a little more frequently.

Downhill "Moutain" Bike Race

OMG, watch out for the dog!

I love it when you can hear him laughing.

Midweek Update

This past week has been a rest week and I've had time for my second hobby, brewing beer. Typically I get to brew about once a month. This past week I was able to get in two batches! Ah yes, it's going to be a good summer. My first batch was a repeat of a success from last summer. A honey amber. Its a high gravity/alcohol content beer with 2 pounds of honey in the 5 gallon batch. It was such a big hit last time around so I had to remake it.

For the second batch I wanted to try an all grain batch. This is brewing straight from the grains without using any pre-prepared and purchased concentrates. I had some time this past Sunday so I bought some grains to make a Summer Pale Ale. This was my second all grain batch, the first was ok... actually I drank it because I'm cheep. It was a Hefeweizen that could have used some fruit to make it better, it had a banana color. Ok, it wasn't that bad but I wanted to try again. So I gave the all grain beer making another shot. I'll keep my fingers crossed and let you know how it turns out later.

On the training and riding front, I've been getting ready for the season and I was beginning to wonder if I was getting any faster. That can be a difficult to answer early season. You know, the trees keep you from seeing the forest. Anyway the training has been focused on endurance and base mile training so how do you tell your getting faster when your staying out of the high end power ranges. Well I got one of my answers on my ride today, I tied my best 60 minute average power output from both 2010 and 2011. I guess things are coming along.

Training Camp Complete

So this past week I was racking up the miles with a second training camp this season. I ended up with about 360 miles, 90 of them on the 29er mountain bike. Actually the mileage isn't all that important, what is important is the time I spent in my power zones. 4+hours in power zone 2 (endurance) and another 4+ hours in power zone 3 (tempo). I only spent about 3 hours in zone 1 (recovery), which is really too easy of an effort to get significant physical adaptation. If you include my heat rate (HR) info from the mountain bike rides, I had 7+ hours in my endurance zone. A whopping 1189 training stress score (TSS - nerdy stuff) over the past 9 days.

So now that it's over, I feel good. Tire but good. I'm on a recovery week this week. Workouts consist of a little intensity but short rides. Rest is as important as the workout. So I guess you could say I'm consolidating for the next work phase.

Actually the weather was really nice last week. Unlike the high winds we've been having the past few days. Made me laugh when I saw this video, looks like some not so fun spring training along the Colorado front range. It's hard to motivate yourself for this kind of a ride everyday.

Training Camp #2

This week I/my coach has bumped up the training load to get in a big block of base/endurance miles. I could really tell a huge improvement in my fitness after the first training camp. This camp has a bigger training load.
For this training camp I have traveled... nowhere. I've taken, no time off work. I have and continue to try and squeeze in the riding time around everything else. So far it's working but I certainly couldn't keep this up longer than a week. Thankfully the weather has been incredible and I've been out and about. I've been commuting to work and taking the long route back and forth. I love riding by gas stations, $3.30 :).
Since this past Saturday I have over 13 hours on the bike and over 200 miles. About 70 of those miles have been on the Cannondale Flash 29er the rest on the SuperSix. Really that's not the important part, what's important is how they've been paced; at a quality endurance level (200-220 W). My base fitness will be larger than ever before, the theory is it will give you a foundation to build on later in the season. I'll let you know.

Work Life ImBalance

Sorry for the lack of posts. Life has been...... complicated. Over the past couple of weeks I've had a big deliverable due at work that required a lot of extra time. The work was hard and long but my group made the deadline. So, life is slowly returning to normal.

During those weeks l had to strip life down to the basics; Family, Work and Health. There weren't any extras. Unfortunately I had to miss a few workouts because there's only 24 hours in the day. I do have to give an extra special thanks to my wonderful wife, she also made sacrifices and really helped me get through it all.

The training is coming along. I'm spending most of my time doing endurance type rides. I do feel like my base endurance is getting good. I'm certainly ahead of where I was last year, not only in my power output but also in how I'm feeling. I really noticed in my rides this weekend were I was able to get out for long hard rides with out excessive fatigue. Not sure I'm race ready but there's time.

More updates soon.

Weekly Update - Training Camp

This past week I’ve been at a training camp. Unfortunately I didn’t get to travel any place exotic or warm. Basically, for the past two weekends and the weekdays between I’ve increased my training load to simulate a training camp. The plan was for multiple days with longer rides all at an early season pace or endurance power and heart rate. These area basically well structured rides at a prescribed level to help the body adapt to the endurance demands of the up coming training and racing season. These rides are not super intense but they aren’t sitting on the couch either. It’s a workout and over time it gets very tiring.

It began almost two weeks ago on Saturday with a long ride out around DIA. About an hour and a half into the ride we came across a “storm wall.” When we left for the ride that morning there was 20% chance of snow, it was blowing in fast and we were at our furthest point out. We quickly decided to turn around and almost immediately it started to snow. Fortunately we had the wind at our backs and the return trip would be a little faster. The snow kept blowing and soon it felt like and looked like we were in the middle of a blizzard. By the time we made it back into Denver there must have been 3 inches of slush on the roads. Snow was sticking to my glasses making it extremely difficult to see. My moral was quickly shrinking as my shoes slowly filled with icy cold slush splashing up from the road. We ended up with about 8 inches of snow and a winter storm warning, information the Nation Weather Service could provided that morning.

The remainder of the week I was stuck riding indoors, in the nice warm pain cave. After the snowy cold start, I was ok with some dry warmth in the basement. It was a great mental incentive for a week of riding indoors. Basically my life that week was to wake up early and ride, clean up and get to work, come home eat dinner, help clean up, spend some time with the kids, help put them to bed, clean up and go to bed. Obviously I couldn’t give up my professional or family duties during the training camp but overall I think it went pretty well. I sat down with my wonderful wife before all of this and she was very supportive and helpful during the entire week.

I’ve been recovering this week and off at some travel for work. Hopefully this effort will pay off in the future. Either way I feel pretty good and remain motivated.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

"Alberto Contador cleared of Clenbuterol charges"

Cycling News had this article.

"According to a number of Spanish newspapers, the competitions committee decided to rethink its verdict on Friday last week based on article 296 of the UCI’s regulations, which says that an athlete can be exonerated if they prove that they had inadvertently ingested a banned product through no fault or negligence on their part."

Now if a rider has a bottle of supplements then I understand how it can be shown to contain a banned substance that is not on the label. It's simple and straight forward, the supplements are tested and proof is provided that he/she inadvertently ingested a banned substance, as long as it wasn't on the label.

Someone please tell me how it was shown that a steak Contador ate last July was tested for Clenbuterol (a substance banned in cattle in the EU). How can proof even be provided that shows he inadvertently ingested a banned product from this beef? Just for the sake of argument, if Clenbuterol is banned from use on Cattle in the EU what percentage of beef from France or Spain contain Clenbuterol (should be 0%).

There is no way I believe any sort of burden of proof was met in this case. I think someone dropped a chain. Maybe Floyd Landis and his outrageous claims aren't so crazy.

Colorado Cross Cup Champions

Feels good to be apart of this!!