On exercise...
So I've proclaimed in a couple of places that I've made it a goal to ride the Étape du Tour in 2016. This requires a certain level of becoming a better cyclist, and to that end I've done various activities. I figured I might as well chronicle these in an attempt to give the impression that I'm capable of working towards a long-term goal, because it doesn't always feel that way the rest of the time.
So, the first thing to do was to get my actual racing bike within a hundred-mile radius of me, which it wasn't due to storage issues. Thankfully my grandparents, who live betwen St. Neots and Huntingdon, agreed to host it, so that was the first problem solved and the bike appeared in July. Then it was time to start cranking up the distance I cycled on a regular basis. I generally regarded 30 minutes as a good time for a length of exercise so generally I rode about 8 miles as an exercise ride; I increased that first to 21.5 miles and then to 31.5 miles which I currently ride in just under two hours. From here there's a few different goals:
Speed up
I currently cycle somewhere between 16 and 16.5 miles per hour average over 30 miles, which isn't quite fast enough for my liking. 20 would be fantastic, but I'd at least like to gain 1mph average speed or maybe a bit more. My plan for that is to try a bit more short-range work at higher speeds and hope that the faster rhythm beds in properly. The other thing I want to do is sort my nutrition strategy out because currently I kind of crash around 1h 30m into the ride and could probably go ~5 minutes faster if I didn't.
Climbing
All this is very well, but the Étape du Tour is a mountain stage of the Tour de France and Cambridgeshire is very flat, even if the area around towards Bedford is decidedly more rolling than the Fens. So I took myself and my bike to Crickhowell in the Brecon Beacons for a weekend and tried this route which contained a climb similar to one of the easier ones you'd expect to find in the Pyrenees or the Alps. Yeah, that's hard. I got up it, but I did have to stop a couple of times for a breather. Basically my bike's gearing is mostly designed for the flat, and so its lowest gear is a bit too high for a sustained 11% gradient. I couldn't keep putting out enough power to keep it turning over without having to stop before I got to the top. (Also, my bike's gears need somebody to look at them, since it didn't really want to stay in aforementioned lowest gear. That didn't help.) It was just as well I'd bought clipless pedals beforehand though since without being able to use both legs to drive the bike all the time I doubt I'd have got over it at all.
On the flip side, descending is awesome. I was worried my brakes wouldn't be up to it, but actually you don't really need to lean on your brakes all the time because you're going sufficiently fast that if you just stand up you immediately start to slow down. It feels incredible. But it appears that a re-gearing will be necessary, that is if I don't decide my 15-year old racing bike could do with an upgrade before I go after continental climbs.
Clipless Pedals
Like I said in the previous paragraph, I bought clipless pedals and racing shoes for my bike and I've now more or less got used to them and able to accelerate from standing without failing to clip in properly and falling over and stuff. However, I think my pedalling style is still very wrong. Obviously when you're clipped in you want to be driving with both legs all the time; but I've been riding a bike without them for 25 years or so and it's not easy to adopt a new style overnight. I have a suspicion a lot of my early attempts at remembering to pull upwards with my legs lead to me forgetting to push downwards in the normal pedalling action, and subsequent "move your feet in a circle" approaches seemed to have been putting far too much stress on my lower legs (at least based on what started hurting first) rather than the upper legs where more of the muscles are. So yeah, that's a work in progress. More practice needed.
There's an additional problem with all of this now which is the whole "winter" thing. With a bike that's about 35 minutes' drive away (depending on traffic) and not all that much daylight it's getting increasingly tricky to fit two-hour rides in around other things I generally do on weekends. So I suspect I'll only be able to do speed training over the winter and not be able to work on endurance so much. Since endurance running doesn't take as long as endurance cycling, since my legs are stored in Cambridge, and since low temperatures are less of an issue at one-third of the speed (my feet went kind of numb on my last 31-mile ride, and it's got colder since then), I've decided to try some of that over the winter to compensate. Started this week, have done a couple of 5ks after work on Tuesday and Thursday (Monday, Wednesday and Friday have other stuff on them). Still struggling a bit to work the pacing out - I'm very unused to distance running and trying to run slowly is alien to me, and my body is still adjusting to the muscle stresses so there's been a bit of joint pain, but things are getting a bit better and my shoulder has yet to really interfere with the plan as I'd been worried it might. Currently around 30 minutes for 5k (a bit more or a bit less depending on whether or not you count time stopped at pedestrian crossings) which is a bit slow, but presumably there's still some room for improvement there given that was the second attempt.
So, yeah. I have a Plan! And it's almost going well. Next spring/summer I plan to ride in 100km events and maybe one or two 100 mile ones. We'll see how that goes...
So, the first thing to do was to get my actual racing bike within a hundred-mile radius of me, which it wasn't due to storage issues. Thankfully my grandparents, who live betwen St. Neots and Huntingdon, agreed to host it, so that was the first problem solved and the bike appeared in July. Then it was time to start cranking up the distance I cycled on a regular basis. I generally regarded 30 minutes as a good time for a length of exercise so generally I rode about 8 miles as an exercise ride; I increased that first to 21.5 miles and then to 31.5 miles which I currently ride in just under two hours. From here there's a few different goals:
Speed up
I currently cycle somewhere between 16 and 16.5 miles per hour average over 30 miles, which isn't quite fast enough for my liking. 20 would be fantastic, but I'd at least like to gain 1mph average speed or maybe a bit more. My plan for that is to try a bit more short-range work at higher speeds and hope that the faster rhythm beds in properly. The other thing I want to do is sort my nutrition strategy out because currently I kind of crash around 1h 30m into the ride and could probably go ~5 minutes faster if I didn't.
Climbing
All this is very well, but the Étape du Tour is a mountain stage of the Tour de France and Cambridgeshire is very flat, even if the area around towards Bedford is decidedly more rolling than the Fens. So I took myself and my bike to Crickhowell in the Brecon Beacons for a weekend and tried this route which contained a climb similar to one of the easier ones you'd expect to find in the Pyrenees or the Alps. Yeah, that's hard. I got up it, but I did have to stop a couple of times for a breather. Basically my bike's gearing is mostly designed for the flat, and so its lowest gear is a bit too high for a sustained 11% gradient. I couldn't keep putting out enough power to keep it turning over without having to stop before I got to the top. (Also, my bike's gears need somebody to look at them, since it didn't really want to stay in aforementioned lowest gear. That didn't help.) It was just as well I'd bought clipless pedals beforehand though since without being able to use both legs to drive the bike all the time I doubt I'd have got over it at all.
On the flip side, descending is awesome. I was worried my brakes wouldn't be up to it, but actually you don't really need to lean on your brakes all the time because you're going sufficiently fast that if you just stand up you immediately start to slow down. It feels incredible. But it appears that a re-gearing will be necessary, that is if I don't decide my 15-year old racing bike could do with an upgrade before I go after continental climbs.
Clipless Pedals
Like I said in the previous paragraph, I bought clipless pedals and racing shoes for my bike and I've now more or less got used to them and able to accelerate from standing without failing to clip in properly and falling over and stuff. However, I think my pedalling style is still very wrong. Obviously when you're clipped in you want to be driving with both legs all the time; but I've been riding a bike without them for 25 years or so and it's not easy to adopt a new style overnight. I have a suspicion a lot of my early attempts at remembering to pull upwards with my legs lead to me forgetting to push downwards in the normal pedalling action, and subsequent "move your feet in a circle" approaches seemed to have been putting far too much stress on my lower legs (at least based on what started hurting first) rather than the upper legs where more of the muscles are. So yeah, that's a work in progress. More practice needed.
There's an additional problem with all of this now which is the whole "winter" thing. With a bike that's about 35 minutes' drive away (depending on traffic) and not all that much daylight it's getting increasingly tricky to fit two-hour rides in around other things I generally do on weekends. So I suspect I'll only be able to do speed training over the winter and not be able to work on endurance so much. Since endurance running doesn't take as long as endurance cycling, since my legs are stored in Cambridge, and since low temperatures are less of an issue at one-third of the speed (my feet went kind of numb on my last 31-mile ride, and it's got colder since then), I've decided to try some of that over the winter to compensate. Started this week, have done a couple of 5ks after work on Tuesday and Thursday (Monday, Wednesday and Friday have other stuff on them). Still struggling a bit to work the pacing out - I'm very unused to distance running and trying to run slowly is alien to me, and my body is still adjusting to the muscle stresses so there's been a bit of joint pain, but things are getting a bit better and my shoulder has yet to really interfere with the plan as I'd been worried it might. Currently around 30 minutes for 5k (a bit more or a bit less depending on whether or not you count time stopped at pedestrian crossings) which is a bit slow, but presumably there's still some room for improvement there given that was the second attempt.
So, yeah. I have a Plan! And it's almost going well. Next spring/summer I plan to ride in 100km events and maybe one or two 100 mile ones. We'll see how that goes...