Zoning out on the bike…

This is bit of an impromptu post that occurred to me while I was traveling so I thought I would share it. So for the past two nearly three weeks I have been working on my swimming and my bike, my midweek rides have been typically riding along with the Sufferfest with a long ride at the weekend I have also tried a couple of rides using TrainerRoad

TrainerRoad Output screenshot

To mix it up I decided to ride a Spinervals DVD that came with my Kurt Kinetic trainer and during the week I rode a #17 “Threshold Test and SufferFest”. Before I get into the results I have to say that this is THE MOST BORING RIDE DVD EVAH!!! Watching a dozen or so riders on trainers in a Mercedes Dealership…really, really!!!

You pays your money and takes your choice!

I mean come on, as I side note rant this DVD retails for $30, for that and the price of a cup of coffee get yourself three Sufferfests or six CycleFilm DVDs which are currently on sale!

Now that being said there is some benefit to this DVD which is the 20 minute Functional Threshold Test, it’s a steady state effort over 20 minutes designed to allow you to work out your cycling zones and power output…the idea is to ride at a sustainable pace somewhere around 85-90% of your RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort), from there you take the average HR an plug it into this calculator…easy!

Slow build up to the 20 minutes 

Result in SportTracks

As for the results I was pretty pleased, for the 20 minutes (actually 21 to round it up) I sustained a 20mph pace, average HR 153.8 let’s say 154, so there is plenty of headroom there and my average cadence was 91.25; not too fast or slow. So when I plug my heart rate into the calculator I get the following:

So armed with the data I can upload it into my Garmin Edge 500 and this will allow me to make sure my hard rides are hard and my easy ones easy…of course all of this was done on my Cervelo road bike and I will need to execute and update it on the Cannondale Slice once I have sorted out the saddle…more on that later!

15:1

That was the plan for yesterday’s long run…yes run! No running for 10 days and basically absolutely nothing for the last week allowed me to finally shrug off my quad thing and so the plan was to basically run for three hours and see where it took me. The 15:1 strategy was run 15 minutes and walk 1 minute…and basically it worked out pretty well; at least until the sun came out! For fuel I had done bad runner math and had planned an hour out an hour back then 30 minutes out and 30 minutes back, but stupidly (of course) there was no-one at the hour out mark to replen me so I was dry for an extra 20 minutes until I hit a gas station and topped up with Gatorade, not ideal but better than nothing.

I got back home and refilled with proper sports drink turning around for the next hour without incident. Despite starting running at 6:15am, the sun was high by 8:30am and by 9:00am is was just plain hot, this weekend was a bit of scorcher, (the mercury in our garden thermometer topped out today at 135f, that’s gotta be wrong right!) and I was forced to walk a little extra in the closing 20 minutes to cool off!

When the three hours finished I had a little over 19 miles clocked up, so all things considered it wasn’t a bad effort and the strategy paid off pretty much, mentally I could have gone on some more.

Yeah it’s not pretty but it’s done!

My heart rate and zones where up in the air but that’s not surprising…any way the long and the short of it is that I may be bumping the sides a bit but I am back in the training groove!

Hmmm…

Well as mentioned two posts ago I was not sure where my new HR Zones would leave me on a long run and so early Saturday morning I found out. The plan was 15 miles and at a little after 5:00am I was on the road…seriously 5:00am on a Saturday morning! Well needs must when you wife has a yoga class at 8:00am right! Conditions were perfect, once the sun came out I could see that there was no sun, low cloud and cool temperatures, I made my way around my neighborhood, hitting the trails was not going to work and that could have taken me up to three hours plus the drive there and back.

I have to say there is some advantage to running in the wee hours in the dark, I really must look like a complete freak! Compression shorts, long compression socks and full sleeve tattoo arm warmers I was getting zero eye contact from the few other runners I saw but I am over 40 and I am all about function over fashion.

So two hours and change I was back home with 15.56 on the clock and an average pace of 8:36 somewhat off of the 7:45 I had mentioned before! I was 47% in the new Zone 2 which is good but 35% in Zone 1…a stark reminder to me to make your hard runs hard and your easy runs easy…the good news is I get to try it again on Saturday! Here are the numbers…not quite a negative split, I missed it by 48 seconds if you extrapolate it to 16 miles.

Anyway this week I have a bunch of reviews to write up before I go on vacation next week so if you interested in new trail shoes (Salomon XT Wings 2) a hydration belt (Fuelbelt H20) a recovery drink (Shamrock Farms or Mix 1) stayed tuned.

Down then up….

This week was a down week, I dropped the second cross training from yesterday, three hours last Sunday was enough, and skipped the gym during the week. After rebaselining Monday I worked out my new zones and hit early mornings Wednesday and Friday with them, I took an extra rest day on Thursday. As suspected the new pace is around the 7:45 mark, I am not focusing on that though I am just trying to stay in the zone. So far so good…

Wednesday

Friday

A little too fast on Friday, I was actually only 3 minutes over my 10k PR! Well three minutes is a lot over a 10k but I was pleased. It will be interesting to see how this plays out on long runs and to be honest this goes out the window on the trail. So the next four weeks I am on the up. With the new zones I am not out to hit them every run, Monday’s will be a recovery run so I’ll be loitering in Zone 1 and I'll be trialling on the long run. The mileage is also increasing, steadily climbing and but the end of the month I will be at 40 mpw…yay! Back in the gym during the week and continuing the cross training will keep me on the straight and narrow.

So onwards and upwards we go! Come the beginning of September I’ll have 9 weeks to race day! And now with a 15 miler to be completed before 8:00am I am off to hit the hay.

Have a good weekend!

Re-zoning Part Deux!

So yesterday I headed to the gym to redo my Heart Rate Zones. Same drill as before, warm up and them a 20 minutes timetrial at best effort. My HR spiked a little and then settled after half a mile and the first mile clicked by in 8:07. I started the next phase; I went out a little too fast and the backed off a little too much and finally got in the groove.

And so compared to 8 weeks ago here is some of the data

	Mile 1 Wk1	Mile 1 Wk8	Mile 2 Wk1	Mile 2 Wk8	Mile 3 Wk1	Mile 3 Wk8
Time	6:50:86	6:48:37	6:50:30	6:52:01	6:19:68	6.27:00
Avg Pace	6:51	6:48	6:50	6:52	6:59	6:34
Ave Speed	8.8mph	8.8mph	8.8mph	8.7mph	8.6mph	9.1mph
Max Speed	9.1mph	9.3mph	9.1mph	9.7mph	8.8mph	9.7mph
Ave HR	159	163	165	168	170	175
Max HR	164	172	169	173	173	181
Avg Cadence	89	88	88	87	87	89

 

I have bolded Week 8 just to make it easier to read. For Mile 3 Wk 1 I covered 0.91 of a mile and for Week 8 I covered 0.98. So here’s the takeaways, feel free to correct me.

* Overall I am faster, I covered more distance in the same time, only 0.07 more, but more nevertheless

* I have a higher top end of speed maxing out at 9.7 compared to 9.3

* I have a higher HR capacity or LT threshold topping out at 181 compared to 175

So what next, well according to Friel I can rezone to the following:

	Old	New
Zone 1	0 – 138	0 –143
Zone 2	139 – 148	144 – 154
Zone 3	149 – 156	155 – 161
Zone 4	157 –163	162 – 168
Zone 5	164+	169+

So for the next month these will be my new Zones and I’ll be spending my time in Zone 2, well as much of it as I can…then the fun really starts; hillwork!

Rest ‘n’ Test!

June and July are done, that pretty much leaves one more week and I have completed the first nine weeks of this cycle. Here are the stats:

June

July

I am within 4% (actually over) of the schedule, a couple of extra rest days in July and actually some over mileage has kept me within that percentage so it’s not really a true representation of reality, when the plan says run 11 and you run 14 cos’ you’re feeling good, it’s a bit of a false economy. So I need to rein myself in a bit to make sure I don’t over do it too soon.

There are four things that I am really pleased with;

The Variety; as you can see I am really mixing things up with swimming, elliptical, cycling and weights. I have managed to set up a nice routine of running in the morning and going to the gym four days during the week at lunchtime, it makes actually make ‘eating’ lunch a bit tricky but I fit it all in somehow.

The Heart Rate Training; my average running heart rate for June was 143 for July it was 135, that’s an 8bpm drop, but that needs to be reconciled to the increase in speed, June 6.17mph a 9:43 pace and July 7.30mph an 8:13 pace, so in lay terms ( my preference) I am faster for less effort! I am, to be honest shocked at this, I was expecting an improvement but not one so large…but hey I’ll take it!

Weight Training; I was never a gym rat, lifting weights is dull, I found this book on Amazon, it’s really simple, as are the workouts, and they are effective, I have actually been using it for three weeks and can feel myself stronger, having better posture and I can even see some muscle growth! I’ll never bench press my weight but hopefully no one will be kicking sand in my face at the beach!

Weight Loss; I seem to have reached that point of slightly less that natural equilibrium where I am in a deficit and the weight is not s0 much falling off but redistributing, going up a notch on my belt without a large drop in lbs on the scale means I am putting on muscle mass and becoming leaner. Also I am no spring chicken so adding some of that lost muscle due to age is no bad thing.

This week I am having a bit of a rest week and I am, as the title alludes to retesting and reseting my HR zones. I am not sure whether to carry on as I am for another month, basically repeating July through August or whether to introduce some hill work…I am rerunning the original test tomorrow so I will make a decision after that but so far so good.

Busy busy busy…even in my sleep!

It’s been one of those weeks, on the back foot all the time, trying to catch up and always one step behind. Lack of blog writing, lack of blog reading, my reader is at 300 and counting! Three working lunches in four days put the kibosh on hitting the gym and I have been up at dark o’clock getting the miles in even before my wife leaves the house for her 6:00am Boot Camp class!

It’s mostly good and I am more or less hitting my training goals, well with the exception of yesterday, unscheduled rest, I am on schedule. I need more weights work. The mileage is increasing slowly and I’ll break through into the 30’s permanently in the next week and be staying there moving forward!

The Heart Rate zone work is really dialing in and now I have shored up the lower limit I am seeing the improvement in my pace, what were 9:00 min miles and now 20 seconds or so faster! But I am sticking to Zone 2 for the immediate future and putting the miles in the bank.

I am seeing a lot of folks switch over to the Garmin 110 and 310XT recently and since I adopted my wife’s 305 last year, it was too big and complicated for her, my need to change has fallen way down the list, in fact I am still using my original 305 from 2007 which is going strong. Actually having two will be great when I hit those longer longer runs that are in the future. The only downside has been I am using up the battery life in the HR straps, the second one died this week and so I switched out the battery from a small torch and it still wouldn’t start! Crap I thought I’ll need to get a new one, a somewhat unnecessary $70! But no, a new battery ($3.29 from Target) did the trick! And so while changing the battery and charging a watch I decided to run a sleep baseline on my Heart Rate, I did this 2-3 years ago and have long since lost the data, but thought this would give me another baseline for this training cycle. So I shut off all the Alerts and Auto Pause on my 305, left it on the nightstand and voila!

Can you tell how fast I fall asleep! What I think is fascinating, are the peaks and troughs, a low of 34 seems very low and a high of 76 a bit high, who knows what causes them, interestingly I used to suffer from sleep apnea, I had some surgeries (this one and this one, oh yeah fun times!) and now it’s a lot better but clearly there are somethings happening to cause the spikes! Of course if you were to believe the GPS tracking I am simply running around the house and garden like my hair is on fire!

As always I am an experiment of one!

Have a great weekend!

Bottom up…

So right about now I am about halfway through week 4 of what I am calling pre-base, it lasts 8 weeks, you can see the plan here. I am firmly trying to stay Zone 2 which for me is 139-148bpm, this equates to around a 9ish minute mile, but the truth is I am not even paying attention to the pace. Now trying to stay in Zone 2 actually resulted in trying to stay under Zone 2, I set the alert on my 305 to chime when I go over and that has proven to be very effective.

This morning’s run really reinforced this “not going over” and when I looked at the data I saw that the percentage of time spent in Zone 1 (83.5%) was by far greater than Zone 2 (16.5%). Hmm as comfortable as it is cruising along in my recovery Zone it’s not the point, so now I need to shear up the bottom limit and have set the alert for that too.

Now moving forward I am sure I’ll be hearing a few more beeps but it also means is that my base is being laid down and dialed in one mile at a time.

By the numbers…

Another week in the bag, books, bank and body! I hit all seven days and even threw in some weight training too! Total failure on the 40 hours sleep front, I’ll be trying that again next week, third times a charm as they say!

Here’s the deets from the week…by the numbers:

• 9 workouts; 5 runs, 1 bike, 1 swim and 2 weights
• 43:09 miles in total: 27 run, 15 bike, 1 swim more or less
• 33.5% in Z2 and 50.8% in Z1
• 7:34 in total time

I had a couple of awesome runs, really dialing in on Zone 2, it’s becoming a point of pride to keep it in the “zone” and even after only three weeks I am noticing a difference. I had one bad, not enough sleep and to much sun and it was an uphill struggle from the start. This data is from the best one of the week; 99.7% in Z1/2.

7 miles at 5am

I have also discovered a very guilty pleasure, cycling.tv it makes an hour on the trainer fly by when you’re watching the Paris Roubaix, Giro D’Italia or Liege Bastogne Liege!

A couple of downspots while faffing with a towel about otherwise a pretty solid and very enjoyable hour on the bike, there's a lot to be learned just from watching the pros, if you want to be a cyclist think like a cyclist, that's very zen!

I have posted the Google doc on the endurance drinks, you can find my early results and thoughts on the first four posted below, sorry it's a bit small. The spreadsheet, which is more current will be updating as I go is online here.