how to really train

the only thing cycling is good for, fitness-wise, is more cycling

it doesnt seem that bad for the xc skate?

what the shit is cankles doing here

we're a broad church these days!

i'll tell you what i do not miss: the high impact of running, esp in the winter when you have to avoid grass/dirt because of mud.

yeah sure, i get a knee twinge here and there or back of knee ache that takes 1-2 weeks to work through but it's nothing like the damage that running did to my body.

we're a broad church these days!

came to absolve me for sin of gluttony. in the face of persecution by known food nazi. >:|

it doesnt seem that bad for the xc skate?

― malicious humor victim (Hunt3r), Thursday, March 11, 2010 5:50 PM (24 minutes ago) [IP: 67.132.3.242] Bookmark

i was actually talking about this w/a college buddy of mine, who's a former collegiate XC guy and cat-nothing cyclist (but who's v knowledgeable, lots of buds race in srs cats, etc.). the main issue with cycling is that literally no other sport (maybe speed skating) is so mechanistically repetitive in its motions. you're never really called upon to use accessory muscles, proprioception is virtually never tested, your arms don't do shit, there's no impact, etc.

so while it can be good CROSS training for other sports (cardio work, low-impact leg work, etc), you'd be hard pressed to say that switching to an exclusively cycling-oriented training regimen would make you better at, say, soccer. or, to be more specific than "better," improve soccer-oriented fitness.

or: five identical candidates start at a given baseline (avg fitness), all aspiring soccer players. one XC skis exclusively in the off-season (and trains like a XC skier), another downhill skis exclusively (and trains accordingly), the third trains like a sprint/middle distance runner (and trains, etc.), fourth does only rowing (etc), and the fifth reads this thread about how to really train.

i posit that the first four dudes will see improvements in their general soccer playing ability (not skills, but fitness), and the cyclist will be the same, or worse. moreover, the first four will see improvements in their ability ~in all five activities~ and the cyclist will not at all

is so mechanistically repetitive in its motions. you're never really called upon to use accessory muscles, proprioception is virtually never tested, your arms don't do shit, there's no impact, etc.

for devil's advocacy: okay then so running is less repetitive and ~proprioceptive~ then cycling because your foot strikes the ground and arms swing back and forth (mostly for balance mind you)?

i will argue that my back/shoulders/arms are more defined from cycling then from running:
1) neck, back, upper arms from helping support your torso in an inclined state/in the drops.
2) upper arms and shoulders from climbing out of the saddle.
3) lower arms from gripping and braking on long descents (seriously the first several times I descended long mountain passes, my hand and lower arm muscles cramped like crazy after a couple miles).

and legs are about the same at any rate.

i mean i don't totally buy it, maybe if you're on the rollers for 2 hours but if you're actually RIDING, it's a bit more interactive then you may think? on long rides i'm always switching my hand position, getting out of the saddle to give my lower back a rest, pointing my toes and heels in different directions to switch up blood flow.

rollers are more like the road than the trainer

if proprioception is self perception/awareness of one's body's position in space, i think mtbing racing is highly proprioceptive, track and criterium significantly so. a non-racer might not get that. general road riding, usually not. but i would need you to do the knowledge on proprioception for me.

from my conversations with xc race guys, bike guys often have terrible squatty xc free technique and a hard time getting out over the skis for the glide.

however ime it sure feels like the muscle groups and general movements on the lower body overlap significantly. *presumed response--'yes, because you are terrible at skating'*

how proprioceptive is dh ski racing? i would think very.

but is it less proprioceptive than curling? darts? those are classic eye-hand, is that sorta a subcat of proprioception?

i can see basketball, polevaulting, steeplechase as extraordinarily proprioceptive. any running track sprint as less so.

rowing as maybe the least of athletic events?

anyway, to the extent that cycling does not require great changes in body position, it would be less proprioceptive by my understanding. however certain disciplines would require very high levels of awareness of balance and positioning and coordinated adjustment. i guess cx would be the most proprioceptive as it is the most dynamic. mtb dh/fourcross/xc maybe next, then bike messengering, then pack/sprint road and track events. any tt event is basically rowing.

/drone on

if proprioception is self perception/awareness of one's body's position in space, i think mtbing racing is highly proprioceptive, track and criterium significantly so.

would agree with this.

saying that proprioception is never tested was....inaccurate. i guess what i really meant was that cycling doesn't require the same level of physicality in a proprioceptive response as, say, basketball. so while crits require acute spatial awareness, they don't demand that racers have Federer-style full-body agility to manage things.

and besides, my ~real~ point was that cycling is unique as a sport in that as someone becomes a world-class racer, they might actually get regress w/r/t general athleticism. we can expect top-level athletes in a wide variety of sports to put up respectable numbers in a battery of tests for broadly assessed "fitness." whereas, i'd posit that a competitive grand tour rider would do no better than joe average when it came time to bang out some pushups or w/e.

cycling has very narrow expectations from the human body, to the point that something that might be considered handy, though not necessary, in another discipline (well developed upper body strength for the soccer player) is actually a hindrance in cycling (muscles are heavy! get rid of them!)

sport climbing/bouldering is a decent comparison: it was def in vogue in the 90s to advocate that aspiring sport climbers NOT run/bike because it would over-develop unneeded leg muscles, and dang, legs are the heaviest things around! even today, knuckle-dragging, rotator-cuff tearing boulderers are good at one thing and one thing only: developing upper-body power (usually from the back).

we should just go to the jock sports argument about what is and isnt a real sport, right? ;) no team? less likely to be a real sport. no ball? less likely to be a real sport. potential for spandex? ew, less likely to be a real sport. mitigating factor- risk of serious injuries or fatalities.

oh c'mon, that's not what i'm saying!

my ~real~ point was that cycling is unique as a sport in that as someone becomes a world-class racer, they might actually get regress w/r/t general athleticism.

gonna continue devil's advocacy here: this can be true of any sport other than a few cherry picked ones that you've included like xc skiing?

xpost gbx- i know

shasta has a point wrt specialization in any sport. when i was tryna be a basketball player i spent all my time training to be taller.

i might've done some cherry-picking there, but think about sprinting (not widely reputed as an all around sport): running around a track as fast as you can will actually do more for you, physically, than just make your legs good at moving fast. pumping your arms is a non-trivial form of exercise (martial artists!), and even though you're basically running in a straight line, you're still drawing on accessory muscles for stability/agility/etc.

the support and structure of a bike frame relieve the body's responsibility for certain things, which allows atrophy imo.

how do you quantify neurological bandwidth doctor?

gibby, there are many, many people who share your POV, they are known as "triathletes". :P

there are also 15 crazy people competing in a sport called decathlon who show up every 4 years

how do you quantify neurological bandwidth doctor?

hmmmm

i guess it would be more like neurmuscular bandwidth? but when they do brainscans, what the hell are they imaging? cellular energy levels or something?

"how to really troll"

jk? :P

electrical activity iirc

hey guys if you want to race bikes you train by riding a bike. i don't know wtf you guys are getting into now.

"how to really troll"

― ✌.✰|ʘ‿ʘ|✰.✌ (Steve Shasta)

interesting new roller idea

not really new

http://velonews.competitor.com/2010/03/news/olympic-ski-star-bill-demong-coming-to-a-road-race-near-you_108603

how to really cross train

how do I really train my back for old man skiing

drag around one or two of these. between picking them up, ensuring they get on the lift, carrying their shit, and putting on their clothes, your lower back and general core strength will really improve, and, you will be actual old man. also, no radness. actually, the kids are pretty rad and out of control most of the time.

http://i486.photobucket.com/albums/rr222/Chass3ur/IMG_1558.jpg
that was sunday, perfect weather for kid skiing, 12500 ft. el at a-basin

wow nice pic!

ok, did intervals at the track last night, which featured the exciting promise of 10min/20min/10min efforts at 170bpm (which is right at/below lactate threshold 4 me), with some near-recovery (145bpm) rest periods of 5mins inbetween.

with some evening wind:
10min (25.2mph/312W)
20min (24.2mph/282W)
10min (24.6mph/294W)

really wanted a negative split on that last 10 min effort but alas, my legs were screaming and i knew that pushing it any harder would send me over the lactic edge.

very green to this style of training, but i can feel it in my quads today.

OH! also yesterday's training food log (for cutty, inspired by Hunt3r upthread):

breakfast: leftover beef chili
lunch: all you can eat gourmet pizza ($8.50): 6 slices!!!
intervals: gatorade/recovery shake
dinner: hamburger/fries/beer and 2.5 ice cream sandwiches

this is called "letting one's self go" imo.

Hunt3er, do u live in CO or are you on vacation? Just curious cuz I once spent a year in Dillon as a snowboard/mtn. bike bum & A Basin was basically my back yard. O how I long for those carefree days of yore.. That place rules! Also: "ridin' the pass, brah."

eat food, not too much, mostly grease, steve. :)

pillbox i live in littleton. really like a-basin, its close, cheap, compact and has some good shit. in the old days riding the palli lift or doing east wall or hiking out was not uncommon. that was on alpine gear mostly- ive been on tele gear for about 12 years now, and now i dont go too steep unless theres straight hero snow. and with kids, its groomers.

i havent skied the pass in... a long time.

10in at baker this morning btw

;_; I want to be there, no skiing these past two winters

how many days of skiing are you gonna get in gbx?

we got m,t,w,f---took thursday off cause it was rainy and my body was ready to stage a revolt

good article to put things in perspective:
http://velonews.competitor.com/2010/03/news/what-it-takes-to-ride-with-the-pros-wattage-numbers-from-redlands_109894

truly ridiculous guns what a waste of mass

Prologue TT, 3.1 miles: Marcotte powered over the course in 10:59.8 with an average power of 389 watts (w) to place 137th.

that's not very fast (what, like 17mph?) for those kinda watts.

was this TT just a hill climb/mountain pass in sheep's clothing?

He was probably just riding a really heavy bike

What’s more impressive is that he did dozens of 5-second-plus efforts at 600w or greater, and topped 1,000w more than 10 times.

that's what impresses me

my female friend who rides for columbia-htc won the final stage of redlands, ina teutenberg won the overall for columbia

tri-based article but was interested in your thoughts?

Athletes and the power of the present moment
By Grant Giles
4/2/2010


After 13 years of coaching and interacting with athletes I find that the biggest single hurdle for athletes is their mental approach to racing and training and, indeed more importantly, their attitude to life in general.

I find that athletes are type A personalities, very driven, very goal orientated and, for the most part, very anxious as well. There are exceptions to the rule but the mirror image to high performance is always some form of anxiety. It’s almost a necessity to want to succeed in difficult goals (i.e. in order to do this sport you need to be driven) and I think this applies from age group athletes right through to elite professional athletes.

It is always difficult to broach the subject of psychology with athletes. There still seems to be some stigma attached to the words “mental health” and I think that’s a shame. Personally, I feel that psychology in sport and in the general population still has a long way to go and for athletes we have only just scratched the surface of what is possible with a good mental prep and psychological maintenance program.

Some of the biggest difficulties I see with athletes relate to their inability to exist for the present moment. I’ve seen so much angst by athletes who are mentally exhausted and don’t realise it. Mental exhaustion causes all sorts of problems from anxiety issues to clinical depression and immune dysfunction. I also believe that I have seen athletes and their supporters label depression as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome because, again the stigma that revolves around mental health always makes it a hard subject to broach with athletes.

One of the causes of mental exhaustion is that athletes have a preoccupation or habit of mentally labelling everything. How does that feel? How was that performance? Why didn’t I feel as good as last week? Oh this prep isn’t going the same way as the last one I did. The prep I did when I won was different and so on. There is a constant noise and there is a constant comparison of now against the past. Also, with athletes there is always a projection into the future. The cost of the above is always the loss of the present moment and the present is the only moment which is critical to performance and general well-being.

For instance when things go wrong with fluid intake or nutrition or pace – most of the time it’s not because there wasn’t a plan. It’s more often than not, the athlete just starts obsessing over things that cannot be controlled – past / future / other competitors etc etc – It is a constant mental labelling of everything that can get very exhausting during a race and detracts from focus because, simply put, focus is the present moment. The interesting thing about the present is that it is a far more intelligent state for an athlete to use because with the present moment comes awareness, a far more powerful state, that in its purest form will not only bring you some calm headspace, but will bring you a better standard of performance because you will actually be present to make changes that actually effect your performance.

It’s a good little test to run on yourself – just check how much energy you use thinking about what has happened in the past or check to see how much time you spend thinking about the future. The big problem with the past and the future is that you are not actually in a state that exists at all. So think about that for second – how much focus, consciousness and presence can you bring to a thought pattern like that? How much closer will those thought patterns bring you to a great performance or a better training situation?

I once read a quote that I thought was brilliant and it read (“nothing ever happened in the past – It happened in the now” – Echart Tolle) How perfectly true and how much we fight this one simple truth by living in some altered state. I can’t tell you how many times as a coach I have watched a talented athlete dwell on one bad result. I have seen athletes have great seasons and then have a bad result and turn a great season into something less in their minds by dwelling on one negative in a sea of positive. I call it the spiral. The place where an athlete will spiral downwards into a suffering hell of negatives that are based on nothing, and again, a non reality that has no basis of truth. In this state there is no connection to the present moment, there is no sense of real consciousness or focus. I sometimes marvel at a good athlete’s ability to see the negative side of their talent. A drive for better is great, but a thought of weakness or dwelling on certain aspects in a great athlete is very destructive. Again, once a negative spiral gets into place, it’s a hard nut to crack.

I always find it interesting that when people talk about focus they seem to think it’s some kind of mystic place that you go on a plane above mortal consciousness. To me this just creates confusion for athletes. Even Buddhists will tell you that meditation doesn’t take them away –it actually brings them into the present moment in a state of awareness and peace. A very aware, intelligent space it is for one simple reason – it is free of the mental chatter and negative self talk that we constantly feed ourselves. The constant labelling good and bad, right and wrong goes into the background and a clear focus comes into view.

So If I needed to summarise this for athletes where would I begin?

“Where ever you are before a race, be there totally.” What does that mean? It means that whatever you do in the lead-up and during a race you must be in the present. Too many people live in the future or the past – even during a race (i.e.) They worry about things that have happened to them in the past or they worry about whether they might cramp later or blow-up or dehydrate and so on. Nothing that you think about in the future or the past can help you Now and the only real tangible thing that you actually have at all times is the present – presence is powerful, presence is real - You either choose to be present and in the now, or you choose to be lost in your thoughts and the “what ifs”. “The only road to a good performance is - presence that takes place now” your ability to stay with the moment at all times and not let your mind take control. If you can stay present and just live for the moment during a Race then anything is possible.

Stay Calm:
Absolutely critical in triathlon. Keep your mind calm and quiet. Practise this. Everybody talks about positive thoughts but an even better option is to have no thoughts at all. It takes energy to have thoughts positive or negative. You need to set up a state of awareness – in this state you are aware of everything that is happening around you but you are not analysing whether it’s good or bad, you are just responding to events as they unfold, and that takes very little energy. It’s a state that some people call self confidence.

Don’t judge every moment:
Most of the mental chatter in your head during a race comes from judging and assessing how the race is going and whether it’s unfolding as you planned it. Again this is valuable energy that you can use to drive you forward. We can turn around even the worst of days out there, but this can only happen from a mind that is calm, quiet, and free from the tendency to continually judge and analyse what's going on.

Don’t hold back:
If you hold back because you have fear of falling short of your goals then you are always going to be sorely disappointed. This is a massive problem even for world level pros. There are no guarantees in this life so don’t squander opportunities by holding back and not being present. There is a quote from sports psychology that I really like it and it reads – “people are scared of winning” I really think this is true. If you hold back that 10%, then you will never achieve your goals but if you throw out your mental blocks then anything can happen and there’s a lot more satisfaction in knowing you gave it everything and fell short rather then fall short by holding back.

There was also an interesting quote from a big wave surfer called Laird Hamilton, when asked why he risks his life in the pursuit of massive waves he replied – “I don’t want to not live by worrying about what might or could happen.” What’s the punch line? – live in the now, and don’t obsess or waste energy over things you can’t control and above all don’t think about outcomes.

Let's take a worry thought for a moment, “what if I flat” basically you are projecting an imaginary future situation, and that creates fear. If you think about it logically there is no way you can deal with this situation because, in reality, it doesn’t actually exist. It’s a mental phantom that creates fear and fear is certainly not helpful before or during a Race. Instead of going down this road of fear and destructiveness, ask yourself - “what problem do I have right now?” Not next year, not tomorrow, not in 5 minutes time – right Now –you’ll be amazed at what can happen if you can stay in that place.

Cheers and the very best of luck,
Grant Giles

What do you lot eat before and during early morning training rides?

i think the advice about being in the present and about staying calm is key but

There is a quote from sports psychology that I really like it and it reads – “people are scared of winning” I really think this is true. we call these people "losers" and "pack fodder"; their role in the local racing ecosystem is to subsidize the non-losers through the payment of entry fees. also, they sometimes hire me.