The Walk of Life

KL's coach uses an interesting term for an easy, easy recovery day: "walking on your bike." The idea is to just head out and roll around, not focusing on heart rate, power, or even pedaling form. Just loosening up, stretching, moving a little blood around and getting into the true spirit of active recovery, with emphasis on the recovery, not the active. This might seem like a waste of time to you, but during the periods of your hardest training, this kind of "ride" can be the best thing in the world for you. You might not want to listen to me, but Justin, having ridden for two teams that are now part of the Pro Tour has a finish of the Giro d Italia on his palmares, and knows what he is talking about. Luckily for solobreak, my suburban surroundings lend themselves perfectly to this kind of activity.

I've used this form of recovery since long before ever meeting KL or her coach. During the heart of the racing season, many of my "training" nights consist of just going out and doing what I describe as "riding around the neighborhood like you are a little kid again." Kids don't use HRM's or power meters, and for the most part they're barely aware of gearing, cadence, or position. They just roll around, speed up, coast, dive bomb corners, and do J-turn skids. The latter might not be such a good idea on your $45 folding clinchers, but all the rest of it will pass the night and help you work out the soreness from the races and "real" training rides.

Astute observers will notice the racing season brought a big jump in purple "JNK" time on my bar graphs below. Much of this comes from these playtime recovery rides. Not all of it does though. My HRM settings define zone 1 as 100-129 bpm, and anything below 100 gets classified as "junk," or zone 0. During the winter and spring, if I'm pedaling at 90 rpm or better, my HR will be over 100 no matter how little resistance is on the pedals. Not so now. During the peak of the season, especially on long, easy days following harder efforts, I can be rolling along at 30 kph and look down and see 90 bpm. Yeah, sure, if I had a power tap I could confirm or deny whether or not my "true intensity" was still in my "zone 1 power range," but I don't believe it makes much difference. On days like that, I'm riding at the intensity that feels right to me, and if my heart only wants/needs to beat 1.5 times every second, who am I to argue with it?

Racing bikes is not a steady state, easy effort anyway. The other day, Bolder's blog linked to a piece on pedaling form by a coach named Dan Proulx. In this article, the author makes a reference to "aggressive accelerations." That pretty much sums up what bike racing is all about. I like to call it "crunch time." Nobody ever gets dropped when the pack is just riding along. The whole thing is sort of like the bottleneck principle. There isn't much point in making improvements in areas that aren't holding you back. Sure, if you can't finish races due to premature fatigue, then you might need to increase your miles and do more steady riding.

Most of us (who already race anyway) don't fall into that category. What we need is to more reliably come up with the goods when the battle is on and the efforts are extreme. What was happening in the race the last time you cracked? Maybe an "aggresive acceleration?" That is what you have to train. Simple right? This was enough to crack you, so it's going to hurt, but you gotta do it. Hard enough on your hard days isn't just a cliche. Neither is "easy on your easy days." Going out and "walking on your bike" is the best way to assure yourself of an easy enough easy day. Easy right? Thanks for reading.