Gotta be cool, relaxed, part 2

Wait a minute, where is part 1? None of your business Pablo, and besides, don't you have more important things to worry about? Publishing this blog is an extremely complex operation that you need not understand, not that you are capable anyway. So leave all that to me. If you must know, transitioning to morning workouts has messed up the blogging process. Wasting precious minutes of daylight spewing BS to keep your mind off work just can't take priority over keep the fat off of me. I'll get it worked out somehow. As of this moment, Part 1 is a draft post containing ideas for things to write about, much like Gewilli's moleskin notebook. Despite not updating my blog lately, I've been reading yours, and hopefully you've noticed that I've been rather generous with the comments lately, which is more than I can say for you. Not to fear, as topping my list of topics is one sure to offend: all bloggers are head cases. I used to think bike racers were the biggest group of nut jobs on Earth. Then along came blogging. Bloggers don't leave any doubt for us, they spell out their lunacy on a daily basis for all the world to read. Combine blogging with bike racing and we have all "you people." No need to elaborate now, I'm sure that's enough to have you all up at night self-analyzing, so I guess I can cross that one off the list.

The workouts have been going OK. Friday night I tried out the mini-gym at the Lowder Brook building before heading out for five ~1k laps of the campus at dusk. This venue will be able to provide suitable workouts in a pinch. Saturday was especially productive, as I not only got my car inspected, but we also got KL's new cross bike experiment put together before heading out for an hour forty five shakedown spin. Later we went out to run some errands and had a nice little dinner date at Jaipur Cafe. Sunday morning we went out for a trail run, covering ~4 miles at (for me) an uncomfortably fast pace of around 8 minutes/mile before packing up so she could get to TF Green for her flight to Vegas and Interbike. This put me back at home (with houseguest for the week the Mighty F-man) in the early afternoon. I continued my productive weekend by doing some further straightening out of the bikeroom, as well as taking the Slim Chance out of mothballs. Still bearing some mud from racing at Battenkill-Roubaix back in April, the poor bike has sat in the basement since. After swapping on some pedals from the TT rig, I went out in the unseasonably warm temps for 2.5 hours on the road. The bike immediately felt perfect. The frame really is quite a bit more comfortable than my stiffer aluminum bike, and the position is perfect. I'll probably be riding this bike a lot over the next few months.

One bike difference though was the gearing (here you go GeWilli). The (road) racing season is over (probably). 'Cross does not hold the special place in my heart that it does for many of you. I've raced cross since long before many of you ever heard of it, and at times I enjoyed it immensely, but for the most part it has always just been a way to keep fit while doing something a little different. We laughed while reading all the accounts of September 'cross races where riders suffered meltdowns from performing the intensity of cross in the Indian summer heat. No shit Sherlock. The entire sport was invented as a way to ride your bike when it was too friggin' cold to ride on the road. Back-extending the sport into September was never part of the plan. OK, where was I? Oh yeah, so I have no real bike-specific training goals for the short term. I can do whatever I want, or do nothing at all. In the past, sometime I've taken the approach of Murat and gone out and tried to do things like five hour solo centuries. What the hell, right, you have the endurance and fitness, so why not? Good idea, but you have to be careful. In the past at this time of year, I've found myself pounding out mile after mile in the big ring, because I could. RPMs in the eighties have their place, but me and others I've know have tightened up our backs and needlessly beaten up our knees quite often by taking this approach. More importantly, for bike racing purposes, these rides have little value. The ability to mash the 53x16 for four hours straight at 22 mph will get you exactly nothing in our racing world.

A better approach, one which I strive to take, is to take any time you don't have a specific training goal to work on your pedaling. Notice I do not use the term spin. Too many people "spin" by thrashing away at a higher than normal cadence with little to no resistance. As soon as they are under then gun, and the pressure is on, they revert to their usual gear mashing style and grind it out at 80 rpm. Sometimes that works, but to me working on my pedaling means developing the "smooth power" spin defined by even, moderate tension on the chain and a round pedal stroke that appears effortless. Accomplishing this means building the muscle memory to the point that you do not need to concentrate.

You don't need to ride at high cadence all the time, and forcing yourself to climb like Armstrong is probably a bad idea. His extreme cadence under high power output reportedly took years of specific training to adapt to. In the short term, using high cadence in stressful situations will probably be less efficient. This is all the more reason to work on it -- in training. When you get out in a race, hey, whatever works. I tend to use bigger gears and lower cadence when I am sitting in a really fast line. The goal though, is to have all the weapons in your arsenal, so at crunch time you'll have a choice of what to use.

What does this have to do with chainrings? Well, in the meat of the season, sure, we all live in the big ring, and if I wanted to work on smooth power at high cadence, I'd be doing intervals at 40 kph. During the off season this is not the case. As an aging master, I may find myself in zone 2 evem when just tooling along at 25 kph, especially on a windy day or a shallow grade. If I want to ride at 100-105 rpm in my 41 tooth chainring, even the 17 cog will require 30-32 kph. If the conditions require me to slow down to 24 kph in order to stay in or near zone 2, I'd have to go all the way to the 23 cog. Even in these days of 10-speed carpet bombing cassettes, once you get past the 17 you have a two-cog jump between gears. Enter the 36 tooth ring. 100 rpm in a 36x17 comes out to just under 27 kph, not too brisk. Yet if I am feeling spry, I can click my way through the "straight block" portion of the cluster and be going 35 kph (105 rpm in the 36x14) before I even have to think about going to the big ring. In a nutshell, these gears are more suitable for my purposes during off season training. Never mind that when the occasional big climb does come, my 36x27 may be just right for keeping me in the saddle working on form, rather than lugging away with no benefit.

So that's the idea. No proofing, you've made me late already. I'll try to keep up the updates but I'm not sure how consistently I'll get them out in the morning. For now I'll keep extolling my ample wisdom through comments. Thanks for reading, mofos.