2009 end of year post

Beginning with the blog scene. Not such a great year. Turnover in my blog roll is up. Frequency of postings from the hombes? Down. Of course FB and Twitter are to blame. So far I've avoided them, just like fast food. No drive-up window style blogging from here. Yeah I know, it's cheap, convenient, fast, easy, just like McDogfood. No wonder it's so popular. I don't put as much time and effort into writing this crap anymore either. It hasn't hurt the readership too much yet. One hundred distinct visitors is still a good day around here, and if I'm posting regularly that's about what I get Monday-Thursday. Fridays are dead, as are the weekends, except for Sunday nights.

The race scene. My unscientific observations are that things are OK in New England. Not great. The spring races did not seem to do as well attendance-wise as they did in the past few years. Of course there were exceptions. There were however, a lot of races to choose from. I know the feds keep track of "rider days" but we also know how weak they are with processing and publishing anything derived from the data they have at their disposal. The cx calendar was completely full too, some of this coming at the expense of the road. For the most part I think attendance numbers held up all year, right?

Health. Mine stayed pretty decent. Whatever the issue was with my foot last winter, it got better. I didn't get sick much, except for the bout with swine or whatever it was in July. Both my primary care doctor and my dentist (who I've seen for 40 years) retired. I need to get off my ass and find replacements, now that I think about it.

Racing. I thought I raced a lot this year. Counting it all up though, not so much: 7 running races, 13 weeknight TTs, 2 real TTs, 4 training crits, 4 real crits, 9 road and circuit races, and 15 cyclocross races. The running was light this year because my foot issue sidelined me in the spring. On the bike, the spring campaign was not horrible, although we did not get the whole team together at many races. Sometimes we were split up due to races being 40+ and 50+. Duano had lingering groin issues but the 50+ guys still managed to come up big and he and the others won a few races. In the 40+ and 45+ the Cronoman and Timmy as well as Billy C raced with me a few times and we did OK, but did not score any wins. I got 2nd at one of the Ninigrets. That was one highlight I guess, other than winning the TT at the Bob Beal, which was a good ride. At Jiminy Peak I had good form but executed poorly and got nothing. Sunapee was another bright spot, but Doug and three others were up the road and we never got organized to bring them back, but I ended up right on their heels while taking the field sprint for 5th. Cyclocross was fun, and the Cronoman raced well, winning some small races, and finishing the big Verge series 10th in the points. I only did six of the fourteen races in the series, but scored bottom feeder points in four of them to wind up in 31st. I also managed 24th in the socalcross series, with just two races. woot!

Training. OK, this is what it is all about. Or is it? What I do probably doesn't fit the strict definition of "training," at least not by everyone's standard. This year especially, I guess I did a lot of just riding around. That is OK. Without mentioning any names, there are some members of my inner circle whom I suspect don't actually enjoy riding their bikes very much. They speak of it as "getting the work done" or may reason against going on an all-day ride in unfamiliar territory by saying "I don't need to do that." That's not me. I still really enjoy just riding my bike. I am however, a little bored with riding the same roads around my house, and like just about everyone, I get annoyed by intolerant motorists and the dangers of life on the shoulder of the roads. That's one of the main reasons I race. Races get me out to new and interesting areas of New England, and we get to ride in a semi-controlled environment for a change. Yeah it's come to that; I race because it's safer than just riding.

There's got to be more to it than that though, right? Aren't racers supposed to be high strung, type A, "uber-competitive" a-holes? I don't know. I enjoy competing. Winning is very satisfying, although I barely know the feeling. Coming in second still sucks. I'm not sure if it's the best form of losing or not. When you get beat fair and square by a competitor that you respect, and it comes with prize money, I guess it is! Sometimes it just feels like ordinary losing, only worse. Second place days are the longest rides home. So yeah, I like to compete. But I don't live for it. I don't set crazy goals. That's just one of the many reasons I don't have a coach. My main goals are to have fun, stay healthy, and keep being able to do this stuff for a long time. Which is the weird part about doing a "year end" post. It's normal to look at a year or a season as well, a season. People like to set goals for a season. To me that is a very short-term outlook. One year? It still amazes me that people accept that it takes four years to acquire an undergraduate degree but then think they can transform themselves as an athlete in just 10 months. Where is the patience and long-term view? Sign of the impatient times I guess. Just like fast-food communications like Twitter, what have you done for me this quarter "investment" strategies, and job-hopping career management. Wow, this is turning into an editorial rant.

So yeah, I'm thinking about "training" more this year. In 2009 I tallied about 444 hours on the bike, which is far more than the previous six years for which I have complete records. In addition to that, I ran for 58 hours total. Any other "aerobic" stuff I did was insignificant. I can't swim for shit, nor can I ski well enough to get a "workout" out of it. I have snowshoes, but only went once last year. Today I equaled that, and may get out a lot more this winter. I also go to the gym regularly, performing a variety of strength and flexibility stuff intended to keep me standing up straight and able to put my bike on a roof rack should the need arise. That's probably well over 100 hours/year, though I don't track it.

What was missing? For one thing, intensity last winter. Since 2006 or so I've relied on running races in the winter for chances to push myself into zones 4 and 5. With the foot injury I did not do that in 2009. My retrospective analysis shows that I spent five months straight, from 2008 Ice Weasels right up until the first Jonny Cake training race in April without doing a race of any kind. That probably hurt. Not that running will make you (or me) a better bike racer. It won't. It probably hurts in some ways. It will make you a better athlete though. In the local races, the serious masters are a strange bunch. Runners don't talk shit and there are no posers like in bike racing. You can't spend your way into the sport. Very few of these guys have blogs either. Not that there's a lot to blog about. But it's a very simple, very natural, basic, hard-assed way to compete. We run from here to there. It might be primitive compared to a bike race, but I like it. This year I want to do more of it. I'm hoping my body holds up. I resisted the "more is better" philosophy, and I think I've been patient, refraining from doing the whole "get the marathon off my life checklist" thing. For that I have patience and a multi-year outlook. Besides that, endurance is over-rated. Anyone (who can stay healthy) can put in the time and "just finish."

Speaking of that, on the bike, I have been doing longer stuff the past few years, primarily because of D2R2. Going under nine hours there this year was very satisfying, especially since I finished feeling much better and much fresher than the last two times I did it. I think I've got it down now and plan on going back. Using CX tires made the whole thing much more enjoyable. This year I went 6+ hours only two times other than that, and 5+ eight times. I rode my bike 240 days, and ran on 72. Only four weeks were 14+ hours total training, and two of those were vacation weeks.

I bought two new bikes, a power tap, some other wheels, several tubular tires, and a bunch of wool clothing this year, stimulating the economy in a big way, for me. The power tap: ehh, it is useful for some things, but they are still way overrated in my opinion. I think I used it about sixty times or so. In time trials it is good for pacing and I got better results because of that. For indoor training I think it's good, because riding indoors can be pretty miserable even if you aren't going too hard, so perception can be very skewed. And even though I can't sprint to save my life, for very short efforts such as sprint training, having a number put on your efforts is valuable. The in between stuff though, like two to five minute intervals, I don't know, I don't get much out of this thing. I don't need a digital meter to tell me when I'm sucking wind.

On that note, oh yeah, I went and got my VO2 max tested at the end of the year, as well as another lactate threshold test, this time using a bike and power measurement rather than a treadmill. The result? My VO2 max was 4.7 liter/min, which works out to 60ml/kg/min. Not exactly off the charts. More importantly, power production at this level was around 360 watts. It will be interesting to see how this compares to my summer values if I can go back in July. I can manage a CP5 of about 410 watts on Blue Hill, but the 360 we got in the VO2 max test is very close to what I can manage in a purely seated effort on the flats. My power at OBLA was around 275. Again, I'm curious how that will compare to the summer number, as I simply cannot gauge how fit or not fit I am at this time of year. I don't do so well at cross, but this testing would seem to indicate that I'm not a far off my summer fitness as I previously believed.

The other bad news is my use of fat as an energy source measured out as very minimal. Like, a %CHO hair above nil (I am so witty). One of the things I've changed in the past several years is to always be topped up with food when I ride. When I was younger and inexperienced, I would routinely ride with just plain water and a little food. And we rode hard then. After three hours or so I'd be cooked and slowing down, always attributing it to fatigue. Well duh, now I know better, and I've found that if you stay out of zone 5 and keep fueled up, you can ride forever. Well, I don't know if it was just this one test on this one day, but maybe I've trained myself to just use the food in my stomach and that's it. Again, next time will be interesting, and I'll try it with less fuel in my belly too.

That's a lot of words to say not much at all. So do I have goals for 2010? You know, other than running more, honestly I don't right now. This winter I want to keep working on being a better athlete and try to do well in some longer running races without sacrificing overall health or too much cycling performance. I don't think (right now anyway) that I will be as focused on the early season hilly road races. I want to get faster on the flats. I may be less focused on big hours and big miles, though I still want to do D2R2 and I'd also like to take more cycling vacations to ride in different areas, even if they're not too far away. I had fun racing cyclocross this year, and I think I got a lot out of the intensity of it. So I'll probably do that again, and might factor that in to my activities the rest of the year. Clear as muck? Thanks for reading.