I weighed in today at 17.18 lbs.

This was the weight with race wheels but no powermeter. I can get below 17 lbs with the acquisition of a new seat.

The weekly updates:

I had a bit of a washout for the first week of this period, it could have been good training but then I went Telemarking for two days. It was fun, but it killed three planned runs. Sure I logged lots of hours but Telemarking is pretty non-specific preparation for a marathon, at least it uses your legs I guess. That trip also hampered the next week because I should have been working on the revisions on my thesis demanded by the examining committee that weekend, but I went skiing instead. They needed to be done the next week and so I botched another opportunity to do some high quality consistent running in alright conditions. The next week I travelled to Calgary to attend the funeral of my Grandfather, and then started work. While that didn’t force me to take 4 days off, run once and really come off the rails with training, I don’t see that I necessarily should have done otherwise. Death is a motivation sucker, it always will be and that’s just how it’s going to be. I actually don’t really care that that week was a write-off, but I am frustrated that I started to slide in the two weeks previous. It’s a good thing Dave demanded that I come out and go skiing the following Sunday or I would have skipped out and taken another zero.

The next week back took some getting used to, I had slipped a fair amount in my consistency with everything and it really felt like I was trying to get a heavy locomotive rolling again. It seemed that the whole metabolism managed to slow itself down and needed some time for the pressure in the steam chambers to build up before I could roll out of the station. I did get moving by the end of the week but was frustrated by the fact that my well laid plans for preparation for this upcoming marathon had been all-but destroyed. Part of me wanted to give up, it was a large part. I asked Dave what I was supposed to do when I just didn’t care about a race anymore. It wasn’t like I was asking if it was OK to switch to the half-marathon, I was wondering about quitting all together. Maybe I’d go to Vancouver and just be a tourist for the weekend with that plane ticket I now wished I hadn’t bought, maybe bring a bike and write off the whole idea of running a marathon.

Then I got roped into a long run that evening by Keegan and went along with it. I stand by the statement that I’ve been making quite a bit recently. “If you’re smart about who you choose to surround yourself with, peer pressure only does good things.” I tapped out a 1h49 half marathon and stayed strictly aerobic for the whole thing. Decked out in full tights and jacket, running in loose snow and doing some single-track trails… that’s a totally amazing time. It was at this point that I drew the analogy that I was the big locomotive that was taking a while to get going after a lousy three weeks of training. Hindsight helps. I figured that my best bet was to try and put together a good week of training, keep it mostly aerobic and then see where I was at before I made any drastic changes of plans.

The last week of training went well. I didn’t roll over 20 hours or anything that would have seemed super impressive last year during the Ironman build, but I did run with good consistency and put together some pretty good runs, nothing junky. Everything had a purpose and I was happy about it. It wrapped up Saturday afternoon with a good long run of 30kms with a 5 mile section thrown in after 30kms where I was able to maintain a 7:22 pace in variable snow conditions. I got home feeling beat up, but happy. I think it’s a real positive sign to feel like the marathon training plan is back on track. Unfortunately it’s not really, there is a pretty significant hole in the middle of my buildup (as evidenced by the falling CTL [red] on the chart at right). I have modified the plan from here on out to account for this. I’m cutting the amount of running above aerobic threshold scheduled for this coming week in half. I’m also cutting out all of the VO2 focussed intervals that the Pfitzinger plan has scheduled in favour of strides and some running just slightly above marathon pace. I’m trying to be conservative with what I can ask my body to do without as extensive a base-buildup as I should have done. I’m then paring back the total volume anticipated by 10-15%, slicing it off of most of the runs with the exception of my long runs which need to stay at the higher durations as they are needed for focus on duration. The marathon on May 1 didn’t get 10-15% shorter.

I’m posting the planned weekly schedule from here to the race [here]. It’s accurate for running, and if the weather co-operates I’ll be adding some aerobic cycling to the mix once the roads are clear. There’s not going to be stress on the muscles in my legs for that kind of stuff so I’ll sprinkle in what I have time for. For completeness sake I’ve included the PMCs for all three sports and my total at the left here as well, click on the mini-picture to expand.

Finally, I have one other stat to note… I swam a 15:31 for 1000 yards on Friday. I went out pretty conservative in the first half. I think that partly had to do with me not really wanting to suffer as much as I could have suffered for 15 minutes but also a bit of disillusionment with the purpose of doing this when Keegan had opened up with a 1:15 1000yds next to me and I was feeling super slow. I did turn it around in the second half which is nice and it made for a good workout even though it’s evidence that it wasn’t the best test of my actual 1000yd TT speed. Despite being a long ways off how well I was swimming last march at this time this is a huge improvement in my swimming since Christmas when I was struggling to come in with 50 second laps on only 100 and 200 yard intervals in a workout. I’m also happy to report that I’m actually tackling flip turns with some regularity. The immediacy of the Spring Thaw Triathlon, where successfully doing flip turns could amount to a full 0.5% improvement of my finish time has convinced me that it is worthwhile. Buying carbon aero widgets to do that would cost me between $1000 and $1500.

The bike has been cabled and taped:

The Quarq is currently in the possession of FedEx and should arrive Wednesday. Carbon wheels are backordered until April. Tubular tyres are currently in the mail from ProBikeKit.

The bearings for my BB30 bottom bracket arrived today. That was the main thing preventing me from getting this bike built. I mounted them up and slapped on a few components. I’ll do the cabling this weekend and post final photos of the preliminary build. This is basically what it will look like, plus some white cabling, white cages and white bar tape. I might decide to get my hands on some white HUDZ for the doubletaps, that might be overkill though, I’ll have to see how it looks in black first. I’m still undecided on what to acquire for race wheels, and I’m currently reconsidering whether or not my perceived need to go for a crank-based meter is necessary. I can get a deep-section set of carbon clinchers that are already laced up to a powertap hub that weigh less than my trispoke-disc combo for the same price as a quarq. There is an aero-disadvantage but I could go the route of a disc-cover for long-course triathlon and this is probably comparable. I also get myself out of tubulars which is costly and frustrating for flats. If I’m running an 808 depth wheelset for my powermeter that means I need to be comfortable doing an awful lot of riding on it. That means I might be “the guy who shows up to the Thursday night ride with deep carbon wheels”. Hmmm…. not sure if I want that. Anyways, here’s the bike so far:

I updated the graphics on my disc and TT helmet for the 2011 season (and beyond) with the logo from the Hardcore bike shop in Edmonton.

< rant >

Before you comment telling me that I need to angle my aerobars down a bit more to get my forearms to be level because you think it is more aerodynamic please look here & here & here & here & here & here & here & here & here and observe that my forearms are level which is actually more important than the angle that the aerobars point when you look at them when the bike is standing still. You don’t usually tell someone that their seat is the wrong height when they’re not on their bike so you’d be wise not to make comments about my handlebars when I’m not riding it.

< / rant >

I’m in another research study, this one is testing the acute effects of L-arginine ingestion on exercise. They’re looking at the growth hormone levels in the blood during submaximal exertion in endurance trained athletes and so need to have a good idea where anaerobic threshold is. This means that they need to know quite a bit about my physiology to determine what normal is before they can do the double-blind test on what L-arganine will do to my two one hour riding sessions, which are to be done at 80% of my anaerobic threshold power. All that just to say that I could get a free VO₂-max test out of the deal which, if you ask me, is always a good trade!

This also required body composition testing done by underwater weighing and I scored 7.2 % body fat which I think was probably reasonably accurate and also pretty acceptable for the base-season of my year. 7.2% fat means I’ve got about 14 lbs of fat on me which either sounds like a lot, or it doesn’t sound like much, depending on who you are. I take this to mean the following: If I think I can lean up to about 6% fat by race-day I have to loose a whole kilogram of fat. That also means I only have a kilogram of fat to loose. If you’re a calorie counter that’s a matter of coming up short on average 100 calories per day from here until race day, which is silly-easy if you adopt that method of body-composition control. I’ll reference you to a recent pair of blog posts written by my coach Steven Lord entitled “Calorie Counting Futility” and “More on Calorie Counting Futility” which very specifically address the issue of leaning-up as an athlete. I think you can probably tell by their titles what his opinion is! I never have been a long term calorie counter and I don’t intend on being one.

I have previously had both great success and negligible success adopting a simple strategy of shifting towards “lean protein and more salad vegetables” during lead-ups to a couple races in the previous few seasons. The philosophical strategy behind that was to phrase the choices positively so that I am trying to get satiated on those fuel sources and then will naturally reduce the component that processed carbohydrates plays in my diet. I’m currently modifying the method to incorporate a bit of a negative statement which I’m not totally certain about, as I don’t like the idea of not eating things, I think it’s more mentally healthy to phrase this stuff in the positive. For now the strategy is again a shift towards incorporating “lean protein and more salad vegetables” as well as “minimizing consumption of processed carbohydrates outside a window of 2 hours before and 2 hours after exercise”. Interestingly, that means if I’m doing a double workout in the day it doesn’t really apply. I am not monitoring my weight too closely these days and I am certainly not monitoring my body composition frequently even though I have access to a four-point electrical impedance tool which has proven reliable in the past. As I’ve written before in this blog, I found that doing so had me miss the forest for the trees.

Now that I sound like I’ve got an eating disorder I’ll get back to the VO₂-max test.

This first figure shows my oxygen consumption with increasing wattage. It shows that I maxed out with one minute at 540 Watts (on an average of 60kms, and strictly less than 100kms, per week on the bike since October – not bad!) and had a peak oxygen uptake of 5.4 L/min which is a pretty good absolute score. I have scored as high as 5.7 L/min previously but that was following the Sea-to-Sea bike tour where I absolutely loaded my body with aerobic work and rode 6 days a week for 9 weeks, a far cry from the point in my season where I’m at right now. My relative score is good but not great. It definitely qualifies me for the study, but it also shows I’m not yet race-ready.

This second chart shows the results of gas-analysis. I crossed over to anaerobic work at 4 L/min with an estimated power output of between 320 and 360 Watts. The corresponding HR to this crossover occurred in the range of 165-170 bpm. Previously, I had been treating my threshold HR on the bike to be around 176 bpm which is a slight overestimate. The results of the test give me an indication that in future I need to down-estimate my cycling threshold HR by a few bpm to the high 160’s rather than the mid 170’s. A more accurate measure is unnecessary (as HR will vary day to day) and unavailable because the step-test protocol goes in 40 Watt increments and lets your HR settle intermittently rather than gradually ramping through all of the different power-outputs. Interestingly I only reached a max-HR of 196 bpm during the test. I have always cracked 200 bpm during previous tests. It’s possible that I am dealing with a tiny bit of residual fatigue from the race this past weekend which could have made a bit of difference.

This figure is the one that I find the most interesting but it’s also the most inaccurate as it’s based on a hack calculation I did of substrate consumption during exercise. I used the table of “Thermal Equivalents of Oxygen for the non-protein respiratory quotient” from “Essentials of exercise physiology, Volume 1 By William D. McArdle, Frank I. Katch, Victor L. Katch” and directly substituted my respiratory exchange ratio (RER) during the test for the respiratory quotient (RQ) quoted from the table. This is a poor assumption and I know it. The testing protocol recording this data was also rather rapid and so it means that I didn’t have the opportunity to settle in to a nice and calm fat burning metabolic state during the early part of the test. This is seen by a low fat consumption in the early stages which is almost certainly false. Then as the test progresses towards anaerobic threshold my fat consumption trails off and so when I hit anaerobic threshold I am by definition exhibiting an exchange ratio of one. This is where the assumption that RER=RQ is obviously problematic. It’s almost guaranteed that I am still metabolizing some fat at this workload but the assumption implies that I cannot be.

RER – the Respiratory Exchange Ratio is the ratio of expired CO₂ to the inspired O₂ during exercise and it is measured at the mouth by the gas analysis machine.

RQ – the Respiratory Quotient is the ratio of CO₂ produced by cellular respiration to the quantity of O₂ consumed during cellular respiration. Burning carbohydrates produced 6x CO₂ molecules for each 6x O₂ molecules consumed giving an RQ of 1.0 Burning lipids which are a more energy dense molecule requires more O₂ to metabolize the fuel for the same amount of CO₂ produced.

Over a long period of time when the body functions at a constant exertion (or rest) the time average of RER is equal to the time average of RQ.

One other thing that’s interesting to do is calculate my efficiency in converting chemical energy to mechanical energy. If we look at threshold power and say that I was at 340 Watts (estimate) and I was metabolizing 20 calories per minute that means I was consuming 1394 Watts of chemical energy and exhibiting a conversion ratio of 24.4%. OK, for those of you in the know you’re very aware that 24% conversion efficiency is pretty much the gold standard in cycling so I’ll admit I cherry picked my estimate to put me there. If you look at the results over the sub-threshold exertions (below) you’ll see that there is a trend that shows me displaying a false peak in efficiency while the metabolic process RQ is translated through my blood and lungs to display itself as an RER measured at my mouth. Where the gross efficiency settles before the next incremental increase would be the true measure of my conversion ratio. As shown in the little table I do exhibit excellent conversion factors but I’m not a world record breaker.

OK, one final calculation for the nerds who read all the way to the end:

I know that the result is going to turn out poorly because as I already discussed there’s lots of evidence to believe that fat burning has been underestimated by the testing protocol and my lack of comprehensive skills in doing the calculations. But, I figure I should run the calculation anyways. I finished at 240 Watts with a HR that was settled right around my Ironman HR last year when all prepped up for the race in Penticton. I was significantly more aerobically fit at that point than I am now so I should have tested with a higher fat burning capacity at that HR than I did during the test, but let’s presume I’m the same. Over all of the records at 240 Watts I averaged a caloric expenditure of 14.3 calories per minute. The average percentage of that that came from fat was 21% or 3.0 calories per minute. That means I burned 858 calories per hour while riding the bike at Ironman, which totals a caloric burn of 4476 calories (5:13 bike split) and I will have been able to process 939 calories of my fat reserves on the bike. I have already well documented my nutrition strategy for Ironman on the blog so I won’t reiterate all the points here except to say that I ingested 2500 calories while on the bike. This calculation means I could have had a bike-leg caloric deficit of 1037 calories. Considering that I can EASILY burn 1000 calories per hour swimming (I’ll tell you right now I swam way harder than I biked) then I should have reached T2 having burned through more than 2000 calories of stored glycogen… (average adult’s stored glycogen is 2000 calories) and while I may be able to load myself up on a bit more than that because I’m a big person and because I employed some caloric storage training and because I did pre-race carbo fueling and the pre-race banana that entered my bloodstream during the swim for ~100 calories) these estimates show that I would have been starting the marathon with nothing in the tank, or at least with less than ~20% of my glycogen reserves.

Like I said, the calculation wasn’t going to work. I was burning more fat than this estimate leaves us to believe. I’m pretty sure that I did the bike glycogen neutral or perhaps even glycogen positive to restore some reserves lost on the swim. The deficit by these estimates would have required me to have burned 6.3 calories per minute of fat on the bike. That estimate is probably a lot closer to the truth and it’s not unreasonable to believe that I could have done that, it only amounts to 44% of my calories from fat at that workload. Considering I was riding a mix of easy and steady, that’s not an unreasonable thing to expect of my body. I’ve seen metabolic testing profiles elsewhere online with ironman exertion fat consumption ratios both at and above this 45% range.

I’ll conclude this post with one final thought. Going faster at Ironman doesn’t require that you burn as much fat as you can on the bike. Going faster at Ironman requires you doing the bike split as quickly as you can and still deliver yourself to the beginning of the run capable of running your best marathon. That probably doesn’t mean that you need to have your glycogen stores full if you’re reasonably capable of consuming calories while running and run with any sort of reasonable efficiency. If we look at how much professional ironman athletes eat (or Kona qualifying AG athletes in the M25-39 AGs) during the run portion of the event compared to athletes who are running standalone marathons in comparable times (2:40-3:00) we see a big discrepancy. Clearly the professional ironman athletes are not arriving in T2 with full glycogen stores or they wouldn’t have to eat like that. I know it’s dangerous to compare yourself to the pros to learn how to go faster (Scott Molina on IMTalk last week had excellent stuff to say on this topic – listen if you’re interested) but I think it is indicative of the fastest strategy on the bike leg NOT being anywhere close to 100% conservative.

The racing schedules for this summer have just been posted and it looks like everything stacks up almost perfectly for me!

When I say perfectly I mean that there is very little conflict of interest in where I intend to direct my attention each weekend for basically every weekend of the summer. It’s simple, choose what you love doing and then love doing it. I’m not signed up for everything listed here, or at least not yet!

• May 1 – Vancouver Marathon
• May 8 – Spring Thaw (Sprint) Triathlon
• May 14-15 – Velocity Stage Race
• May 21-22 – Bikes on Broadway Stage Race
• May 28 – Crewing for Aaron at Blackfoot 100km
• May 29 – Pigeon Lake Road Race
• June 5 – Oliver (Half Ironman) Triathlon
• June 11 – Half Moon Lake – Mission3 (SuperSprint) Triathlon
• June 18-19 -Banff Bike Fest Stage Race
  • or June 18 – Chinook (Olympic or Half Ironman) Triathlon
• June 25-26 – Devon Stage Race
• July 1 – Canada Day Crit
• July 10 – Edmonton ITU (Olympic) Triathlon
  • I think this will have slots for Worlds but they are in New Zealand in October 2012 so taking a slot is a rather outrageous proposition.
• July 16-17 – Perhaps run the Skyline Trail with Aaron?
• July 23-24 – Perhaps a backpacking weekend in Wilmore Wilderness?
  • Sylvan Lake (Half Ironman) Triathlon is on the 24^th and is likely the spot that I’d need to race to qualify for the ITU Long Distance World Championships that are going to be held in Spain in 2012. Doing this is an attractive alternative to chasing a Kona slot in 2012 as this is a true world championship, not a corporate world championship.
• July 29-30 – Tour de Bowness Stage Race
• August 6-7 – Jason Lapierre Stage Race
• August 14 – Bicisport Road Race
  • or August 14 – XTerra Canmore (Offroad) Triathlon – rumour is that this will have slots for Maui in 2012, so racing on the course the year before is an advantage if I want to try and qualify for worlds in 2012.
• August 20 – Headwinds Provincial Road Race
• August 27 – Recovery Weekend
• September 1 – It’s September – time to start riding the ‘cross bike!

Two or three weekends out of the whole four months with conflicting interests is a pretty slim number. I’m happy to have a couple weeks in July without much potential distraction which I can either use for relaxation if I’m running on fumes or use for hard training to prep myself up for the upcoming stage racing. I’m really hoping to be able to bring my A-game to the criteriums in Calgary, the infamous Tour de Bowness “Bownesian Pavement” Crit and the soon to become infamous Jason Lapierre “Speedfest” crit that was run downtown last year, rumour is that it will be downtown again in 2011. That means big base in May and June and serious sharpening efforts in June and July. Lots of bike riding!

Over the last couple years I’ve had plenty of people ask me how to TT well in a triathlon. Recently I’ve had a bunch of these requests and so I’m slapping this on the blog. Being able to execute the bike split well requires fitness, but similarly importantly it requires that you have practiced the specific skill of doing it. That means you need to have a decent idea of how fast you can be going to gauge your effort (let’s presume we’re not working with power).

Note that this isn’t a cycling program. It’s a component of a cycling program that you’d implement as a part of your training during the specific buildup to your race. Alongside it there would be perhaps some intervals or hill repeats and maybe some middle distance rides and some easy rides to the coffee shop and back.

This plan makes use of two workouts and only two workouts. It’s simple but at the same time, what we’re trying to do is in some sense pretty simple as well. We’re trying to ride our bikes as fast as we can. The workouts are as follows: “Ride your bike” and “Ride your bike faster”. If you spend a while executing the progression inherent in this plan it will be able to tell you how fast you should try to ride at your upcoming race.

Workout: Ride your bike

Endurance Focus

Total Time: Rough estimate of total bike and run duration of planned race plus 1 hour. (Longest race of your season)

Get on your bike.
Ride X hours, take breaks in the first half if necessary and at half-way. When you are riding your bike you should always be doing the same effort. Minimum standard deviation across the full ride is the goal.
No breaks allowed during final half. Ideally this includes no stoplights etc. Leave town during the first half and complete the duration of the ride when you get back to city limits. Then take it easy on the way back through town. If your technology is capable of it take splits so you know your average speed during different portions of the ride you’ll need it for the next workout.
Note how much of the ride you are able to complete in the aerobars. Do not exceed riding the same fraction during your race bike split. The fastest bike split is to ride 100% on the aerobars, thus, try to do this during training.
The entire ride should be at a pace at which you would slow down significantly if you stopped pedaling. The interpretation of this varies from person to person based on fitness. The emphasis is that you are pedaling your bike for this duration, not sitting on your bike and just riding it along the road. The goal is to develop race-duration endurance.
Completing this workout should be a confidence booster for your ability to complete the race.

Notes:
For a sprint distance, this ride should total around 2-2.5 hours.
For an Olympic distance this ride should total around 3-4 hours.
For a Half Ironman this ride should total 5.5-6.5 hours.
For an Ironman this ride should total ~8-10 hours… more than this is likely not beneficial, you need to eat too differently during such a ride that it’s similarity to racing reduces effectiveness.

Workout: Ride your bike faster

Time Trial Specificity Focus

Total Time: Total bike-segment duration plus 1 hour. (Longest race of your season)

Get on your bike.
Ride until you are warmed up and have an uninterrupted stretch of highway ahead of you. (ie. ride out of the city)
Begin the workout by choosing one of the following methods (based on if your pace is likely going to be wonky due to wind)
Pace is based on that of the second half of a recent successful completion of “Ride your bike” where you didn’t fade off into oblivion. Target pace is 25% faster than that.

ie:
endurance ride at 25 kph, interval pace: 32kph
endurance ride at 28 kph, interval pace: 35kph
endurance ride at 30 kph, interval pace: 38kph
endurance ride at 32 kph, interval pace: 40kph

If it’s windy, note which gear you would be riding in for the workout “Ride your bike”, select a gear that is 3-4 teeth smaller in the back. (This means shift up 2-3 gears depending where you are on your cassette).
Ride at your normal cadence for “Ride your bike” or slightly lower. Ride on the aerobars for the full interval, you are allowed to sit up on breaks (best to do initial recovery following intervals in the aero position).
Interval duration: first time doing this try intervals of 20 minutes. If successful do future workouts at 30min (then maybe 40) duration. The duration of your rest between intervals should be equal to or more than approximately 25% the duration of the interval completed. This isn’t a rule, but it’s a guideline that is supported by exercise physiologists. Don’t be a slave to the clock, for example, if you’re approaching a stoplight don’t start your timer to start the next interval until you know you will make it through. Ride your recovery intervals at “Ride your bike” pace or slightly slower, this isn’t supposed to be 10+ minutes of just coasting along the road. Eat and drink, keep pedaling and psyche yourself up for the next one.
Completing this workout should be a confidence booster for your ability to pace the race appropriately.

Notes:
For a sprint distance, this ride should total around ~1.5 hours including 2 intervals (20 min intervals).
For an Olympic distance this ride should total around ~2.5 hours including 2 intervals (20 or 30 min intervals).
For a Half Ironman this ride should total ~4 hours including 2 or 3 intervals completed (30min intervals).
For an Ironman this ride should total ~6 hours… more than this is likely not beneficial, it will reduce your intensity on the intervals too significantly. Ride includes 4 intervals completed (Perhaps mix of 30 40 and 60 min intervals). Suggestion: start at beginning of 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th hours.

Progression and estimating race pace

The fastest pace that you can manage on average without fading on the intervals in “Ride your bike faster” during your biggest volume weeks of training is likely a good target race pace (if done on similar terrain) once tapered, rested, and mentally prepared for your race. Think about this as a two stage qualification: you need to complete the workout “Ride your bike” without drafting someone and without doing an out and back with a tailwind on the second half and actually record your average speed for the second half… no exaggerating allowed. Then you need to calculate the goal pace for the workout “Ride your bike faster” and ride all of the intervals at this pace without a fade-off at the end. It could take a while to develop the strength to actually do this as fast as suggested, keep at it. Once successful, “Ride your bike” again, you’ll likely be faster and have a new target to work on for a “Ride your bike faster” workout. Targets for race pace should be based on what you have proven yourself to be capable of during a successful long interval workout not an extrapolation of 25% speed on some endurance ride which may or may not have been impacted by the weather.

Disclaimer: You are hereby deemed incapable of riding any pace you may interpret that these workouts to have suggested for you until you have proven yourself to be able to do it. If you blow yourself up on the bike leg of a race based on this, you probably screwed up the math, or interpreted it to mean something that it doesn’t suggest. This is a conservative estimate of pacing the bike leg and you are almost guaranteed to run well off the bike. Remember that you’re supposed to be basing this off of an execution of the “Ride your bike faster” workout where you evenly paced all of your intervals and did it amongst other training without specifically resting up to do it.

Note that the 25% speed increase between “Ride your bike” and the intervals in “Ride your bike faster” is something I found to work for myself to compare appropriate speeds for the two workouts. If you’ve been riding for a long time you can probably estimate the appropriate interval intensity just based on what the interval set’s duration is supposed to be, use that rather than simply my estimates of speed. Relative intensities on what you would call an endurance ride, HR zones, current fitness, history in the sport etc are going to impact this. Use these numbers (and all numbers) as a guide, if your body was designed to operate strictly with numbers it would have a built in speedometer.

The wheels arrived this morning from Neuvation. I picked up a pair of M28X on the Christmas sale and they arrived while I was off in Calgary for Christmas so I made an early morning trip to the post-office to go pick them up and slapped them on the bike. It’s looking good. They actually came with different decals than I was expecting and for a couple minutes I thought I might leave them on there. That lasted a couple minutes. The decals will come off tonight. The bladed spokes are longer in cross section than any I’ve ever ridden before, they look great and I hope they perform well too. I rode a wheelset once that whistled at high speeds due to airflow over the spokes, probably a sign of poor aerodynamics but if this wheelset does that I won’t complain, whistling wheels are sawheeeet! The wheels look pretty beefy but when you pick them up you’d be surprised, they’re 1750 grams for the set. That’s a totally acceptable training wheelset weight. Compare that to 1770 grams for the Mavic Cosmic Elites I was using as a training wheelset on my TT bike this past season. I don’t know the weight of the Ritchey wheelset I’ve been running on my road bike but it’s at least a half pound heavier than the Cosmic Elites, so that would put it at over 2000 grams for the pair. All in all, the wheels look to be good but I can’t really tell you how they perform until I can take them on the road.

The wing bar is great. I can’t comment on the ride yet because I don’t even have a stem to mount it to the bike. I’m sure the bar itself is stiffer than my EC90 cross bar, and with the oversize diameter for the stem mount it’s going to be a far stiffer front end, especially once coupled with the beefy head-tube and giant fork. The shape is excellent and it’s got all of the features that I wanted. Basically it’s an ergo drop bar with two lower hand positions, the low hand position and the cornering hand position, It doesn’t do the long curve, just the double bend. I think the wave style bars are really uncomfortable they’re on my commuter bike and I don’t like the drops. I’m not looking for a myraid of hand positions along the lower drop of the bar, I just want two so make it fit them properly and get the bar out of the way for the rest of it. Zipp and PRO amongst others are making the long curve bars these days whereas FSA and Easton are pretty much set of doing it the comfy way with the double bend on the bottom there. I like that. I’ll admit the nice long curve looks really nice when the bike doesn’t have anyone riding it, so I guess they’re selling ’sexy’ and indeed they’re making money on it.

Click to enlarge

The main purpose of buying the carbon bar isn’t really weight, although this is indeed lighter than the aluminum bar I was running on my road bike prior. It’s to get the wing under my hands for riding on the tops. Stretching out the area under your hands distributes weight over a larger area which means less pressure on your hands. This isn’t a gimmick, the area is at least double and so, the pressure will be less than half. The corner has the recessed dimple characteristic of a lot of the nicer bars out there designed to reduce pressure on the median nerve when riding at the hoods. Those features combined with a bit of vibration damping from the carbon and this is likely going to mean I’m never going to have sore hands, except maybe when I’m white knuckling the bars racing on Calgary’s finest Bownesian pavement. The cable routing is beautiful on this bar and I’m surprised that there isn’t a photo posted online, I snapped this picture and the attention to detail is spectacular. It really makes the housing disappear. The mind-blowing thing is that this fine piece of art was $82 (full retail: $91). That’s a fifth the price of a comparable carbon road bar (or for the triathletes reading: a third the price of a carbon TT base bar before you start adding extensions).

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Finally. I’m really not pleased with our society’s extremely low appreciation of any sports other than the ones that start with “N” (Nascar, NFL, NHL, NL, and NBA). I saw this ticker on the TV last week. How are pro triathletes realistically going to make a living if the world around can’t even spell the sport that they do, let alone know how what it entails?