Coach? Wow, expensive tastes!

I’ve been threatening to write more about coaching for a while now, and I’ve been putting it off. One of the big reasons that I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I have a cycling coach. But I’m finally talking about it because I know now it’s one of the best cycling decisions I’ve made. Why the embarrassment?

1) I'm not racing. And have no immediate plans to start. I might, in the future. But racing's not the reason I signed the coach.

 2) What are books and the internet for? So many people buy Joe Friel's bible, a few DVDs and seem to train extremely effectively.

Thinking it through, the whole “I’m not racing" is a bit bogus, frankly. If I’m not racing, why do I have an aggressively set up road racer with components that are built (and priced) for lightness and precision? Why do I use Speedplay Zero pedals with road cleats that have a deathgrip when on the bike, and make me waddle around like a hobbled penguin when off it? Why am I so obsessed with my average speed and heartrate? Why not just tootle about on the Volpe with its relaxed geo, Crank Brothers Candy pedals and Tiagra components--all perfectly adequate for anyone who isn’t paid to win races--and just be happy with that?

And as for the second (still doing that ‘thinking it through’ thing) it's great that some people can train from books. Perhaps they are more motivated and have an instinctive understanding of what is needed, as well as excellent proprioception. I’m not as good about being motivated to do LT tests, time trials, hill repeats and workout planning. 'Above average, but not particularly good' is my default landing zone, and I really need a bit of a kick to get me going. (Another thing to consider is about how much better those skilled self-trained people would be if they had a coach.)


Cheaper than an upgrade
Coaching has been expensive, at least for me, but looking back I realise that I don’t regret any of the expense. It is still cheaper than a set of light wheels or a carbon frame (the logical upgrades for someone who has a CAAD9 frame and RS-10 wheels). More important, I’ll bet the cost of frame and wheels together that coaching has given me vastly more speed, power and efficiency than BOTH the upgrades would have done. What’s the point of doing the same rubbish I’ve always done, just that my bike’s a bit lighter?

Thanks to the coach’s relentless focus on pedalling technique, my efficiency has gone up drastically, making me faster at a given HR. Also, it’s made my climbing so efficient that I now actually look forward to battling gravity (something I used to dread). I recently climbed 2,300m over 90km, and felt just fine. I remember how it used to kill me to climb half that over the same distance.

Also, because of the coach’s long hill intervals and constant emphasis on LT and that “lactate feeling”, I’m able to control my effort and therefore the level of tiredness during and after rides so much better. I’m now on a strength training programme, and because it’s cycling orientated and I’ve been shown exactly how to lift, I’m more motivated and confident, not just to stick with it, but to push it a little and challenge myself. (I’ve been know to hurt myself in the gym before. Nothing bad, but enough to put me off.)

And finally, it’s a huge relief to have someone who knows you and your skill level to turn to with questions. It’s here that the coach’s experience really shows, and he is able to get to the heart of problems very quickly. Very often, some of the best advice you get is stuff you knew (or kind of knew) all along--you just needed someone else to see it/qualify it/confirm it.

Like a surgeon

An interesting article on coaching by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker. If cyclists and sopranos have coaches, why not surgeons? Is the question he asks. There's insight into just what a coach does for you, but also peeks into sporting culture in general. For instance, this paragraph:

What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying too hard. For the Brits, coaching, even practicing, was, well, unsporting. In America, a more competitive and entrepreneurial spirit took hold.

Apart from car culture and great distances, it helps explain why America tends to be a country of cyclists, unlike other countries that tend to have people who cycle. This sentence really stuck in my head:

Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.

That's exactly the learning road that drills attempt to lead you through. They break down a complex movement into constituent parts (suddenly making conscious your incompetence with one or more of these parts), and then repeat them over and over in an unnatural way, gradually leading you through to (one hopes) unconscious competence. Sometimes, the mistakes you make are simple and easy to correct. The hard part is knowing you're making them in the first place. When paying for coaching, I often remind myself of the old joke about the mechanic who hits an engine with a hammer to get it to work. When asked to give a break down of his outrageously high bill, he writes: Hitting engine with hammer, $1. Knowing where to hit engine with hammer, $999. More to come on the subject of coaching!

I say, “I'm tired”, you say, “My PE is high, but HR is low”

I've had a lot of trouble understanding this idea of HR “running low” when you're tired, but have finally sorted it out. This post is more to keep it sorted for me than anything, but if it helps you, I'm happy.

The reason I was confused is that I've made the wrong assumption all this time, the one that's the complete opposite of reality. It seemed logical to me that when you're tired, your HR rises quickly and goes too high. After all, that's what it feels like right? You get out of breath in no time, your heart seems to race, and you feel like you're putting in a lot of effort.

But at these times, if you look at your HR on a monitor, you'll probably be surprised by how low it is. All that huffing and puffing and yet the ticker's clattering along at a relatively sedate 140bpm (Perhaps you were expecting 150). In other words, your perceived effort (PE) is high, but the actual effort is low (since HR is indirectly a measure of the amount of work your muscles are doing). In still other words, and back to our first words, you're tired.

At this time, it's vital to remember that it's actual muscular effort above a certain level that triggers training adaptation, not perceived muscular effort. So just because it feels like a hard workout, doesn't mean it is a hard workout. (In another post I mentioned that when you have the flu, just getting out of bed tires you, but that doesn't mean you got any fitter.)

And so, the opposite is also true: when you're well rested, your HR rises quickly and easily. You might be riding along your usual route, feeling good, look down and see your HR is 160 when you were expecting 150. If that sounds wrong, don't forget your average speed for the section will be higher. You're doing more work, but it feels like less work.

I don't know about you, but these concepts are totally counter-intuitive to me. But if you think it through, you realise they aren't counter-intuitive, it's just that it's a shifting POV.

So imagine you ride exactly the same route, same weather, same gearing. You do it on three days—the first day you're well-rested, the second moderately rested, and the third you're tired.

If you keep speed constant over the three days, you'll find that on the first day, your PE will be lowest and your HR lowest. The second, PE will be higher and HR will be higher. The third, PE will be highest, HR will be highest. That follows the intuitive pattern, that more tired you get, the harder it is to hold a certain speed, the higher your HR at that speed.

But we rarely keep speed constant. We usually ride by “feel” or PE. So assume we keep PE constant, i.e. the amount of effort we put into the ride feels the same, no matter what our level of tiredness. On the first day, speed will be highest, HR highest (we feel good, so we push). On the second day, speed will be lower, HR lower. (To feel as good as yesterday, we have to slow down.) On the third day, speed will be lowest, HR the lowest. (We have to go really slowly to feel as good as we did on the first day.)

So it's pretty much the same thing, just seen from a different point of view. When we talk about HR “running low” when we are tired, we are simply leaving out the part that we are also riding slowly, and yet feeling as if we're putting in a lot of effort.

Phew, I think I've got it. Zhu?

Edit:
Here's an analogy that just struck me that makes this whole HR low when tired concept a lot clearer.

Imagine a car engine running on good fuel with clean fuel lines. You push the throttle and it revs quickly to a high RPM. That's you when well-rested. You rev up quickly and can rev really high.

Now imagine the engine is "tired" i.e. it has adulterated fuel and clogged up fuel lines. You push the throttle the same amount, but it takes some time to rev up, and doesn't get to as high an RPM as when everything was good and clean.

Burn baby burn: Getting out of the 'all or nothing' mindset

I was due for 7x300m sprints today, but after the second sprint, my legs started to smoke, heading for a spectacular RD-350 style seizure.

The legs were tired from the start of the ride, but I managed to post a higher speed than last time on the same section on the first sprint (50.05km/h). The second sprint burned like crazy towards the end, and as I rolled into the rest lap I was surprised to find the legs just burned all the harder. After several minutes, I started to get a bit nervous, wondering whether my legs were cramping. I could practically feel the lactic acid boiling in there, and nothing helped, not stopping, not walking and not riding slowly.

I instinctively kept moving though, and cut off the Santa Fe dam for home. The boil soon subsided to a simmer and in five minutes my legs felt as if nothing had happened. I felt guilty, wondering whether I should have finished my sprints, just at a lower intensity.

This leads me to the mistake I made, and one that I think is quite common. The belief that the sprint or interval workout should be all or nothing. Instead of monitoring whether the LT is running low and scaling accordingly, my tendency is to think, "If you're tired, take the day off, else just get out there and kill."

Expert feedback on my day has told me that I was simply tired, and probably didn't heed the signs. Indeed, I knew that my HR was running high for a given level of effort (and I guess my LT running low), but instead of scaling down my sprint effort, I just thought incorrectly that "sprints are sprints, you either blow up with them or you don't do them".

I'm reminded here of another exercise I've been given: to climb out of the saddle for 15 minutes. When I first heard that I laughed derisively. Fifteen minutes? Just 10 seconds out of the saddle makes my HR bounce off the rev-limiter in a most uncomfortable fashion.

Again, it was a matter of recalibrating. Of understanding that just because you're standing, doesn't mean you have to piledrive up the hill. As soon as you start working on standing and yet keeping the HR down, it's pretty surprising how far you can go. I'd have hit 15 minutes by my second workout, but ran out of hill. For my third go, I found a long enough climb and didn't touch butt to saddle for the entire 15 minutes. (Okay, I dabbed once to be able to get my hand off the bar to wipe some sweat off the brow. Reminder, drink water before you start this workout!)

There's much depth to the training wisdom that "it's hard to go easy" and it's true that the more you train (no matter how old you are when you start), the more maturity you gain. I think back with a shudder to my days when I applied "all or nothing" to every workout, not just the short, high-intensity ones. It seems so stupid now, but it's frighteningly easy to get caught up in the belief that if 70% effort is good, 90% must be better.