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.

We're all leg men

It's probably impossible to find a group of guys who look at each others' legs more than cyclists do. Oh, and talk about their butts.

With hard exercise it seems, comes total lack of shame when it comes to the body. On bike forums cyclists happily discuss leg shaving, butt sores and even other non-cycling afflictions such as haemorrhoids.

Training changes your relationship to your body. In one way it's a more intimate connection--you understand it better, you track its little moods and know to a specific heartbeat how hard to push it. But in another way, it's a more dispassionate relationship. The body becomes another tool to optimise, just a machine that needs to be fuelled and run in a certain way to get the best out of it.

The very language you use to talk to and about your body changes. Drinking water becomes "hydration", eating becomes "nutrition" or "fuelling", and rest "recovery". In fact, the day you un-selfconsciously and non-ironically use the word "hydration" to refer to the ingestion of water, you are well on your way to being a velokundi.

You also start splitting systems into constituent parts. No longer do your thighs ache, but it's your "quads, but not the hamstrings, with some tightness in the IT band". No longer did you have a hard ride, but your "heartrate was near LT for nearly the whole way". It's a strange tug of war between understanding, accepting, even loving, your body like you never have before,and yet using cold clinical language and methods to get it to work like never before. ("Periodisation" of training, or intervals is a great example of a cruel, calculated methods to force fitness.)

Food also starts to get split up. Familiar dishes start being looked at through a kaleidoscope that splits them into the "macro-nutrients" i.e. proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Foods get analysed for quality of micronutrients too, and no matter how much or little you love food, hard exercise will change your relationship to it.

I wrote about this in an article in Gulf News, where I said: In this context, I’m often reminded of two motorcycles I used to own. One was an old Czech bike of ancient vintage, but available new in India up to 1996. I would sometimes notice that my front tyre was visibly low on air, and feel guilty that I couldn’t feel a change of something like 10psi. A few years later I rode a modern, highly engineered sportsbike and realised I could feel a change of even 1psi in the front tyre. It wasn’t that I had got more sensitive, but that less play in the system meant my connection with my front tyre was more solid and more crucial. In the same way, as exercise removes the play in one’s body, the connection to food gets more solid and more crucial, and eaters start to feel more results—both good and bad—of their eating choices.

But I know that you've still got that legs bit running around in your head, so let's get back there. It's so funny that most of my life I got teased for my largely hairless legs, but now, hanging out with cyclists, I'm envied because I don't have to shave them. (Yes wide-eyed noob who is now regretting reading this, most of the cyclists I hang out with shave their legs. Let's go there another day, shall we?)

I'm remembering how, at a recent race, I overheard one guy saying to another: "Your legs look so good man. The cuts, the striations--your legs are just amazing."

Where else, baba? Where else will you find straight men talking to each other in this way?

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!

Back in the US, sir!

After a fun-filled, food-filled, friend-filled trip to Bangalore, where I did no blog writing (but did a fair amount of riding), I'm back to the rather surreal peace and beauty of So Cal. I suddenly saw my regular ride through new eyes, and thought I'd post some pictures.

Here, the San Gabriel mountains either beckon or threaten from the San Gabriel River Trail (SGRT). Today they threatened, since it was to be my first sustained climb in nearly two months.

A short way up, I stopped to watch the 4WD crazies churning the mud in the dried reservoir bed.

And this is the top of the ride, about 1,000m up. Shortly after this, is the sustained 14km descent, always a good time.

What's the catch?

Swimmers often talk in hushed tones about the "catch", and it isn't when you get a guppy in your mouth. It's an elusive feeling of balance, comfort and (dare I say it?) oneness with the water, that comes after acquiring good balance and when working out at least three times a week.

Back when I used to swim under coaching, I used to get it... hmm that makes it sound like a disease... I used to experience it, and it was a good feeling. But as I said, it's elusive. Take two too many days off and it goes away. Or some days you're just tired and the catch just doesn't bite.

Catch must exist with any oft-repeated motor-activity. I remember reading a quote in Readers Digest that was attributed to Pandit Ravi Shankar and went something like this: If I don't practice for one day, I notice it. If I don't practice for two days, my accompanists notice it. If I don't practice for three days, the critics notice it. If I don't practice for four days, the audience notices it.

Runners also talk about days when they feel they're just flowing over the ground. And yes, I definitely think there's catch with cycling. Some days, you and the bike are one and the pedalling just flows. The more you ride, the more frequent these days become, until days without the catch are the exceptions. Until you run into a bad week that is. It's not quite as elusive as the swimming catch, but it is hard to pin down. It needs a different word though, and unless I've missed reading about it somewhere, it seems to have been left up to you and me to come up with one.

Get the gutter onto your head

Even as I nursed guilt for spending nearly $20 for a product whose function I probably could have replicated for $5 with stuff from Home Depot, I saved $38 on a Speedplay Grease Gun by using a plastic syringe I had lying about at home.

That the syringe was from a little kit that saved me much money on printer cartridges was even more satisfying, especially considering how HP changed the sponge in their cartridges so they could no longer be refilled using a syringe, those capitalist, cheapster-hating bastards.

When we were kids and fiddling around with our bicycles, I remember how we thought it a sign of excellent lubrication if pedals whirred around for several minutes when batted at with a hand. I was surprised to learn that if this happens, your pedals were probably shot about a month before. If pedals are properly greased, they should make about half a turn and stop.

If you're relatively new to being a velokundi, as I am, you might read stuff like, "Re-grease every 2,000 miles" and go, "Two thousand miles? That's YEARS away" and promptly move on to better things. So I was pretty dismayed one recent day, to find my Speedplay Zero pedals spinning freely when bapped at, especially the right-hand one.

It's still hard for me to remember that since I'm cycling regularly, maintenance tasks that are annual or even bi-annual events in my head now come up every few months. Tyres and brake pads wear before my eyes, cables sag like clotheslines every few weeks, and the chain dries up every few days (and I NEVER remember to oil it until after the creaking drives me to near axe murder while climbing a quiet state highway into national forests).

But as the title of this thread suggests, it's actually about that Sweat Gutr thing. (Image from Sweatgutr.com.)

As I've written before, I'm a sweater, and I don't mean a sheep-based upper garment. On hot days, little reservoirs fill up above each eyebrow and every so often, the levee breaks and all that salty water comes cascading down into my eyes and onto my glasses. And since I'm a velokundi, rides don't stop for tiddly things like that, so my glasses gradually become little salt flats through which I can't see shit.

One recent day, I was pretty sure I didn't want to attempt a climb of nearly 2,000m without eyes, so I sprang for one of those stupidly spelled Gutr things. I liked it because it didn't have an absorption element to its design (though the Halo headband uses a gutter concept as well). I knew that anything absorbtive (is that a word?) would be sopping in about 30 minutes. Some people on BF talked about using one band for an hour and then hanging it on the bars to dry while they used a second. Thank you but I want to ride my bike, not be a bliddy dhobi.

It worked. There were times when my 99% perspiration overwhelmed it a little, but it worked. I took a little while working out how to best fit it, because it all gets a bit busy in the above-ear-al area if you wear glasses. Also, all the sweat it channels away runs in a little stream off your chin, so you start to look like a rabid, slavering loon. (More than is usual for a roadie, that is.)

Recommended, but note that someone on BF tied a soft rubber pipe around his head and achieved the same result for about $17 less. I just didn't have time to experiment, so my mind... ah my mind went into the Gutr.

(Could. Not. Resist.)

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.