New art work
January 26th, 2008
Another winter weekend with a Monday morning snow storm to look forward to. Does life get much worse? Maybe, but to help brighten your day check out my latest art work...
BTW, are you all catching SNL? Damn, talk about bringing the weekend down! It's pretty bad tonight!
I spent the day working on my new favorite past time, art. Below are two of my resent creations. They took some time to create and I'm not even sure I think they're any good. Art is in the eye of the beholder, so I'll post them and you can decide for yourself if they're any good ...
Racing against the clock.
January 19th, 2008
I've started to take a long hard look at the season ahead and started to align my training with goals that have been carried over from last year and some newly established goals for this season. The only problem with goals is once you establish them you have to work towards them and work to achieve them. The clock is ticking in more ways than one for me now.
Since starting to train with a power meter I'm finding the training to be very different, it's HARDER much HARDER! My cadence remains the same but the average resistance has been notched up on my longer rides and intervals have been added to my shorter rides. Today I have a slight reprise, I will do a long recovery ride which will gradually allow my legs to recover from the hard workouts of this week. My cycling takes place in the morning and each day this week I dreaded getting out of bed to face the inevitable pain I knew I would feel from the hard workouts.
If you've never done intervals with a power meter then you're missing out on some serious pain. Your head, your veins, your legs, lungs and any other part of your body you care to arbitrarily think of hurts like hell! They're hard!
I've also learned that like racing, you need to grit your teeth and hang on, even if it's just holding that wheel for just a few more seconds to make it around the next corner or until the pace slows just that much to allow you to recover slightly. Training this off season has taught me a great deal about myself and my body and I certainly am learning more about my ability.
After a long hiatus from cycling (since I was younger) I had forgotten just how hard it really is. Just how hard it is to maintain a hard pace and how consistent the pain can be and most of all, how exhausting it can be. From now until racing season I will build my mental toughness so I can begin this racing season with some confidence.
My new iBike arrives next week and from there I can start to truly analyze my power workouts and consistently measure my improvements. I'm also planning to lift more weights to strengthen my entire body but specifically my legs to generate more power.
Some people have asked me how fast I can ride in a one hour time trial, to be honest I have not done a field test so I do not know. I am measuring power with the Kurt Kinetic power meter on the trainer until my iBike arrives so I am not getting what I would deem, accurate power measurements. Nevertheless, while I don't have speed measurements I can tell you that every 3 minutes during a one hour ride I can interval consistently at 450 watts. On a foundation ride I'm averaging 180 watts for an hour with no intervals and out of the saddle for approx. 30 seconds to relieve the pressure on my butt. I am hoping to exceed 200 watts on average before racing begins as I would imagine (and I have no clue) that racing in crits must require at least an average wattage of 250.
I'll keep you all posted on how things are going; but one more week is down which means I'm one week stronger and one week closer to the first race! The clock is ticking indeed!
The holy grail ...
January 15th, 2008
It's been the season for epiphanies. First I find Ichthammol, the cure for the common saddle sore, remember? Keep up, it was a previous post! Then I find Bike Racing 101 by Kendra and Rene Wenzel and then stumble upon the holy grail of cycling, Training and Racing with a Power Meter (by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan). The book is all about, hmm let's see, training and racing with a Power Meter.
I had always read stories of Lance Armstrong and many other professional cyclists training with a power meter but didn't really pay much attention. Perhaps because I was still focusing on heart rate and other such fundamentals to care. Or perhaps it was because I just sucked and simply riding my bike would be all I needed to get better.
I did get better even though I still suck and during the, getting better days, I focused on heart rate, cadence and other cycling fundamentals. As much as I focused on consistency, strength etc I noticed my gains were only marginal. Until now, I never knew why.
This book arrived; I raced home and started reading. It was one of those books that instantly resonated. I could open it on any page and immediately garner much needed and previously unknown information. Even when I didn't learn anything new the book managed to put existing information in context, which ultimately made infinately more sense to me.
I've only been using some of the training programs from the book for a short while now, but I've noticed notable differences in strength and power already. (I'll talk more about power measurement in another post). Right now, simply performing intervals and using as much consistent power as possible is all that's required for me to improve. I can now maintain a steady pace, in or out of the saddle for one minute at approx. 440 watts of power, which for me is excellent.
I'll keep you all posted on the progress and will post wattage data from time to time. In the interim, pickup these two books, they're both excellent reads …
The cure for the common saddle sore.
January 15th, 2008
What do you do when something doesn't go as planned? Read, disastrously so, definitely not as planned! What do you do if you keep searching for a solution to a problem and keep failing to find a solution? Give up? Ok, that's one option. I recommend you continue trying for as long as you can. Or end up living with the problem if you can't fix it and need or want to continue doing what you're doing. I thought I would need to live with my problem.
For months, every single ride would end in excruciating pain. I'd undergo a period of recovery, try again and end up back in the same situation. Sometimes worse than when I started. If you've ever had saddle sores, you'll know the pain and you'll understand why I was eager to find a solution. What's the definition of insanity? Repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result. That's why I tried solution after solution. Poured over the web, searched every blog and book I could get my hands on. Read every medical book that may offer a solution until I finally stumbled upon a solution. Well several actually ...
Bike fit was one of them. Of course, this goes without saying, you need to get a proper bike fit. Your saddle needs to be hard. And yes, that final cm makes the difference folks. So keep at it until that bike fits you're, well ... bottom line as perfectly as you can. But if you're like me and you've got sensitive skin and hours of riding will always take its toll then you need to find a way to drain those boils before your next ride. Yes folks, they're boils. Sorry to put such a horrible face on, your sore ass.
Enter an old wives tale (not tail), Ichthammol ointment from goldline. Perhaps the miracle cure. It's rumored that this cream was utilized by Mom's and Grandmothers through the years in an attempt to draw splinters and other such items from little kids' hands. It's also used to drain, boils. I found it described as drawing salve. This is the proper category or way to describe the ointment when you're standing there like a dummy looking for any solution to your problem. It can be found over the counter at CVS or Walgreens or, insert your favorite drug store but is not regulated by the FDA. From what I gather it's not widely used anymore as several of the CVS' I went to needed to order it. But they did know what I was talking about.
So, if saddle sores are a pain in your ass, try Ichthammol, it may just be the solution. How do you win, succeed, solve a problem? Don't give up! You can't fail if you don't stop trying.
my other web site ... Brian Roche Music
January 9th, 2008
... and if you find yourself with time on your hands, check out my other website which has been recently given a face lift ...
new artwork for you
January 2nd, 2008
Hi everyone, I hope you're all doing well even though most of Mass was held hostage as we got yet another winter storm. I hope you all found something fun to do ... Even though I was working I did find time to update my blog with some art work that I've been working on recently. These are 85just a few examples of some items I've been playing around with. I hope you all enjoy ... lemme know what think ...
