Category Archives: Cycling

de Ronde van West Portlandia

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Last year’s Ronde PDX went well. I survived, if not terribly well. With another full year of training behind me — and unfortunately at the exact same weight — I’m getting ready for this year’s torture-fest.

I pre-rode two sections over the past two weekends, and both went well. I managed to paperboy up Brynwood last weekend. And looking at my power meter, I’ve come up with a different tactic for approaching it. And the rest of both rides was… just easy. Hammering was never the goal, but everything was totally doable. There was never any grinding or true suffering. Just managing along.

Avoiding bonking is a big thing for me after a really shitty ride with Paul. But keeping the water bottles full of Gatorade, and eating some quartered up PBJ sandwiches seems to’ve really fixed that issue. This weekend, my goal will be to try to eat while riding, rather than stopping. It’s not a skill issue, but rather more that my various jacket and vest combination makes it %$#@ing impossible to get into my jersey pockets.

So this year, I’ve added a consistent regimen of strength training at the gym. Plus I’ve been on the Time-Crunched Cyclist training program (slightly modified) for longer than last year (three weeks last year, six weeks this year). Also, I’ve been taking it really easy this week to get ready. Yes, I am actually training for de Ronde.

Worries, I have a few. I recently switched shoes, added a new saddle, and OH YEAH, have completely switched over to my ‘cross bike. I rode with everything this past weekend without incident, but still. It’s a little worrisome to change the bike set up so dramatically right before a long, hard-ass ride. Shoes mean a different cleat position. A saddle means the height is probably a little different, and the fore-aft is probably a little different. And the cranks are shorter on this bike (172.5) vs. my road bike (175). It’s possible my knees will fall off halfway through the ride.

My other worry is that I’m doing this with my team. Last year I did it with just Paul, and he was gracious enough to stick with me during the last two climbs. My legs were positively quivering. I imagine the team will be going faster. And who knows if they’ll wait around at the tops of hills (though, really, who cares?). Plus, you know, machismo. And those factors could easily lead to me not eating and drinking enough. Which will lead to bonking and not finishing. So discipline will be the key this weekend.

Anyway. The weather promises to be decent. If I can keep my shit together, it could be a breakthrough day for me that sets me up with confidence for the rest of the season.

Kruger’s and 2012 Recap

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Muddy in Movember.

Kruger’s and my singlespeed once again were effing awesome: 6th out of 46, and less than a minute down on the winner. I felt like I belonged that whole race. I belonged out front. I was strong and knew how to race.

Strong and powerful and confident, except when I had those little bobbles over the last three laps. Whenever I got out in front of my little group, I’d get over-cautious and screw something up. The first time, I took a wimpy line through a little off-camber section and caught my foot in the marker pole. The second time, I bobbled going through the same little greasy rutted section that gave Paul problems. If I’d just powered through that section, I’d be fine. It wasn’t *that* hard to ride. So dumb.

I said last year that I need to get my geared bike set up like my singlespeed, but did I? No. Next year, I really will have to do that. I fly on that bike.

More after the Strava widget…

2012: There Were Lessons, and I Learned Them

I saw a good line on the ‘Cross Junkie blog, where he’s citing his mentor:

“I can’t corner well in mud.” Well no one can. You just get less bad at it. Practice!

Other than getting the geared bike set up more like the singlespeed, specific ‘cross training was probably the only thing I neglected to do this season (OK, fine, I probably ate terrible too. And drank too much beer. And kept my day job.). Compared to last season, my technical riding skills are getting better. But they’d be getting better faster if I’d done what I said I would: practice off-road once a week in the park over by my work.

But I learned. I’d evaluate what went wrong in a race, and fix it. I pedal through corners more. I pedal through off-camber sections. I horse my bike around rather than hoping my bike will go where it should. I worked on my core and upper body with my new personal trainer (a perk of my job!). I watched more pro ‘cross videos, which I genuinely think helped me ride within myself, but go super-hard when I needed to.

I didn’t let myself get psyched out of any race. I only screwed up once not being in “race mode” at the start of a race. I started making warm-up a priority (especially at races that I actually cared about).

When things got a little sideways with Amanda and Lo — hustling to and from the race too fast so I wasn’t having fun — we talked about it and solved it. When I realized how annoyed I was to NEVER see a teammate at a race, I joined a new team made up of the guys I enjoy racing with anyway.

And lastly, I remember being pretty fried last year around the time Blind Date ended. No energy, and really starting to question how those weekends were being spent. This year, I had energy. It stemmed from two things:

  1. The Time Crunched Cyclist program worked well. I had fitness and strength for the races. I can’t say that I had a “base,” because that’s not what the program builds. But I put in a lot of hard rides, and suffering became second-nature.
  2. I rested better this season. Before I started working out with my trainer, I was only doing maybe 2-3 workouts a week with my two races. When I started working out with the trainer, that fell to 1-2 workouts plus one race. I barely got on my road bike the last 2-3 weeks, and it worked out just fine.

    3. On that latter point, next year I might start my CX block a little earlier so I can go into the season with sharper point on the stick, get some points, and maybe force an upgrade. But then, basically take that minimal workout plan through the racing season.

    Anyway, my larger point is I tried to learn my lessons from race to race. Given that I was in the top half, third, or quarter for the bulk of the season, it was a great season for me. I got better and better each week. With another solid training year in 2013, I don’t see any reason I shouldn’t upgrade next year.

Embrace the Yuck

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A friend posted on Facebook that she was worried the onset of winter weather would end her runs and walks outside. I commented for her to “embrace the yuck.” The more I started thinking about it, there are tons of tricks to stay outside.

  1. New gear. New booties, new fenders, new tires, new jacket, new hat, new knickers, new socks, new gloves. You gotta test them to make sure they work, right?
  2. It’s only 30 minutes. Or an hour. Or two hours. You can do anything for an hour.
  3. Throw a towel in the dryer before you leave. Nothing feels better than wrapping up in a warm towel after that mad scramble in the garage to peel out of wet clothes.
  4. Do a hard workout. We used to joke that if you’re cold, you just need to ride harder. Hate the cold? Ride harder!
  5. It’s winter. You look like a dork with your perfectly clean shoes and bike. We’re making fun of you behind your back. Go get dirty.
  6. Go to the extreme. Wait for the craziest downpour. Go at the coldest part of the day. Look for the muddiest trail. Race cyclocross.
  7. Who says the lunch hour has to be used for lunch? It’s dark before work and it’s dark after work. So go to work early and go run or ride at lunch when it’s not dark. Don’t use the excuse that you’re too busy. You’re not. Don’t use the excuse that you’ll be dirty or sweaty afterward. You will be — and everyone will be jealous.
  8. Take some pride. Seriously. Buck up. You want to have a good season next year? You want to avoid putting on weight during the holidays? You want to be a bad-ass? Then embrace the yuck and get outside!

I DNF’d, Then Cut a Workout Short the Next Day

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I’m not dead. At least, I think I’m not. Just having a crazy week.

The DNF was because I pinch-flatted at Blind Date at the Dairy during my first SS race. It was terrifying. The race, I mean, not the flat. That’s the first race I’ve done where’s it’s genuinely, genuinely dark. It is freaky to say the least, especially because I didn’t get to pre-ride the course. I don’t know how people do that week in and week out without getting to pre-ride the course. If nothing else, when I do this again NEXT WEEK, I’m gonna check out every inch of that course instead of giving it the cursory glance I did yesterday. Jesus.

Blind Date at the Dairy.

Cutting my workout short today was a little crazy though. I really felt like ass. I’ve since decided that I was both a little dehydrated and a little wimpy. I compared my wattage numbers for today’s workout (6×3′ PowerIntervals) with the last time I did that workout. They were similar. But on the 4th interval, I just really got gassed. I tried for a fifth interval, but I could barely maintain 310 watts barely 1:30 into the interval. I should be pushing a minimum of 320.

That said, I think for those PowerIntervals in the future, I need to use effort and HR, rather than wattage. Because assuming that my heart isn’t about to explode — and p.s. it kinda felt like it today — I’ve done much harder, higher wattage numbers when I focus not on watts, but on kicking ass. Granted, those numbers were at Mt. Tabor where the interval was nearly all uphill, but still.

Anyhoo. Not dead. Not yet.

P.S. Summer’s over. We’ve had this insane run of dry weather since July, and here we are nearly half way through October and it’s still blue skies. No more. The rains arrive tomorrow and apparently won’t let up until, like, June. I got some new fenders that will apparently be awesome. Looking forward to installing and trying them tomorrow.

P.S. No. 2: I joined a new team. Team Oregon. Paul, Chris and Jimmy are all on the team, so it just made sense. Anyway, I borrowed Chris’ kit for Wednesday, and picked up my own kit today. Exciting! I hope I come home from this weekend’s race with some pictures.

Blind Date #2 and Battle at Barlow Recaps

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I raced harder and more positively the last two races. I chased people, I didn’t fear the consequences of going deep. And at Blind Date, that worked out great. Battle at Barlow? Not so much.

Blind Date was Wednesday. I got over there late, didn’t warm up much, had to wait in line for my numbers and to register. But I somehow staged well. Early on in the race, as I was soft-pedaling around the velodrome, I looked at my Garmin and was horrified to see we’d only been racing 16 minutes of a 40 minute race. “Oh sweet God, this is gonna go bad,” I thought.

But I bucked up and decided to chase down the next guy ahead of me. And then the next. And then the next. And by the last lap, I’d been swapping places with a guy for a bit. I sat on his wheel and decided to pass him in the barriers, which were near the finish line. Except on the big run up pretty early on, he was going *really* slow. So I sprinted past him, mounted fast and hammered it into the velodrome. And when I looked back, he was gone. Like a good 15-20 seconds back. There was one more guy waaaaay ahead, so I decided the best defense would be a good offense. I never did catch that next guy (I came close though! I caught him on the last barrier, then overcooked the last corner!), but it totally worked. I placed 45th out of 121. Which is a good result in a big field.

2012 Barlow Cyclocross from kent johnston on Vimeo.

Battle at Barlow is a good long course. I really loved it — long stretches, single-track, farm roads, gravel, grass, a little pavement, adventure enough to keep you on your toes, and enough gradual elevation gain to make it really hurt. I was having a really good race, being competitive and aggressive. I’d settled in with this one group and had figured out where I was going to pass them, but on a set of barriers, a guy in front of me ran REALLY SLOW and I bumped him with my bike, which knocked my chain off. FUCK! So I stopped, put the chain back on, and started riding like a demon. I was passing a bunch of folks, and going into the section where most people rest (some wide single track), I decided to pass a guy wide. Except I went a little too wide, ended up in the brush, and a thick stick went into my front spokes. BAM! Down hard on my shoulder, slammed my head, landed in the thorny brush.

I feel like I sat there for quite a while. I sat up. Nothing broken. Head rattled. Stood up. Legs OK. I picked up the bike, and pulled the stick out, threw it, then went and picked it up because I’d thrown it onto the course. Spun the front wheel. No problem. Spun the back wheel. No problem. Chain on. Straightened the handlebars. Decided to leave the left shifter a little wonky, remounted and rode on. My should hurt, but I was able to move it. I soft-pedaled probably a quarter mile. Got over the 3-pack of barriers, rode the off-camber, and a guy panting and wheezing went by.

I told myself, “dude, you’re fine. Just go!” So I did. I got in the drops, stood up, and hammered. I re-passed the wheezer, caught another 2 people, and on the long gravel climb, caught sight of another guy 100 yards ahead. The officials were ringing a bell at the start line, I’d been on the course for 40 minutes, so I knew I wasn’t going to get another lap. So I slowly reeled the guy in. 25 yards separated us at the top of the hill, and through the little off-camber section. Then I sprinted after him down the hill, and pipped him about 50 yards from the line for 65th place. Sprinting for 65th place? Yeah, it’s still important to be competitive.

Afterwards, I was sure that I’d been on the ground for multiple minutes. I really took my time after the crash, but looking at my Garmin data, I was rolling inside of a minute.

Anyway, the fact that I was thinking semi-strategically at the late stages of both races gives me a bit of confidence that my training will generate some results. Now if only my shoulder would stop hurting…

GPTB Double Cross: My First In-race Endo

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Dented downtube

Downtube dent: Things you don’t notice until you’re washing up. I have no idea when I did that.

Yeah. I endo’d.

The course had a really long section of single track. Like, really long. Like, a good 4 minutes per lap on 9:30 laps. Right near the beginning, there was a big log with dirt piled up on either side to ride over. Unfortunately, on the far side, there was a big rut that caught my wheel and turned me over.

I also hit a tree with my shoulder at a pretty slow speed, and that threw me down. And then I slid out on a super soft section. My bike has a huge dent in the downtube, I lost a hand-sized chunk of skin on my leg, my ankle bone got smacked and is swollen. 31st out of 50. So on the whole, a forgettable race.

There were some semi-positive takeaways: The long run-up wasn’t too awful, but I really needed to get on top of my gears afterward because I struggled to catch people while recovering. My runs through the sand were really good, and I was able to chase people down after. On the last lap, a guy was near me going into the sand, near me coming out of the sand, and near me 100 yards after the sand. The finish line was only a minute away, and I’d been unable to get into my big ring. So I threw down hard and sprinted. I guess I only beat him by a few seconds, but considering how close he was, I’ll take that as a win.

But the single track was just a real killer. If you weren’t in the top 10 going into that on the first lap, you were never going to pull it back. The inability to pass for half a lap is not ideal. I staged near the back, and made up maybe five spots on the super-fast run into the single track. But after that, it was just picking off one or two people per lap because the rest of the course was flat, straight double track with a 10-yard sandbox.

That’s not a complaint — just the reality. If this were the end of the season and I was in the points, I would’ve sure as hell staged earlier, pre-ridden the course, and been ready. I would’ve taken advantage of the course set up! But mostly, I didn’t care too much, so no biggie.

You Have a Power Meter. Now What?

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I spent some time today thinking about what I like and don’t like in cycling software. Because, you know, that’s what I do when I’m in-between projects at work…

Garmin Training Center and Garmin Connect

Garmin Connect: You can mouse over the charts to get individual points, but the scale of these is wonky, and it’s just not intuitive at all. Plus, you can’t click down into each lap to get individual lap graphs.


The Garmin Training Center software has exactly one advantage over Garmin Connect. Actually, near as I can tell the best thing about it is the ability to click into each lap/interval (or the whole thing), and zoom in on the graph. Why is that important? Because the jaggedy up-and-down graphs in Garmin Connect are fairly useless. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s six of one, half a dozen of another.

There’s a lot more features in Garmin — the ability to plan workouts, uploading workouts to your device, tracking your body weight, etc — but I haven’t used them because there’s a few important elements of Garmin that I don’t like.

  1. Data put into separate charts. HR goes here, speed goes there, power goes over there. You can click into its “player,” but then you can only put two data fields into one chart.
  2. I want to be able to export the data into Excel. You can do it with the Garmin Training Center, but for some reason, that export doesn’t include power data. WTF?

Garmin Training Center runs on your computer as a native application. It’s nice because you can, as I have done here, click down into the individual laps and see the data. You can also zoom in on the data, which is actually pretty sweet. But it’s still lame that you can’t overlay data on the same graph. At least these graphs seem to put the data on a scale that allows you to see changes.

Strava

I bought an upgrade to Strava, too. I can’t decide if I’m going to keep it or not. I love love love segments and being able to see other people’s times and their performance metrics (like power or HR, if they have it). I’m also a big fan of the fact that Strava lets you click into each of your laps/intervals, where it graphs the sub-data for you.

Strava also lets you pick and choose which data to plot on the graph. Power, speed, elevation, cadence, HR. Very cool.

Strava's graphs

Here’s Strava looking at a single lap. I love having all the data on one graph. I rarely look at it like this, but it’s nice to pick and choose depending on what you’re analyzing. One important data visualization: the scale of the graphs. Each graph is its own thing. The power graph doesn’t need to go up to 1,000, and the HR graph sure as hell doesn’t need to start at zero!

Weaknesses of Both

What I don’t like about both Garmin and Strava is that the charts are straight. As in, if my HR only fluctuates 10 BPM, don’t put it on a 200 point scale. That makes it very difficult to see any change in the chart. (And that’s why zooming in on data points in Garmin Training Center is cool. Otherwise, that software just feels kinda useless to me.)

Oh God, What Have I Done?

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PowerTap G3 on H Plus Son rim

My new wheel. Raaarrr.


So I got a CycleOps power meter. Did I mention that? I don’t think that I did. Yeah, I took on a little freelance project and earned the scratch to upgrade the training tools. I got a CycleOps PowerTap G3, which is the newest, latest and greatest thing. I did not buy the carbon rims. Just the hub.

And then I had Jude at Sugar Wheel Works build me up a wheel on a wide H Plus Son rim. Black hub, black Sapim CX-Ray spokes, black rim. I am, as the kids say, all murdered out. Or something like that. It’s hot. (And the spokes? Man, they make a difference. Very stiff. If you’re gonna buy wheels at Sugar, do the test ride. You’ll be amazed at what she can do with different components.)

But anyway, let’s get down to brass tacks. I got the G3 to improve training. I’ve been training based off my heart rate for years, and it’s a fabulous way to train. But your heart rate reacts to what you’re putting into the pedals, and that reaction lags.

One example of a workout where that’s not so good is OverUnders. You do 2 minutes “under” at a hard tempo, then a minute at a really hard tempo (or in my case, all out). You repeat that three times without a break, take a five minute soft pedal, and do it two more times.

Training with a heart rate monitor, you get up to your tempo HR, then hammer for a minute. When you’re supposed to go back down to your tempo heart rate, you end up going too easy. You just do. You’re trying to bring your heartrate back down so you can do another hard jump.

But with a power meter? Oh no. You’re gonna keep going hard, dammit. “Oh, did you just crest that steep pitch with your heart rate nearly maxed out? Pity you need to maintain 304 watts for another minute. PEDAL, YOU SOFT MOTHERF&#%&R! GO! PUSH! HAMMER!”

So in other words, it’s great. Today was the first OverUnder workout I’ve done, and it really hurt.

I’m a big believer in using the numbers you see in training as a base, not a ceiling. That is, if my 1 minute, all-out, hurl-your-guts out interval needs to be 320 watts, that’s the floor. I need to be above it the whole time, but most importantly, I need to be putting that 110 percent effort in. It would be easy to do the opposite, which is to try to hover around 320 watts, all the while thinking, “yep, I’m working hard.”

(As an aside, one of the harder workouts for me is “SteadyState” intervals. They’re not very hard in terms of intensity, but both with a HRM and a power meter, I can’t seem to find a comfortable cadence or effort level. I’m always going too hard or too easy. It’s a pretty small window that Carmichael asks you to ride in for a SteadyState, but seriously. With the HRM, I was always a few beats over. With the power meter, I’m always 20 watts over or under. Maddening.)

Anyway. Today was a great workout. Yesterday was a great workout, too. I’m noticing that I should maybe hold back just a touch in my early intervals so I have a little left at the end. Because oh man, I am just tapped out by the end. And I’m not just feeling tired: I am literally putting less watts into the pedals at the end. I guess that’s kind of the point though, right? Crush your body and force it to adapt.

I Am a Time Crunched Cyclist

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I’ve been following the Time Crunched Cyclist program from Chris Carmichaels’s book for the past four weeks, and the results so far seem promising. The gist is that since I lack time, my training should be intense and hard. It is.

Typical workouts are series of 9-12 minute intervals run at (for me) 160-165 BPM on my heart-rate monitor. or Over-Under intervals where I do 2 minutes at 160-ish, then a minute at 168-ish, then drop down and do it twice more. This next week starts a series of 3-minute all-out efforts that are gonna hurt hurt hurt.

So how do I know it’s working? Continue reading →