 |
Current mood:  recumbent Category: Sports
(NOTE: This blog is intended to be read on Friday 8/28 at no earlier than 8 AM. So if you're reading this and it's still Thursday, you're sort of time traveling. I'm just saying).
In previous blog posts, I’ve written about the Ride to Montauk. I’ve talked about what a great ride it is. I’ve gone into some of the details of my preparation. And I’ve written about the bicycle I’m using this time. If you’ve followed me this far, I’ll tell you some of the minor (but important) steps I’ve taken over the years to prepare for century rides.
OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER: I’m not a doctor or a physical therapist. I don’t know how much these things matter. I have a minor case of Tourettes and I make people nervous when I ride the train. I wouldn’t listen to me if I had the choice. I have gone without all supplements, and I’ve had varying degrees of bad outcomes. That said, this is my fifth year of doing this, so maybe I know something. Or maybe the Placebo effect is stronger than we give it credit for.
Dietary supplements I have used and recommend:
L-Glutamine: It’s a non-essential amino acid involved in building muscle tissue. When you work out with weights or undertake a long cardio event, you put stress on muscle tissue—in fact, you tear some of it apart. Your body produces L-glutamine, which helps repair muscle tissue. However, L-glutamine is not terribly abundant in your system, so frequently your body cannibalizes healthy (but unused) muscle cells to provide extras for the muscle tissue you’ve torn down. By taking artificial L-glutamine, you allow your body to work around this conundrum. It means you build muscle tissue somewhat faster. L-Glutamine also helps regulate blood sugar. I take 3-5 grams a day when working out in resistance training, 1-2 grams after a long bicycle ride.
QC 10—a derivative of quercetyn, it helps immune function. There was a report in Bicycling magazine indicating that oxygen processing was helped by Quercetyn. I’m taking about 200 mg a day. It’s expensive, so I don’t do it all the time.
ZMA: The product that built Balco (the company accused of supplying steroids to baseball players). ZMA is a compound of Zinc and Magnesium along with mixtures of B vitamins. Weightlifters have been using it with varying degrees of success. It apparently causes a small increase in production of your body’s human growth hormone and testosterone. There’s a lot of ritual around its use—you take it at night on an empty stomach just before going to bed, you can’t take it if you’ve had milk or calcium in the previous few hours, etc. I’ve had some success with ZMA and apparently people who are susceptible to diabetes are deficient in magnesium. I wouldn’t stay on it all the time. Sportlegs: When you take part in cardio vascular-intensive activity such as running or bicycling, lactic acid is not your friend. Your body starts producing it as soon as you reach a certain exercise threshold. It’s the stuff that makes your body feel beaten up after a lot of exercise. Sportlegs is a supplement that contains lactic acid—when you take it, its presence in your system keeps your body from producing its own. This means you can keep going for a longer period of time. You’ll also have less pain and stiffness during the days after the event. I’ve used Sportlegs for several events and I’ve felt better afterwards.
Training tricks:
I’ve mentioned some of the physical training I’ve done. It’s far too late in the game to try this for Saturday, but I have to tell you: intervals are your friend.
Intervals are a training technique that alternates crazy levels of high output with recovery periods. For example: if you’re doing 30 minutes on a treadmill, you’d do a five minute warm-up followed by ten two-minute intervals. The first two minutes of any interval would be a maximum output period—you’d run at a speed that you can’t maintain for more than two minutes. This is followed by a two-minute recovery interval—you’d drop your speed to a slow jog until you get your breath back. And then you do another interval! The best way to manage this is with a pulse rate monitor and/or cardiac strap. It helps you understand what your pulse rate is telling you.
Intervals help you push up the rate of maximum output from your body in terms of wattage and power. At the high rate of an interval, you’re essentially trying to fail in your two minutes. In the time after your workout, your body changes so as to set the bar higher on its output.
PS: See my statement at the top of this blog. I have no idea what I’m talking about except in terms of the things that have worked well for me. Your cardiovascular system may not be in shape to handle intervals. Mister cholesterol may come out of hibernation and set up a road block in a big artery in protest over this kind of thing. Talk to a doctor before you start doing intervals. I’m not kidding.
What the hell does my pulse rate want to tell me?
Okay, this is what your pulse rate is about. When athletes and doctors talk about maximum heart rate, resting pulse, etc., this is what they mean.
Maximum heart rate is a ballpark figure of what age does to your heart rate/pulse rate. In general, you take the maximum heart rate for an archetypal human infant (220 BPM) and subtract your age from that number. The adjusted number is your hypothetical maximum heart rate. So if you’re fifty, your adjusted MHR is 170 beats per minute. There’s a reason you should know this number before you begin an exercise program. Taking the above number as our example, your goal during a high-performance interval might be to achieve 80% of MHR. So that number you want to pop up on your pulse meter is 136 (.8x170=136). You may have compelling reasons to keep the number higher or lower depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if all you’re trying to do is burn fat, you might keep your pulse at around 75% MHR (128 BPM).
I’ve met riders on Century rides who keep tabs on their heart rate as they ride. I remember talking to a doctor who was riding along on his road bike. He was in his late fifties and he told me was keeping track of two numbers: he wanted to ride at least 15 mph, but he also felt he wouldn’t be able to finish if he pushed his MHR above 130. For the record, I kept track of my pulse rate on the 2006 ..North Fork.. century. There’s a rather wicked downhill in the middle of the ride (it's about 40 miles in). It’s like a roller coaster—you have to maintain speed going down the hill in order to be able to ride the uphill out of the roll. I’m pretty sure I hit 40 MPH on the way down, and I’m absolutely sure my pulse meter showed 156 when I came up. I’d almost rather not know at that point, you know? Physical tools
I swear by the following:
Gel packs: You need to get calories into your body while you ride or else you’ll cramp up and be unable to finish. There are various companies that make ‘gel packs’. It’s like pudding in a tube, and it contains lots of calories, carbs and some electrolytes. If you’re lucky you can find some that have a shot of caffeine as well. My guess is that someone my size averaging 16 mph is burning 720 calories an hour. Without food, you’ll bonk out in an hour or so.
C02 tire pump: You use a c02 cartridge to refill your tire. You have to be careful, but it takes less than two seconds to pump up a tire this way instead of using a hand pump.
Spandex: sorry you look like Batman Elvis, but this is the most practical clothing for a long ride. It wicks moisture away from your body, and the inner recesses are seamless, so they won’t cause chafing. And despite rumors to the contrary, you need to wear bike shorts on a recumbent—the seat angle pulls conventional clothes seams into the worst possible places. Besides, it’s virtually impossible to keep chain grease off your pants when you’re riding a recumbent bicycle.
Clip shoes: these are shoes that lock into the pedals. I was resistant to these, especially when riding the Bike from Hell. There is no feeling quite so frightening as having your bike tilt over when you can’t get a shoe unclipped. Embarrassing? You Bet! Hurts, too! And wearing these shoes when you’re not on a bike is really uncomfortable because the way the clip hits the pavement. But clip shoes allow you to both Push and Pull at the pedals. You don’t lose watts by having your shoes slip off the pedals. And best of all, you can tap out “On the Good Ship Lollipop” when you arrive at your destination. It’s especially entertaining when you’re wearing spandex.
Other messages from your body:
Forget about eating big at the pasta table the night before. You do need lots of carbohydrates, but white pasta actually doesn’t help in this regard—it will screw up your body’s glycogen stores and have your glucose numbers going crazy. You should look for vegetables with high carbohydrate levels such as carrots and beans. Refueling after the event with pasta is fine, by the way.
Alcohol is not your friend, especially the night before the event. There’s some evidence that alcohol makes unwelcome changes in your body’s ability to process and burn fat stores. It’s also loaded with a lot of calories relative to its lack of nutritional payoff. The same is true of most carbonated soda. Soda (especially the brown stuff) also tends to deplete calcium from bones. There was an article about the loss of bone density among cyclists where a mountain-bike racer with a two-liter a day brown habit was found to have the bone density of a fifty year old woman. Not good.
Fruit is good. Fish is good, especially fish that’s high in Omega 3 fatty acids. Chips and salsa, not so much. KFC and McDonalds, even less.
Sleep is good. The reason many of us can get by on six or seven hours of sleep a night has a lot to do with sedentary behavior. You need more sleep if you want to do this. Your body needs to repair itself.
So that’s it. I don’t plan to blog again until Monday at the earliest. Hope you all enjoy yourselves.
Copyright 2009, Daniel Kinch. Okay to use if source attributed, but drop me an e-mail first.
10:44 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|