There’s a snow pack rising, and I’ve
got evil on my mind
It’s here.
Training that is. So far three weeks of sticking to the preset training
schedule, increasing mileage by 9% per week. With the ride today that makes 132
miles this week. The ride today…winds of 25 miles per hour. Someone once stated
that ‘the wind is my friend’, when training. That person was demented. The
thought is that the extra effort riding against the wind helps. Sure.
I take it
personally though! In my heart I know that there is a Training God, and he is of
the Old Testament because he rides a Brooks saddle (thus in agony, but denies
it in favor of fashionability), not merciful, and takes liberties to torment
the poor bike rider. Hills must end, races have a distance limit, and winds do
not. OK, stop whining.
The aero
bars help a lot, and to be fair the experience of toughing it out is a plus. Gosh I hate to be rational – more satisfying
to whine! Anymore, the wind is an annoyance, but helps to gain that ‘adverse
conditioning’ so necessary for racing the Tour Divide.
Three more
months to go. By that time I should be at a 300 mile per week level, holding it
for three weeks, then tapering the last ten days. There is no ‘peak’ level I am
striving for. Peaking before the TD is physical suicide – you will peak on the
ride. There is no way you can hold your peak conditioning for two or three
weeks! If you have, in fact, peaked before the race, then each day after about
a week or so will put you in the hole. That’s my scientific buttwing guess.
No, I don’t
do any specific interval training, although parts of my ride resemble
intervals, such as brief steep hill all out climbs. My spin classes substitute
for interval training, not that I need a lot of intervals. They do help though.
Oh, and for now I train almost exclusively on pavement.
My typical
routes (overall) average about fifty to seventy-five feet of climbing per mile
of distance. Except the average consists of valley flats with rolling hills,
and extended climbs in the Sierra foothills. My problem, if you can call it
that, is that I have one speed, and that is what I call ‘training pace’. The
pace is relatively fast (for me!), and more than sixty plus percent of time is
spent in heart rate zones 3, 4, and 5. I know that I should slow down for some
rides, and I’ve been trying. The funny thing is that keeping my heart rate in
zone 2 or low 3 results in a per mile time increase of only 7 to 10 percent of
normal training. Think I would learn? Later maybe.
I do have recovery
rides scheduled and every third or fourth week is a recovery week (recovery weeks
are 60% of previous week mileage). Last race training year (2015) I forced
myself to slow down periodically, and will again this year. Ditto weight
training. The past few months I’ve increased the weights by 50 to 100%
depending on specific exercise. Yep, noticed a significant increase in
strength, along with more fatigue, while teetering right on the edge of injury.
Now that I’m ramping up the miles, I’ll back off the mass slowly, coming back
down to the normal weights.
Brain freeze
- Snow is on my mind. The snowpack in Montana and Wyoming is higher than
average. In Wyoming it is 200% of average for parts of the TD route. In years
past parts of the race have been rerouted to avoid snowed in mountain passes. I really want to race the entire route, and a
delay of a year is not in the cards. I’ve worked too hard this last year
pre-training, and besides, next year might be worse. Another adversity to
overcome. Heck, who knows? Perhaps this year will be a warm spring and snow
will magically go away the week before the start. Race regardless, race with
honor.
My hands are
getting better, having a long history of numbness during rides. Part of that is
changing my handlebars to a 41 degree back sweep model and a 30 degree stem.
That puts me more upright, (maybe too much) taking weight off my hands. Still
fiddling with the angles and dangles, grips and such, but looks promising. Another help is that I’ve been doing planks as
part of my training, and my core is stronger.
A recent discovery is that my
right hand ulnar numbness (last two fingers only) is in part a problem of where
the nerve crosses the inner elbow (it gets irritated). Look up ‘Ulnar Flossing’
on YouTube – thanks to Matt Lee for that tip. It’s a method of stretching the ulnar
nerve, helping to relieve numbness. My fingers still fall asleep at night when
I am on my right side though. Take care when you ride to avoid hand issues –
mine stem from the 2013 TD ride injuries, exacerbated greatly by the 2015 race,
and riding since then hasn’t made things better. You have been warned.
Speaking of
my butt, my long standing issue of uncomfortable saddles has eased a bit. Still,
I prefer to describe my present saddle as my ‘least painful’, rather than most
comfortable. (I give names to my saddles, such as ‘Vlad the Impaler’, ‘Cheek
grater’, ‘Chainsaw’, ‘Scrotumizer’ and the like). A large part of the
improvement is just putting in mile after mile. I’ve been changing saddles
recently to ‘train’ my hiney (I’ve got fifteen or twenty saddles to choose
from). Confounding the issue is that the more upright position changes the
butt-ometry, so to speak, thus the discomfort level of certain saddles.
All things
are interconnected.
