Stronger, Fitter, Faster

Stronger

Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.

Fitter

Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.

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9 posts from January 2009

Acheiving a milestone

Thanks to the short nature of the racing I'll be doing later this year (every race is less than an hour) I thankfully won't be expected to do the Lance Armstrong style 6-8 hour daily training rides all Spring. But early on my coach said I would have to eventually work up to a regular midweek 3 hour training ride.

It sounds pretty tame as I've done 6-8 hour rides on Cycle Oregon and in the Portland Century, but it's actually pretty hard to do a 45-50 mile ride by yourself near your home with regularity. It requires the following things to go right:

• Safe: off major highways, with as little traffic as possible
• Nearby: I could ride to Portland and halfway back, but if something went wrong, it'd take an hour to get a ride home at least
• Not boring: Doing a ten mile loop near your home five times is ridiculously boring
• Refuelling spot: ideally, a small store to get water/snacks would be handy

Yesterday I rode into town to run an errand, headed back out on my normal ~32 mile loop, but I added a 10 mile hillclimb loop. By the end, it was 47 miles and took three hours to complete, but I was never more than 10-15 miles from my house if anything went wrong. Additionally, I forgot to grab my tube/CO₂/lever repair bag and I didn't take any food with me after eating a big breakfast. I dressed warmly since it was about 42F and my two bottles (one water, one tea) lasted for the full trip. It was the longest solo ride I've done and I (luckily) made it back with zero tools, food, or support (the refueling spot I use in the summer is closed for winter).

Overall, I'm happy to have conquered this milestone in just the first two weeks of the year -- it's something I was worried about planning and wondering if I could do it week after week by myself, but now that I've done it, it'll be mentally much easier to do in the future.

Posted on January 15, 2009 in training | Permalink | Comments (7)

"Being a bike racer in Oregon is like being a mouse in a cheese factory"

The organization that puts together all the bike racing in Oregon (OBRA) had their annual awards banquet the other night and played this four minute video showing highlights from mountain bike, track, criterium, cyclocross, and road races over the course of 2008.

Something to watch for: around 2:30 is one of the most spectacular crashes I've ever seen in a velodrome. Someone goes down near the top and their rear wheel disc becomes a ramp for the person crashing behind them.

OBRA Banquet Video 2008 from Pat Gerke on Vimeo.

Posted on January 12, 2009 in oregon | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of the last photos of my flatland bike

Thanksgiving 2006, a friend stopped by to do an interview of me and took some shots around the house, but when she spotted my old trick bike she insisted I pull it out and do something, and this was about the most photographically impressive thing I could think to try.

Posted on January 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Real stories versus "real" stories

I'm about to go on vacation and I've been picking up a bunch of cycling books, each about an epic journey somewhere. Last night I cheated a bit and started reading one impressive sounding book before the vacation even started and I quickly realized they're hard to read. Depending on the rider-slash-writer, the recounting of a day's ride can include several pages of wandering thoughts about the protagonist's role in the world before ever divulging details of actual honest-to-goodness ride information.

Maybe I'm a literalist, but the most interesting stories from the road are light on flowery details of personal psychology explorations in a riders head and instead tell you about the road conditions, how bad the wind was, how many miles you covered in how many hours, and who you met along the ride.

I realized I might just be leaving a stack of cycling journey books behind when I always end up riveted to my seat while reading tour diaries at a place like the Crazy Guy On A Bike community. If you don't know anyone using that system, try looking for your hometown or current trip in progress from the front page. I found a random guy that rode from the Oregon coast, through my town, and then all the way to New Hampshire over the course of several months with daily updates, photos, and stories.

I had no idea who the person was before I started reading but after a few entries I wished I could have bought him dinner when he passed through my town or rode along with him for a day. Oh, and I started reading his tour story right before bed and it wasn't until he was halfway across Ohio in the stories that I noticed it was 2am and I should really get to sleep.

Posted on January 8, 2009 in stories | Permalink | Comments (2)

Amazing cyclocross shot

Easily one of my favorite images of cyclocross ever, this fantastic shot looks like it could have been taken on another planet. It also reminds me that I'm basically working all year to get better at races like this, so while it may look like hell to some people, it's actually the highlight of the year for my riding.

Posted on January 6, 2009 in photos | Permalink | Comments (0)

A cyclists' best friend in Winter

After the past couple weeks brought heavy snows in the otherwise rainy Pacific Northwest, all the local towns started throwing gravel down to improve traction on main roads and at intersections. The downside is it leaves gravel everywhere that gets kicked up and deposited on the roadsides, making the bike lanes unusable while covered in sharp rocks.

Thankfully, a week after the thaw I noticed this street sweeper was making quick work of most of the town's bike lanes. I shot this over my shoulder while driving around doing some errands this morning.

I haven't had any flats in recent riding, but I have had to take the main lane on most roads to stay out of the gravel. Looks like in a day or two things should return to normal on the shoulders of major roads again.

Posted on January 6, 2009 in photos | Permalink | Comments (0)

My first round of testing

Monday I had my first meeting with Seth at HPchiro to kick off our coaching for 2009 and I decided to do some lactic acid testing to show what kinds of baseline fitness I had going into it. I'm hoping for a retest in 4-6 months and another 4-6 months after that to see how I improve through training.

Overall, the testing wasn't too bad. You ride on a trainer for 10min to warm up, then start riding in 4min stages that get increasingly hard until the last stage feels like an 80% effort. We did some quick pin-prick blood tests after the first ramp up, then went back down to easy pedaling and repeated the sequence back up to where I stopped before, doing more pin-prick blood samples through the sequence.

Here's what I looked like doing the test, and what it looked like from my perspective on the bike:

My results are shown below and are pretty low which is what I was expecting for my untrained body at this time of year. My muscles can flush lactic acid up to about 205 watts of output with a heart rate of around 148bpm. Seth went ahead and created a set of training zones I'll be doing the next couple months of base mileage with, and I picked up an old powertap hub to stick with watts going forward when I'm riding.

Overall, it was a pretty painless experience and I'll have some good numbers to check against several months from now after I start getting into much better shape (hopefully I can start moving from a 2 watt/kg output to something more in the 3-4 watt/kg range by year's end).

Posted on January 6, 2009 in coaching, testing | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good initial progress

I've been tracking my weight every morning for the past couple weeks and so far things are shaping up nicely. Around Thanksgiving I was pushing 230lbs, but I'm back down into the 225lb range. My next goal will be getting to 220, which I hope to do by the start of February.

It's good steady progress of about a pound a week and I'm starting to get used to thinking about how full I feel when eating, I'm cutting out desserts, and I've stopped eating after 7pm.

Posted on January 3, 2009 in weight | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some Goals for 2009

Like JD, I'm not a fan of resolutions, I'm a fan of goals. Some goals require more than one year to accomplish and resolutions are just ways of setting yourself up for disappointment. Last year my goals were to ride at least a thousand miles and two thousand if possible, ride Cycle Oregon, and both race more often and do better in races. I pretty much hit all of those except the "do better in races" which is why I'm here now.

Everyone I talked to about getting faster said the next step was to get a cycling coach. After reviewing and interacting with about a dozen different coaches in the area (and talking to a few longtime coaches about what to look for in a local coach), I settled on one and our first planning session is this coming Monday. There are lots of places you can read about cycling coaches, but I found very little about what it's like being coached. My hope is to cover how hard the training regimen is on my body and through testing and racing see if it had a major positive effect on me. Since it's New Year's Day, I might as well put down my goals for the year:

My goals for 2009:

• Ride a lot more, try to hit 5,000 miles ridden in 2009
• Ride Cycle Oregon again, including all the optional extra riding
• Move up in classes for cyclocross, from beginner to Masters C
• Finish at least in the top half of my class in races on days where I felt good
• Win a cyclocross race at some point
• Race the short-track series in Portland and the one in Salem
• Try a road race of some sort (either Eugene Roubaix, the Banana Belt series, and/or a PIR crit)
• I'd like to see a noticeable improvement from coaching so I know the time and energy were worth it
• Continue with regular trips to the gym, get stronger
• Do 50 pushups non-stop
• Maybe try a different form of riding/racing (either Alpenrose Velodrome practice night or a XC mt bike race or something)
• Get a power meter and learn how to use it
• Sponsor a team and help build it
• Get my weight down in the 190-200lb range

I'm mostly worried about my two most difficult goals, which are to lose ~30lbs and find the time to ride 100 miles a week, every week, for a year. I have the strong feeling doing better at races is going to require that I trim some major weight off and ride enough so I'm conditioned for full race output. At 36 years of age, those things are often easier said than done. It's going to require a lot of discipline year-round to not eat too much junk and to always be taking 1 and 2 hour rides whenever I can.

It's a full plate of things to do for the year and I don't know if I'll hit them all, but I'll revisit this post later in the year to see how well I'm shaping up on it.

Posted on January 1, 2009 in goals | Permalink | Comments (8)