Endurance Workout

Just completed an endurance workout and thought I'd review it since it covers a lot of training points. There are quite a lot, which might seem a bit like overkill, but in practice I don't stress over most of the stuff here, most has become habit and adds very little in terms of time needed over and above that needed for the cycling itself.

Objectives: I'm a believer in making a effort to get as much out of workouts as possible, over and above the basic ones of improving fitness and, hopefully, enjoying the exercise. 

This applies double to endurance workouts which, by their nature, can be a long old slog.I find having a number of things to think about helps complete them.

So this workout I had the following aims:

• Develop endurance using result from recent tests to set zones.
• Measure current state of endurance fitness
• Gather some baseline data for later simulations of long distance TTs
• Work towards a self test for measuring glycogen levels
• Monitor fluid levels needed 
• Increase cadence, get out of 7x rpm comfort zone and see what 80+ rpm feels like
• Burn lots of calories
• Listen to some old favourites (via Spotify)

Workout The workout was just a bit short of 4 hours and was done on my turbo. This may sound a bit tough but I much prefer to going out on the roads at this time of the year. It consists of 3 "hills" each an hour long going from start of endurance zone to just nudge lactate threshold then a final 45 minutes of a couple of shorter "hills".

I had a breakfast bowl of porridge an hour or so before starting but only ate couple of tangerines during the workout itself.

Results Power data is below 

There are a number of points most of which I was very happy with.

• Average power was just short of 200W with a slight negative split which is pretty smack middle of my endurance zone
• Average HR was nice and low at only 128bpm with a max of 145 near the end
• HR tracked power very closely with very little drift, only 3.4%
• Cadence was on target an average of 84rpm. This actually felt very comfortable and probably felt easier than previous efforts in the 70s.
• Ride felt comfortable up to the very close to end, final "hill" felt a bit tough.
• kJ was 2600, breaking this down (using data from test a couple of weeks ago) I'd guesstimate I burned around 2400kcal made up of roughly 90g of fat and 400g of carbs. This may explain the tough end as I was probably running my glycogen levels quite low and my body was warning me of this
• I drank 4.25l of water. I weighed around 500g less at the start of the ride compared to the beginning so this amount of water was probably just about spot on.  
• I reminded myself just what a great band Black Label Society are.

 Future plans I'll extend this workout to around 4 hours then up the power bit by bit (by increasing the "valleys") to move average power up towards my lactate threshold level of 225W. This will provide useful info for a 12 as this will be my target wattage for that ride. 

I'll then push it further with the aim of hitting an average of 240-250W which is top of my endurance zone and the power I'll need to improve my 100 time. 

At some point I expect my HR drift will increase to past 5% which is a fair indicator of when I am straying out of my pure endurance zone. It will be interesting to see how this then changes, in theory if I get fitter it should come down.

I'll continue to do the workouts on no food and at some point I guess I will  bonk. This won't be much fun but should give me some steer on my glycogen levels. Once I've hit this I'll start to eat just to check if this sorts things out and to give some indication of what level of feeding will be needed on "real" rides.

Cadence felt good at 80rpm+, so I'll make that a goal for all future rides of this nature.

Power -3 pronged approach

My approach for improving power is three pronged.

• On bike training, the first phase of which I covered in my last post
• Working on riding better, in particular pedalling more efficiently and descending 
• Core and strength work to improve general fitness and help with both the above.

• In the next few posts I'll cover the latter two in a bit more detail.

It's a kinda magic

On another subject, we went to a magic show last night, first one in ages.

It was courtesy of Morgan and West Time Travelling Magicians    and it was utterly superb.

Magic is one of those things you have to really see live to fully appreciate. You know it's all tricks but simply can't figure out how it's done.

The delivery matters a lot of course, not only to make the tricks work but as part of the entertainment and this was one of Morgan and West's many strengths. Their patter was razor sharp and very funny. 

Show took place at the New Greenham Arts Centre and was full to overflowing. Nice aspect was that, literally, the audience had a full helping of folks from all ages, lots of children their along with quite a few parents and grand parents. We were integral to the show with most of the tricks involving the participation of a least one of us but this was done in a fun way and not even the most timid of folks looked embarrassed. 

Pick of the tricks for me was the "travelling cards" that somehow made their way from one side of the stage to the other, a close follow up being the "mystery biscuit" routine where one of the audience not only had her favourite cookies divined but got given a packet of them as well.

Also mention has to be made of "Hobbit the Rabbit" who survived a harrowing process of natural selection to become a much loved pet, along with personalised medal.

Very highly recommended, if Morgan and West are playing anywhere nearby go and see them, stupefaction guaranteed. 

Knocked Knees

I paid a return visit to Cycefit recently to get properly fitted for my TT bike, with a view to training in this position over winter, hopefully with a result that the gap between my TT power and climbing power will narrow from its current level of around 30W.

It proved to be very worthwhile and I ended up with a position I felt a lot more comfortable in.

I also got a bit of a shock. The assessment included a front on view of my pedalling action, highlighted by the use of a couple of lasers. My knees were noticeably off plane, both being too close to the top tube, the right knee especially so. 
 
A radical change to the wedges on my shoes helped improve matters. My left leg is pretty much sorted. My right is still away from perfect but is probably as good as it will get given my genes combined with the effect of the injuries I sustained 

Good news is I have the winter to sort out not only my TT position but my slightly knocked knees 

 

3 on, 3 off and a rest day

So far I have been concentrating on losing weight and it's gone pretty well. I've managed a couple of milestones, my low of 67.3kg is an all time best and I've consistently been under 70kg/11 stone which had been a bit of a bit of a blocker in the past.

Now I've scheduled a change, mainly for a bit of variety. I'll continue with the  endurance sessions that have helped shed the pounds but will mix them up with some higher intensity workouts as well 

Each week I would hope to do:

• 3 x Endurance Sessions: These will be main calorie burners. Currently they are just over 3 hours at around 200W.  I'll eat normally beforehand but during them only take on water, then eat normally afterwards. I have no problem completing these at the moment. I'll extend them to 4 hours at the same power then slowly increase watts. My hope is to get to around 240W which is pretty close to power needed for a 4 hour 100. At some point I'm guessing I will need to eat during these sessions which should give me some indication of how my glycogen levels are. 
• 1 x Tempo Session: This is a slow ramp up to tempo level then hold for a longish interval, take a 5 minute break then a second interval. I'll use HR to pace this one, starting with 20 minute intervals and adjusting power until my HR hits 151 which is the bottom of my tempo zone. Once I have established the power I'll extend the interval times, hoping eventually to hit 2x60 minutes.
• 1 x Threshold Session: I'll use Chris Boardman's routine for this. It comprises a set of 15>12>10>8 intervals at threshold with 5 minutes rest between each. It's "easier" than the classic 2x20 but mainly on the mind, you still get a good chunk of time at threshold and if it's good enough for Boardman it's good enough for me. I'll start these at an easy wattage then nudge up each week until I can't complete. While doing these I'll include some of Bradley Wiggins' pedal routines. This involves doing repeats of 1 minute 50 rpm, 4 minutes "normal" rpm. 
• 1 x Short Interval Session: Another Chris Boardman routine, 3 x 3 minutes threshold++ then 3x2 minutes threshold++ with 7-10 minutes between each interval. Again I'll start low in terms of power and nudge the wattage up a little each week.
• 1 x Recovery Session: In the past I haven't felt the need for much in terms of recovery so I'll just have the one session a week to start. The 3 sessions above will help me judge how I am doing and if I feel rough I'll schedule in some more recovery time. I don't plan to take the recovery day fully off, I have an idea for a "CO2 threshold" test that involves doing an easy routine so I'll do that.

VO2, MLSS, MHR, peak power

The other measures from the tests I undertook were all about peak efforts.

My "MLSS" was 300W, 4.48w/kg, 166bpm
VO2 was 62.8

Max HR was 180rpm

Power at VO2 max was 375W 
Power/weight at VO2 max was 5.59 W/kg

The protocol to get these values was 

• Start at 150W
• Increase 25W every 3 minutes until MLSS
• Then increase 25W per minute until crack

The results don't come as a big surprise. I have not been doing any top end work recently so they are all a bit low, apart from max HR which is higher than I expected. 

The VO2 is a bit lower than my last test in 2006 when it measured 63.9 (and I was a bit heavier)

All should get better once I up intensity and lose a few more pounds. 
 
 
  

Lactate Threshold - another surprise

One outcome of the recent test I did was to find out my "lactate threshold".

I thought I knew what this meant but in fact I've been wrong all these years. My believed this was the same as my "threshold power" but in fact its much lower. 

Wiki explains all here

So the lactate threshold occurs quite early on as you ramp up power. For me it occurred at 225W/133bpm. 

This point coincides with the point where you need to start breathing through your mouth so is quite easy to monitor. 
 

Cycling Efficiency

The physiological assessment I undertook recently measured my "Cycling Efficiency".

This is a figure representing how much oxygen is required to generate power. It is measured in ml/min (of oxygen) per watt. 

The lower the figure the better.

Mine was around 11.3 at 200W (my power just before lactate threshold). 

This is rated as typical for club athletes, for pros it will be below 10.

Since this is the first time I have had this test not sure about how this will change with training. Will be interesting to see what happens.

Fuel from Fat

I recently took some physiological tests to measure my fitness. My intention is to redo these next year and hopefully see some changes as a result  of my training.

I'llg/ do some write ups on these to serve as a reference for the future, starting with the one that surprised me the most.

This was the one that showed where I was getting the energy to cycle from. This will always be a mixture of fat and carbohydrate,  with a greater proportion of fat at lower intensities,  carbohydrates taking over as intensity increases to provide pretty much 100% at peak levels.

The table below shows the results at the key transition point when carbs take over from fat.


Watts             CHO g/h        Fat g/h      CHO kcal/h  Fat kcal/h Total kcal/h     Calc kcal/h
150                   46                 45              188             417              667                540
175                   113               15               465            139              665                630
200                   100               17               410            154              621                720
225                   114               25               470             235             776                810

There are a couple of interesting things in these figures

• The transition from fat burning at 150W to carb burning at 175
• 150-200W consumes the same amount of calories, showing how rough the rule of thumb that calories = kJ is (the last column shows the KJ figure)

  

Goodbye Mr Fox

Our daughter Katy has spent the past few years living in London, firstly studying and more recently working. 

So we have made quite a number of trips to see her over this time and I have noticed two very nice happenings.

• The number of cyclists on London's roads has exploded.Whereas you may see the occasional chap on a bike taking his life in his hands now you see hundreds of them (and just as many chapesses as well). Bikes have become really cool and you see all manner or weird and wonderful machines on the road now. 
• Craft beer has hit the UK. I was sort of in on the beginning of this, having been a long term fan of American speciality beer. This has crossed the Atlantic and now there are 10s of breweries in the UK, loads of pubs selling craft beer and what feels like hundreds of different varieties to choose from. Having been in despair about the "youth of today" drinking slop like Stella its great to see so many swap and drink real beer, 

These two trends sort of coincided this week. I went into Cyclefit to get properly sorted out in terms of TT position. The fact that a business like this can exist and apparently prosper is testament to just how cycling has grown. 

This trip gave me the opportunity to meet up with Katy for one last time in London, in just a couple of weeks or so she will be starting a new chapter of her life in the USA. 

I thought it appropriate we should have a drink at her "local",The Fox a great pub with a huge range of beer and not a bad burger to boot. We had a drink here on the day I helped Katy move in a year ago, since then its just got better, with an even wider range of great beer to choose from as the picture below attests....

For food we went somewhere new (for me). Duke's   which has its very own beer and a quite stunning range of  meat including the biggest rib of beef I have ever eaten.  This place was all of about 100yards from the Fox, it's amazing, so much goodness in so small a distance.

So, slight disappointment I won't be making quite as many trips to London in the future. But every cloud and such, Katy will be in New York soon and that opens up a whole new world (well country) of beers to explore. And the ribs there probably make even Dukes seem like a starter....

Skipping breakfast

I used to skip breakfast in the mistaken belief it would help me lose weight and sessions done would increase my "fat burning". In fact it doesn't for the reasons below.

The average person has 450-550g of glycogen stored. If depleted this will be replenished as a priority by any carbs digested from food (and to a lesser extent from fat reserves). Only after it is replenished will extra carbs be stored as fat. Each g of glycogen provides about 4kcal worth of energy.

Glycogen is stored in 2 places
- 80% Locally in muscles, prime use is to provide energy for exercise. Glycogen will only be available for the muscle where it is stored
- 20% Is stored in the liver. The prime purpose is to provide energy for non-muscular body functions that require glucose, the most important of which is brain function. As a secondary function it will provide a top up to muscles whose glycogen is starting to get depleted. (Note: this happens before the glycogen level in the muscle hits zero, at around 25-30% left.)

Assuming your glycogen stores are full on kipping down, following a night's sleep you will wake with
- Practically all of your muscle glycogen still available (assuming you have have not been involved in some serious "interval training" with your partner :) )
- 50% of your liver glycogen available (the rest will have been used to provide the energy the brain needs to create your dreams/nightmares)

So if you went to bed with 500g of glycogen stored you will wake with 450g.

Even taking into account the fact that not all the muscle glycogen is available for training this is still allows a lot of exercise, very roughly there is enough to allow a 70kg rider to climb Alpe D'Huez one and half times flat out without feeding.

If you are not going flat out then you will be able to go for an even longer as fat provides an additional source of energy at intensity levels less than flat out (around 30% at endurance pace).

Skipping breakfast will however make training sessions FEEL harder. This is because on waking your blood sugar level will be low and, since the brain needs sugar to work at its best, this will make you feel rough. Missing breakfast and going straight into training will aggravate this. Worse, if your session is quite long and you don't eat during it after a while your liver glycogen will start to get seriously challenged

Skipping breakfast means that the liver glycogen is level only 50% and this will continue to decline. It will decline even quicker if some of it is needed to help out muscles whose local glycogen levels are getting low. Once the liver level hits around 10% the brain signals that things are getting serious. Pushing past this point without eating will be extremely tough regardless of how fatigued your muscles are or how much  muscle glycogen you have left. Push too hard and you will collapse big time. All this is very stressful but has very little benefit in terms of physical fitness, though it may make you mentally tougher.
 
So bottom line is that skipping breakfast really has little impact in any sense that will affect your fitness unless the subsequent training session is very brutal and/or long.  You will only by training in a really "fasted" state if you eat and train in a way that stops your body replenishing glycogen (i.e. running a serious calorie deficit and/or following a very low carb diet). Even if you do this best advice is to have eat a small amount of high GI carbs before exercising first thing in the morning and, if planning to ride more than a couple of hours, eat a few more during it just to keep brain ticking over.

Weight target

Following my Bodpod experience I now have a target fat %, which in turn gives me a target weight.

When I did the test I weighed 67.5kg and want to lose 3.5kg of fat. 

So target weight will be 64.0kg. 

I plugged this weight into the two key metrics I am tracking and came up with a couple of happy coincidences.

• It's slap bang middle of the "healthy" BMI range
• Simply repeating the last test I in terms of power would yield a w/kg of 5.05

Both of these would be nice :) 

Entering the Bodpod

Recently I took some tests to establish a baseline for comparison next year when I turn 55.

Included amongst them was the "Bodpod". This is a device that provides an accurate measurement of your body fat %. 

Using it is quite funny, its a bit like an egg/womb. You strip off down to your undies and sit inside it, then a soothing woman's voice asks you to relax and stay quite still while in the background you can hear the whirring  of machines and feel subtle wafts of air on your skin as the Bodpod does its stuff.

Bodpod in action (not me in it though)

Anyway once all that was over I got my results. The result was 12.4%. My weight at the time was 67.5kg which means that I am lugging about 8.3kg of fat. 

8.3kg is quite a lot. Many cyclists (including me I have to admit) will spend large amounts of cash on carbon fibre widgets that will shave a few g off bike weight, yet I am carrying around the equivalent of an entire bike (and full water bottles) in fat all the time, including up every mountain.

Shifting all of this is not going to happen. However knowing exactly how much fat I have does let me set a target. 

I'm going to aim for 5kg of fat which will mean a target fat% of around 8%.

This in turn gives me an objective/means of tracking. I need to lose roughly 3.5kg of fat which is the equivalent of 11500kcal. so I need a total calorie deficit of around that number.

So, in theory, I can just keep a running total of my calorie deficit with a view to hitting this magic number. This is nice as I find tracking a running total that I have complete control over the most satisfying way of working towards a long term goal. 

Will be interesting...