Cycling Epi Center

I recently read a book about the Wright Brothers, and was fascinated by the people of the time who were in competition to fly the first powered airplane. Certainly the Wright Bros. were not alone in the quest. Their meager budget did not stop them from gaining world wide notoriety. What was even more fascinating to me was a local competitor to the the Wrights from Hammondsport, NY. Glen Curtiss shared an interest in cycling (as did the Wright Bros), and was even competitive in bicycle racing before the turn of the century. How cool is that? Anyway I plan on riding my bike down to Hammondsport way this fall, for to check out the Glenn Curtis museum. Curtiss gave up his bicycle to work on motorcycles and specifically low weight high horse power engines which helped in his flying machines.

Holy Grail

I apologize for the lapse in posting frequency, but career intensity, personal software projects, training, and my daughters lacrosse season have taken its toll my disposable free time. That said, I have been giving some thought to what I consider the Holy Grail of Training. No, its not a new drug, but rather understanding more about recovery. I am perplexed at my own ability to train hard, recover and improve in fitness. I am under whelmed with the current best practice of using your waking heart rate to determine your physical stress. I know it’s been around for years, but there seems to many factors that influence morning heart rate other than recent cycling intensity. The theory being that the body can only improve in fitness if it stressed to a certain point, then allowed to recover and rebuild. Pushing yourself during a time when the body needs to recover and rebuild is counter productive. Ok, that sounds romantic, and I guess I buy it. So how do you determine when your body needs to recover, resting heart rate seems to be the most objective. Personally, the subjective “How do I feel today?” while probably more accurate leaves something to be desired.
Most of what you read about training plans is some permutation on intense days followed by easy days, thus somehow building in programmed recovery. The problem with this is that other factors besides training affect recovery. Good coaches understand this and allow for flexibility in training. I wish I had a device that I could just stick my finger into and it would tell me how my body is doing. That probably requires some technology like the Tricorder from the old Star Trek series though.
I have religiously kept a record of most every ride I’ve made in the last three years. This among other things keeps how much time I spend in various HR zones, with 5 second accuracy. I have to some degree kept track of my morning HR, Blood Pressure (I used to suffer from Hypertension before I started cycling), and morning weight. What I have not kept track of and now understand better are the subjective stresses on my body such as how good was my sleep each night, how stressed was I because of travel, work, family, mowing the lawn. These things definitely contribute to morning HR and probably contribute to your body’s ability to recover.
So my new quest it to write some piece of software that will take in all the data I have collected, and guess what my morning hr should be. If my data is good and there is correlation, I should be able to “discover” the formula that predicts morning HR. So why would I want to be able to predict morning HR? First it seems like a challenging piece of software, and well that’s cool. Second if I can predict morning HR, then I can understand the sensitivity of HR to various stimuli. For example what is more stressful? 4 hours of z2 or 1 hour of a particular type of interval? How about 3 days of that? How does the number of hours of sleep affect recovery? All these things are there for the understanding. My guess is that I have no idea on the number of items that actually affect morning HR, and its going to be like trying to predict the weather.

Year's first sunburn

Yesterday the team went for a three hour tour "to the tune Gilligan's island". Anyway what a great day. I don't know if I would ride, if I couldn't race, but a three hour ride with lots of chuckles was a lot a fun as well. I don't think anyone was immune to personal verbal attacks, all in fun, ...I think. Anyway 1200 calories down the drain. Leaving room for some over the edge peanut butter and banana sandwiches for a recovery meal. Ah peanut butter, I eat more than I should, but I started making my own. There are a lot of reasons to make your own, cheaper, tastes better, and I know with a greater degree of certainty whats in each jar. Here goes

Homemade Peanut Butter

2 1/2 cups dry roasted peanuts
1 tsp salt
Add 1/2 cup of peanuts to the food processor. Pulse until the chunks are the size you like for chunky, about 3 or 5 quick pulses. Remove peanuts, and put aside. Add 1 cup of peanuts and do the same, but after they are all chopped, keep the food processor on. This will take about 1 or 2 minutes. The peanuts go through a couple of phase transitions. First you think the food processor is going to explode, then it becomes a large ball, and finally the ball is beaten into submission and peanut butter forms on the sides of the bowl. Spoon out the peanut butter, and repeat with the other cup of peanuts and salt. Add the 2 cups of creamed peanut butter/salt and peanut chunks together in a jar, stirring as best you can.
This is a tad salty, and sort of grainy, not too dissimilar from Reece’s peanut butter cups peanut butter. I don't know if you can add 2 cups at one time or not.
I am going to try other types of nuts next time, like walnuts.

Rollercoaster

Every time I go to an amusement park I go through the same set of emotions about the roller coaster. From a distance it looks seductively fun, and instantly I am attracted to the thrill factor. As I wait in line, I grow frustrated with the rate at which I progressing to being able to ride. Once the front of the line is in clear site and I am able to see more clearly what is going on, I begin to become nervous. I am thinking to myself, well this really looks like zero fun. Finally when I am bolted into the car and it starts moving, I am thinking this is a mistake of epic proportions. Through the ride I promise myself and my creator that if I live through this torture I will never ever do this again. The ride is nerve racking. When we stop and get out of the car, I immediately look at the line and think to myself, you know that really was a lot of fun, I don’t think the line is any longer, let’s gets right back in line.
These are the emotions I went through in our training race earlier this week.

Book Review II

French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating For Pleasure

First, I haven't read many books worth the cover price, and this once certainly is not worth the money, but worth the time to read, ergo find it at the local library. Any book with Fat French Women in the title would normally not make my book filter, but the order of the words caught my eye.
Basically 1/2 recipes, and 1/2 stories supporting her premise, which is The French in general spend more thought about eating than we do, thus tend to eat slower and with more varied yet smaller portions. All this tends to increase meal satisfaction with fewer calories.

Thats my free review and worth all the money for more reviews see this.