Best Training Day of the Year-- Failures Included

Today's brick was the BEST training day of the year-- 90 mile ride + 4 mile trail run with Amanda and Pater, some of the most beautiful scenery in the Midwest, and some hard-core education that will be useful come race day.

Every training day is a dress rehearsal for a race day nutrition plan. Since one third of all Ironman athletes suffer nutritional breakdown on race day, getting things right is worth a couple thousand miles of getting things wrong. The athletes who don't finish are rarely under-trained...expect in nutrition.

Mid-Ohio River on the Augusta Ferry 43 miles East of Cincinnati-- breathtaking!

The ferry is free for patriotic cyclists!

My day's nutrion plan failed me in two ways:
1) I didn't have enough dates-- my supplier is out for the season. So, I had to use gas station "food". By trial and error I've discovered my rule of thumb is one date per mile of riding.
2) For about a half hour, I didn't take in enough calories, PERIOD. Regardless of the "purity" of my nutrition source, starvation is the worst poison. My legs lacked punch from about mile 60-70. After two candy bars and a Sprite, I was feeling back to life. They had no real food to speak of. WTF?! Some people believe the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. But if you want to be a good cyclist, you almost have to treat your body like a Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future.

Garbage "food" from gas stations is a delicacy for a starving bonking endurance athlete. You can't be a purist, man. It's a dangerous raw food religion.  1.21 Jiggawatts!!!!

Here's what I had for breakfast, on the ride, and for my recovery drink-- (prior to lunch and dinner).

"You're a vegan-- how do you get your protein?" By paying attention to nutrition and not paying attention to the meat and dairy industry. Cronometer is a FREE download-able program that helps me keep track of my nutrition from day to day.

There's nothing more rapturous after a workout than a creamy glass of summery cantaloupe frappe. Oo DAG!

One cantaloupe yields about one liter of Nati Nectar

Dude! What happened to my organic peaches? They went from rock hard to black plague. Lunch is a bust. Back to bananas and spinach.

BEWARE: TMI (Too much information)
After today's workout I had about 4 BM's over the course of the evening. This was annoying, but nothing abnormal when I'm eating as many calories and as much soluble fiber as I am. Come race day, I'm not afraid of soluble (soft) fiber. Still, with a better date supply and some fresh coconuts and time to juice oranges, I will be eating and drinking considerably much less fiber with my calories when given more time for preparation.

Paula Radcliffe pooped en-route to setting her world record marathon, you poop haters!! I would like to believe that in this case, correlation IS causation. Some people believe anal retention is the root of global violence. I for one will go as far on that band waggon as agreeing that getting folks anally resolved wouldn't hurt with world peace.

Here's Pater working on world peace. The fairy's port-side port-o-john saved Pater from the ill-timed effects of his team's big 3 week colon cleanse. Sounds like just another day in the life of Chris Dwyer, whose entire life has become a colon cleanse.

Quote of the day from Pater: "You know it's bad when you're pissin' dust."

Cleves Time Trial Results

On Tuesday, I participated in my first Cleves Time Trial 16.4 km (10.2 mi) of the year--I set a PR! My old best time was taken during May 2009 (Ironman Lou' training season), where I clocked 25:43. Tuesday, I went 24:52-- 3.3% faster.

Elevation of the Cleves course

The top performance of the year belongs to a genuine stud, John Murdock, who went 10.9% faster still at a time of 22:09, averaging 27.6 mph, whereas I averaged 24.6 mph.

Below is a summary of all the times posted this year. This includes all times by all riders, and therefore includes repeat performances of some riders, (usually the faster guys). See if you can spot the oddity with the data.

The orange line represents my performance Tuesday compared to all times of all riders this year.

The oddity here is that there are a couple of plateaus near the faster times and these plateaus are broken at integer minutes-- that is, at the 23:00 mark, the 24:00 mark, the 25:00 mark, etc. So, my performance Tuesday crossed a critical barrier of the 25:00 mark. If you had to guess, based on human psychology, you would expect times to cluster around the upper limit of each plateau-- that is, you'd find many more performances in the territory of 24:57, 24:58, 24:59 than you would near 24:02, 24:03. Because, if you can ride as fast as 24:02, than surely you'd have the mental motivation to cross into the 23:00 zone. BUT...as it turns out, this intuition doesn't hold up for the very fastest times. Not only is the 24:00 plateau crossed, but it's smashed with a time of 23:59. Similarly, the 23:00 barrier is smashed with a time of 22:59. Perhaps these dudes are stuck in their own personal plateaus or represent the owners of an important technology gap.

The very fastest riders (in the first and second plateau zones) have several tech features in common --1) time trial bikes (aerobars), 2) aero helmets, 3) disc wheel(s), and 4) shoe covers. Of course, they deserve credit for stellar athletic performance.

LESSONS LEARNED
I'm going to ride that course a couple more times to gather more data. Undoubtedly, some of my performance gains came strictly from my new time trial bike-- better positioning, better knee pinching, more aero. What I find interesting (and daunting) is that in order for me to double my speed from cruising around 12.3 mph to hauling ass at 24.6 mph, I have to quadruple the work to overcome the frictional forces of air. The force of air drag is proportional the square of the velocity. So, if I triple my speed from 10 mph to 30 mph, I have to do 9 times the work! This is a good reason to find a way for me and/or my bike to become more aerodynamic.

There is also room for plenty of fitness improvements, as well as tech improvements, but just as importantly, strategy improvements. I tried to catch my :30 man from the get-go. I almost had him about 3/4 in, but he pulled away on the last long flat, where I started petering out. I ended up only gaining 2 seconds on him. Next time, I will wear a heart rate monitor and race my own race and I'll use an odometer and try to leave some gas in the tank for the final long flat stretch and the uphill finish.

I did happen to wear my shoe covers and removed my water bottle from the aerobars, but I should have removed the water bottle from my down-tube since I didn't drink the whole ride. I'll also remove the gear bag from my seat post since there's no time to change a flat, but I figured I would want to leave some sort of room for improvement for the next race where I feel a little more optimized inside and out.

OTHER GOOD NEWS
After my tune up last week, my car's fuel efficiency went from 19mpg to 32.2mpg! This is terribly important when business trips have me routinely going to Toledo, Columbus, Dayton, hauling a car full of equipment for me energy audit work. I've already racked up 20,000 miles this year. Yuck!

I haven't unplugged from this grid, but it's a start.

Back In Cincy, State of Planet Address

NYC and Miami, FL are but happy memories. Now...back to realty, back in Cincy, back to training and back to work, with nearly every project's construction calendar synchronizing like a menstruating convent. AGGHH!!!!

What did we learn from all these world travels?

*NYC will chew you up and spit you out hourly. If you stop walking, the pedestrians will run you over. Goldang, it's a tough city to relax in. Luckily, Sis-in-law Molly branded her urban machete and was an ever-gracious host. We even found a raw restaurant where we ordered a raw cake for my birthday-- only $55!

My family OWNS the subway once we board. But the noise at terminals fries our brains.  We ain't really city folk.

 

Watch out, here we come.

*Miami is an inappropriately sexy city.

The women are sexy. The beach is sexy. Even the buildings are sexy. 

 

Manatee expert/adventurer and future free range vodka farmer?

Manatee in the harbor drinking fresh water from the hose

*The second green LEED building you build may be the worst building ever built.

Crappy technique. C'mon guys, do it like you did the first time. 

On your first building, you have the fear of God in you because you don't understand the LEED rating system and the owner is breathing down your neck so they can claim government incentives. But then, on your second building, you consider yourself a green expert and you come up with cute ways to cut costs, i.e. don't put insulation in wall cavities.

*Shaving your legs brings ZERO improvment to your triahtlon's aerodynamics, but does NOT hurt your marriage, and CAN lead to easier road rash cleaning. 

I took a turn too fast on a the greasy wet pavement and slid across the entire intersection in front of about a billion on-lookers. "I meant to do that."

It takes too much time that could be spent training or resting. It wastes fresh water and energy. It requires costly shaving lubricants. It demands dangerous bodily contortions in the shower. It burns too many calories. It is never 100% finished. Despite all these wonderful benefits, it will NOT make you any faster in wetsuit, on a bike, or running. Nevertheless, the wifey likes it and it makes your legs look fast which are both just the kind of ego-stroking perks that every triathlete needs.

*The worms are getting busier (hubba hubba, bow chicka waow waow)

The worm bin was full of lettuce heads and brown bananas and peels before we left. Now all that's left is the most amazing soil on the planet. I frapped a bunch of spoiling iceberg lettuce for them when we got home since they sounded hungry as they slithered across each other.

*$180 sunglasses are worth their weight in litter but not their weight in urushiol oil (aka poison ivy)

My training partner D-Bo tromping around for his broken sunglasses today that he wishes he didn't throw away in the poison ivy. His last words before tossing his glasses: "I feel bad about littering but F*$% this hill, man. [Toss] Yunno, for $180, I bet there's a warranty. I'm gonna get 'em. Shit! Is this poison ivy?"

*Coffee's a hell of a drug.

Today's training experiment-- what does a single shot of espresso do for a former addict on a 90 mile brick workout?

Since I went off coffee 11 months ago, I've developed better habits of eating, sleeping, working, relaxing, and playing. Best of all, my depression is gone.

I've decided coffee drinkers have implicitly declared dietary bankruptcy. I've come to see coffee as a great confuser-- an addictive drug that enables exactly the kinds of behaviors that we know are destructive-- overworking, undersleeping, eating foods that bog us down. Nevertheless, I wanted to see how my body responded to a shot of espresso today. After I lost D-Bo to the poison ivy fiasco, I still had about 30 mi to ride and 6 mi to run. I knew it could be dangerous flirting with my former addiction, but I decided, what the hell.

It actually felt pretty good. Not like anxious energy. However, when I tried to take a nap after my ride and run...which is normally pretty easy, I couldn't un-tense. I didn't sleep at all...which means I lost out on some dosage of critical recovery.

*A man who "cooks" is as cherished in our house as a woman who "cleans".

I "cooked" and Susie cleaned today for the first time in months! A delicious raw pizza sits in front of our new banana-ripening shelf. I love playing house with my womyn.

Summer is here. Life is good.