Ninigret NBX

Seeing as though I like to throw a little math into most of my posts, here's a new formula I learned on Saturday at Ninigret:

3-Day High-Intensity Block Training + One Recovery Day + Drinks and Salty Dinner Friday Night + 2 Slices of Buttered Toast Before a 2 PM Race = Getting Your Ass Dropped on Saturday Just 10 Minutes Into a Perfectly Flat Race

What a waste of time and money. Lesson Learned: Take each race seriously or stay home.

Wompatuck

Went down to the Wednesday night Wompatuck race with Rich. I was eager to test out my legs in a field that wasn’t an “A Field”. Wells Ave on Sunday had been my first race in a while (3+ weeks) after a good period of training. While I was happy that I could keep up with the A’s at 27+ mph and feel OK, I wanted to know how I’d do with a cat 4/5 field.

Rich and I got there late thanks to the route 95S parking lot, but hopped in late with 20 to go (it’s a 25 lap race). I could tell right from the start that it was going to be a good race, the pace seemed slow and easy. My heart data after the race would prove this, with my HR dropping as low as 155 at times. I can’t remember the last time my HR has been below even 175 in a race. So I moved up to the front after 4 or 5 laps of warming up and chased down a four-man break. A few laps later I was up front pulling when my only teammate in the race went shooting around. I should have blocked and stalled the pace but I’m an idiot and broke off to go with him. We stayed out for less than half a lap but it was fun.

It’s funny how no breaks seem to stick on this course, I wonder why that is. You’d think with the Bicycle Link team having 10+ guys in the field of 40 that they might be able to organize something and get away, but the peloton seems to chase down everything. The race was coming down to a group sprint and I was trying to figure out how the heck I was going to place. The course is relatively narrow so I figured positioning would be key. I figured if I could be about fifth wheel with one to go and stay out of the wind until 200m to go I’d be in good shape.

With two to go I was sitting mid field and the pace let way up going up and over the top of the one slight incline in the course. This seemed to happen every lap so it wasn’t really a surprise. There was a big hole on the inside and some guy in orange attacked it so I went on his wheel and we moved off the front. I didn’t really want to be second wheel but we both took it easy and some riders came around. By the time we came around for the last lap I was fifth wheel, perfect!

No surprise people just went nuts at the start of the last lap. There was one junior in the race spinning some ridiculous gear (that rule must suck) that went for a super early break here. A few people went to chase him down but I stayed on orange guy’s wheel and he got on the wheel of some larger bicycle link guy that was chasing. We caught the junior and as we passed the starting area I was third wheel, still behind orange guy and larger bicycle link guy. We were really nuking here doing 30-35mph. Larger bicycle guy seized up just after the starting area and as he pulled off to the left a five-man train went past us on the right, including my NEBC teammate. We made the left-hand turn up the slight incline to the finish and I pulled off to the left to go around orange guy. My move was just a little too late for a win, but I did manage to pick off a few that were in the five-man train and I ended up in fourth. My NEBC teammate won the race. Rich did a good job of not losing a wheel and rolled through around 11^th, great for a mt biker in his first road race.

This was an exciting race for me because it’s the first time in a while I’ve been with a field at the finish, let alone finishing near the front. All these road races that I’ve done over the past two months have had hills that have just been killing me. I’ve been working really hard to get better at hills, dropping my weight down to 170 and working on my LT power, but it was nice to do a race without any hills for a change. It seems like the race schedule is full of crits in the next month or so too. I’m looking forward to heading down to Ninigret on Saturday.

Weekend of Surprises

Erica and I went to the Monson Road Race Saturday morning, and the plan was to head out promptly after her race to head up to Lake Placid for the Whiteface Hill Climb. Unfortunately the race was a disaster as Erica got mixed up in a big crash. You can read more about that in at Two Adventures. We spent most of the day in a small hospital that was overwhelmed by all the girls that came in from the crash. After a bunch of x-rays Erica and all the other girls ended up being ok with mostly road rash.

I had tapered a bit for Whiteface and was anxious to try out my legs, so I rode down to Wells Ave Saturday morning in time for the Men’s C race. I stood at the registration desk for about 20 minutes while a Newton Police Officer tried to shut down the race (I don’t want to get into the details of this). Cheers to the race director who did an amazing job of not only handling the unreasonable cop, but managed to keep the women’s race running safely at the same time.

After that debacle I finally got to register, but I couldn’t race in the C group due to my recent cat4 upgrade. Fair enough though, I figured I could handle doing 20 miles instead of 12. After warming up for a while I got my next surprise, not enough people signed up and they were forced to combine the A&B fields. This meant doing 32 miles. Not really what I got out of bed for but I’m up for anything.

The first three laps were a little slow, and by a little slow I mean I wasn’t totally hanging on by a thread and my heart rate was only 170-175 (max hr = 196). I hadn’t raced in a crit in a while and was a little uncomfortable on some of the turns in the field of about 60. I was braking a little too much going into turns, not sucking wheel closely enough, and was cautious pedaling through turns (thinking back to Ninigret). It didn’t take too long to settle into a groove and with 30 to go I was working hard, but comfortable.

The pace seemed pretty darn fast to me, the average speed was 27 mph which is the fastest race I’ve been part of to date. After I got comfortable I was able to move up in the field a bit from the back where I started. The pothole on the back straight gave me a good bump somewhere in the middle of the race and sent my chain up and over my top chainring. Had to stop to fix it and jump on the back on the next lap. I slowly kept moving up in the field after jumping in again. As the race went on I felt better than I had in the beginning, I think the pace was tiring ever so slightly.

With about five to go another NEBC rider made a big move up the side. I had no interest in sprinting from mid-pack so I jumped on. I think this was too aggressive though and I couldn’t get tucked in out of the wind after moving to the front. I certainly couldn’t handle being out in the wind for more than a lap which caused me to totally blow up. I pulled off to the side and let the field go by, calling it a day.

In hindsight pulling out with three to go was the best move ever. There ended up being a decent-sized crash towards the middle-back of the field with parts flying everywhere. Someone’s fork must’ve broken because a wheel went rolling down the road. Messy.

My Garmin data for this race was pretty shocking. My average heart rate for the entire race was 184 including rolling out slowly, stopping for my dropped chain, and a few minutes at the end. My average while riding in the pack was 187. That’s 95% of my max heart rate 196. When I thought to myself that I felt good near the end of the race and tried to move up my HR was 182. My heart rate rarely gets above 185 when I train, and that’s usually only after a hard interval. I can’t believe how totally redlined this is, especially for a one-hour duration. I’d like to figure out if this is normal or not.

More Data Analysis

Still trying to figure out what the best way to use all this data is. It's fun to play with and all, but if I can't use it for some type of good what's the point in having it?

It seems like some sort of relationship between power output and heart rate would be a very good way of quantifying one's fitness. Often times time trials are used to benchmark fitness, but that seems kind of narrow in that it doesn't really capture all the aspects of a real road race.

I used data from three different rides that I've done, all within the past week, to make the graph shown above. The data used was filtered to remove points where the power was calculated to be negative, which usually indicates braking. This could throw off the accuracy of the graphs, but I'm not sure.

The data sets do seem to be surprisingly consistent given that each ride was very different. One ride is a group ride where CdA is difficult to estimate, one ride is a hilly tempo ride where there are more gravity forces than aero forces, and the other ride is an interval ride both over hills and flats. That being said, I'm actually shocked that the trend lines are this similar.

Should every ride I do give more or less the same trend line given an equal state of fitness? In the ideal time trial, I think a rider's power output and heart rate would be perfectly constant. Of course that's not the case as hills, wind, and other conditions make the rider's power and heart rate vary somewhat. It wouldn't vary nearly to the extent of a road race, but I'd think that it could produce the same trend line, just over a more narrow range of heart rates.

If this is true that a single trend line of power vs. fitness can be used to represent a single fitness level, it would be a great way to quantify one's fitness and the effectiveness of various workout plans on an individual. I'll be trying to figure this out in the future.

If anyone knows a thing or two about this I'd love to hear about it.

Leaning Out for Whiteface

…and I don’t mean me, I’m talking about my bike. This weekend is the Whiteface Hill Climb up in Lake Placid, NY. It will be my first pure hill climb race and raises about 3,500 vertical feet over 8 miles, at a pretty consistent 8.3% grade.

Being the nerd that I am, I’ve estimated that I will be about 17 seconds faster in the race for every pound that I can lose (off me or my bike) without affecting my power. It’s too late for effective dieting at this point, but I have been eating a little more carefully than usual the past few weeks and my weight may be down a few pounds. What I’ve yet to figure out is how exactly I’m going to minimize my equipment weight.

My Ultegra Orbea Lobular 50 weighs in very close to 18.5 lbs with no water bottles, or bike bag accessory stuff. Add on clothing and two water bottles and I’m probably adding another 5 lbs or so, totaling about 24 lbs of equipment weight. The goal is to make a list of things I can do within reason to minimize weight:

-Carry 1 water bottle (-1.75 lbs with bottle and cage)- if I could get fed water half way up this could be reduced by another 1.75 lbs for half the ride.

-Racing Wheels (-0.8 lbs)- this one is pretty straightforward.

-Minimize clothing (-0.5 lbs?)- no socks, sunglasses, will probably carry the 80g+ HR monitor though to help with pacing.

-Brake Caliper (-0.5 lbs)- taking off one of the brake calipers and the control cable, this is going pretty far for me

-Front Chainring/Derailer/STI Lever/Cable (-1.2 lbs)- this is going REALLY far, too far for me, especially if I’m going to be doing a ride the next morning. So tempting though as 1.2 lbs is over 20 seconds!

I think I’m content with the first three options, but it makes me wonder if I’m missing any other easy things. One other idea I just have to get out…

Here’s a theory, say you’d normally sweat 2 liters per hour without deodorant, and your antiperspirant deodorant reduces that by 75%. That’s 1.5 liters of sweat per hour that you’d retain, weighing 3 lbs! If you were to lose that 3 lbs to evaporation or just pouring onto the ground at a constant rate over the one hour climb, that’d be an average weight reduction of 1.5 lbs. By my 17 seconds per pound rule of thumb, that’d yield a time improvement of 25 seconds! Of course this assumes that your clothing wouldn’t absorb the moisture and that your power wouldn’t be negatively impacted by dehydration or making it more difficult to concentrate. And as an added benefit, your time relative to your competition may actually improve as they find it

That makes me wonder, does wearing an antiperspirant keep me better hydrated? If so, would it be beneficial to drown myself in it before a hot race? Isn’t there a theory out there that antiperspirants can be somehow harmful to a person? If it is, is my old spice going to end up on the banned substances list? Kind of a stinky subject (pun intended! baha)!

CBTT

I went up to Concord Wednesday after work to do the NEBC-sponsored Charlie Baker Time Trial (CBTT). I figured it since it was 13 miles from work and registration ended at 6, I’d leave work at 5 and I’d casually average 13 mph to make it in time for registration, ha. It never works out when I plan stuff like this. I didn’t actually get on my bike until 5:07, I was carrying a backpack weighing around 10 lbs, and got backed up in some nasty traffic. By the time I found the start and registered it was 6:20. Luckily the officials were laid back and didn’t seem to mind, friggin awesome!

The scene at the race was pretty intense with a lot of neat aero gear that I don’t typically see at roadie races. Speedsuits, trick custom paintjobs, spaceman helmets, all sorts of cool stuff. I don’t have any of that neat gear and I wasn’t even sporting my new aero wheels. Also, I hadn’t eaten anything since noon and I’m pretty sure my fuel was body fat by the time I finally made it to the start. My legs were also pretty toast from a high volume high intensity interval workout the day before.

All things considered, the plan was to set sort of a worst case scenario time, a mark that I should never be slower than unless I race half-assed or I’m out of shape. I gave pretty close to a 100% effort, easing up more than I should have only once or twice for a short period. The race was pretty boring and uneventful other than the aero-rocket guy staged behind me that yelled out a jet engine sound as he passed me like I wasn’t even moving. I finished around 27:30 which is around 21.2 mph. I was happy to be above 20 mph.

My ghetto power calculating worksheet suggests that my LT power in the race was 257 W at 176 bpm. I’m new to the whole LT power thing, but it’s my understanding that if I were to do the time trial when I was well rested, fed, and hydrated, that this heart rate value would be higher and hence my power as well. I’ll come back this this next time I do the race.

Math Dork Analysis

The Auburn Road Race gave me very disappointing yet not very surprising results that left me wondering where my fitness stands and what I can do to get up to par. Having more of a mathematical approach to training rather than an exercise science approach, I’ve dug deep into my Garmin data for some answers. Others with a Garmin Edge 305 or similar device might find this especially interesting.

I recently made a post describing a pretty ghetto approach to estimating my power output at the Sunapee race a few weeks back. To calculate my power output using my Garmin data I made some assumptions about resistance forces including aerodynamics, rolling, and gravity. Because I couldn’t figure out how to get that data into excel I printed out graphs and did takeoffs to calculate things like distance, time, and elevation gain. As if my approach to calculating power weren’t ghetto enough, this was really over the top.

Luckily, I got some good feedback and suggestions for getting my Garmin data into excel (thanks Andrew). I’ve since found a website at http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/convert that allows me to easily to convert the data into a format that I can analyze.

The GPS data gives me position, altitude, and time which is enough to calculate my power output using some of the information I learned in my physics and dynamics classes back in college. This way I don’t have to shell out $1,500 for one of the new PowerTap 2.4 hubs. The best part is that I can use the same methodology with my competitors’ data to determine not only where I am, but where I need to be. This data is easily available on motionbased.com.

Previously I discussed power profiling. There’s a good writeup about it here http://www.cyclingpeakssoftware.com/power411/profile.asp. If you look at the power profile chart it shows W/kg ratios for 5-second, 1-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute efforts. This is nice because it gives you a sense of comparison between each type of effort. If you have power data you can use this chart to determine where you stand in each category. The chart can be used to identify a person’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, a sprinter might find he has a high 5-second W/kg ratio relative to his 5-minute or 20-minute W/kg ratio while a strong time trailer might find the opposite.

I think that my method of analyzing Garmin data to determine W/kg ratios is reasonably accurate within 5% or so for 1-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute efforts because it uses an average of several data points (~20 for 1-minute averages). While I do calculate power for 5-second efforts, I don’t think it is nearly as accurate because my methodology uses an average of 3 data points at best. (The Garmin device records data points every 1 or 2 seconds when data points are changing quickly.)

I chose three of my more recent high intensity rides to analyze including a 40k practice TT effort, a road race, and a hill climb. I was also lucky enough to find data for the winner of the cat3 field at the Sunapee Road Race for comparison’s sake. I determined maximum efforts at a range of the key inputs that I am assuming with the aerodynamic drag factor (CdA) being the most significant. I then plotted the estimated W/kg ratios for each effort on the aforementioned chart on cyclingpeaks.

My results were surprisingly consistent. In each of my own rides I had several decent 5-minute and 20-minute efforts, but was severely lacking in 1-minute efforts where I was almost off the chart. While all of the winning rider efforts were obviously higher W/kg ratios than mine, they were also very consistent from 1-minute to 5-minute to 20-minute efforts.

So my 1-minute efforts suck relative to my longer efforts. This does seem to relate pretty well to the problems I’ve had in recent races. At Sunapee I was able to keep up easier than I would have expected on the long gradual hills and it was a shorter but steeper hill that sent me off the back. A similar short yet steep hill got me at Myles Standish. At Blue Hills I could keep up on the long gradual hill. At Auburn I was dropped not on a hill, but on an attack coming out of a turn.

After all this analysis my weakness is evident and I really need to train 1 minute intervals hard. TPM and other exercise scientists would laugh at me and say “duh, you could have figured that out just by discussing your results”, but I guess I just don’t think like that.

Also, I found it very interesting to use my Garmin data to produce power output. I look forward to figuring out what other cool type of data you can produce once you have power numbers. I’m sure there will be more to come.