Beyond the Lactic Threshold

I've started to use a heart rate monitor whilst riding. At first I just monitored, reading the results and looking at the data when I got home, just out of interest like. My Garmin device allows you to display heart rate as you ride along and so I decided to switch this facility on. I'm not saying it's a mistake to do this but it certainly was a shock. Let me explain.

I've been reading about lactic threshold lately and naturally as a cyclist and a scientist, this particular aspect of riding intrigues me greatly. My lactic threshold remains unknown and may do so till such a time when I really need to know. I can however arbitrarily determine that it must be somewhere between 165bpm and 175bpm and the reason I know this is because on Sunday last, after suffering two punctures in a row, my fellow club mates paced me back to the group and with some speed. A distance of some 16 miles was covered in way less than an hour and if I said that included the long climb up Old Winchester Hill, which is 3.5Km long with an average gradient of 4%, then you can appreciate that we were motoring; the speedo did indicate, when I had time enough to look at it, 28mph on the flat. After this effort I was a wee bit knackered and looking at the heart rate for that section of the ride I was in Zone 3 for all of that time. I had, I concluded, been riding above the lactic threshold for too long. The rest of the ride was uncomfortable to say the least. 31mph gusting headwinds did not help and I kind of limped home. What's that about pacing yourself I hear you shout?

So how has monitoring my heart rate helped me. Well, my intention was to ride in mostly zone 2 (65-75% max HR) which for me is between 130 and 152bpm. This is the rate at which I do an hour on the turbo trainer in order to build endurance; it is generally considered and I would concur that this heart rate should be maintainable

for long periods of time. Problem was that My HR was in Zone 3 for 53% of the ride on Sunday and this isn't, wasn't, sustainable. In Surrey and Hampshire, most rides involve a fair bit of undulation if not outright sustained upward effort and so Zones 3 & 4 are often encroached for short periods of time and I consider this to be a natural sort of interval training. The big question for myself is how can I be a bit more efficient with HR; perhaps the answer comes from maintaining cadence. Of course the weather on Sunday was awful, the headwind was brutal and I couldn't feel my hands or legs at all by the 80Km mark, so there are a few factors to consider as to the poor performance in the last quarter of the ride but I do wholly believe I pushed too hard for too long.

http://bikeroutetoaster.com/Course.aspx?course=516513

bad days in the saddle aside however my obsession with improving hill climbing continues.

So, like all good scientists I need a hypothesis to work to in order to drive an improvement. I think the major improvement will come on hill climbing. Hypothesis: maintaining cadence, not over or under pedalling will improve 1) endurance and 2) Hill climbing ability. I will be taking Heart rate into consideration but only in a monitoring fashion. For Hill climbing I would expect to be at 85% of max HR and even above.

This article that I found on the Internet seems to point to the direction I should be taking: http://tunedintocycling.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/hill-climbing-101-pedaling-and-shifting/ . Actually after breezing through the 101, I recommend going to the 102, where technique is discussed in a more detailed and useful way.

As the clocks move froward into British summer time; I know it doesn't feel like summer, but for those of us with day Jobs the extended evenings mean more opportunities to get out and ride. I for one will be overjoyed to see the return of the after-work evening ride.

Strava, Garmin and Cyclemeter

The abundance of sophisticated electronic devices and iphone applications that one can monitor performance in a manner of different ways. Like a lot of people, I've got  little hooked by Strava and although I would rarely expect to be competing for "King of the Mountain" honours, I like the way that you can monitor and compare timings on your sections of a ride against historic values or additionally see how you compare against the times posted by your friends. It becomes very competitive. One downside to Strava is not being able to put the times in context. For instance, a typical ride will be mapped out in a number of sections, but depending on the length of ride you may be quicker or slower over those sections, especially those sections towards the end of a ride. I could just rock up to a section and blast the hell out of it until my Strava rank was good, as I am sure many people do. This behaviour kind of defeats the point of the social aspect of the application for me but none the less its a good app (unless satellite reception in your area is poor). I don't use the iphone as a bike computer as I find the reception is poor in our area and its a bit ungainly sitting on the bars.

My Garmin is still proving to be very reliable, the sat nav capability being invaluable. Garmin have a dedicated website where you can upload your ride information. I find this to very useful too, again for comparative reasons and to see where I'm loosing or making time. The Garmin connects to Strava too. And here lies the problem. So many things now telling me a wealth of information about heart rate, pace, speed, distance, course, speed up and down hills, averages galore and more besides. I haven't even had a chance to look at cyclemeter and what else could it do for me anyway? My Sunday evenings are now consumed by plugging in various devices to a laptop and analysing rafts of data. Having written this,I am now self coaching myself - pick one data set that has meaning and stick with it. I am going for Strava, no Garmin, no wait a minute - damn it!

Hopefully last weekend saw the last of the truly cold weather in the South of England. I have been hoping for a Sunday morning which is warmer than 1°C for some while now and I feel that better weather is on its way. Despite my hoping however, last Sunday saw the temperature plummet again to 0°C with a biting 20mph North-Easterly wind. To distill this down to more than a very typically British rant about the weather, I had a headwind all the way back from the tea stop in the otherwise delightful village of Compton. The café stop was good, one of my favourites actually. http://www.southdowns-tearoom.co.uk .

The ride back from there was tough!

http://bikeroutetoaster.com/Course.aspx?course=504183

I've only myself to blame as I decide to ut such a hilly ride in the club diary. Up to Buriton twice and on to the A272 via Elsted and in the shadow of Harting Down. Fro there we had 2 more big climbs to go. Woolbedding hill. Steady gradient, but long and then finally over the intimidating Blackdown.

By the final climb over Blackdown, the highest point in Sussex, my legs were in agony. This ride, with 1352M of climbing and and just shy of 100km was a good indication of my form. I rode this route last May and was 10 minutes quicker. No head wind or freezing conditions that time. None the less, I was generally happy with the outcome yesterday. I'm doing some very considered riding this year in a bid to be "Pyrenees ready" by August and the indications are that I'm ahead of where I was last week. A bit of extreme hill work this early won't do any harm to this year's ambition and I feel miles ahead of where I was 1 month ago.

The true comparison of my fitness versus the same time last year will be fully understood after I complete the Southern Spring Classic sportive on March 24th. Last year I crawled over the line for a bronze at a shade under 15mph average. This year I am aiming to sit comfortably in the silver medal positions and improve my Strava rankings along the way.