Thought Replacement

Cycling often functions for me as a microcosm of life.  It's a smaller, rather more controlled circle of limited boundaries in which to try things out.  Since much of the focus is on the physical aspect of power against the forces of wind and climbing, it's sometimes easy to forget that it is the mind which ultimately powers every endeavour.

I've been experimenting with saying one word from a mantra or validation phrase on every third stroke of the pedals and synchronizing this with the breathing.  That is, on the first right stroke, I will breathe out, focus on pushing the pedal hard, and saying in my mind the first word of the affirmation.  Then I will soft pedal the next left and right strokes, giving both legs a brief respite.  Finally, I'll breathe out, push hard, and say the second word of the affirmation on the next left.  And so on.

The natural tendency is to synchronize the breathing with one or the other leg, but this leaves things unbalanced.  Focusing on every third revolution balances the effort between legs and repeating whatever affirmation during moments of hard effort replaces any thoughts of the suffering with what I choose to put in my head.  It can be as simple as "keep going."

Risk

Today is two years to the day since Wouter Weylandt died racing his bike in the Giro.

We all take risks every day, in cycling and in life, and often it is the seemingly innocuous little things we don't see that can have tragic consequences.  In Wout's case it was some low stonework that he clipped on a descent, and instantly he would never see his wife and child, nor race a bike again.  And yet, the man died doing what he loved.

RIP.

Souplesse Workout

I did this simple workout the other night to emphasize the Souplesse of my pedaling action.  Yes, it's Springtime in Seattle, and it's generally more attractive during the dark months of Winter than now, but I had been puttering around the shop working on and cleaning bikes.  After taking the Bridgestone out for a few mile test spin, I came back to the shop and rode the rollers.

Rollers are excellent for increasing cadence and fluidity in the pedaling stroke because the primary resistance to keeping the wheels moving is the friction between tire and roller, and there is very little mass to store the energy of the pedaling.  This combination results in immediate feedback to the rider in the form of a smooth whirring sound if the stroke is smooth, or alternately a kind of whoompa-whoompa-whoompa if power is being applied only during the downstroke.  I always begin roller sessions with the awareness of the sound and concentrate on pedaling faster while keeping the whirring going.

Once I'm good and warmed up from this, I clip in only one foot at a time and do sets of rotations with only one leg at a time.  In addition to training the muscles in each leg to fire in the order necessary to rotate the cranks around the spindle, single leg reps will tend to provide information on relative leg strength in the different muscles.  Begin in a relatively easy gear and start by rotating the cranks until exhaustion, noting the number of cycles for each leg and the muscle group that tires first.

Next, go back to pedaling at high cadence while concentrating on keeping the whir going.  I find that this feels so easy with both legs compared with the difficulty encountered doing only one leg at a time.  This indicates that the training is working, and the key here is to focus on continuing to recruit the same muscles in the same order, while maintaining an quick and fluid pedaling motion.  I like to repeat alternating between the single leg muscle recruitment order training and the bi-pedal fluidity focused training until I can only pedal about 25% of the original reps till exhaustion per cycle.

If there are side to side discrepancies between cycles before exhaustion between legs, I might do 5-10 more reps on the weaker side during the alternations.  I also like to incorporate some yoga like poses or sequences to address the muscle groups that were the first to tire.

Happy circle making!

Discovery Park Hill Climb

This is a fun and short, but quite steep climb.  Having just descended this same route from the top of Discovery park, and turned around at the bottom while admiring the oft windswept shore to the west, we turn around and begin the climb to the flatter rolling area above the bluffs.

The climb starts out at a fairly reasonable gradient, but steepens just around the corner to the left.  The grade maxes out at 25.3%, according to the Strava segment for this climb, and it sure does feel steep for about half a km.  Indeed, it is a struggle to remain seated and spin up in even my lowest gears, and the proportion of the climb I can manage this is a generally good indicator of fitness.  But once it's been crested, there is some flat to be had before the road again stairsteps up and around to the descent down the other side of Magnolia.

This is only the beginning.

This climb frequently makes it into my coastal hill rides that are right around my area and more or less within Seattle city limits.

Bike Sharing Coming to Seattle

Puget Sound Bike Share has announced that Seattle will be joining other large cities in North America in and has selected Alta Bicycle Share as the implementation vendor.  Seattle joins a growing list of world cities embracing Bicycle Sharing systems.

Calculations

Sometimes, in the interest of HTFU, I enjoy setting myself an unreachable goal.  Yesterday’s ride was like that.  Leaving at 3 for a three plus hour ride, the true length of which would be determined by riding hard for an hour and a half on the way out with a predominant tailwind, and returning fatigued into a headwind while trying to beat the sunset at 6:00.  This is, quite simply, a formula for not getting back by sunset, for bonking into a headwind miles from home as the darkness slowly and inevitably descends, and for getting home solely on the anticipation of warmth and a hot cup of tea.

I had taken a hooky day and was feeling quite Buelleresque.  The miles rolled by as I headed north on the Burke-Gilman, not to any physical point on the trail, but to a point in time.  I love this trail on quiet weeknights, the cold February wind keeping the fair weather riders, joggers, and walkers away.  As the trail turned east and then south at the top end of Lake Washington, my tailwind turned to a sidewind to a headwind, and I got my first real taste of what would await on the return trip.  My legs turned to mush, but I still had 20 minutes remaining to meet with my date in time, which I stubbornly refused to miss, despite my legs telling me otherwise.

The wide open and windy stretch of the Sammamish River Trail where I turned around.  Beautifully deserted on a cold Winter day.

This is how it is early in the year, the legs unaccustomed to rides lasting more than a couple of hours being reacquainted with such efforts.  I checked the phone a couple times to see whether it was time to turn around yet.  Nope, 14 more minutes, then 4, then finally it is time.  This too frequent checking a sign of weakness of resolve, it must be quashed.  Turning around for the short downwind leg brings brief respite, a chance to get some food and fluids down in preparation.  A turn back to the south, and boom – headwind.  I knew it was coming, it was a part of the calculations, and these situations often feel to me to be both easier and harder than anticipated.  Harder as the legs are protesting against the increased mileage, and easier because there is nothing to do but keep going, keep changing position, stand up and push a big gear, sit in the saddle and spin a small one, change rhythm.

Most of the way back down into this headwind, I get a text from Velomihottie, who is done with a frustrating day at work and wants to take a ride, she will come and meet me on the trail.  In a short while, she is there at the side of the trail, and proposes I turn around to go back up to Magnuson Park with her.  No, thanks, I tell her, let’s just head home.  With her, we chat about the day we’ve each had, plans for the evening (Taco Tuesday), and just generally converse.  This takes my mind off the legs and makes the rest of the ride home a relative breeze.  In fact, the last couple of miles, I seem to recover a second wind, and we joke around by her grabbing onto my jersey and me pulling her along coasting.  We got home, and then it was time for Taco Tuesday (all you can eat for $6.00 – I had 8) and a couple of large beers which taste like the best beer ever due to the effort.

Sacre Bleu!

One of the best things about new people in our lives is how they often end up challenging us to go beyond ourselves, doing things that would never had occurred to us previously.  The Velomihottie and I have been together a couple of very enjoyable months now, and one of the things that initially attracted me to her was that she seems to enjoy cycling about as much as I do.  She is much more a cyclist of the Mountain Biking variety than I have ever been, but has been reasonably good, giving and game, to use a Dan Savage expression, to indulge me by joining with me on a couple of road bike rides.

So it was that I felt a similar need to giving Mountain Biking with her the old college try. I'd been poking around the interwebs, looking at various entry level and used mountain bikes.  Happily, the Velomihottie pointed me in the direction of the Bridgestone MB line, and a quick craigslist search turned up an old MB-4 for sale from Sprocketts Recycled Bicycles in Interbay.  A cursory test ride and $125 later, I was the proud owner of this fine retro steed.  Further poking around on the interwebs, courtesy of Sheldon Brown's fine work, revealed it to be circa 1992.

1992 Bridgestone MB-4

We decided that Sunday would be a fine day to pop my MTB cherry, and we soon found ourselves at Duthie Park up in the Issaquah Highlands for my initial ride.  The day was foggy and quite chilly, with ice on the sides of the trail, but the trails were mostly dry as a result.  My first initiation was on the Boot Camp trail, and I was mostly able to not make too much a fool of myself as I repeated my mantra of, "rubber side down."  The riding and companionship were both very enjoyable, and it seemed I learned new skills with each corner.  For instance, I was advised to look only where I wanted to go to avoid banging into things or falling off the trail, and I also found the rapid changes in gradient and incredibly tight banked switchbacks to be very challenging.  The uphill corners were initially very hard for me to keep the front wheel down on, but I soon learned that actually dialing back my effort enabled me to steer through the corners.

A foggy day in the woods.

We rode both the Boot Camp and Moving Up trails twice, and the second time on each revealed that I had more confidence than the first.  I love the steep part of the learning curve when one is first trying a new activity, and I seem to have a natural inclination to dive right in.  This led to the only violation of my mantra to keep it rubber side down, after I saw some kid wheelie past us and decided to attempt a wheelie of my own, landing flat on my ass.  The issue, it seemed, was not in getting the front wheel up, but in keeping it down.

Going just fast enough to be blurry.

After this, we had a final run on the Moving Up trail, and I started to notice that I was fatigued and losing the ability to focus on my new found lessons, making silly mistakes of some of the lessons that I had just learned.  Nonetheless, it was a very good workout that elevated the rate of the old ticker on multiple occasions.  Moreover, riding the trails and mostly keeping up on such a retro machine made me feel somewhat badass in an old school way.  I went to sleep last night with visions of mountain trail switchbacks still dancing in my head.  I will definitely be going Mountain Biking again.

Trail Map - Next time we'll hit something just a bit more advanced.