Wind. Threat or menace?

Took the chance to get in a workout this afternoon during another opportunistic gap between rainstorms. It was good to get one last effort in before the week long eat and drink fest that lies before me visiting with family.

It was extremely windy out there. On a long steep descent where I can usually hit 47-48mph just coasting if I manage to stay off the brakes, today the gusts were stripping my momentum and I was pedaling hard just to keep it around 35mph.

That power plugin for SportTracks is disappointing. It is all over the place and usually is wrong.

This may be the last of the graphs from it.

Giving the knees a break

Last week was all swimming. Hence no graphs or maps. Snuck in a bike ride last night between rain showers. Timing could not have been better. Roads had cleared of standing water but were damp. It bucketed down about 15 minutes after I got home.

Here's the somewhat dubious power graph using the power plugin for SportTracks. Calculated values are way more volatile than the actual effort was.

Forecast is for 4' of water in the shallow end, 5' in the deep end.

Today was probably the first day this season where a workout had to be changed due to weather. Biking was out. Swimming was substituted. The pool feels like a giant hot bath given how chilly I've been keeping the house. A cold rainy Sunday in mid December doesn't bring the families with kids to the pool. Good times for lap swimmers.

This may happen a lot more this week. The trails may finally get enough water that even when it isn't actively raining at a given moment, they'll be nothing but muck for days.

Runners toe.

This is the end result of damage incurred during the 18-20 mile range portion of the 6 month buildup to the last SF Marathon. Ran the race with it loose and it took about 5 months for it to decide to fall off. Blech.



Shoe problems that only show up in long (>6 miles) training runs are a drag.

Idle net surfing on an off day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNwmpLPhoHw

Should be able to guesstimate how much this guy (including his gear) weighs with the formula posted earlier. That plus the grade of the hill.

Would love to see the readings from his HR monitor to go with the footage.

Time to invest in some cold weather gear.

So sad for me. I had to wear a jacket on today's ride and could have done with some gloves. All in all though it was another good ride and a great way to burn off the last traces of a hangover.



Having finally upgraded my main SportTracks instance to version 2, I submit to you a new style graph of the ride.

Back on the schedule

Felt good to get out. Got home from work, ate dinner and chilled for a bit and then went at like 8:30. More like a mid-July kind of time to run, but LED headlamps enable a whole new way of life. Better living through technology indeed.

Why is it so hard to remember that working out is good?

Took a break from a few regularly scheduled workout days to spend time with family and eat some turkey and drink perhaps a bit too much.

A mere 7 days from the last run and it takes all of my self discipline to get into my gear and get to the start of the trail. Inevitably, once the run is done I feel 10 times better than when I started. Repeat as necessary. But why is it so necessary? Another of the eternal mysteries.

Residual laziness does prevent me from uploading any kind of image with this post though.

Low intensity just doesn't have that certain something.

It's been difficult lately to resist the temptation to just stay home play GTA instead of going for a run. The dog requires me to get out of the house regardless and that is usually the catalyst for overcoming even the most extreme laziness.



Tonight that was good for 40 minutes of zone 3 jogging and even led to a 5+ hour hike last Saturday. Had never been to Lake Chabot before so that was worthwhile.

Is our triathlete learning?

A friend bought me a copy of Joe Friel's The Triathlete's Training Bible.

Funny how I finally found time to start reading it when the TV was not available. Have read about 70 pages so far. Pretty interesting. Notable items:

1) the split in % of fat/carb burning at different intensities. Looks very useful for planning a long workout where you will exhaust your carbs at some point.

2) the 80/20 rule for gain from working out shows that you get the most bang for your buck working out 3-5 times a week. I like to see that since going over 5 times a week would be difficult for me to schedule.

3) your body produces HGH when you a) work it hard and b) sleep. There have been other benefits to splitting long workouts into 2 per day that I've heard of but that is a new one.

4) One of the keys to being able to use the book for successful training is being able to feel your effort level and grade it on a scale of 20 values. This worries me that I may not be able to make training plans based on this because I think it is tough already telling which of the 5 more traditional HR zones I might be in. 5-8 levels of feel is about the most I think I can distinguish. Maybe there are only a few critical thresholds and being able to tell them apart will do.

More than 48 hours. 96 at least.

Relatively long bike ride today. 2.5 hrs moving time over 34 miles. 5 large climbs (4000 ft climb total). Managed to keep it close to aerobic limit except for the first climb which is 2 miles of >10% grade. (According to the Forerunner I hit 48mph today descending this just tucked in and freewheeling.)



All of which makes a beer taste mighty good.

No TV for 48 hours. The horror.

The DVR has suffered a major malfunction. Couldn't watch the hockey game after work. New unit being shipped. 2 day estimated delivery time.

Might wind up getting in a bonus swim session tomorrow night because of it. Then again it being Friday I may go to happy hour instead.

Had a good aerobic run tonight though. Strangely warm (about 70) for November 12 at 8PM, long after the sun has gone down. Barely even needed the LED headlamp.

First spill of the headlamp running season

The dog was wading into a puddle for a drink and I was paying too much attention to calling him out of it and not enough attention to my footing. At least this time I realized it was inevitable early enough and rolled and was able to jump back up and keep running.

There were a couple of nutty people starting a bonfire in the middle of the trail about a mile into the park. Not recommended. Nights with a full moon bring out more than just the folks who are willing to run or mountain bike after dark.

Here's the loop. Have probably done this 150 times by now.

More like it.

This afternoon however it was sunny and warm enough to be t-shirt ride weather.



Nice pace overall. Mostly aerobic. Good length at 90 minutes. Not bad considering that a 2am emergency call from work kind of spoiled my beauty rest.



There was one section of road that had been chewed up with an industrial grinder as part of prep work for resurfacing. It was so bumpy that my tail light shook loose. The rubber sleeve compression thingy got lost. Nuts. Now I have to find another one.

Moving speed average of 15.4 might be a best for our relatively hilly rides.

Pity the poor californian

Last night, riding the roadbike at about 7 pm, several hours after dark here in post DST November, it was too cold to ride in a t-shirt. Even when I was warmed up. At least on the easy fast bits. It has to be 55 or lower to wear a jacket when I'm running. Looks like 60-65 is about it for biking. Hopefully my running jacket can do double duty.

Quiet week on the fitness blog

Politics trumped it all. Although I did sneak out in the middle of the election returns for a quick run. Still keeping the distance short these days to take it easy on the knees. So the DVR buffer hadn't even filled up before I was back home watching the late returns come in.

The rain kept me off the roadbike this weekend but if it stays dry the rest of the week I should be back to 3 sporting again.

DST ending, headlamp running season beginning

Second run of the week in the pitch black tonight. Another 5 months of that in store.

The trails were so dry before today that even on and off rain for about 8 hours didn't make them muddy. As soon as it stopped raining they were runnable.

My sinuses finally seem to be back to normal. Should be back in the pool next week.

Roadracing and heartrate

Early last year I wore my Forerunner 305 and heartrate sensor out on track for a session around Buttonwillow Raceway. You'd think being on a bike with 160+ horsepower would mean it does the work while you just sit there, but folks what have actually done it will tell you different.

Here's my HR chart.



A friend is a serious triathlete and wore the monitor for a session and he was averaging about 30bpm less, but he can run 7:30 miles at 130bpm... so that isn't much of a surprise. He was trying hard, for him.

Another friend had us all worried when we tried it on him, because he was 190+ bpm. We were convinced he was holding his breath for about 2 miles of the 3 each lap. Remembering to breathe can be hard.

Here's the layout plotted by the GPS track.



All in all it is sort of a combo of cardio and weightlifting.

Offroad motorcycling as crosstraining

Here's day one of a 3 day ride. Average heartrate = 130. Max was about 165. At 10,000 feet, 165 bpm feels like 180 at my usual altitude. This graph covers about 4hrs 30 min. Just because a motorcycle has an engine and a seat, doesn't mean it can't be a workout to ride it.

The toughest part is long steep descents where you can wind up doing what feels like trying to bench press your max and then hold it for a minute.

Even better than ice. 80mph massage therapy

A buddy and I went to the mountains around Bishop and Mammoth CA this past weekend for some offroad motorcycle riding. After 3 days of that my runner's knee had almost vanished. You stand on the bike a lot, using your legs as a secondary suspension, and the effect is like doing a lot of lunges and squats. I'll post some more later about motorcycles riding as working out.

Conventional wisdom is actually right sometimes. Who knew?

Icing the knees post run seems to be helping. The commuter mug trick works well and keeps the ice frozen in the car while I run. The drive back from the trails is about 10-15 min and that is enough to make a difference. The patellar straps hold the ice bags in place. Convenient.

Flatted

Done in by a staple. Bah. Hadn't had a flat in a LONG time. Didn't think I needed to be in a rush to get a flat kit on the bike. Good thing I was riding with someone else. His flat kit: a spare tube, a patch kit (containing no patches, just the directions), and no means of inflation whatsoever. We got it sorted out eventually. There was even a bike shop on our route so within 20 minutes we were resupplied.

Here's the route. Nice ride on a day that threatened to be hot or cold a few times but never did. Please excuse the extra bit of activity tacked on to the end where the Forerunner got turned on for a few seconds.

Personal trainer

All credit where it is due. Here's a vid of my personal trainer pacing me on a trail run. If it weren't for him I wouldn't have run marathons, or be planning an olympic tri.

Runners knee cure. Take three.

Packed a baggie of ice in a commuter mug tonight and stashed it in the truck at the trailhead. Got back from the run and was able to try icing up my knee right away. Use the knee strap to hold the back on. Seemed to work. Should have an idea in a week or two if this will help or if I'll just have to stop running until this heals up. Taking 3 weeks off helped but now after two weeks of low-intensity runs symptoms are back. So 3 weeks wasn't enough to heal it for good.

1 workout = 2 apples?

While taking off a few days from workouts this week due to some sinus foo I was trying to remember the last time I'd been sick. Near as I can recall it was March 2006. 3 workouts a week seems to have done a lot to keep me healthy. Since the prescription is supposed to be "an apple a day", that must mean that a workout is as powerful a preventative as 2 apples, since it lasts for 2 days.

Flonase is the best.

Heel striking; threat or menace?

Almost didn't run tonight. The sinus symptoms that started earlier this week turned into more general head cold type symptoms overnight.

Decided to go for a 100% aerobic run and to try and have better form. This is always hard for me to change since it seems to affect the balance of all your body parts at once. Tonight I just ran sort of slow, worked on gently hopping from one eggshell to another and kept an eye on my heartrate. Other than that I just tried to move forward as fast as those constraints allowed. At first I couldn't even coordinate well enough to push hard enough to get my HR up to the max I would allow.

The course is an out and back. Mostly downhill out, and uphill back. The hills are steep enough that if I run this loop for best time I'll average 170bpm and be over 180 on the steep parts, and the back will be a minute slower than the out.

Tonight out was two minutes slower than back, which itself was pretty respectable for considering how light the effort was. Nowhere near PR, but the adjustment to the stride was starting to feel automatic.

Aerobic workout on Grand Theft Auto IV

If this works a heart rate trace will accompany this post.

Maybe zone one doesn't count as aerobic work. Still funny though. This is from the Snow Storm mission.

First run since the 20k

The knees got three weeks to recover after a hard 20k trail run. Tonight was the first time testing them. Back on the trails we went and just to keep it loose I decided to keep the heartrate under the aerobic limit. Tried to keep it under 160 mostly but let it go a bit over that on a few steep spots. This worked OK but I had to keep telling myself not to look at pace. Allowing myself an extra 10-15bpm shortens each mile by about 90 seconds. May try this for a while, there's nothing to prove trying to set PRs every time out on my favorite loops.

PS. Did you know that high pressure bicycle tires lose PSI fast even without leaks? Fast = 15 PSI overnight. I did not know that. But hey, going for that 3 hour ride a few weeks ago with 50 PSI in the tires just made the workout better, right?

Heh

This is kind of amusing, this blog is: http://www.howtoavoidthebummerlife.com/weblog/

My goal is to be faster than the guy with the front wheel that looks like it was stolen from a lawn mower, and the rear wheel that is just a wheel, with no tube or tire.

In order of diminishing redeeming social value (hint -- not safe for work) you may also not be able to turn away from:

http://trifathlete.blogspot.com

and

http://sorryimissedyourparty.com

Slow progress

When I first started running with some discipline a few years ago 12 min/mile was typical for the hilly trails where I do most of my running.

Each year since that has dropped by about a minute/mile.

In the last year it has sort of leveled off at 9 min/mile on easier trails, 10 on tougher ones. It also depends on whether or not I pay attention to going faster on the downhill bits.

Pace has always been the upper end of aerobic, by felt effort. That's usually 160-170 by HR monitor, which convention says is a bit high.

Cross training in biking and swimming I am hoping will give me more aerobic base (swimming) and strengthen my quads (biking) so that I'll be striding faster and longer with the same or less effort. There are way too many people out there who can run 7 min/miles at like 130 bpm. Something has to be possible to make me more efficient.

Heat

Have I mentioned that I slow down about 1 min/mile for each 10 degrees the temp goes up from 60 degrees F?

That's about it.

Maybe not a whole minute, but pretty close.

60-70 degrees is not such a big change.
80 makes a difference.
90+ is a whole different situation.

Fitting in 3 cool (60s) weather workouts a week in the Bay Area is not a problem. Upping that to 5 or 6 will eventually run into trouble when there is a hot spell.

Interesting stuff

Plugged some examples from recent rides into this formula.

First up was a flat stretch of ground where we had a two way average of 19mph. It was a long enough stretch and not much time passed between the runs so it is assumed this cancels out the wind.

Using a test case with flat ground (slope = 0) revealed something interesting to me about the equation. You can break it in two parts. The first part is all about energy to push through the wind. The second part looks like it all about fighting gravity, but in the case where there is no elevation change it still has a contribution, and that is loss through the tires. That friction loss is a bigger part of the overall picture than I would have guessed, given the small (.005) estimate for coefficient of rolling resistance.

In our first example speed was 19mph which is 8.5 meters/sec. That gives 183 Watts steady output. About 145 aero, 38 rolling.

For the second example, there's a big hill near my house with a tough portion of about a mile of 11% grade. In a recent ride I averaged 5.6 mph through it. This version of the calculation shows only 4 Watts aero, but 256 for climbing.

Taking the whole climb including a few easier spots the averages were 7.2 mph at 8.1%. Overall power = 254. More than I thought!

I guess that means if I really got down to it I could push faster on the flats if I were motivated. Let's see how fast that should be, starting with the power and solving for speed. Answer: 21.7 mph

If that holds up in reality I'll be satisfied with that for sure.

Useful references for this formula:

mph to m/s is approximated by multiplying mph by .4469
grade is simple rise/run (elevation/distance)
If you want to convert grade to degrees (not required for this formula) take the arctan of the grade %. One spot on the climb mentioned here is 17.4% grade, but that only works out to 9.8 degrees, which sure doesn't sound as hard as it really is.

Someone make a sporttracks plugin that uses this

http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~et181/hpv/hpv.html is the source for this.

It has been retyped here in plain text

P = p/2(V+Vw)^2 V CdA + (Cr + slope) m g V

m = rider + gear + bike (kg)
V m/s bike velocity
Vw m/s wind (positive if headwind)
P Watts
p 1.18 kg/m^3
CdA m^2 frontal area (A) times coefficient of drag (Cd)
Cr coefficient of rolling resistance = .005 ballpark
slope = elevation/distance
g = 9.81 m/s^2


I weigh about 175 lbs and my bike is 19 or so. Round up for water bottles and call it an even 200 lbs.

200 lb = 90.9kg
CdA = .4 ballpark estimate from the site with the formula -- probably bigger for me

Will have to pull some velocity and slope datapoints from recent rides to see if they check out the same. Climbs should work well because you know you are giving a certain effort there that should be pretty consistent from one ride to the next.

Running changes you. Part two.

Aside from the heart rate there was also the freakish thing with the feet.

When I stopped growing back around high school/college, my feet were size 10 1/2.

This spring when I was buying some shoes to break in during training for the marathon, I was trying sizes I thought would leave generous toe room for hot, swollen feet. I thought something funny was going on with the shoes and put my foot in one of those measuring thingers (apparently these are called Brannock Devices. Now you know too.) and it said 11 1/2.

So, two years of running with some discipline and my feet have been pounded like scallopini and are now an inch longer. Who knew?

3 sports. 2 times. One week.

How did we get here?

4 years ago, I got a new fitness trainer. I thought I was adopting a dog, but now I know what I really got. One day about a year after I got him, he scented a horse and ran off ahead of me on some trails to investigate. I had to run for about a mile to catch up to him and the horse and make sure everything was copacetic. That run was way more difficult than it should have been.

The dog and I went to the trails many more times. He set the pace and hikes turned into walk/runs and then runs. 3 miles turned into 5, then 7, then 9, etc. Trail running 3 times a week turned into training for the San Francisco marathon. After doing that event in 2007 and 2008 it was time to mix something else in besides running.

The current goal is to do the Laguna Phuket olympic triathlon in 2009.

Old workout plan: Run Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday
New workout plan: Long bike ride Sunday, Run Tuesday, Swim Wednesday, Run Thursday, Swim and bike ride Saturday

Speaking of heart rate

For as long as I can remember ( I think in high school we checked our resting HR in a Phys Ed class and it stuck in my mind ) my resting HR was 72. Textbook normal.

After the last couple of years of running with some discipline that had dropped to 60.

Last night a few tests were required to see if the firmware update on the Forerunner had taken, so I collected some HR data while sitting around. Resting was as low as 52. Pretty amazing.

Maybe if I keep this up there is more efficiency to come.

What is that "Fast heart, slow feet" bit supposed to mean?

Sustained running pace (minutes/mile)

Heart rate (bpm)

10	160
9	170
8:30	180
8	188
7:30	193-197 (max)

This can be summarized as: I am not an efficient runner. I'm probably not much better on a bike. And as a swimmer I'm so slow it's no surprise my heart rate there is low.

There's plenty of room for improvement in all 3 sports.