Lose Weight the Hard Way

I haven't been bloggin, 'tis true. It turns out that when my wife of 21 years went on a 26 day bike trip across the USA the everyday world got more problematic. The minor foulups at work didn't help either. She made it, EFI*. Three thousand three hundred and eighty miles. PAC Tour provided big breakfasts and lunches as well as snacks along the way. Her diet included having two desserts at lunch (usually big slices of pie) and consuming a chocolate shake prior to dinner. She lost five pounds. So now I get to ride a century (actually 200K) this coming weekend with a wife who's got the aerobic capacity of a quarterhorse. That will provide some amusement.

Her experience has taught me lessons about so-called "base" training.

1. It matters.
2. It can be done in fewer days if you ride more miles each day.

My training has been 180 degrees out of phase with hers. I've been riding about ten hours a week, but spending around an hour above lactate threshold and another two within about ten bpm of it. This has produced some really freaky results which have nothing to do with cycling. Doing three slammin' hard workouts with only enough riding between to recover makes a person into the worst sort of adrenaline-junky-slash-endorphin-head. If I went more than three days without putting the needle in the red it felt like my skin would just crawl off my body. I'd wake up at four AM and clean the kitchen. Weird. The tragic part was that my knees got tweaked early on and, although I could hang in well and chase breaks (or participate in them) by using relatively low gears, when the sprint started I just couldn't wind up quick enough without doing more damage. But I showed up anyway because there's no substitute (at least for me) for racing when it comes to getting fitter.

Returning to the topic of base training, my wife's power output curve seems to have shifted by ten bpm in the right direction. It requires a big effort to actually push her heart rate into the upper ranges, but if this phase is followed up with a good building phase that can be fixed and gains maintained I think. Books on the subject recommend up to twelve weeks of base training. She did four and got huge results. It's the miles.

*Since I'm trying not to use vulgarity in this blog, "E" is for "every" and "I" stands for "inch".