Double Fun

I was remiss in not reporting my impressions of the Eastern Sierra Double Century, a Planet Ultra product. It was like riding a hard century. Then an easy one, with lunch in between. All of this with generally beautiful scenery throughout, something that the Mammoth area pretty much guarantees. Describing any double century as "easy" would be a little weird, since my butt hurt for about 130 miles of it. Luckily, the pain didn't get any worse after about mile 90, although it worried me. I used Descente Strata shorts and lots of Assos chamois creme and still got some chafing. I think bibs would have been better, since the chafing was not really in the crotch so much as toward the outer edge of the chamois in the back. I've now invested in the bib version of these shorts to minimize chafing by limiting movement of the chamois relative to my body.

The link in the first line of this blog entry points to a complete description of the ride, so I'll assume the reader knows how to use this interweb thingie and I'll just give some impressions:

• $80 is a lot of money for a ride. On the other hand, a $40 century isn't considered unreasonable these days and it's not like there's any economy of scale. Planet Ultra is clearly a business, and that has its pluses and minuses.
• The rest stops (known as "checkpoints" in planet ultra lingo) were well stocked with provisions and workers. The food I needed to carry at the start was enough calories to get me to the first rest stop at around the 30 mile mark. Lunch at Mono Lake was sumptuous and well placed at the 110 mile mark. This ride featured "Bonkbreaker" energy bars - well cubes really they are very compact and tasty.
• Regarding shorts, since I am posting this way after the fact I can now report that I've found the right ones for me. As you probably know this varies from person to person, but for me it's the Pearl Izumi's with the Pro 3D pad in bib form from now on, or until PI changes the design (sigh!). Just FYI the most experienced riders tend to use use Assos.
• I hadn't ridden over 90 miles on a single day for the previous six months. My training averaged about fourteen hours per week, with a lot of interval work. I did make a point of doing two 90 mile rides with 10,000' of climbing at altitude in the month prior to the event though. My wife says Lon Haldemann told her that "If you can go hard, you can go long" so do yourself a favor and include some high-intensity work while training.

Sharing Routes Using That Internet Thingie

When I started in with my GPS I had a plan to record rides and upload them to Google Earth to share with others. For a variety of reasons, mainly that the damn thing would drop out under trees or just randomly, this didn't work all that great. The Garmin ETrex Vista is better for following routes than creating them. There are a number of websites which allow you to create routes and share them with your friends (or your enemies, up to you). Here's a quick review:

www.gmap-pedometer.com
This is a basic tool which allows you to double click on route points on Google Maps and it traces your progress. There are mileage markers, an elevation profile and map, satellite, hybrid (map overlaid on satellite view) and topographic views. You save the route and Google gives you a link to it. On the downside, if you aren't using Explorer on XP then kooky things can happen. Also, lockups are not unusual. This basic tool is what lies beneath every other one I've found except one.

www.toporoute.com
Very new, and will probably improve. This is a frontend for gmap-pedometer which adds a really cool feature, "Follow Road". While this is turned on you just click points along the route you are recording and the program fills in the interim points. On the basic pedometer, it's purely "connect the dots". Downside: this feature does occasional screwy things, you'll know when you see it. Ironically, the "topo" view isn't there!

www.mapmyride.com
This is probably the oldest frontend for the pedometer and has the most features (including "Follow Roads") and routes . You'll find thousands of rides in the database. Downside: very commercial, map is somewhat small because of all the extraneous stuff on the screen.

www.bikely.com
Fairly new and quite international, and necessary if you're going to be doing brevets in the San Diego area. Downside: not that many routes saved (as yet, that'll change) and you must get a free account to make any significant use of it.

www.runningmap.com
Obviously made for the runner, the only one not using Google. Last I looked it had not road following feature and was limited to 500 points, but if the gmap-pedometer site is locking up your computer this may be useful. A nice point, when you browse to a point on the elevation graph and click it lights up on the map. Every point has a distance from the start, so it's easy to calculate slopes between any two of them.

www.elsewhere.org/journal/gmaptogpx
This isn't a mapping site, but has a java widget that convert gmap data to gpx format. REALLY COOL! This means you can map out a route on the pedometer, converts (a little clunky, you cut and paste the text it makes) and upload to Google Earth. Makes you wonder why Google doesn't incorporate it.

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".