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Friday 21 December 2012

The Tyranny of Testing


If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it’
Lord Kelvin – Inventor of temperature (or something like that)

When Henry Ford started time in motion studies back in the 1920s, the purpose was to investigate how people worked on the production line in order to make it more efficient. They ran into problems however, because as soon as people were observed working, they worked differently. Some worked faster, some worked more carefully, some worked slower. Regardless, the results of their investigations were skewed because the very act of observing peoples behaviour changed the behaviour that was being observed. This was termed the Hawthorne effect.
My training works in blocks of three or four weeks. I have a medium week, a couple of hard weeks and the block always finishes with an easy week. Perversely I dread the easy weeks, because at the end of the easy week is a fitness test. Fitness tests are hard. Very hard. They are a simple enough premise; a 30 minute warm up followed by 20 minutes of eyes bulging, vein popping, sweat coursing all out effort. The last 15 minutes hurt, the last five minutes seem to take an hour and the last minute takes an age.  When you climb down off the hamster wheel and out of your pain cave, you are barely able to stand, you are gulping air and soaked with sweat. I spend the week before the test with a heavy heart dreading the tunnel of pain that awaits.
The fitness test is designed to figure out how hard you can go for an hour. That’s a bit of a magic number in cycling (and indeed all endurance sports). Its called your FTP (Functional Threshold Power) and although not perfect it’s a pretty good indicator of ability. Broadly speaking the higher your FTP (in relation to your mass) the better a cyclist you are. So if you can improve your FTP you improve your cycling. Therefore, measure your FTP, work to improve your FTP,  improve your FTP, improve as a cyclist.
When you exercise you body produces lactic acid. The more you exercise the more lactic acid you produce. The harder you exercise the more rapidly you produce lactic acid. Lactic acid is bad. It gums up your muscles and stops them from working efficiently. However, your body can metabolise (get rid of) a lactic acid at a certain rate, provided your body metabolises the lactate it can still work. The amount of effort (ie power) at which the body can metabolise lactate at the same rate as it is being produced, is your lactate threshold, or your FTP. If you work at powers above your FTP you will build up lactate and eventually you will fall over, work at powers below your FTP and you can go on forever (in theory at least). The maximum power you can output for an hour is your FTP. However, going for an hour at maximum is super hard! So you can go for 20mins do a wee sum and get a very good approximation of your FTP.
But the thing with a fitness test, is that it is really, really tough to replicate your best performance. That is usually done outside, on a hill, in competition when you aren’t watching your computer which tells you exactly how hard you are working and lets you know just how much pain you should be in! Part of the problem is of course the vomitron and the lack of external stimulus which I have mentioned earlier. The other part of the problem is that the natural reaction of the body when things start to hurt, is to try and stop them hurting, why put yourself through pain, after all? In competition there is a prize, succeed in an FTP test all you are doing is making your next block of training harder! All the motivation you have is an abstract prize a few months down the line and even then there are no guarantees.
So Kelvin was right, without measurement there is no improvement. But when measurement hurts then there is no guarantee that your measurement is correct and when so much of the results are down to how the subject is feeling it becomes difficult.
My point? Im not sure. I guess I’m just trying to say that I don’t like the FTP test!

From Glasgow,
n

Monday 17 December 2012

Blood on the Track(s)



Now, Bob Dylan; I reckon he might be the kind of guy who would ride a bike (Elvis is Alive... And Cycling.). But he doesn’t ride with me on the hamster wheel. No, cerebral lyrics and a nasal folky twang is not what is needed when your eyes are popping out and you’re chewing your handlebars. I need something a little bit more up beat for that.
Glasgow has recently opened up a velodrome and it is an absolutely superb facility. A sinuous curve of beautiful Siberian pine, like an ocean swell frozen in perpetuity. If you have never ridden a ‘drome then I would heartily recommend it. Particularly at this time of year. Whilst there are Buckets of Rain outside the 'drome offers you the chance to take Shelter from the Storm in the air-conditioned comfort of a world-class facility. The ‘drome is a 250m wooden track with vertiginously banked corners. Not unlike the Wall of Death that you would see at fair grounds. The corners are banked at 46 deg and are about 3 stories high. You would not believe just quite how steep they are. If you didn’t know otherwise, you would insist that it would not be possible to ride round the outside of the track. It is certainly not possible to walk up the track. On the occasions when the track needs to be repaired, the ‘ground keeper’ has to tie a rope onto a rail running round the top and abseil down.
Track bikes are also different from road bikes, in two important ways. Firstly the bikes have no freewheel, which means that if you pedal backwards, you go backwards, if you slow down your cadence your speed slows down, if you stop pedalling… you fall off.
Secondly there are no brakes. Let me just run that by you one more time just in case you didn’t get it the first time. There are no breaks. So how do you slow down I hear you bellow in over wrought tones? Well, you stop pedalling, in which case you fall off… or you can slow down your cadence and slow down in a more controlled fashion, but you don’t slow down fast. When I say ‘controlled’ you slow down in much the same way was a glacier slows down. Unless you have thighs like a track cyclist, but none of us in the Glasgow Wednesday night Track Meet C League are anything like track cyclists and neither are our thighs.
Cycling on a track is different than cycling on a road in one important way. Remember those 3 story high 46 deg steep banks? Well you don’t get them on the road. They are pretty scary, and best way to make sure you don’t fall off is to make sure you are going fast. Speed is your friend. The centripetal force welds you to the side of the track, much in the same way as if you were to birl a bucket of water round your head.
The problem with the track is that there is no rest. You are either battering round the track accelerating as fast as you can, or working against your hard won momentum and trying to slow down.  Your thighs burn constantly as you accelerate and decelerate, your lungs burn constantly as you try and hold the wheel of the guy in front, your eyes burn as the wind rushes past you. Everything hurts. But it’s fast, it’s furious and it’s fantastic.
It’s also bloody dangerous. I guess accidents are always going to happen. It's not just you on the track but about 30 other guys all straining every sinew to try and force their bike over the line first. 30 guys, none of whom have had more than a couple of months experience riding on a track, 30 guys on bikes with no brakes, with nothing to protect them but a stupid wee hat and 1mm of lycra. It's no wonder accidents happen, they’re bloody inevitable. A Simple Twist of Fate and you’re eating teeth and picking shards of Siberian pine out of your arse.
I saw it coming. I saw it coming a mile off. I saw the eejit in the blue looking backwards, slowing down and weaving over the track as a herd of 30 guys with no breaks piled headlong into a corner. All of them subconsciously speeding up so they don’t slide off the bank that was rapidly hoving into view. I remember thinking ‘What an eejit, if I were getting chased by a heard of elephants on bikes with no brakes, the last thing on my mind would be looking round to admire the view’. I saw the snot green jersey of the Velo Club Glasgow rider swerve to avoid the blue eejit but in doing so their wheels touched. I saw the eejit in the blue hit the deck and slide out down the track in front of the luminous Day-Glo green of the Johnston Wheeler who was in front of me. I saw the VC Glasgow rider career into the back wheel of the eejit and heroically try and summersault over the prone eejit whilst still attached to his bike. I saw him try and I saw him miserably fail. Not deterred by the gymnastic ineptitude of the VC Glasgow rider, the Johnston Wheeler not only tried to emulate him, but better him, except he came off his bike early on in the manoeuvre, his bike catapulting into the peloton ahead and rapping one of my fellow Gales across the knuckles. I remember hitting the VC Glasgow rider just after he failed to land his double salko, bumping up over his wheel and across his ankle, before my bike thought it was missing out on the action and decided to get airborne. I remember looking up and where I thought I would see sky I saw my shoes attached to my bike a sure sign that the universe is somewhat misaligned. Then I landed on my VC Glasgow compadre, my bike coming down on top of me a split second later. I didn’t see anything after that. Chiefly as I had curled up into a ball and closed my eyes in the infantile belief that if I couldn’t see the danger then the danger didn’t exist. I was wrong.  I think a bike ran over my hip and somebody else used my ankle to break his fall.
Amazingly after I had checked my limbs, my fingers and my toes I realised that every thing was present and correct. Other than being winded and a few bruises, scrapes and splinters and a dead leg I was in the rudest of health and fit enough to get into the next race.
So Elvis might be ever present on the hamster wheel, but last week at the Velodrome, when there was Blood on the Track(s) – Bob was my man.

From the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome,

n

Thats me on the left of the picture, cowered up into a little ball. Bracing myself before someone runs over me.

Nice 'lounge pants' huh? I got them cheap. 50% off. Cant think why. Id take them back, but I dont think I'd have a leg to stand on. I'm here all week.



Wednesday 5 December 2012

Elvis is alive (and cycling)


I’m not sure if Elvis ever rode a bike. I doubt it. That rhinestone encrusted, skin tight, jumpsuit would not have permitted him to swing his leg over the cross bar without causing some permanent damage. And those platform boots would have been murder on a set of clip in pedals. Infact, I’m not sure there would be any rock star, worth their salt who would have enjoyed spending time on the humble velocipede, it doesn’t exactly fit in with the 'rock 'n roll' lifestyle after all…
Winter is a difficult time to be out on the bike.  You hardly see the daylight during the week, so getting outside is tough, if you work during the day. Although a cold crisp winter day on the bike can be a joyus thing. However excess crispness brings ice. There is only one weather that you can’t cope with on a bike and that’s ice. There’s not much grip on two slick road tyres barely the width of your thumb at the best of times and precious little protection afforded by a millimetre of lycra, from either the cold or a tumble.
Thus, the winter nights are spent squeezing out miles on the turbo trainer, or to give her pet name -the Vomitron.  For those who don’t know, the turbo trainer is basically a hamster wheel for bikes and it might be the most effective instrument of torture yet devised by man. Forget water boarding, listening to Phil Collins or Chinese burns, the Vomitron is premier league torture. Had the Spanish inquisition been in possession of the vomitron I doubt there would have been any dissention against Catholicism for a thousand years. Richard Dawkins would still be saying the rosary and be thankful for it.
Thumb screws have nothing on you, my sweet little Vomy.
It is not much to look at - just a small fly wheel on a sturdy tripod. There are no hills when you're on the turbo, no wind to batter and retard your progress and no rain to soak you. But it is everything that is bad about cycling and nothing that is good. There is no changing scenery to engage your mind and distract you from the pain, no moving air to cool you. Its just you, pools of sweat and your discomfort. The thought that there is always a tub of chocolate digestives just three steps away, the couch calling sweetly like a Siren to a sailor in a tempest and NOBODY WILL KNOW IF YOU QUIT! I fucking hate the turbo (sorry for the invective Mum, but I really really f****** hate the turbo).
It’s just you and your tunes trying to distract you from the pain and a towel stopping you drowning in your own sweat. Jackie Wilson implores me to go higher than I've ever gone before; Paul Simon spins me a yarn about his back garden and a wee boy called Julio; Me, Gladys Knight and her Pips take a Midnight Train to Georgia. And Elvis. Good old Elvis and his Swinging Little Geetar Man.
So I don’t know for certain if Elvis ever rode a velocipede in life, but he tolerates only action and no conversation on the vomitron and he and his suspicious eyes are with me nightly, telling me that Vomy and I can't go on together.
Oh yeah, me and Elvis cycle together every night.
In spirit at least.
Uh huh huh.
From Glasgow

N
Sweat stained mat, soaking towel, water bottle and Elvis on the tranny. Welcome to my pain cave. 

Friday 9 November 2012

And so it begins...

Across Glasgow and the country beyond various aged relatives sat crouched over their computers fingers hovering over 'the big red button' in order to try and get me a place on the Tour de Force. A charity challenge to cycle the entire 100th running of the Tour de France. Within 20 minutes the places were sold out, but thanks to my cadre of silver surfers I managed to procure a place.

In a scene repeated in kitchens across the country my uncle Sandy, sits crouched, like a viper about to strike, ready to press that 'big red button'.

I very nearly managed to secure two entries. Doing the dam thing once will be tough enough. Not sure that twice would be possible.
The physical toll on my family has not been recorded. Although there are rumours of hernia for uncle John, a slipped disc for aunty Linda and I think the excitement may have resulted in a bout of incontinence in my mother.
I must confess to being both excited and trepidus about the whole endevour (cycling the tour rather than my mothers incontinence). But the Tour route is just amazing.
I haven't really had time to digest it all yet but the immediate highlights for me will obviously be the chance to sample the 21 hair pins of 'The Alpe'. Twice - Its nice of them to give me a chance to beat my PB so soon after setting it...
My old friend Ventoux. With a 150mile pre amble - just to make sure the muscles have been properly basted in a marinade of lactic acid before we start the climb.
The Port de Pailheres in the Pyrenees, her and I have some unfinished business!
The cycle through the hopefully sunny south of France, Corsica, Nice, then the Pyrenees.
Mont St Michel, the Glandon and the Madelaine.
3,360km after the start, a finish in Paris on Bastille day.
The Grand Boucle looks to be grand indeed.

The route of the 2013 tour.


So... 7 months and a whole lot of time to be spent on the bike between now and the Grand Depart, it'll be some journey.