Saturday, March 17, 2007

New Weakness?

A couple of things all came together for me this afternoon. Here's the brief outline:

- During my test this morning, my legs felt OK, but my lungs were struggling to keep up. (This is counter-intuitive, but stay with me.)

- During my full suite of testing in Jan/Feb, my feeling was that I just couldn't produce enough force to turn over big gears.

- Last weekend, I really struggled riding into the wind at Stony (in fact, I always struggle riding into the wind).

- This morning, Sarah commented that I should probably eat more protein. For whatever reason, when Sarah said this, everything started to click...

I've been re-reading Joe Friel's Cyclist's Training Bible this winter (and taking notes). One of the things that jumped out at me was that any weakness in the basic cycling abilities (Force, Endurance and Speed Skill) will produce weaknesses in higher abilities, and likely lead to poor race results.

Here's what dawned on me this afternoon: Force is likely a weakness for me. I had always assumed that Force was a strength of mine (or, at least, not a weakness) since I'm a strong climber. Pretty much everything else points against it though; probably the reason I'm strong climber is that I weigh a lot less than the guys I normally ride with.

The next thing I did was to plot my "power profile." I had intended to do this in February after I finished my testing, but I didn't get around to it. What I found seemed to confirm everything. I didn't test at all the same time intervals, but I feel that I'm close enough. Here's what I found:

- FT Power to Weight: 3.89W/kg (Good)

- 5Min Power to Weight: 4.36W/kg (Good) (I actually used a 6 min test)

- 1Min Power to Weight: 5.85W/kg (Untrained) !

- 5s Power to Weight: 8.35W/kg (below Untrained) !!! (I actually used a 12s test, but I'm not sure switching to 5s will help.)

I'm not sure that I buy the absolute numbers here, since my "Good" FT result should have meant that I shouldn't have gotten smoked so badly in the Hines Park TT last year, but I think the relative numbers are probably valid. I don't mind if my short duration power numbers are lower than my higher duration ones, but I think that they should be in the same ballpark. Essentially, I'm looking for all 4 power numbers to fall along the same line, not to have this big step between the 1 min and 5 min numbers.


Having poor 5/12s and 1min power results means one of two things. Either my anaerobic capacity is poor, or I'm not strong enough to turn over a big gear. While I wasn't doing hard rides on the bike in January, I was doing a lot of Ross's high intensity work, so I don't think anaerobic capacity was the main issue; that leaves strength (or Force in Friel lingo).


So, what next? Well, the first thing I'm going to do is retest my 1 minute and 5s threshold power (I guess I'll use 5s, there's nothing special about 12s) to make sure that this is really a problem. For the retests, I'm going to tighten the roller on my trainer a little more; certainly wheel slip is a factor for the 5/12s test. I'm also going to have Sarah work the computer and stopwatch for me; just one more distraction I can eliminate.

(Last point, the bit about the legs feeling OK and not the lungs. I read an article in Runner's World a couple years ago about this. They said that if your legs are burning but you're breathing OK, it's likely a problem of inadequate aerobic capacity. The reasoning is that your legs aren't getting enough glycogen because the lungs/heart are poorly trained. Conversely, if your legs feel OK but you're having trouble breathing, it's likely caused by an inadequatly developed anaerobic system... in that case, the problem starts with the legs and moves to the lungs/heart.)

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