Author Archives: Gene Dan

No. 55: Come and Take It Road Race 2012 – Race Report

3 April, 2012 2:09 AM / Leave a Comment /

Hey everyone,

I woke up at 4:00 AM to drive out to Gonzales for the Come and Take It Road Race last Sunday. It wasn’t in the most ideal time or location for me, but it was just far away enough for me to not need to spend the previous night in a hotel. There was only a criterium on Saturday, so I decided that there wasn’t enough racing that day to justify booking a room, though I would have considered doing so had there also been a time trial. I really looked forward to this race since I had a good result last year and produced good numbers during my training rides the week before. Unfortunately, I woke up all sore! I hadn’t expected that at all and it looks like I overtrained on a 3-hour joy ride around Houston the day before. Nevertheless, I decided to race anyway and after I arrived, Philip Shama waved me off at the start line and wished me good luck.

The race started off at an easy pace with a slight crosswind. I had two goals for the race – the first was to stay in the front, and the second was to stay with the pack. When I wrote about Walburg, I mentioned that some races were decided by physical strength whereas others were more tactical. I think this race was a combination of the two, with more emphasis on the latter. The race took place over a loop divided into 4 sections. The pace was pretty easy for the first half of the race as it was slightly uphill with maybe just one or two half-hearted attempts to break away from the pack. I made sure to stay front-to-mid pack the entire time, but the echelon formation made it difficult for me to maintain my position for long. For this reason, riders constantly found themselves in the back as the peloton rotated. On the third leg, we cruised along at about 25 mph and I took the chance to eat a gel. One of the juniors put in an acceleration and it took Abe Covello – the guy I was following – by surprise and a gap opened up between us and the pack, but I leapfrogged him to regain contact.

We reached the fourth section of the course after an easy right-hand turn, and at this point I made sure to stay in front so I wouldn’t get left behind by any surges in the pack. This last portion was mostly downhill with a crosswind and few short climbs. We continued to rotate for about 5 minutes in echelon form, when all of a sudden, a 787 rider who was pulling in front crashed! He just suddenly down…his bike just fell over and he ended up in the ditch. Usually you can see it happening because someone gets nervous and overreacts – but in this case I don’t think the rider did anything wrong and it was probably just a horrible accident. I later heard his rear tire exploded and that caused him to go down (he’s okay though, and only suffered minor road rash). The riders remained calm after that accident, and we regrouped and continued to rotate in front. When it was my turn to pull, I held the pace steady at 24 mph for a couple of minutes. However, as soon as I finished my pull, a rider from the Ghisallo Foundation, Matt DeMartino, launched a vicious attack with 10 k to go, and another rider followed suit. The two of them opened up a gap of maybe 30 meters and we struggled to pull them back. At first, I thought we would easily catch them, but the two of them stubbornly held on after 3 or 4 riders tried in vain to reel them in. I heard another rider yell at me telling me to chase, and at that moment I decided that they posed a threat so I gave chase. I almost used all my energy trying to do that, and after my pull, the pack spit me out the back and a gap of 10 meters formed between me and the peloton. The referee pulled up to me and asked me if I was OK, but I was so tired and too busy gasping for air that all I could do was say “urrghhhh” and motioned for him to pass me. I saw that Abe dropped as well, and at that point I decided to muster enough strength to get on his wheel, and used him as a launchpad to get back to the pack. Abe managed to make it back as well, and at that point we caught the 2-man breakaway in front.

At around 4 K to go, the pack was all together. After I recovered, I worked my way back up to the front and I found myself second wheel with 1 K to go. Unfortunately, about 300 meters to go, the guy in front of me peeled off and I was exposed for about 100 meters before the start of the uphill sprint zone 200 meters from the finish. So, when I arrived at the foot of the hill, I tried the best I could to launch myself but I just couldn’t find the energy. Instead, I probably did an effective leadout for whomever followed me, and after the pack swallowed me up, I soft-pedaled to the line and finished at the back of the pack.

Analysis

I wasn’t too thrilled with the end result, but I regained confidence in my ability to stay with the pack. After the race, Brian told me that the ideal position to be in before the sprint zone was fifth man – not first. That was a big mistake as I had wasted too much energy 300 m before the finish. Also, one thing happened this year that didn’t happen last year – a strong, late-stage attack. I was really impressed with Matt DeMartino’s effort to get away from the pack, and I didn’t think he could have held it for as long as he did, but looking at the data, he managed to stay away for about 8-10 minutes:

The attack started right before my heart rate reached 160, and finished right before it dipped below 170. Now, in training, I managed to keep a heart rate of 170 for a longer period of time – for about 16 minutes:

If you look at the maximum 8-minute average for power, I actually managed to produce a higher average power output during training than I did in racing – 271 W during training and 260 W during the breakaway. However, it was so much harder when I was racing, and I just barely managed to regain contact with the pack. Why did this happen? If you compare the graphs of these two 8-minute averages, you can see that the variance of power was much greater during racing (top) than during training (bottom):

8-Min Max. Avg. Power during the race

8-Min. Max. Avg. Power during training

From the graph, you can see that during training, I never went over 500 W, and only above 400 W a handful of times. However, when racing, I hit a peak of 700 W, went over 500 W several times, and 400 W even more times – but had a lower average power. From here, you can see that volatility increases effort. I need to find a way to incorporate this volatility into my training schedule since it’s more race-like. One commenter a few weeks ago suggested that I do over/under intervals and I think this is a great way to simulate this type of scenario.

Other than that, I felt like I improved a lot on handling. I wasn’t afraid to stay in front this time and I didn’t feel nervous at all in the pack, even when I made physical contact with the other riders several times, and when the 787 rider crashed, I didn’t lose my cool. Anyway, I have at least another month before my next race, or maybe even two if I have to take time off for studies, but I can’t wait to be back. This week I’ve decided to do recovery rides since I overtrained a little. After that, the intervals will continue.

Posted in: Cycling, Logs / Tagged: , , , , , ,

No. 54: Spring Training

27 March, 2012 1:58 AM / Leave a Comment /

Hey everyone,

I didn’t race this week, but it looks like the rest of my teammates had a lot of fun so I kind of regret not going, but I did get some good training in despite the lack of good weather/suitable courses. On Tuesday, it rained, and on Thursday through Sunday there was an art festival at Memorial Park, so the Picnic Loop was closed to bicycle traffic. This means that I couldn’t do my structured intervals as planned, but I went out anyway and rode from Memorial Park to Highway 6 and back again, keeping the heart rate at about 160 bpm and the average power above 200 w.

On Saturday, I drove back down to Clear Lake to ride with the folks at Space City Cycling Club. I really looked forward to this ride since I hadn’t done it since I started racing this year. In my opinion, it’s one of the best training rides in Houston since some of the best cyclists in Texas ride down there on weekends when they’re not racing. The pace usually speeds up to 30-34 mph at the beginning, and I almost always get dropped before I hit FM 517, but this time I managed to stay in contact until that point. I felt really good until I got boxed in by a bunch of people who couldn’t hold the pace, but I’m pretty sure I could have held on if I had paid more attention. This is actually a really important factor in racing because you need the ability to accurately gauge other riders’ fatigue in critical situations so you know whom to follow and whom to avoid. I tried chasing in vain at a pace of 32mph, but after I got tired I decided to work with a chase group and I did some long pulls of 2-3 minutes at 300 watts each. After 1:30:00, I measured my average power at 220 watts – about 7 w more than I had done at Fayetteville. 7 watts doesn’t sound like a lot, but it could mean the difference between hopelessly dropping off the back and staying in contact until the finish.

Coming back from the halfway mark, I felt fantastic. I kept doing the long 300 watt pulls at around three minutes each until I got a flat tire. Thankfully, a group of three guys helped me fix the flat, but 10 minutes later, one of the riders who helped me also flatted. It took a while for me to feel comfortable again, but at the end of three hours I averaged 207 watts – that’s a higher wattage over a longer period of time than both Walburg and Mineral Wells. I’m feeling optimistic, considering that this was just a training ride, and that I only averaged 173 watts on the same ride 2 months prior.

Average power isn’t everything, however. Sometimes the ability to maintain a high output for short periods of time during the right moments matters more. On the other hand, if you can maintain a greater number of peaks for longer periods of time, you won’t have to worry so much about timing your efforts correctly. In reality, the best racer will have both a superior level of fitness and an acute awareness of the overall racing situation. The physical fitness comes from good preparation, but the ability to time your efforts correctly allows you to conserve energy for those crucial moments when the pack surges. Without racing knowledge, your physical ability will never manifest itself during the moments that matter. I think that’s what separates the winners from those who are strong but not smart, and vice versa. I don’t consider myself to be strong or smart (yet), but I feel that I’m getting better at both and I’m looking forward to racing at Come and Take It this weekend. My finishes during the last two race weekends were really demoralizing, but when you’re down, you really have to keep at it – you have to take a moment to reflect on what went wrong, and then do the things in training that you weren’t able to do before. One main weakness in my training is that I don’t have specific goals – when I train, I come in with the attitude, “let’s do these intervals and see what happens,” but the problem is that it’s not focused or goal-oriented. Tomorrow, the weather looks good and I aim to do two 4-lap intervals at 170 bpm, while reducing the amount of rest between them from 4 laps to 3 laps. It’s harder than what I’ve been doing previously, so it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Posted in: Cycling, Logs / Tagged: , , ,

No. 53: Fayetteville Stage Race 2012 – Race Report

20 March, 2012 2:44 AM / 1 Comment /

Hey everyone,

I just came back from Fayetteville Stage Race and there were some good things and bad things about that race, with more of the latter. Unlike Mineral Wells Stage Race – where placement was determined by a point system (where you get points based on your stage finishes and the person with the most – or least number of points depending on how they score it – wins the overall classification), placement would be determined by cumulative finish time where the person who finishes the race in the least amount of time wins. Unfortunately, none of this ended up being relevant to me since I dropped out on the very last lap of the last stage.

Preparation

I couldn’t train enough because it rained a lot over the last two weeks. I do have an indoor trainer but you can’t really train at the same intensity or duration. It’s not that I didn’t get any better since Lago Vista, but I didn’t improve enough or gain enough endurance to match the physical demands of Fayetteville. Here’s a snapshot of my last training session before the race – 3 x  7-10 minute intervals:

HR vs Power 15.03.2012

Splits 15.03.2012

And here are the splits from the last time I did this workout:

Splits 07.02.2012

I’ve written a table comparing the average power output between the intervals:

Comparison of Power Between Workouts

There’s some good news about this – I was able to increase my power output by about 12% from a little more than a month ago. This isn’t exactly a fair comparison because my heart rate was also about 5 bpm higher this time – which means I tried harder – but that’s also good news because I didn’t know I could sustain a heart rate that high. What I’d do is I would start out the interval at around 150 bpm, and then work my way up to 170 bpm midway through the first lap and hold it there for the rest of the interval, averaging about 167 bpm for the entire interval. I still need to do two things though – I need to decrease the amount of time between intervals and focus more on time-based intervals instead of distance-based ones. I plan to focus on the former these next two weeks. For example, tomorrow I will do 2×4 lap intervals but only rest for 3 laps instead of 4 laps between the intervals (found out this morning that it would rain…I’ll try this on Thursday).

Stage 1 – Road Race

I felt optimistic coming into the race and I felt really good on the first lap and I didn’t have any trouble matching the accelerations and the only thing that really bothered me was this one rider who kept shaking as if he had trouble controlling his bike. I tried to avoid him but I ended up spending most of the time within 2-3 bike lengths of him. The first half of the lap was mostly downhill with a short climb (KOM) near the beginning and the second half mostly uphill. I didn’t find getting up the hill very difficult – it was mostly the few minutes afterward trying to catch my breath that was psychologically difficult. Said attempted to join a breakaway but the pack later reeled him in…nevertheless, he managed to stay in the front and continued to do a lot of the pacemaking. Sometime after the second KOM a couple of riders broke away from the pack (I later realized one of them was a semi-professional triathlete – Sean Schnur who ended up winning). Said ended up doing the bulk of the chasing but no one wanted to cooperate. I finally got sick of staying near the back with the guy with the jerky movements so I decided to move up to the front and help Said a little with the chasing. Unfortunately, that ended up being a really bad decision as there was a series of stair-step climbs immediately afterward and I ended up getting dropped when the pack surged.

I felt pretty stupid about that…it was the last hard part of the race and I think if I waited until after those climbs to bridge up I would have been alright. Instead I got dropped with just a quarter of the race to go and ended up 8 minutes back. Before the finish, I saw a Bike Barn rider trying to catch me but I managed to stay away from him at the line. Afterward, Said said he was frustrated since Bike Barn didn’t help him out with the chase – after the results came in, it turned out that half of the Bike Barn guys dropped early on and finished behind me…if that’s any consolation.

Anyway, here’s the data from the first stage:

Heart Rate v.s. Power for Stage 1

You can see the point at which I dropped from the pack. It’s where my heart rate fell precipitously at about 1:35. I spent a few minutes at 170 bpm at 1:25, working my way up to the front of the pack. Once I got there it dropped a little but still stayed above 160 bpm. At around 1:32, it went back up again to 170 bpm for about 3 minutes until I couldn’t hold it any longer. As soon as I got dropped, I saw an average of 213 watts…definitely the hardest 1:30 effort I’ve recorded so far, which is good news, but also bad news since I got dropped.

Stage 2 – Time Trial

The second stage was an 8.9-mile time trial – the second TT for me this season. I think I learned from my mistakes last time so I decided to be more conservative at the beginning so I could put a harder effort towards the end. The first 2/3 of the course was relatively easy (which is still really hard since I’m going at 170 bpm) since the course was mostly rolling downhill with a tailwind. I kept a steady pace of 25-30 mph at about 250 watts. The last third was really difficult for me – it was mostly uphill into a head wind and there were some points where I was only going 10 mph. My legs were really getting fatigued and I was scared that I might have gone too hard at the beginning but I kept it steady until the finish.

Fayetteville HR (Purple) v.s. MWSR HR (Blue)

The blue curve represents my heart rate at Mineral Wells whereas the purple curve represents my HR at Fayetteville. You can see that I indeed started more conservatively but managed to sustain a higher heart rate from about five minutes onward. In addition to that, I averaged 247 watts at Fayetteville against 220 watts at Mineral Wells – a 12.27% increase over the span of 3 weeks. Instead of finishing last like I usually do in time trials, I beat 6 guys in my category and 5 guys in the category above me. It’s nothing to brag about but it’s a sign that I’m getting better. I felt relatively good about the wattage and HR as I hadn’t held 247 watts or 167 bpm over 25 minutes before (the longest recorded time at that intensity was the training data at the top of this post).

Stage 3 – Road Race

I don’t really have much to say here – I was so fatigued from the day before that I didn’t have the legs for this day. I dropped out midway through this stage and I only managed to average 140 bpm. I dropped a little bit further out from the place I dropped on the first stage but instead of continuing at 200 watts I really couldn’t pedal at all and if I continued I would have risked injury. This wasn’t a good way to end the weekend, and I felt really demoralized afterward, but I feel a little bit better and more motivated after resting today. Said had a good finish for 7th place. For a more action-oriented race report, you might want to check out Cat 4 rider Jack Mott’s race report.

Recap

The races at this point of the season feel a lot harder than those of a month ago – the following table compares the watts and bpm of the last three road races I completed:

If you only look at the average heart rate, you’d think that I put in a similar effort at Fayetteville and Walburg, but it was much harder for me. Here’s a graph indicating the points at which I surpassed 170 bpm at Walburg:

And this one indicates those points at FSR:

You can see that I surpassed 170 bpm about 5 times at Walburg over the course of 2:10 whereas I surpassed that mark 9 times over the course of 1:30 at FSR and probably would have needed to do that 4-5 more times had I stayed with the pack. So, the difficulty is definitely ramping up. It’s disappointing results like this that sometimes make you want to give up, but as long as those numbers keep going up I’ll stay motivated to keep trying.

Posted in: Cycling, Logs / Tagged: , , ,

No. 52: A Few Updates

13 March, 2012 2:47 AM / Leave a Comment /

Hey everyone,

It’s been a year since I’ve moved into my new place after starting my current job. I first started working in November of 2010 after getting a call from one of the recruiters at my old job, who offered me an internship, and I remember feeling really excited about starting my career. I had a lot of misconceptions about what work would be like, from the difficulty of the tasks to the amount of free time I would have left over to pursue my hobbies. Each day I would have to wake up at 5:00 AM and commute for about an hour or more and arrive at work at 7:00. Afterward, I would feel exhausted and that gave me little motivation to train or study for my exams. Even though I didn’t have to worry about rent and had my parents helping out with the cooking and laundry and things like that, I felt I didn’t have enough time to get anything done.

I managed to acquire full-time work in March at another company, and at the time of the offer I decided to move out and find my own place closer to the office. I’d say I have about the same amount of free time now as I did at the time of my old job, but over the months I’ve learned how to manage it better. At first, all of the household responsibilities piled up at once and I had a difficult time prioritizing my tasks and ended up skipping exam MLC along with the spring races. However, little by little, I stopped doing the things that were eating up time – for example, I stopped playing video games and have almost stopped watching television all together – and this has allowed me to focus more on cycling and studying. I still have a lot of things to improve on – for instance, I still have trouble getting enough sleep. I think I averaged only 6.5 hours a night last week. Anyway I’m still setting monthly resolutions. Last month I tried to record my personal data every day. I was successful about 65% of the time. Incidentally, today I read an article that Stephen Wolfram had been doing an extreme version of the same thing since the 1980s – keeping track of all his footsteps, keystrokes, emails, files, and phone calls. Like the author, I’d really like to know how he did that so meticulously. Anyhow, this month I decided that I hadn’t been eating enough fruit (I’ve only averaged .65 servings/day in the last year), so I’m trying to eat at least 1 serving a day, hopefully reaching 2-3 servings. I have to be realistic though, so I think 1 serving a day is something attainable – at least for this month. I’m only counting actual fruit – not juice or processed food with fruit in it. I’ve averaged 1 serving/per day so far.

I didn’t race last weekend, but I’ll be racing next weekend. In lieu of a race report, here are some updates

I started reading a Sociology book

This book reminds me a lot about the Anthropology course I took my senior year, especially when it comes to thinking about cultural taboos and how a lot of the things we see as normal in our society can be strange or unacceptable to others, and vice-versa. In my Anthropology course, the professor focused more on case studies involving inner-city youth, different dialects amongst Americans, and the role of cell phones in developing nations. This book, on the other hand, deals more with broader concepts like how we think of morality based on our idea of appropriate gender roles, how we divide people into “winners” and “losers” and how we value people based on their occupations or social status, and how these criteria for judgment arise in the first place. I think it’s all very interesting. This subject isn’t my forte both in theory and in real life, but by reading this introduction I aim to gain a better understanding as well as build a framework for the possible study of mathematical networks, should I ever reach that point.

I started reading Using R for Introductory Statistics

I first set up RStudio on a Linux server a few months ago, and I haven’t really touched it since. I started learning R in the Fall of last year and I got the basic syntax down. Recently, a project came up at work and I’ll need to use R to crunch some of the numbers so I picked up this book to help me refresh my Statistics knowledge and that of R itself. I would have liked to keep studying Algebra instead, but sometimes these things pop up and you have to take care of them first. I’m looking forward to the challenge though, because I finally have some real-world data to work with instead of textbook exercises.

I’ll be racing at Fayetteville next weekend – stay tuned next week for the report.

Posted in: Cycling

No. 51: La Primavera Lago Vista 2012 – Race Report

6 March, 2012 2:46 AM / 4 Comments /

Hey everyone,

Lago Vista didn’t go well. The race took place over the course of two days. On the first day we went clockwise around a 5.5 mile loop, 75% of which consists of a gradual climb and 25% of which consists of a steep descent. On the next day we went in the other direction so we’d have a really steep climb but a long, gradual descent. In short, I dropped quickly on both days, though I stayed in contact for a longer amount of time on the second day. I don’t want to go into too much detail since not too much happened, so let’s just take a look at what little data I gathered to see what went wrong during the race.

Preparation

Every Tuesday and Thursday, I wake up at 5:30 AM to do intervals on the Picnic Loop at Memorial Park. I start out doing 8 intervals of 1 lap each on the first day, then 4 intervals of 2 laps each on the next day. As the days go by, my schedule goes as follows:

8 intervals 1 laps each
4 intervals 2 laps each
3 intervals – 1 interval of 2 laps + 2 intervals of 3 laps each
2 intervals 4 laps each
2 intervals – 1 interval of 3 laps + 1 interval of 5 laps
2 intervals – 1 interval of 2 laps + 1 interval of 6 laps
2 intervals – 1 interval of 1 lap + 1 interval of 7 laps
1 interval of 8 laps

After I complete the cycle, I start over again. On Saturdays, I usually do a 3 hour group ride. I haven’t planned out what to do on Sundays. So far, I started doing 2×20 min. intervals, aiming to reach 2×30 min. Here’s some data from the training session I did the Thursday before the race, along with the splits below:

Here’s an 8x interval training session from the previous month:

Isolating the intervals gives the following comparison:

Which shows that after 1 month, the average power increased about 9% for each lap.

Now, I felt pretty good about that because it shows that I’ve improved over the month. Unfortunately, after putting in an easy effort at Walburg, I underestimated the difficulty of Lago Vista…

Lago Vista – Day 1

As soon as the race started, I felt like I was trying really hard the whole time at the limit. The data above confirms it – the black line marks the point at which I dropped from the main pack. For the brief time I stayed in contact, my heart rate was fluctuating between 166 and 172 bpm, and I took several efforts at 400-600 watts.

Lago Vista – Day 2

On the second day, you see a similar pattern, with my heart rate barely going over 172 bpm before I dropped. Now I think I know why I didn’t do very well during this race with respect to my preparation – I don’t train like I race. Shama racer Ken Day took a look at my interval data (from the first picture) and told me that I took too much rest between my intervals, and advised me that it would be better to not let myself rest completely before starting another. I agree – during a race, after you or someone else attacks, you never really get the chance to fully recuperate. Your heart rate will fall a little but it will still stay at a level where you’re still trying hard. I took a look at Said’s data, and he managed to average 166 bpm for about 2 hours. I can hold 166 bpm for extended periods of time, but during training, I’ll hold it at 166 bpm without going over 170 bpm – ever. However, during the race, I will certainly have points where I have to go over 170 bpm, as demonstrated above, so I need to somehow incorporate those efforts as I haven’t intentionally gone over 170 bpm during a training ride. In terms of wattage – I mainly try to hold it steady at 250 watts but I don’t have any training sessions where I try to hold a higher wattage, say 300-600 watts. In short – I haven’t done any high-intensity (as in not just higher than normal, but really high) or max efforts so I need to do them since that’s what I’ll be doing during a race.

So, for this Thursday, I plan on doing 8×1 minute efforts. I don’t know how many watts I can hold during that time so I’ll just go as hard as I can and use the data from this session as a benchmark against which I can compare future sessions. After that, I plan on reducing the amount of rest between intervals, and maybe during my 30-minute intervals I’ll intentionally go up to 800 w and then back down to 250w to simulate racing situations. Anyway I’ll be joining a group ride tomorrow to give myself a mental break before I start doing intervals again.

Even though I didn’t do well last weekend, I don’t regret going at all. I had a lot of fun and made some new friends, and learned a lot. Special thanks goes to our teammate Jennifer Wagner for setting up the condo at Lake Travis.

Notes:

I’ve finished my European History book last week, and I just finished reading Kingpin yesterday. I’ve since started reading a Sociology textbook, which should keep me occupied for the next two months. After that, I’ll read The Cyclist’s Training Bible and Training and Racing with a Power Meter, which should eliminate a lot of the guesswork in setting up a proper training schedule.

Posted in: Cycling, Logs / Tagged: , , ,