Finds from the Grind - The Little Engine That Could

Forming a little train up the San Gabriel River Trail with little old me as the main engine. This was my first long ride of the year. For the first 12 weeks of 2016, I've been building my base fitness, so my weekend rides were still pretty boring and not very long. If you call only 2 hours of riding not very long... Anyway, I changed my regimen a little bit to get stronger in a shorter amount of time. Usually that means increasing your training load, but I didn't really want to ride an extra 20% to 25% increase in mileage. Instead, I added core workouts, building up to 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups after my hour long daily ride.

Now, you may ask, what do those exercises have to do with helping you ride faster? And not only that, they don't sound like they would help your aerobic capacity. Well, there's no other way of saying this, but that thinking is just flat wrong. Doing 100 pushups is exactly like holding a plank position for 7 minutes, but also adding strength training and endurance training. Part of aerobic and endurance training is getting your metabolic processes good at moving blood around your body, and it's not just to move those red blood cells to carry oxygen to the large aerobic muscle groups. The body needs to get good at carrying away lactate (lactic acid). Lactate builds up in muscles during anaerobic exertion, but gets quickly flushed out if cardio activity is high. Unfortunately, endurance athletes will always have some muscles working anaerobically, which is why we need to get good at pumping blood with our hearts and lungs for long periods of time.

So, done correctly with proper breathing, 100 pushups and 100 sit-ups is strength training and endurance training. Let me tell you, the pushups still hurt, mainly because there's no real equivalent exertion on the bike other than holding an aerodynamic tuck. So, now I can hold that tuck longer, but... still very ouch. The hundred sit-ups was no big deal because the lower abs do the same motion anyway with proper form and pedaling on the bike. But the upper abs... that took a while to figure out how to get them strong and breathe properly while they squeezed the hell out of my diaphragm. Can't do the bellows action if that thing is constricted. I'm done with both sets of exercises in 10 minutes. Boring, painful, but that took care of the extra training load.

And the extra core work was a total success on my base fitness. I'm throwing down time numbers on my training courses I normally wouldn't see until 6 months of cycling. On the easy to medium climbs, I'm already at monster fitness. On the flats and the steeps, I'm only up to peak fitness, which is still ahead of schedule. As you can see in the video above, I'm good enough to be a little locomotive on a flat river trail.

Also, I'm kind of not proud of this, but one of my favorite things to do on the bike is pass an aero bike on a flat piece of road. Me, 110 pounds on a climbing road bike smoking a 170 pounder on a tri-bike. Hey, the other person could be working on some different pedaling technique, they're new to the discipline, or they're recovering from a sprint interval, or any other reason they should be slower than me, but it still feels good to pass someone in a tuck on top of deep dish wheels. I'm petty in a competitive way like that on the bike.