American Road Cycling: PSL : Total Failure

Total Fucking Failure
- SlingShot
04/30/08

this page last updated: 11/28/2012 11:38:18 AM

I was hammered and barely able to pedal. It was doubtful I would make it up this last hill to Turtle Boy's house.

I had no idea how the music got stuck in my head, but a calliope version of the Arkansas Traveler kept looping through my brain. Maybe I heard it on the radio coming over to the ride, but I figured it meant I was worse off than I imagined.

I traced back trying to remember how I stumbled into such a sad position. Everybody else was already finished, probably had their bikes put away.

I did remember coming to the ride.

We pulled up to Turtle Boy Humberto Cavalheiro's house with our bikes on the top rack, and I was immediately distracted by a new sculpture—in the middle of the road.

Apparently the people in the Addams Family house across from Humberto's added another objet d'art to their growing collection of lawn gnomes.

Right on the corner of their lot they already had a bronze of a tree with a few kids climbing it, and a matching whale or something as their mailbox, plus some gewgaws in their treed back lawn.

What made me stop to think about this newest addition was wondering how they could have gotten a permit to put it right smack dab in the middle of the road.

It was oddly beautiful though... a cyclist doing a track stand on his bike. What was extra eerie about it, was how still it was.

We are all so used to seeing bicycles in movement that the sight of one totally still with a rider astride is a bit disconcerting.

An extra touch of strange shone around it like a beacon, because the workmanship revealed very close attention to detail.

The rider was dressed realistically in one of those race kits used to promote women's eyeliner. Maybe it even had a Mary Kay sticker on it. I don't remember.

The bike itself was perfectly true to the point of having a Giant logo on the down tube. Mary is still talking about how beautiful the bicycle was.

Whoever made this thing brought realism to a new level.

Our arrival marked a divergence from my day's plan. I meant for Mary to do a short ride from home, because too many group rides had thrown her a month and a half behind (at least) on her training for her 23+ Widder's Hump.

We planned to go for a quick ride around Sugar Loaf and test her 5 minute Peak Power in hopes of bringing one of her personal bests up from Cat3 Women to Cat3 for Men.

I have been very careful about keeping Mary's goals well below her ability in order for her to build slowly and surely, without worrying about peaking before the grand finale Hump.

A 5 minute ITT at 231 watts should have presented no problem, and it would have cleared out the cobwebs from all the recent group rides and gotten her back on track.

Except the Widder and I are weak willed go alongs, so when Turtle Boy phoned offering a ride, we lost our focus.

Everybody who pays attention knows the worst thing for a cyclist's performance is group rides. Maybe you might do one every month or so (if it's among like minded riders with similar ability, clear goals, and who have nothing to prove), but otherwise group rides totally defeat improvement, because you are likely to be forced into following somebody else's game plan, not your own.

Joe Friel puts it this way, "If you had a horse that could win the Kentucky Derby, would you race it every day?"

But to be fair, there is a problem with that question. A horse works as slave labor. Sometimes people get to make their own decisions.

The question might be better put to the horse, "If you were a horse who could win the Kentucky Derby, would you want to race every day?

A great horse would answer, "Yes, I do want to race every day. In fact, I want to race up every hill, down every descent, and along every inch of every flat in between. Who the fuck cares about the Kentucky Derby anyway? I just like to go fast."

I guess we can be forgiven for going to a ride when we should not have. Besides, I still hoped we could do our tests during the ride.

Of course, Mary had her one goal, and I had another.

Hers was to improve on her best 5 minute average ITT wattage of 211. That had been done over a month ago in Florida during a very technical workout, and she could now easily do 200 watts for 12 minutes. Also, we had been doing multiple 70 second repeats of 260 watts for a couple months, so going for a quick 5 minutes at 230 watts shouldn't be much of a problem.

The significance of a 5 minute 230 would be to enhance Widder's self image, and the criteria for that was only recently known to us.

A couple weeks ago we finally got the Hunter and Coggan, 2006 book, Training and Racing with a Power Meter and found in it (on page 64) a comparison chart for typical power to weight ratios tied to racing levels.

What a wonderfully simple description of performance and potential. Toss out everything related to wind, slope, age, body type, and specific body weight. Boil it all down to a simple ratio such as 6.4, and you can easily compare abilities over the widest possible range of riders, terrain, time, and speeds.

Even though technical skills and tactics are another matter, plus you need a power meter on your bicycle to make any sense out of it all, it sure beats, "How fast did I go? What was my heart rate at the end? How might I see the most improvement? If I weigh 200 pounds, what effort will it take for me to stay with a group of 160 pound cyclists?"

The chart is just slightly arbitrary as a goal set, but as soon as we realized Mary's performance compared favorably to Cat3 women, and already very close to Cat3 men... well, we decided that raising her figures a little might be a pretty good next step, if only for her self confidence alone.

So Mary's goal for the day's ride was to do 5 minutes with a 231 watt average. That is well within her ability.

My own goal was to take one single solitary pedal stroke without a pain shooting out of my knee, ricocheting off my back and down to my other knee, then lancing back up to my other back with a white hot lightening bolt. I know that sounds optimistic, but I still keep hoping for that one sweet pedal stroke.

Unfortunately, we both failed miserably. Group rides are like that, but this time we have data files to show why.

First off, there was the start. The ride began with a major shock. As we started to leave Humberto's the cyclist sculpture sprung to life and followed us.

Turns out it wasn't a sculpture after all, but this guy Sore-azz who is some big time bike mechanic, boutique fitter, ladies undergarment salesman, and Cat2 racer.

In any case, he had been doing a track stand in the middle of the road without moving a whisper for the entire time we were gearing up for the ride. Still, seeing a lawn distraction become a boy is rather jarring.

Otherwise, Mary's warmup could have been worse, but it set up her approaching massive failure right at the start.

Her average watts down Clove Road and then along the early rollers on Route 32 was a nice 90, but there were dozens of spikes well over 200 (with some in the 275/300 range) and lots of drop-outs to zero caused by following the group.

Also, her standard cadence test only resulted in 112 rpm.

Her target is always 150+ in order to confirm everything is in good working order and ready for the workout. She believes her low number was due to equipment failure and has ordered a new sensor... but this time she has taken pains to make sure it is compatible with her trip computer.

I sort of suspect her low spin number was a warning about the pain in her left glute which would arrive toward the end of the ride, and which probably affected the results throughout her ride without being obvious.

In any case, the cadence test backing her off the pace, so Twin George thought she was dropped, was just a bonus.

To me, it was obvious her erratic warmup and failed spin test was really bad mojo against any possibility of a good performance, but a group ride makes that sort of result unavoidable.

After her sketchy warmup the insane spikes continued. Many were 400 and above, and each zero only set her up for the next spike. That went on all the way across the cut-over to Heart Attack Hill.

Of course Heart Attack Hill itself was an impromptu test which she started by over spinning (125 rpm) then the first 12 seconds showed a 444 watt average and a peak of 482.

From that point on it was downhill for the rest of the uphill, but her graph reveals something very interesting.

Her wattage dropped off precipitously as it closely followed her drop in cadence as the slope got harder (they don't call that hyperbolic rise Heart Attack Hill for nothing), but her torque remained the same throughout.

It proves the great benefit of holding her 105-110 peak-power spin rate, and the necessity of getting her a 27 cog in order for her to hold that rate a little longer on the steeper slopes.

I have lobbied for a triple, but macho is as macho does, especially for little old ladies.

Still, if she had not over spun and overworked the first 30 seconds, she might have at least moved her 1 minute peak up to Cat3 Women instead of missing it by 0.009 of a ratio point and staying mired at the top of Cat4.

I hate to see her fail like that. Here's the chart. Disregard the red line. That's her supposed heart rate, and the Powertap is totally worthless as a HR monitor. Also, the green line cadence should be considered an approximation, because it was established by arcane software calculations, not by an actual sensor.

Torque is purple, and speed is blue. They are accurate.

After her pitiful performance on Heart Attack Hill, I had to yell at Mary several times for being way too excited to be on a ride with Twin George, Turtle Boy and the new kid, Sore-azz.

She was wasting a whole lot of energy yakking and riding erratically, but once again it was a group ride. What did I expect?

At least on the long two stepped climb up 94 (just before Mary's 5 minute trial), I knew my limits and let Twin George go. I ducked off early enough to insure a chance of staying on Widder's wheel during her 231 watt trial.

Happily, my move also cued Mary to back off and save something for her test.

Unfortunately, I didn't pull off soon enough to enhance my own chances at reaching my goal of taking one solitary singular pain-free pedal stroke, but I'm used to failure, so that was of no consequence.

Either Tuthill road was flatter than I expected, or I was stronger than expected, because I managed to stay on Mary's wheel for the full test. I didn't like being there, but it wasn't hard enough for me to just quit either.

We took the altimeter back later and found the 1.48 miles she covered in 5:02 was a climb of 88 feet in elevation. That is basically the same height as the Camel Farm Hill or Dog Hill but over a longer horizontal distance.

Also, considering the headwind her 17.62 mph average was as expected.

Her major failure on the test was partly my fault. The test started on an uphill, so I failed to realize she was overworking immediately, averaging 287 watts for the first 26 seconds.

If it was on the flat, I would have known, but the incredible variation of my own effort which is required to keep pace with her on all these differing slopes, makes me incapable of judging her effort now that we are back in NY.

We turned onto the hill, and I knew I was going to have to work a lot harder than usual, so I just figured the effort was to be expected. Also, I thought she was looking at her current watts and would have a handle on it, so I beared down and kept quiet. Actually, she was looking at her average watts display, which allows her to overwork without seeing it.

A 5 minute test at this intensity requires too much concentration for her to be constantly switching her display from current to average, so next time she is going to start in current mode until the effort is in her legs for a minute or so, then switch to average for the rest of the test.

After that her standard rules will apply. Get two watts above target, if the average drops by one watt push a little harder, if it drops to the goal wattage do whatever it takes to get back to two over.

Assuming she doesn't go nuts by really overdoing the rebuild, she should be ok.

During her last one hour time trial, she stayed mostly in current watts and checked her average after every event which could have potentially caused a drop (i.e., the turn onto Ridgebury, the crossing at Lime Kiln, the downhill on Oil City).

Here's the chart for today's 5 minute trial. Once again disregard the red line. There is no way in hell her heart rate was under 50 bpm, nor is it likely she was ever dead with zero beats as shown. Even if the software was reporting the number as above 100, she was still actually well over 160 for most of the test. The Powertap HR function is fucked.

Remember also, the green line cadence is nonsensical as the software calculates probability and does not show results recorded by an actual sensor. We would already have a sensor if we weren't so disgusted with the HR recording.

Torque is purple, and speed is blue. They are accurate.

In addition to the large section of overworking at the beginning of the test, you will notice the torque tracks very well this time with the power in watts, because the flatter slope allowed her to maintain her higher cadence... though the green line doesn't really show it.

This performance gave us a basis to review a subtlety of power to weight in action. Mary was quizzical about how I stayed with her uphill during an intensity that should have dropped me.

There were subtle breaks in the hill that Mary didn't notice but I was very much aware of behind her. In fact there were several places where downhills occurred even though the general trend was definitely uphill. When the road flattened, my effort was incredibly lessened, and when the slope reversed so did the formula regarding her significant weight advantage. On the downhills and flats I was resting and gathering strength for the next uphill. Mary was holding the same wattage, so barely noticed the terrain shifts.

Now she clearly understands why I have cautioned her against attacking on anything other than a long steady hill where she will also be able to hold a weight advantage for at least 12 minutes. The male cyclists around here are invariably self trained to overwork the uphills then rest on the downhills. When it is time to hold a steady pace for any length of time, they eventually drop like flies.

I spend most of my rides with brakes on waiting to get dropped on the first power climb where I would have to churn 1000 or more watts to stay in contact.

Mary is supposed to learn from my fat ass mistakes such as after her test when I got dropped on the second crest of a long triple step. At least I came close to reaching my goal of a single solitary pain-free pedal stroke, because by the time I lost it the burning in my quads was so intense I almost couldn't even feel the pedal strokes.

I told Mary to go on with them, because they weren't really going that hard (assuming somebody weighs less than 165 (not my over 190), but she said she wanted to stay with me, and she wasn't even breathing hard when she said it.

On one of the later hills I asked what her watts were, and she reported 150. That was another big lesson in how a blown-up effort is a lot different from a working effort. She has never stressed me on that slope at such a low wattage before, but this time my legs were screaming trying to keep up.

Finally, when my back and knee joined the final chorus, I sent her off on her own. She then did a little test of her own going back up Clove Road into Central Valley.

Here's the chart. The instructive aspect of this chart is how her performance radically fell apart toward the end. That happened because of the pain in her glute finally showed up, but it could have been predicted from her cadence test at the start of the ride.

She was trying to hold 180 watts just to see, but her glute fell apart, and numbers went all over the place. Oddly, her watts average during that section was the same 186 she held for the first 2/3's of the test, but her perceived effort was incredibly harder.

Just goes to show how much consistency and smoothness counts in this sport... also how one should pay attention to program benchmarks and stay away from group rides.

We plan to try the 5 minute test again on the next Hump.

So that's how I got to be going up the final hill to Humberto's with calliope music jangling through my head.

When I pulled to a stop, Humberto said, "Bob, here comes the ice cream truck just in time."

"What?! Thank goodness. I thought that music was just in my head. I'll take four of those ice cream bars. Wasn't there a bicycle sculpture here before?"

The rather ironic part of the ride was that during this total fucking failure Mary posted 3 personal bests, and two of them happened in the same interval going up Heart Attack Hill.

this page last updated: 11/28/2012 11:38:18 AM