The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Notes -
Step two in the path to a Century Ride is completed, I made it 50 miles on Saturday morning. The final ten miles were definitely a different animal compared to the prior rides I've done, I don't think I technically "bonked" or whatever the preferred technical term is, but I was definitely on the struggle shuttle. Near the end of both rides, I start adjusting constantly. Jacket on-jacket off, different handlebar positions, saddle postures, different podcasts or audiobooks. I feel like I just can't get comfortable, which makes sense at that point, but I need to work on ignoring the discomfort and just locking in, there is no combination of things that makes riding a bike that far comfortable.
This time rather than a long ride to a destination where my wife would pick me up, I did it out-and-back, which worked much better. As I wore down on energy, the streets got more familiar rather than less familiar. Which was a good choice, I was more comfortable in the saddle despite fatigue, I knew where I was going and which streets would be safe/efficient. I'm realizing in retrospect that some of the confusion and getting lost at the end of the 50k ride was more related to fatigue than it was to the route itself. And the traffic concerns can easily be lessened by knowing the route better.
It might be too late in the season to practically shoot for the 100km ride this year. I think I have the physical capability to slug it out if I needed to, but the combination of temperature/daylight/location would work out such that I don't think I could do it in the way I want to do it, if that makes any sense. So it's sort of back in the lab for me. I need to increase my speed to hit 100 miles. I did 53 miles in four hours flat, so around a 12mph pace. That would make a 100mi ride way too long to be practical, I want to be holding around 15mph at least, and to do that I feel like I need to be able to hold 18mph for a few miles, which I really can't seem to do right now. My problem seems to be with cadence, I can't manage to move my legs fast enough for very long to sustain higher speeds. I picked up a used Peloton bike for my wife a year back, I suppose I'll use that pretty extensively this winter, they have a lot of rides built around varying cadences, so hopefully that will help. I'm not going to be able to ride my bike outside as often with the shorter daylight hours, but I'm hoping to get out to a bike trail one morning a week and hit at least ten to fifteen miles to keep the groove greased.
My target is right now to try for the 100km in early spring, and if that goes well the 100mi in late spring, or if it doesn't I'll aim to do 100mi next fall. My secondary worry being that I need to do a better job of choosing a route, that the friction is going to catch up with me over the course of a really long ride.
This is more cardio than I've done in years, and that's been good for me, no question about it.
I would at least hem and haw about this a little. One thing that stood out to me when I came to cycling from other sports was that being a bit of a princess about fit and contact points paid off on long efforts.
Another thing that stood out to me as a new rider was the need to fuel more, and more frequently, than I had hitherto experienced. Even dabbling in endurance training, it's easy to underrate this if most of your efforts are under an hour.
Two quite different points occur to me here:
-You probably have some free-to-cheap speed from drivetrain friction (clean, freshly lubed, straight chainline), rolling resistance (faster tires, potentially higher or lower tire pressure), and aero (no baggy clothes, postural changes if compatible with comfort).
-Being on The Motte, I imagine you'd appreciate the rigor of measuring and possibly setting goals with power and work rather than distance. (Even back before power meters were widely available, the pro move was to measure training in hours and/or total elevation gained rather than miles.). I'll go so far as to suggest that a good power meter, a dumb trainer, and whatever bike you have anyway is a more useful training loadout than a smart trainer or smart bike with less-applicable and perhaps less-accurate power metering. Favero's pedal-based systems are quite well-regarded, the MX series uses a user-friendly cleat system, and they generally have a decent Black Friday sale. Lots of stuff on the used market too.
I've actually been pleasantly surprised how little irritation I had after 50 miles, I wasn't super comfortable by the end but bib shorts+moisturizer+new comfortable seat worked pretty well, and I was fine the next day. I'll definitely take your advice to keep looking for room to optimize though!
What I'm talking about it more, the first hour I was singing along to my music choices, the second and third hours I was listening to Darryl Cooper give me the other side on Adolf Hitler and fascinated, and then the last hour I kept looking for a podcast to hold my attention.
If I get a chance to ride my neighborhood on a nice day, I basically want to just work on hills, because I suck at them to a degree I find embarrassing, and getting better at them will open up more rides around my home. Oddly, given the autism, I hate overly complicated metrics in workouts. I nearly always gravitate towards simplicity and effort over metrics. Lifting I'm either doing some variation of OLAD or Bulgarian styles, or I'm doing a Smolov style focus on one lift. Climbing and BJJ I just go out and do it. I think cycling has appealed to me for a similar reason, that at least to start all I needed to do was roll out of my driveway and I'd be at the bottom of a hill and need to make my way back.
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