There is pain to be found upon this road. Photo via Symonbike
My training hasn’t gone as I’d like it to be going. My days keep getting loaded up with things that pay the bills more than they add to the account at the V-Bank. It’s part of not being a Pro, I suppose, as if to spite my obvious talent which is a sort of talent sleeper cell where only I recognize my potential while the rest of the world perceives it as mundane mediocrity. I’ll show them, when I get around to it.
[rule number=10/]
To be an athlete is to mimic the animal world; this is the luxury of our age, stimulating the survival instinct through games rather than an actual need to survive which is itself a staggering accomplishment. It is our nature as animals that drives us to find the next level of achievement as athletes; as athletes, our success is rooted in our ability to process the act of suffering into a productive output, to push beyond the plane of perceived capability. What is left to the adventurer who walks along the path – the Velominatus – is to discover the complexity of suffering.
And, as Rule #10 implies, what lies hidden within the complexity of suffering is deceptively simple: more suffering, like some diabolical Mandelbrot Set set of pain where every point on its continuum contains an infinite set just like it.
The strange thing about suffering is that as you gain fitness, your lens shifts. When our fitness has the most opportunity for improvement, we alternate between pushing through a blockage either in the legs or the lungs – never both. The human mind is, after all, equipped to process only one pain at a time. But as our fitness develops, the mind learns to delegate the pain to the lesser organs and allows them to self-manage: the strength of one learns to support the weakness in the other. Over time, the suffering body becomes a holistic organism that can compensate for the most acutely weak unit with those which still yield some reserves. This is how we go faster; we transform how our body manages its resources.
When we speak of suffering, our minds shift to the climbs. Climbing is the easiest place to find suffering, a sinister gift of our old friend, Gravity. But suffering is to be found anywhere just as easily, provided you can motivate yourself to push as hard as gravity can pull. The Hour Record doesn’t have a climb in sight, but it scores a 100% on the Cycling version of Rotten Tomatoes (which, I am not too modest to suggest, finds its logical home right here at Velominati.)
As I suffer my way towards some level of condition, I am grateful for the opportunity to rediscover the pain behind the pain, to find some hint of control over the suffering, the ability to compensate one suffering unit for another. The ability to, despite every signal emitting from the body, push a little harder and resist the temptation to yield is perhaps the most noble gift our generous sport imparts upon us.
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View Comments
@markb
Ha Ha! I was only being arsy about the amount of hours I'm spending at work just at the moment.
PS - You'll have to cone over and try out my leafy (well muddy at the moment) Surrey/Hampshire lanes. Very few cars and no hoards of other cyclists.
Cripes no idea what happened there - did not try to embed anything at all. Sorry @frank!
@Teocalli
Oh no, Teocalli's broken Velominati!
PS. might take you up on your offer, so long as you promise not too many hills
@markb
I'm glad you did not say again - as in my early days I did manage to crash a whole article stream......
PS I live on the top of the hill at Hindhead.
@Al__S
Indeed. A turn of phrase commonly heard around the southwest side of Glasgow by people wearing copious amounts of red, white and blue supporting a football team with a chequered past when it comes to the employment of non-Protestants.
@ChrisO
I started training with power last year, and wasn't settled on a particular method right away. (TrainingPeaks offers a few, and I'm self coaching). What I've used for the past 6 - 8 months, is 7 zones, structured pretty much exactly like you describe above @ChrisO with the exception of my Z7, which max is 200% of FTP. Sounds like I should adjust that to peak beyond my max sprint. Would that be accurate?
Although I've never ridden with @ChrisO, I've watched him on that website for the Rule #74 masturbaters. He can rip my legs off. My FTP W/kg at the end of last race season was 4.07. That just goes to show, that in the W/kg measurement, tenths are big.
Cheers!
@markb
Just bear in mind the last person to do that ended up in hospital.
I assume Teocalli is just planning to work his way through the Velominati until he is the last man pedalling.
@VeloSix
Whether you have a Z7 depends on how you can modulate your power. Personally, if Z6 is 105-120% that's 400+ watts for me. It's about the most that I can do in a controlled way.
Scales that have Z7 usually just say 120% to infinity, so to my mind it is pretty meaningless - it could be 600 watts or 1500 watts (I wish).
Sometimes my coach might give me an all-out sprint where I might hit 600, so I guess you can call it Z7 but I would just call it Max Sprint, whatever that happens to be.
Interestingly, and I haven't tried this yet because I'm not back in proper training, but my coach - who's quite well connected to Sky and British Cycling pro training - was saying the latest zone thinking was that it didn't matter where you trained in the zone.
So normally if he gives me a range of 200-250 I would try to be near the top end, but apparently it makes little difference whether I'm at 210 or 245, as long as I'm in the zone. Nice to know - I might need a bit of leeway.
To your other point, yes it's true that a tenth of a w/kg is an appreciable difference. But there's no avoiding the question of who is able to suffer more - that makes up for quite a few watts I reckon, and it's not something I claim to be especially good at to be honest. I train to avoid the pain cave !
@ChrisO
I can't get enough of this kind of talk.... I have an acquaintance who I get to ride with from time to time who receives a paycheck from Cannondale/Garmin. I think I drive him crazy with my questions like this... I'm an engineer, so I'm constantly chewing on numbers, trying to grasp the science of it all. I'm pretty good a short and big efforts. 3 minutes at 135% for example, and be able to repeat it several times in a race. Short 20 minute and below time trials, I have two 1st place, and one 2nd. But a 40k TT, I'm likely not even going to sniff the podium because I can't produce sub 1 hour results.
Be it a fueling, hydration, or absolute power, I'm hoping this winter I've improved on my longer efforts. If I can get closer to 4.2 w/kg, I should be a serious force this season in my region. As long as the place I get a real paycheck from doesn't infuse some upheaval, like a looming relocation... (which by the way puts me within an hour of the 2015 Road World Championship)
@ChrisO
I rather like the term Neuromuscular as a description of Zone 7 efforts - it sounds like you've really done yourself some damage.
I've just started training with power. Indoors rather than on the road and I'm amazed at how much easier it is to really focus things. I'm quite good at rationalising hour long or two hour long interval sessions by telling there are only x number of efforts on which I'll be on the edge and the total time spent in pain is relatively short. Once my simple and shallow part of my brain has accepted that lie, it's quite happy to look at the number on the screen and ensure my legs push hard enough to match it.
I guess that the whole thing of working with our inner chimp rather than fighting it.