Lithgow Enduro- Write up

Well last Sunday was the first of the Chocolate Foot Races, using the Lithgow course.
And up until this weekend had a real dislike for the course due to the rutted, rooted nature of the course and the toll it takes on the body. The previous 2 times I have raced an 8hr here I pulled the pin by the half way mark.

So the day began at stupid O' clock (2.00am) for the 3.5hr drive through the back roads to Lithgow. The scene through central Canberra was interesting with all the creatures of the night still out at 2.30am drinking. Here I am steeling myself for a 19hr day drinking black coffee and their still out drinking..... yup there was a small sense of self satisfaction there.

The rest of the drive was uneventful except for the fog around Goulburn which slowed the driving for about 1/2hr due to the limited visibility. I rolled into Lithgow just before 6ish, topped the car up with gas and then off to Macca's for another coffee and read the newspaper for 1/2 an hours before heading out to the course.

Driving into the start area, I pick a spot and start unloading the bike and setting my little table up. I line up 8 750 bottles for the 8hrs and throw one in the bike.
I set out 3 gel flasks with a mixture of Hammer Gel (vanilla and raspberry which is my new favourite) and Leppin shots.

I then sit in the car chilling before getting changed and heading over to the pre-race briefing. Once this is out of the way everyone heads off in the general direction of the start. I line up about 4 rows back and were off.

From my hit out the day before, I know how sore my ribs still are and just take it easy for the first portion. I'm quite happy swinging over on the fire roads and letting people through where they want.

At this point 3 riders I recognise get in front of me and I have a bit of a marker to chase, Dreggsy Grantly Butterfield and Kevin Wells.

After the first lap the results show I came through in 10th place, thought I had no idea where I was in the field. The time was about 34.30 I was feeling comfortable so just aimed to about that pace for as long as I could. On the next lap I got in front of Kev on one of the fire roads before he came screaming up on the next section of single track. At this point I had alot of pain in the ribs and to hear "Dave, get off the brakes!" as I'm standing trying to cushion all the vibration to them didn't go down well.

I over the next 3 laps I worked my way up into 5th place before stabilising there for the rest of the race. I was losing about 3 minutes a lap to 4th (not that I has any idea) but my lap times were consistent up until about the 1/2 way mark at 4hrs.

Here the times started blowing out to the 40min mark, they remained here right up until the last lap where I threw down a 38.5min lap. At about the 6hr mark I started playing mental math games to keep me amused to work out how many laps I had left, then started counting them down.

By this stage the body was sore, and hands had blisters from gripping and bracing the bars on all the downhills so I was glad at the end of the day to cross the line in about 8.15hr for 13 laps.

Analysis



Overall I was happiest about the pacing I managed for the race with a quickest lap of 34.5min and a slowest of 41.3mins. The race generated a whooping 560TSS with over just on 5000cals burnt. The quadrant analysis shows just how steep and punchy the climbs were in places with alot of time spent in quadrant II.



On another note I decided after the race I'm getting ride of XTR cranks. The entire race I never touched the dog. I spent the entire time in either the 22 or 32. The problem with this was the number of ratios that were unusable due to cross chaining, So I've decided to go to a double up front with a 27/40. I've order a FSA afterburner 386 crank as a trial. This will give me most of the gears I had previously with the triple but I should loose alot of the overlap.

I have a double on the hardtail with a 29/40 and gripshift for the front derailleur. This works really well as I can get all the gears with no rub at all.

But time will tell if it's going to work.

The Secret Herbs + Spices

No I'm not going to talk about KFC.... though they do have this back on the menu



As I mentioned here, Dr Cogan is back in the lab re-designed the TSS metric from the ground up.

Today he released another teaser,



Blue points are from structured or unstructured workouts at levels 2-5. Red points are from races and from level 6-7 training sessions. TSS was modeled after Banister's TRIMP, and attempts to express power data in terms of the stress that is applied. The new score, OTOH, was designed from the "ground up" based on first principles as a predictor of training-induced improvements in performance.

What this seems to be showing is that some things (crits, circuit races, L6/L7) are in fact NOT as good training as others given the same amount of training stress. That is, 1 extra point of TSS in L6/L7/Crits only gives a 0.46 extra boost in the new performance index, whereas 1 extra point of TSS in L2-L5 training/TTs/ road races gives a 0.76 boost in the new performance index.


I guess the obvious question becomes: is the new performance index intentionally biased toward adaptations that increase FTP (as opposed to, say, strength or Anaerobic Capacity)? Is it trying to measure more directly how much impact your training/races contribute toward improving FTP.....

Fitz v AAC250

Now that the AAC250 has been done and dusted, debate has started as to whether this is harder then the shorter 200km version and how it compares to our very own Fitz's Epic.
Firstly I haven't ridden the 200km version of the Audux Alpine Challenge so I will be doing a comparsion with Fitz Epic which I have ridden the last 2 years.

Fitz Epic



The Fitz Epic is an Audux ride here in Canberra around the base of the Brindabella mountain range taking in a number of major climbs. These are Fitz's Hill, Apollo Rd, and Corrin Rd. These climbs range in length from a mere 4km for Fitz's Hill to 12km for Corrin Rd.

The rest of the course os characterised by open rolling roads with shorter steeper climbs in the region of 300-600m.

The temperature at the time of year that is run is normally in the mid to high 20's and this normally accompanied with wind later in the day.

The check points are not of the quality of the AAC, but this due the smaller nature of the event and also that they are situated in the middle of no-where with no buildings, electricity, running water.

ACC250

My report from the ride is located here so I won't reiterate too much of it.

The AAC250 is an Audux ride starting from Bright and traversing through the Victorian mountain range taking in a number of major climbs. These are Mt Hotham, Falls Creek, and Towanga Gap. These climbs range in length from a meer 7km for Towanga Gap to close to 30km for Mt Hotham.

The rest of the course os characterised by a mixture of open roads with some shorter climbs in the region of 1-2km.

There are also three significant descents the First from Omeo, the second from Falls Creek and the final descent from Towanga Gap to the finish.

The temperature was in the high 20's little to no wind to speak of

The check points were some of the best I have seen with good facilities and plenty of food and water.


Multi-File Analysis

When version 3.0 of WKo was released I briefly mentioned the multi-file analysis feature of the software. What this allows is a comparsion between multiple rides on the same or similar courses (Yes, JD this would be perfect for your 100's of testing laps around Majura!).

The results once the files are combined is firstly a graphical plot with key metrics listed underneath for easy reference. The second result is a combined quadrant analysis plot of the files.


Graphical Plot of Fitz's v AAC250


Quadrant Analysis of Fitz's v AAC250

Conclusions

First up are the basic numbers,

AAC250
time: 8:42hr
work; 6048kJ
TSS 560
IF 0.81
VI 1.29
Normalised Power: 249w
Average Power: 193w
Average Speed: 27.9kph

Fitz Epic
time: 7:34hr
work; 5624kJ
TSS 543
IF 0.851
VI 1.29
Normalised Power: 267w
Average Power: 206w
Average Speed: 27.6kph

So we can see straight away that I had both a higher average and normalised power for Fitz than the AAC250. The VI of 1.29 indicates that there was a reasonable amount of coasting for both rides despite Fitz's having significantly less downhill.

On examination of quadrant analysis the % time spent in the 4 quadrants is roughly the same (within 3-5%). What is interesting is when the outliers are examined, the majority for quadrant II (high force/ low cadence) are from the Fitz's ride, and the for quadrant I (high force/ high cadence) from the AAC250 ride.
This shows that the climbing for Fitz's entailed a higher amount of low cadence/ high force climbing than the AAC250.
I would suggest that this is a result of the number of rolling hills and Fitz's Hill it's self.

In summary from this data I would conclude that Fitz's Epic is a "harder" ride to complete physically than the AAC250

MTB Quadrant Analysis

So continuing on from yesterday, today I have posted up a quadrant plot from a MTB ride. What we will do is compare it to yesterday's road ride.


- The general shape of the plot (a tight elipse, but there are alot of seemingly random outliers)
- The direction of the shape (low right to top left, but the major axis is steeper than yesterday and closer to the my self selected average cadence)
- Where the outliers are sitting (Again the majority are Quadrant 2- High force, low cadence)
- What the percentages are in each quadrant (This is very important, note the amount of time spent in quadrant 1)

Tomorrow I will post up what I have gleened so far from usin this tool.
Feel free to post up questions if you have any.

'Cause I am smarter then your average bear

Just to prove I actually do something with all the power data I have.
This is the quadrant plot from the road ride I did today.
So what is it?
Quadrant Analysis is a way to measure the neuromuscular power demands of cycling. Taken from the book, "Training and Racing with a Power Meter by Hunter Allen and Dr. Andrew R. Coggan, "Tools such as Normalized Power, Intensity Factor, and Training Stress Score explicitly recognize the seemingly stochastic nature of cycling power output and help coaches and athletes better understand the actual physiological demands of a given race or workout.

Neuromuscular What? “Neuromuscular function” may sound complicated, but it simply means how fast you can contract a muscle, how strongly you can contract it, and how long you can contract it before relaxing it again.

Each quadrant represents a different combination of force(how hard you push on the pedals) and pedaling velocity(how fast you push on the pedals).
QI: High Force and High Cadence- An example of this would be sprinting.

QII: High Force and Low Cadence- An example would be steep hill repeats, big gear intervals and a lot of Mt. Biking resides in QII as well.

QIII: Low Force and Low Cadence- An example would be a recovery ride or just an easy ride around town.

QIV: Low Force and High Cadence- An example would be a Criterium or fast pedaling drills.


I have highlighted some key areas to look at when reading one of these plots.

These are,
- The general shape of the plot (a tight elipse)
- The direction of the shape (low right to top left)
- Where the outliers are sitting (Quadrant 2- High force, low cadence)
- What the percentages are in each quadrant

So this is what a road training flie looks like. Tomorrow I will post up a MTB ride to highlight a number of points.

Don't Bring a knife to a gunfight (Part II)

WWS Race 1 Lithgow

Interesting ain't it?
So what's the tale of the tape? Heart rate was smack bang on threshold level for the 3hrs. You can see that the first lap was more intense with higher and larger spikes (to be expected). The other trend that can be seen is there is a gradual decline in HR, it's a bit hard to see using the polar software but its there.

Cadence, well the pedals went round with an average of 87rpm.

Climbing? 1200 metres....yum yum