Videos and Boring, Pseudo-scientific Logorrhea

Blogger has a sweet new function where they allow you to add pages to your blog. I got all kinds of excited and decided to add a page before I had anything good to put there. I am now the proud owner of a "videos" page, the only problem being that the only videos I could come up with are a couple from some the testing I did with my coach Judd Van Sickle the other day. Hopefully in the future that page will feature videos of the Yahoo! Cycling Team crushing some sprints or me doing no handed backflips on my Fuji, but for now its just these two boring videos. They do, however provide me with a decent segue into a post about testing and training.

There is a constantly raging battle over what the best way to train is. It seems like in this day and age we'd have a pretty good idea of what to do to become a fast cyclist, but the knowledge is constantly evolving and its only ever as good as the last study. Throw into the mix the fact that a lot of coaches and directors are champions of old, still convinced that the way they did things 20 or 30 years ago is best. On top of that you have a great debate between people who are fired up about incorporating the newest studies and technology, and those who think all the numbers stuff is so much B.S. There are some people who refuse to ride with a speedometer while others ride along with their noses glued to their power meters, sticking perfectly to their training zones and barely looking at the road let alone the scenery. Its crazy because there is no consensus and you get champions from both ends of the spectrum.

I've always found myself somewhere in the middle, though I'm starting to lean a bit more towards the scientific end of things. Part of it is that when you first start riding and racing regularly you see huge gains in fitness just from spending time on the bike. After a few less structured seasons I think I'm at the point where if I want to see significant gains I'm going to have to be more meticulous about my training. With that in mind I went up to do some testing with Judd.

I'm extremely lucky to have Judd as a coach. He's a bright guy who knows his stuff backwards and forwards, we get along well and he has access to some really cool toys up at UC Davis Sports Medicine. I'll run through the testing protocols, but first I'd like to give a little background on what we were doing. Scientists forgive me, but I'm going to try to make this as simple as possible and hopefully not embarrass myself in the process.

The body has a few different energy sources and it draws on them in different ratios depending on how hard you're exercising. At a low intensity your body is mostly burning fat stores in the body and as the exercise gets more intense muscles start burning carbohydrates stored as glycogen. A byproduct of burning glycogen is lactic acid which builds up in your blood. Your body can buffer a certain amount of lactic acid, but at some point your body can't flush it quickly enough and it begins to build up. When too much accumulates it becomes really, really hard to maintain the level of intensity. One can then do a test where the rider exercises at gradually increasing intensities and blood is sampled for lactate levels along the way. By doing this you can plot at what wattage (how hard the rider is pushing on the pedals) and heart rate the lactate is no longer being flushed properly (that point is called OBLA, which stands for onset of blood lactate accumulation). From this you can derive training zones.

So that's what Judd had me doing. I rode over to his lab about an hour away in Sacramento where he weighed me, did a skin fold test to determine body fat percentage and then he set me up on a computrainer. A computrainer is like a regular wind trainer except it allows the tester to set a specific wattage. No matter how quickly or slowly the rider pedals, and no matter the gear the computrainer will adjust the resistance so the rider is always pushing the specified watts. We started at a low wattage and then upped it by a percentage every ten minutes, all the while testing my blood for lactate levels every three minutes from a small cut in my ear. You can see him do this in the video. Judd was also testing my VO2 efficiency during this lactate test. The crazy mask I'm wearing during the video was only on for the last three minutes of each ten minute block, but it pipes my breath into a machine that measures the volume of breath and the ratio of oxygen to CO2. In the end we couldn't even use the VO2 numbers because the intern didn't calibrate the machine properly. Oh well, not as bad as when the same intern messed up a skin fold test and almost told a pro triathlete that he was fat. That would not have been pretty.

So whats the point of flogging yourself on a computrainer while someone cuts open your ear to steal your blood? Well, with the information you glean from the testing you can specify your training so as to get the best results from your hard work. You get a great picture of what your training zones are by wattage and heart rate. For example, if you're out riding and you're trying to work on your endurance then there's a specific zone where you train the physiological systems associated with endurance riding, and its actually a pretty small window. Go too easy and you're not really getting a good endurance workout. Go too hard and you're not working on endurance at all and worse, you're making yourself too tired to finish the effort or recover well.

Beyond dialing in your training zones the other great thing about lactate testing is that the results will change over time. Now that we know where I stand and what kind of training I need to do we can come back in 6 weeks, retest, and hopefully see some marked improvement.

Okay, I know that was a long-winded yet decidedly poor explanation of lactate testing, but hopefully it gives someone somewhere a bit of info on another side of cycling beyond just pedaling a bike around all day. If you are interested in exercise physiology and by some minor miracle you've read this far I highly recommend you go check out The Science of Sport blog. Its written by two bright young PhDs and they have great, informative posts on cycling and whole lot more. Also, I've been doing some reading recently on training, especially with power and for anyone who wants a professional view on all of that I'd point you towards these books: "The Cyclists Training Bible" and "Training and Racing with a Power Meter".

I hope that wasn't too dull for everyone. I'm thinking I'll try a bit harder in the future, but remember: no one is making you read this.