Training Summary - Week 8

This concludes week 8 of the training plan, 4 more to go. 

I have been mostly mountain biking up to this point. I'm getting bored riding all the same trails, so this week I decided I would mostly ride the road bike, and arranged to do a 100 mile ride with my friend Ron on Saturday. We did the Copper Triangle, a route that goes from Copper Mountain, to Leadville, Minturn, and back to Copper. We extended it by starting and ending in Frisco, which makes it the Copper Lollipop.

The big, and not so good news of the week, is that during the above ride, which was not that long or difficult relative to the other rides I have been doing lately, I developed some significant soreness in my left IT band. The soreness is continuing off the bike, and is the first significant issue I have had with my IT band since I had surgery to correct the problem over 7 years ago. Obviously the timing of this is not good, and I need to make it go away very quickly. I'm starting some IT specific stretches and I'll probably try to get a steroid shot early this week. I'm crossing my fingers.

This coming week is the largest planned training volume of the program at 28 hours, 18 of which will be during a long overnight next weekend. I'm still figuring out where to go. These overnights are difficult to plan because I have to end up back at the car at some point.

Ron, always texting

View heading up Fremont Pass

Bridge near Minturn

Training Summary - Week 7

As I mentioned last time, I was in Orlando most of the week for an important trade show. I was hoping that I would be able to train in the evening either in the hotel exercise room, or at a local 24 hour fitness. Unfortunately with long days working the booth followed by long dinners, I was only able to get a single, one hour workout in on Tuesday evening between 11:00 pm and midnight. Fortunately, most of the weeks training was scheduled for Friday through Sunday.

I flew back to CO on Friday morning. Mickey and Sam met me in Denver for an early Father's Day lunch because Sam was going to be at a mountain bike camp, and I was going to be spending the weekend on a two night training ride.

After lunch I headed to Buena Vista where I planned to start my weekend riding two or three more segments of the Colorado Trail. Nothing was really going right. I couldn't find my iPod, or my bike computer. My rear tire wouldn't hold air, and it took me over an hour to unload my car, pack and get going. I found a bike shop to put more sealant in my rear tire, but it didn't work. I had to keep pumping it up until the next day I finally gave up an put a tube in my tubeless wheel. Saturday morning I checked my spot GPS tracker and noticed that the low battery light was on. I had told Mickey that I would bring spare batteries ( Which I forgot to do ) so that there would be almost no chance that I would lose contact. So I was forced to ride by to Buena Vista to buy batteries, and then drove my car back to the Mt. Princeton parking lot to continue where I left off.

Towards the end of segment 13, I ran into Pete, another rider training for the CTR, who had also finished in 2011.

The CO trail in this area runs along the front of the Collegiate peaks. Looking at the elevation profile, the area doesn't look terribly daunting, but I found the trails difficult. The trails had lots of short steep climbs with loose sand and rock. I spent a lot of time pushing my bike, and getting off and on over and over. I keep doing the math in my head to figure out how long this race is going to take me, and the answer is not good. I'm in the best shape of my life, and I'll be luckyif I can just finish before I have to go back to work.

Relaxing Friday night

Shining my Niterider bike light into a water bottle made for a nice camp light.

Rise and shine in camp 1

Meadow near the end of segment 14

Training Summary - Week 6

I have to admit that after last weekend, as good as it was, I found myself high in fatigue and low in motivation. I started asking myself why I must choose goals for myself that are ridiculously hard, and considered changing my goal to set the world record for most pounds of Cheetos consumed in a single day. OK, enough whining!

The above, combined with a big software release at work, resulted in my first training week where I really missed workouts, and didn't get the hours in. I did finish the week out with a strong weekend, but ended about 5 hours short. Next week I'm in Orlando all week for a trade show, so next week will be even more difficult.

It has been two weeks since I attempted to ride Fall River Road in RMNP. I attempted it again today, and except for a couple of snow fields at the top, it was rideable. So I rode it twice.

The second time, I locked my bike to a very secure, sun bleached road marker pole, and walked the final snow field to the plowed road near the top to the visitor's center. ( Both shown below ) After a snack, I did some obligatory hiking around the soaking wet alpine tundra for an hour or so.

As I headed back past the visitor center towards the snow field, a conscientious park employee pointed out to me that there was a sign that said "No pedestrians or bikes beyond this point". I may have snapped at him a bit when I said "THAT'S THE WAY I CAME UP, AND MY $7000 MOUNTAIN BIKE IS ACROSS THE SNOW FIELD, AND THERE WAS NO SIGN ON THE WAY UP SAYING THAT I CAN'T GO BACK". Apparently my argument was compelling since no park rangers arrived to arrest me.

Alpine Visitor's Center

I walked the final snowfield to the visitor center. The visitor center is just out of view on the other side of the snow field.

Training Summary - Week 5

Last weeks training was the highest volume of the program so far.

The big event of the week was a long overnight during the weekend on the actual Colorado Trail. I wasn't feeling great this week so I deviated from the training plan a little bit, and put in some extra hours on the weekend. I really wanted to go far on the weekend, so this worked out well.

My weekend ride consisted of riding segments 1-3, plus the Bailey detour to Kenosha Pass and back.

In total it was about 135 miles of mountain biking, 17,000 feet of climbing, and almost 17 hours of pedaling. It was difficult, but I wasn't completely at my limit. I recovered quickly. My performance was much improved over last Summer's experiment on the trail. My average speed on Saturday where most of the climbing occurred was 7.7 mph with a fully loaded bike. I stopped less and went further in a single day..

I worked on nutrition and hydration strategies. In particular I set an alert on my computer to sound every 15 minutes to drink and eat, because I tend to zone out and forget until it's too late. This worked well for the water, but I'm going to continue to fine tune what and when I eat. I also tried to take some electrolyte supplements every hour which I did pretty well the first day, but mostly forgot to do the second day.

Clearly, I want to enjoy the scenery and the experience of these long rides, and I do. However, assuming a rider has the fitness to do these rides, the next issue becomes physical and psychological pain management. I always ride with music, but music is more of a background thing. I experimented with listening to books on tape this weekend, and they are very effective at making the time go by faster.

On Saturday while riding segment 3, I rode through a large group of riders resting at a trail junction. Seeing all the gear on my bike someone said "Cool", and then someone else said "I'll see you in Durango". I said "I'll be there", without seeing who was speaking. It was a cool exchange.

At Kenosha Pass I met another lone camper ( David ) who provided me with a beer, a camp fire and some good conversation. It was cold up there, but the sky was clear and the stars were bright. I should know, I woke up about every 20 minutes to look at them. :-)

Below is a map of the course I took.

As always, here are the totals after week 5.

Training Summary - Week 4

This last week was a lower training volume week, to allow for some recovery from the previous three weeks. Monday - Friday was nice and easy, and I think I needed the time off. I wasn't feeling that great. The usual summary is below.

On Sunday, the plan called for high altitude riding combined with a couple hours of hiking to get the legs in shape for the inevitable hike-a-bike sections on the CTR. I decided to ride Fall River Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. The road was not yet open to cars which was why I chose it, but I was hoping the park had done some Spring maintenance on it. Unfortunately at about 10,500 feet the road became unpassable without snow shoes. I climbed the road twice to get in the needed time and then hiked for a couple hours on a nearby trail. It was a beautiful day with lots of great scenery. See video below.

Lighting Systems Part 1

Some night riding will be required if I want to complete the CTR in the shortest possible time. I may not be fit enough to ride all day and ride a significant amount at night, but there may be days where I get a late start, or days when it makes sense to stop due to cold or dangerous weather. So having the option to make up time after dark is very desirable.

I have experience night riding just for the fun of it, and at races like the 24 Hours of Moab. I'm comfortable riding technical single track at night because even the older Niterider lighting systems that I own are extremely bright compared to standard camping headlamps that most people are use to.

However, the CTR creates some challenges for the typical high lumens bike lights. These lights use a lot of power, and therefore have dedicated battery packs that require hours of charging between use. If things are going well, there will be limited opportunities to recharge the batteries during the CTR. One option is to carry extra batteries, but the batteries can be very expensive, and are heavy. Some lights have multiple power settings that allow for up to 6-7 hours of use, but that probably wouldn't be enough to get through the CTR. Also, cold temperatures in the mountains could reduce the battery life.

So my goal is to find a lighting system that is as bright as what I'm currently used to ( roughly 500 lumens ) but that also has a low power option that will provide 15 hours of use or more when the terrain doesn't require as much light, like when climbing. In the past, high end lights typically had a detached battery pack that the rider stored in a pocket or backpack, and a power cord that ran from the battery to the light mounted either on the rider's helmet or handlebars. There now exist excellent lighting systems that package the battery and light into a single package. These tend to be lighter and have no cord to manage, but won't have the lumens or battery life of the external battery systems.

It turns out that these days there are a great many different light manufactures and models. It's not my goal to review all these systems, but you can check out this article on MTBR to browse the various options.

http://reviews.mtbr.com/2013-bike-lights-shootout

There is a lot of information in the above article, but it was difficult to determine which models had lower power modes. I decided to fallback to the incumbents, and go directly to the NiteRider and Light & Motion web sites.

The products that stood out for my needs was the NiteRider Lumina series. These lights are combined lights and batteries, range from 350 - 650 lumens,  have low power options with up to 18 hours of use at 40 lumens, and are quite light ( no pun intended ). These lights have a solid looking handlebar clamping system ( The 650 also includes  helmet mount ) that is much improved over previous handlebar mounts from NiteRider. To top it off, the high end 650 model can be purchased online for $118-$140. Considering that  my last lighting system from NiteRider cost over $400, this light seems to be a bargain. If they pass my field testing, I may just buy an extra and use it as a backup.

I purchased the Lumina 650 online for $104 and although I haven't used it for any technical night rides yet, it looks like it will work out very well. The 40 lumen mode is still very bright and the beam it casts is very good. I'll have a chance to to test it on some of the over night training sessions coming later in the plan. I have not tried using my GoPro at night, so I might try to capture the night riding experience in a video that I'll include in a follow up post.

http://www.niterider.com/lumina-650-2013/

Training Summary - Week 3

This week was an interesting training week. The prior weekend I felt invincible on the bike, climbing with ease. But this week started off difficult. The first workout was road bike climbing  intervals, and I just couldn't get my heart rate up. The second workout was an easy mountain bike ride, and again I couldn't find the power or any skill for that matter. I was putting my foot down everywhere. If this continued, I would start to worry, but I chose to assume that this meant I was training good and hard.

Things turned around on Thursday when I did mountain bike intervals up the Horsetooth tower road. I did 4500-5000 feet of climbing before work. See the nice pictures below.

Pre-sunrise at the marina

Longs peak from the top of Tower Road

Friday I had a short 1 hour recovery road ride planned. I procrastinated throughout the day, and ended up missing the ride in exchange for watching a movie with Mickey. It was worth it.

The weekend training plan consisted of the first overnight to work out gear selection and to start getting accustomed to the extra weight. The plan was for 4 hour Saturday, camp out, and 4 hours on Sunday. Lory State park has six back country camp sites, so I planned to ride Horsetooth Mountain Park, and then head over to Lory and meet up with Mickey and Sam who would backpack in from Lory.

Saturday morning I started getting a stomach ache, which is not something that I'm used to. I started riding about 2:00 pm, and rode every hard ride I could think of including Stout, Herrington, Wathen, West Ridge, Spring Creek, The service road, Mill Creek and Howard. Despite the extra fifteen pounds of gear on the bike, the riding went well. Unfortunately by the time I reached the camp at around 7:00 pm, my stomach was killing me.

It was fairly cold and very windy at this point. This combined with the fact that Mickey and Sam had seen a bear hiking in resulted in both of them being hunkered down in the tent. After resting a bit, we cooked dinner and went to bed. The girls in the tent, and me in my new bivi sack.

By midnight my stomach hurt so bad that I was writhing in pain in my sleeping bag. I thought that I had some strong narcotic pain medicine in my first aid kit to handle situations like this, but when I got up to look they weren't there. I took an aleve with not much hope that it would help, but within an hour I was feeling a lot better and was able to sleep, despite the 30 mile an hour winds.

I felt well enough to ride for 4 hours on Sunday, but didn't feel as strong. I still don't know what caused the issue, and I'm still not feeling that great.

In summary, the week went well. My mileage was low, but I did mostly mountain biking and I did a lot of climbing. The totals for the week show 17643 feet of climbing this, but if I turn on elevation correction in GarminConnect, the total is almost 21000 feet. 

Here are the totals.