Week 1 review Part 2 – Wow I’ve learned alot

Picking up where I left off yesterday –  some more serious cycling stuff. The other major things I have learned this week can be put in 3 categories – climbing, nutrition, and pacing. Let’s start with nutrition.

Nutrition

Twice in the past 10 days, I’ve found myself in a caloric deficit. I am not going to drill too deep into the science of maintaining energy as a 6 day on one day off cyclist – but basically you will burn more calories during your ride than you can comfortably consume. After that – as you start to approach a 1500-2000 calorie deficit, something called bonking happens.

This is bad for two reasons. 1.) you are done for the day. You basically have to bust your ass to go faster than 8mph because your body is simply out of energy to burn. 2.) This actually sets you up for a bad day tomorrow as you now have to replenish calories up to baseline in your body, then you need to eat enough to get ready for the next day.

If you are burning ~3000 calories just on a ride then another 2500 per day – you need to make up 5500 calories in less then 12 hours. At 500 calories per hour – this is not really possible and you go into the next day at a deficit. This plain sucks. I can’t describe the feeling – but it’s not fun. You basically have to not ride, or ride very little the next day to get back to baseline and to get ready for the ride the day after. So – yea this has happened to me twice. Combined with mad climbing.

Climbing

So let’s say that Rochester, NY where I live has a few “anthills” and that’s about it. You need to ride well over 50 miles to actually get 2-3K elevation, and then – it’s spread out over that distance. Well folks, welcome to the Blue Ridge/Appalachains/Ozarks of VA/KY/MO. Suffice to say that if I climbed more than say… 6000 feet all year, I’d be surprised. Well, week one alone, I climbed over 25,000 feet. This is no joke. Now, these aren’t 5000 foot days over 70 miles, these are proper Tour de France caliber climbs. Turns out climbing 1000 feet in 3.5 miles if fracking hard, especially with a pitch averaging 6-8% (12-14 degrees). Now – not that I didn’t suffer up to the top – I did, but on some days – burning 1000 calories in an hour during the beginning of the ride – they just kicked my ass.

My first and longest climb – up the Blue Ridge Parkway on July 18th, was my longest climb ever in my life. It was 2500 feet up in about 10 miles. Then 2 days ago, I climbed Hayter’s Gap (aptly named) at 1000 feet in 3.5 miles (the climb I mention above) and then yesterday – 2 climbs (700 feet in 2.5 miles) and 600 in 1.5 miles) just took everything out of me. Now – I weigh a few more pounds than I’d like to and every extra pound you need to pull up a mountain means more work – but I honestly think my muscles just need time to repair (hence the day off today) that was proudly earned. I really wish I could do every mile – but man the climbing is unforgiving.

I have to thank my man Dave Bonan who messaged me on Facebook and reminded me to scoop up with my legs while going up hill – this tip single handedly got me up the Blue Ridge parkway and subsequent climbs. Thanks Dave!

Pacing

Let’s wrap up with pacing. So – when riding in Rochester – it’s not really a big deal to power up a “anthill” as you will reach the top in 20-30 seconds on most climbs – way before you get anerobic. Not out here – even on the quick up and downs – I naturally want to burst of these hills with the logic of the faster I’m over it the less I have to be on the uphill. Well – you can’t really do that with a marathon. I have had to learn to force myself to be ok with starting a hill at 6-8 mph and just slowly powering up it. I notice my HR stays down or at least it’s longer til I have to get off my bike for a moment, and I’m generally more successful getting up the mountain.

So a huge thanks to Bruce, Heidi, and my dad – Art, for putting up with my learning curve as I start to get comfortable being in the saddle everyday and behaving the way I should on the road, and with my eating as I start to transition in to an amateur long distance cyclist. Here’s to hoping that this is the first of many multi thousand mile journeys!!!

 

Day 10 – Buckhorn Lake to Berea

By the end of today, we had officially left the mountains of eastern Kentucky. But boy, do I feel like it took something out of me.

We left Buckhorn Lake State Park this morning in the MCC to get back to the route. Upon pulling over to the side of the road to get out, I darn near stepped in poison ivy. It turns out, there’s a LOT of poison ivy on this route. Every time you stop, you have to check to make sure you’re not about to step in poison ivy… or a snake – there are a lot of them around as well.

Today was punishing. It was hot and humid… and there was an incredible amount of vertical. 5.5k’ of vertical in just over 70 miles. And much of that climbing was at 10%+ grades. I was definitely gassed towards the end of the ride.

When I created the GPS route the night before, I had only taken the route to the city line for Berea. It turns out, Berea is actually a large town. Well, there aren’t that many people, but it’s wide. Our hotel is on route, so Heidi took a picture of the map directions and sent them to me so I could navigate in. She’s so awesome 🙂

Also, today was the first day we had to do any real RV specific maintenance. The “black water” tank was almost full. For those that don’t know what black water is in the RV context, that’s the holding tank for the waste from the toilet. Grey water is sink/shower water, in case you were wondering. So we found the local RV park, and for the low low price of $5, we got to empty our tanks. Bobby got to help. He is clearly thrilled.

As a side note, we see a lot of roadkill on the rides. Today the roadkill du jour was turtle. I saw an unbelievable number of dead turtles on the road. I almost racked up one myself on a downhill. I’m happy to have avoided that disaster (for both the turtle and myself)

 

Week 1 Review Part 1 – Wow I’ve learned alot

Well, a little more then one week under the belt, and holy crap – I’ve learned alot about my body, my bike, and climbing hills.

Let’s start out with getting on the road. I’ve finally gotten a routine down that for the most part I’m ready with in 5-10 minutes of when I say I will be. Being packed in the car and on the bike before 7am isn’t easy. Now that the Stanley Cup Playoffs are over, this should be a bit easier as I’m trying to get to bed by 10pm each night. (Not my style.) I’m considering shipping some stuff back home, as I’m a chronic over packer (the Potters have already shipped stuff home.

Next up – electronics. I can’t even begin to describe how grateful I am that I bought a Garmin 810 a month ago. (Learn all about it here.) First – I’ve never had turn by turn directions for riding before. I’ve always tried using my iPhone and gone as far as buying the full Wahoo suite of products (iPhone mount & ANT+ sensor + external battery.) This ended up being fail for a few reasons – one big one was that one of my gmail accounts requires a phone password and while – yea it’s a pretty good idea – if your phone locks while you are riding entering a PIN to see your speed/stats/etc is kinda lame. In addition – when going on long-ish rides – say 40 miles – I start to battle the battery gods. Between GPS, grabbing sensor data once per second, and just normal activity (incoming email, and whatever else an iPhone does to suck down your battery) I’d be down to like 30% half way through my ride. The only solution I found that saved my battery was to turn off cell service – but what good is that. Anyhoo – the Garmin has been brilliant once I got the Lower 49 states maps loaded (more on that in a bit). So – turn by turn directions – brilliant! Bruce maps out the ride the night before – emails me a GPX file, I load it and off we go. If we run into a problem with a confusing turn or anything – we have full maps right on us, as well as auto re-routing to get us back on route. Finally – after a 70 mile ride I still had 56% battery left. The only thing this thing doesn’t do is tell me the weather – we’ll it does if I let it pair to my phone via bluetooth – but I’d rather have a charged phone in case I need it than the weather as we check it pretty often.

OK – so there are 2 ways to buy maps for your Garmin 810. The easy way (which Bruce did) is to buy the SDCard with the required maps preloaded at Performance Bike or REI, plug it in and you are done. Well since I don’t have either of those around – and I bought my Garmin very shortly before my trip, I chose the download route. So for $59.99 you insert a SDCard in your Garmin, then you download it and you are done. Turns out – this is kinda true – you just have to wait like – overnight… I had to start the download, configure my laptop not to go to sleep, and wait overnight. They finally updated (after like 5 tries – even one with Windows) and I had the maps.

Also – between Bruce and I – we are seeing some elevation differences of about 10-15 percent. I need to look into if I need to calibrate mine or something.

In Part 2 of this post – I’ll talk about what I’ve learned regarding Nutrition, Climbing and Pacing myself.

Day 9 – Lookout to….Hazard?

Some days go how you plan them. Then there’s today. But variety is the spice of life… or something

Apparently Pikeville KY is an amazing civil engineering feat. No, I don’t me how epic the DQ is (tho I highly recommend a late night DQ run after a long ride). The road that cuts through Pikeville is one of the largest civil engineering projects in the western hemisphere. I’m not sure where all these roads went before the cut-through, but now they go through pretty amazing man-made landscapes.

JP got a bit of a jump on me today. Since we were staying off route, we had to drive to the start location. Rather than get the boys up super early just to be stuck in the MCC, Heidi and I let them sleep in a bit (6:45! gasp!) while JP and Art left the hotel about 7. JP snapped this photo in the morning fog of a particularly bike friendly IGA.

There were two pretty serious climbs early in the ride (1k’ and 800′ respectively) that had some serious grade to them. I caught up with JP at the bottom of the second climb and we continued on the route together. After about 8 miles, it was pretty obvious JP was gassed from the previous 2 days’ climbs. JP has really been kicking ass on the climbs, especially considering he normally trains in the flatlands around Lake Ontario. However all that ass kicking came at a price. His legs were spent. He hooked a ride and I pushed on through the hills.

Heidi had more practical plans for the day. After the first few days, we realized we had all packed too many clothes (and we only allowed for about six days of clothing plus swimsuits, etc to begin with, so this was a bit of a surprise). We all sorted through our bags and chose some clothes to send back home. Today, Heidi stopped at one of the PO’s along the route and got 2 small boxes of stuff we don’t need sent back to Maryland. While we still have the same number of bags, they’re not nearly as full which makes packing them away in the MCC much easier.

About 55 miles in to the ride, we found that the route out of Dwarf, KY was closed due to construction. Heidi was a few miles in front of me in the MCC and she started working her way through the detour and attempting to get on route. I followed behind and eventually we found ourselves pretty far off route and headed in towards Hazard. While Hazard is (basically) on route, I had burned a fair bit just getting there because of the detour. I called Hazard “good enough” and jumped in the MCC for the ride to the hotel.

We’re once again staying off route… there aren’t a lot of hotels in this part of the state. But tonight rather than staying at a mass market hotel, we’re staying at the Buckhorn Lake State Park Resort. It’s a hotel and resort run by the state of Kentucky. Beautiful views from each room, great food, and lots to do. Dax even got to play mini-golf. He was shockingly good.

 

Tomorrow we ride to Berea, KY, the end point of the second ACA map for this ride. JP’s legs are pretty nuked so he’s going to take tomorrow as a rest day. It’s 77 miles and a fair bit of climbing but I hope to have us in to the hotel in the early afternoon. We’ll see how it goes.