Anyone seen my form???

No seriously. I'm thinking about taking out one of those milk carton ads because it was no where to be found this last weekend at the Elkhorn Classic stage race. And, man, did it suck ass! I'm just not used to riding that poorly. I mean, I've had an "off" day or two over the years but nothing like this. Honestly, I was not expecting to be great. I'm one month out from hitting my rib cage against a cement wall at the end of a criterium and separating a couple or rib cartilages. I followed that up with a nasty cold and bronchitis. Lot's of pus coming out of my lungs for a couple of weeks and a seriously impaired ability to cough. For better or worse, I trained through it and was feeling fairly fit on the other end. I tried not to do too much the week before and felt good riding to the line Friday afternoon.

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Hard-Wired to Compete

This post was inspired by a recent experience I had at a local athletic event. It covers territory well-traveled by psychologists and anthropologists way smarter than me. However, the experience affected me enough to want to document it here with some musings on the topic. Mostly preaching to the choir, I imagine, but fun to think about nonetheless.

Two weekends ago I participated in a local fund-raising event, the Skinny Skis Run and Ride. This is a 5 km run followed by a 15 km bike ride done either solo or as a team. After hitting a cement planter box and injuring some ribs during a criterium a couple of weeks prior, I was not going to race. I had looked around for a fast runner initially but after getting hurt I stopped looking. Seemed like all the fast runners were already spoken for by other cyclists, anyway. As a local cycling team, we decided that some level of participation in home events should be maintained for appropriate sponsor exposure. I felt a little bad not doing my part. 

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Feeding the Machine - Navigating the Maize

In an effort to make these sub-topic posts on nutrition more digestible (ahem, sorry for that), I want to break them down sufficiently enough so that your interest does not wane in the middle of reading one. Any post about carbs and sports could get out of control long if I'm not careful. 

From a performance standpoint, I don't think anyone will argue the fact that we need to ingest carbohydrate to continue to train and race in endurance activities. We've covered this before in these pages. Let's recap the salient points as a segue to this post's topic. First of all, training and racing is supported primarily by glycogen which is stored in a limited capacity in the liver and muscle cells. At race intensity, we can last between 90 and 120 minutes before this supply is exhausted. By ingesting carbohydrate (which is converted to glycogen) during exercise we can stave off exhaustion almost indefinitely. We seem to be able to process about 300 kcal/hour. Yes, I know, fat is part of this energy equation, too, but I want to keep things simple here for the sake of discussion. Some athletes use fat for energy better than others but glycogen and, thus, glucose is still the main player for most of us. Bottom line is carbs are are both good and necessary for athletes.

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Feeding the Machine

This is an introductory post to what I foresee as a series of more specific articles dealing with aspects of diet and performance nutrition. I will cover topics as diverse as the myth of the dangers of cholesterol, the pitfalls of meatless eating, benefits of fatty acid supplementation (think fish oil here), Paleo and Zone Diets, anti-inflammatory eating along with other related topics. I will try to cover topics that readers do not have the time to research or are simply unaware of. I will try and distill the information down to the salient points and how this knowledge can be used in our own programs.

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Don't be a slave

Slave to what, Brian? Funny you should ask. Well, for starters, how about your heart rate monitor? Or your power meter? Perhaps your cog set or your speedometer. Your training program can certainly enslave you. What do I mean? First of all the devices. They give us feedback that tells us something about our performance at any given instant on any ride. We then internalize this information and decide how we're going right then. Is this the usual gear I ride this hill or am I killing it? Why am I going so slow right here? I'm usually pushing 30 watts more on this stretch. God, I can't seem to get my heart rate up. I'm supposed to be doing threshold hill repeats today but my legs feel like shit! Any of this sound familiar?

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