Crash and Burn... Hard!

Early in my cycling career in the late 80's I bought a cyclocross bike to use for training on the dirt roads around Boise in the winter. As the mountain bike trail system developed in the foothills above town, I ventured onto the single track on the cross bike. Although mountain bikes became popular during this time, I resisted them, continuing to ride the skinny-tired bike on more and more technical terrain. Hell, I was a telemark skier, too. I thought it was cool doing things the hard way.

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The Future is Here

Just as Mark Twight, Steve House, Rolando Gariboti and others ushered in the era of fast and light, single-push alpine mountaineering with mind-blowing repeats and enchainments of routes all over the world, ski touring and ski mountaineering sit at the threshold of a similar breakthrough. Due to the rising popularity of ski mountaineering racing, the industry has responded by engaging in a surge of technological breakthroughs in equipment and materials. These breakthroughs have then trickled down to the more modest touring sector creating a whole new quiver of superlight boots, skis and bindings. This equipment, combined with the skills developed while racing on ridiculously light gear, has created an environment where exceedingly long tours and traverses can be completed in previously unthinkable times.

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Training and Racing Observations - week 4/18 to 4/25

Since most of you are interested in my musings on all things training and racing, I thought I would start a regular post discussing my previous week's efforts both preparing and performing, successes and failures and how I think I got there. Lot's of stuff goes through my head guiding my decisions on volume and intensity for any particular block. Perhaps writing my thought processes here will give others insight that could help their own progress.

I finished the 25 hour, 8-day endurance fest with a long drive over two days. I was not able to get on the bike for either of those days so last Monday and Tuesday were a bust for miles. Wednesday I decided to hit with all guns blazing. My Restwise score was 90 which indicated I was good to go.

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Endurance block comments

I'm back in Jackson after a long two-day drive back from the Mexico border. I did what I set out to accomplish this past week getting 25 hours of bike time in 8 days. For a near 50 year old working stiff, that is a significant chunk of training volume. Attempting to be intelligent about it, I drove home without getting on the bike, effectively getting a two -day recovery. My sensation walking around today is that I am quite recovered. My Restwise score (80) indicates as much. Of course, numbers are great but all I care about is how I will feel in the weight room and on the ride after work today. Time will tell.

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Training Monotony

After discussing over-training in the last couple of posts and introducing readers to the on-line recovery monitoring tool Restwise I thought I would maintain this vein of commentary and talk about training monotony a little further.

The idea of training becoming monotonous is easy to grasp emotionally but it’s important to understand the subtleties of the concept and how they apply to our conditioning program.

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