Orny's Cycling Journal

Here’s another rule of thumb I’ve developed for endurance cyclists: if you have to use your brake, you’re doing it wrong. That might sound a little silly, but it’s good science.

The only way that a bike moves is through the rider producing the force to propel it. You invest a lot of muscle energy to get the bike up to speed, and then its momentum allows you to keep it rolling along while expending just a little bit more muscle energy. When you stop pedaling and coast, the bike gradually loses momentum and will eventually come to a stop. On an ideal ride, you would only have to produce enough energy for the bike to just make it to your destination.

Since we don’t live in an ideal world, there are times when we need to use our brakes and come to a stop. For the endurance cyclist, stopping and starting is a really expensive operation.

First, the stop. For most stops, a rider uses the bike’s brake, which dissipates the energy built up in the bike’s momentum. That’s momentum that originally came from the rider’s muscle power. When the rider has used more muscle power than needed, he must use the brake to get rid of that excess momentum. Theoretically, he would have been better off expending less energy and coasting to a stop, rather than using too much of his limited muscle power and throwing the excess inertia away.

If you’re just out for a ride around the neighborhood, that’s no big deal, because you’ll never exhaust your stored muscle energy. However, if you’re an endurance rider doing a seven- or eight-hour 130-mile race, running out of energy (bonking) is a real possibility, so conserving every calorie of muscle power is critical.

Then comes starting back up again. As I indicated above, getting a bike up to speed is an investment of energy. It’s costly at first because you’re propelling both yourself and the weight of the bike; however, the investment pays off later in being able to use the bike’s momentum to keep it moving with much less effort. But every time you stop, you use an awful lot of your stored muscle energy getting back up to speed, especially when trying to do so quickly.

There are clear lessons here for cyclists. First, avoid stopping overall, because repeated stops and starts can consume a lot of energy. Second, manage your effort and try to ride in a way that doesn’t require much braking. You might even consider use of the brakes as a warning signal, a reminder that you probably expended more effort than absolutely necessary. I.e. if you have to use your brake, you’re doing it wrong.

Now, obviously the real world is a little more complicated than that. Downhills also put energy/momentum into the system that might need to be dissipated, and road design and traffic control placement usually don’t allow bicycles to gradually coast to a stop. Riders obviously need to apply a modicum of wisdom to these concepts.

But I’ve found it useful, especially on long-distance rides, to be very conscious of how much muscle power I use, which includes riding such that I can avoid using the brake as much as possible.

One thing amateur cyclists have in common with pros is that after a certain amount of time spent above your lactate threshold, you crack.

The human body is capable of producing prodigious amounts of power, and can sustain it over surprising lengths of time. But there’s a limit, and although you can’t see it coming, when you surpass that limit, it’s like slamming straight into a brick wall.

Maybe you’re on a fast, hilly group ride and pushing yourself as hard as you can. It’s a constant mental and physical struggle to hold the wheel in front of you. Depending on how fit you are, you can get away with that for twenty, forty, ninety minutes. But at some point your body will decide to shut down. It’s done, and so are you. You’ve cracked.

The drop-off is surprisingly sudden and dramatic. One minute you’re working hard, at 100 percent but just hanging on to the other riders; the next minute, you can barely put any power into the pedals. You watch as your buddies disappear around the bend. It’s not just that you can’t hold their wheels anymore; you’re going backwards, only able to produce about half their speed.

You can try to recover, but no amount of soft-pedaling is going to bring you back across the precipice you fell from. You’ll have enough energy to drag yourself home, but only at a tepid grandma pace. You watch helplessly as you get passed by three year-olds on tricycles, butterflies, and the occasional roadside boulder.

You can see it just as dramatically in the pro peloton. They’re all in a pack, climbing huge mountains as if they were no big thing. A couple serious attacks and then *BAM*! You watch, wondering why one rider who was at the front suddenly and completely fell off the pace.

The problem for both amateurs and pros is that there are few (if any) clues that precede cracking. Every part of your body is already screaming because you’re pushing your absolute limit, but there’s no gauge showing how long you can sustain that effort; no “Check Engine” light to tell you that you’re on the verge of a blow-up.

There are only two things you can do to avoid cracking, and they’re both painful as hell. First, ride so hard that you crack often, and try to learn how to estimate when it’ll happen, so that you can hopefully back off before you’ve spent too much time at maximum output. And second, train like hell, so that your body can sustain redlining for increasingly longer times.

Suffering and cracking were the primary topic of one of my classic blogposts, a book review from twelve years ago, citing really eloquent passages from experienced riders Tim Krabbé, Lance somebody, and Paul Fournel. It’s titled “Be sure to really suffer out there!”

As my cycling mentor Bobby Mac always said: you can go fast, or you can go long, but you can’t go fast for long.

I’ve mentioned a couple times that this year I planned to visit a massage therapist after my big rides, to evaluate whether professional massage provided any discernible benefit in terms of recovery, flexibility, and muscle tightness. Now, with my season unexpectedly cut short, I guess I have the time to summarize my experience.

I had five sessions (sort of). The first one didn’t really count, as it was early season and I hadn’t ridden in several weeks. It was more just an expectation-setting and get-to-know-you session.

My first real post-ride session was three days after the hot & hard Tour d’Essex County. The result wasn’t very positive. Despite my primary interest in leg work, the masseur worked my upper body a lot, and not gently. I left with new pains in my chest, bicep, lower back, and groin, along with some unexpected bruising.

I think much of the problem was his predominant orientation toward therapeutic massage. His initial focus was on finding structural issues in my upper body and “repairing” them, rather than my explicitly-stated interest in simple muscular recovery and flexibility in my legs and glutes.

My next session was two days after Outriders… or would have been, except the masseur canceled on me. I’d been looking forward to a good workout after the extremely long 130-mile early-season ride, but so much for that!

Two days after the Mt. Washington Century was my next session. By then it was the end of July. That went well; I felt like I got more than my allotted timeslice, and my legs did feel a little looser afterward. But I can’t say it was dramatically different from what I could achieve myself.

My final session was two days after the Pan-Mass Challenge, and that was very similar: a bit more time than I expected, and reasonably good (but not dramatic) results.

Then of course after the accident there haven’t been any long rides, so I haven’t been back.

So my overall experience was mixed. While it was pleasant and somewhat helpful, it certainly didn’t provide a compelling training and recovery benefit beyond the self-massage techniques that I’ve done in previous years.

Judging from my experience at the PMC, I believe that what you get out of massage can vary very widely from MT to MT, so maybe that’s part of the equation, too.

Would I continue doing it? Sure… except for the expense. At $70 to $100 a pop, that’s a lot of cash to pay for a small benefit, especially if it’s coming out of pocket rather than covered by insurance. I’m glad I tried it, but I can’t justify the expense.

I certainly will put renewed emphasis on self-massage after rides, because I have certainly seen the benefit of postride massage. I’m just not convinced that that it’s worth paying someone else to provide that service.

Or maybe I should find a new romantic interest who might be willing to help… Nah!

Some interesting stuff that shouldn’t wait for the release of my 2011 PMC ride report.

First and most importantly is that the PMC home page features a photo of me putting the hammer down during last weekend’s Pan-Mass Challenge. I was absolutely floored, because in a field of 5,200 riders it’s rare enough to have one’s picture taken, much less selected for inclusion in the post-ride photo montage!

On top of that, there are so many things about that photo that blow me away. It’s actually a good picture of me, wearing this year’s event jersey. And the jersey’s properly zipped up, a pro move that I teased my buddy Noah about a couple weeks ago. It’s a picture of intensity, with a pained grimace on the guy behind me. I’m down in the drops, leading a paceline, both of which are somewhat rare events. I didn’t even think I’d seen any event photographers on the course! If you look carefully, you’ll notice that it’s the biggest photo in the whole collage, and I’m given more prominent placement and a larger picture than Lance Armstrong and Senator John Kerry! And damn if I don’t have nice legs, too!

So yeah, when my buddy Dave Long pointed that out, I pretty much flipped my shit. Huge moment of pride, excitement, and amusement. Hopefully I’ll be able to obtain the original.

Next items are a couple of new purchases.

The first is a replacement rim for my rear wheel. Two days before the PMC, I found cracks in the rim of the Ksyrium SL that I run. So at the last second, I went to Back Bay Bikes and one of the mechanics let me borrow one of his (personal) wheels to ride the PMC with. I guess that deserves a paragraph in and of itself.

But a few days ago I got my rebuilt Ksyrium back. You might remember that I had a warranty replacement of that wheel two years ago. While they would have done a second replacement, the wheel was two months out of warranty, so I had to foot the bill to repair it. But now she’s back and hopefully will last. I wish I knew why I’m so tough on rear wheels, tho; I’ve destroyed two Ultegra and two Ksyrium SL rear wheels.

I also received the new Shimano cycling sandals I’d ordered. I’ve used two identical pairs of sandals since I started riding back in 2000, and I wore them into the ground because they don’t make that model anymore. However, one of them literally fell apart after this year’s Climb to the Clouds, so I ordered a pair of Shimano’s current model: SH-SD66.

Any time you change anything related to the contact points between you and the bike—hands, shoes, or seat—you risk screwing things up. I’ve only taken a couple rides, but so far they feel good. The most noticeable change is that the soles are stiffer, which is good, since I could feel exactly where the cleat was on my old sandals. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that stiffness is permanent or just a factor of the shoes being new, but I’m hopeful enough to retire the old ones and order a second pair to keep in rotation.

Final item is an interesting article about what it takes to be a pro cyclist, and how integral suffering is to cycling, whether one be a pro or just a neighborhood speedster. You might be interested in the whole article, but here are a couple choice citations that resonated with me:

Everything about cycling is contained in that gesture, including its reigning truism: to race bicycles is to drink greedily from a bottomless chalice of agony. The sport and its heroes are only knowable, and then just barely, once you come to understand that suffering is cycling’s currency. And what that currency buys is the occasional—the very, very occasional—moment of exquisite glory.

The first thing you notice about professional cyclists is that, with few exceptions, they appear to live their internal lives in a heavily padlocked tomb of mental anguish. They are at once astonishingly young and improbably ancient, a result of the fact that they are paid for their agony. They are modern-day ascetics, working in the open-air monastery of the mountains of Europe, with helmets as tonsures, spandex as robes.

There is thus a detachment in their manner that suggests the real world—our world—exists to them only as storybook legend, trapped as they are in another realm, with no corollaries, no points of contact, no common ground. They experience their lives through the tiny aperture of cycling; the aperture is so small because the light is so fierce. They have felt and done things on the farthest shore of the possible.

The reward for being the best isn’t that one takes *less* pain; rather that one is able to absorb *more*. The nature of this process is revealed at the precise instant that we come to know ourselves completely: we learn how far we can push ourselves, and the true mettle of our character. But that knowledge isn’t properly intelligible, nor is it transferable. To mangle Laurie Anderson’s aphorism, writing about cycling’s meta-state is like dancing about architecture. It is a private knowledge, forged in pain’s stables, and belongs to men who are not served by articulating it.

There’s no outward sign that [the cyclist] is one of the best athletes on earth. If you came across him shopping for a Billy bookcase at IKEA, you’d assume he had just returned from an island survival challenge, which he lost. Badly.

Over the past few months, I’ve been re-reading my back catalog of cycling magazines, pulling out points that I thought were worth remembering and/or sharing. Here in part four is a collection of hard-won cycling techniques.

In training, either go easy or go hard, but don’t spend all your time at a moderate effort like 10 BPM below your lactate threshold. While this is exactly the pace most group rides travel, you’ll wind up incurring fatigue without stressing your body enough to cause it to adapt and improve. Emphasize quality in your training sessions, not quantity.

When riding in a group, try to stay in the front half of the pack, because riders at the back expend more energy by getting whipsawed during braking, turns, and accelerations.

People habitually breathe very shallowly, using only 10-15 percent of their lung capacity. Train yourself to breathe deeply to more effectively power your muscles. On the bike, concentrate on full exhalations, because it’s more important to get rid of waste carbon dioxide than to take up excess oxygen.

As you approach a climb (or a sprint), take a dozen big, deep breaths to flush all the carbon dioxide out of your system. Also, most riders’ heart rates go up unnecessarily at the mere thought of a hill, so work on mentally relaxing and welcoming such efforts, and your heart rate will not spike as readily.

At the start of a climb, be sure to ask the people you are riding with questions which require them to give extended answers. While they’re busy talking and panting, you’ll be breathing normally and dropping them.

When climbing, pull up on the handlebar with same hand as the foot you are using on the downstroke. That is, pull up with your right hand to give you more power while you drive your right foot downward.

On descents, beyond a certain speed (around 28 mph) pedaling actually doesn’t provide a lot more forward momentum (maybe 5 mph max). It’s probably more efficient to get into your tuck and use the time to rest and recover from your climbing effort.

Coasting descents are your best opportunity to relieve a weary butt by raising yourself slightly out of the saddle.

Aerodynamically, it’s important to keep your knees and elbows turned inward or inline, rather than splayed out, where they catch a lot of wind and function like air brakes.

Counterintuitively, having your head very low, with your chin near your bars, isn’t an aerodynamically optimal position. It actually creates more turbulence than if your head is 4-6 inches above the bar. Keep your head still and your back flat and aligned with your head rather than hunched up.

This time of year, five weeks before my annual PMC ride, my reading habits usually turn to cycling titles. Many deal with training, technique, and nutrition—more on that in a subsequent post—but a few address the indescribable essential nature of cycling. Paul Fournel’s “Need for the Bike” and Tim Krabbé’s “The Rider” are two outstanding, enduring classics of that genre. There aren’t many others.

So I was very excited to come across a book called “Open Your Heart with Bicycling” at the BPL the other day. The volume was subtitled “Mastering Life through Love of the Road”, and a pull quote offered the definition, “To become aware of the inspiration that a sport or hobby, such as bicycling, brings to your entire life”. The back cover talked about the author’s years as a Benedictine monk and further time spent at a Buddhist college.

With that kind of a lead-in, I suspected I’d found another example of that rare breed of book that manages to capture that essential experience of cycling, full of the elusive insights that are almost impossible to relate to anyone but another cyclist.

I was misled. “Open Your Heart” would be more appropriately named, “A Very Basic Beginners Overview of Cycling”. It’s really a book for the neophyte, save for the nonsequitorial chapter on how to open your own bike shop. Sadly, there’s more philosophy in a single chapter of Fournel or Krabbé than can be found in the entirety of “Open Your Heart”.

So why am I writing about it? Well, there are three points I want to make/save/share from the exercise.

The first is confirmation of my theory that the “runner’s high” is extreme glycogen depletion and the resulting impaired brain function. I first articulated this idea six years ago in this post on my regular blog. Here’s the relevant quote from OYHwB (bolds are mine):

I have to eat; there is no question that I must eat after a long ride. […] I am perfectly content eating alone, particularly when my blood sugar is low as a result of very strenuous exercise. I am a grouch when I have not eaten properly. I eat what is necessary to stabilize and improve my disposition and only then am I allowed to be with other people! I have made more verbal blunders in this condition than I have ever made while drinking.

I think that illustrates my point very nicely.

The second item of note is the one bit of philosophy that I was able to glean from the book. It derives from the following passage:

But that’s how my real spiritual journey begins: with a world-class bicycle, a dream, and the haunting realization that no matter what the hucksters on television say, not every dream comes true. You can’t have it all, but you *can* have what you truly desire. I needed to learn this lesson, and I discovered the simpler pursuits like cycling gave me exactly what I desired. Not achieving boyhood dreams has been the least of my worries, and the joy that I experience on a daily basis began when I understood that as a young adult.

While the author doesn’t say it, he’s dancing around an interesting truth: that real happiness doesn’t come from fleeting experiences, but from simple things that one can derive joy from every day of one’s life. That could be something simple that is available every day, such as enjoying the sun in a clear blue sky, or the wind in the trees, or one’s favorite companions, or it could be satisfaction derived from a memory one can always revisit, such as helping a friend or donating time or money to humanitarian causes. But the idea is to base one’s sense of joy on things that aren’t transient, that don’t need to be reinforced every few days, weeks, or months.

Finally, the book caused me to reflect on what happens during a long ride. If you asked me what my mind was up to during those six- or eight-hour jaunts, I’d have to admit that it’s not doing much! While some of it might be off pondering things, most of the time I’m fully occupied making the moment-by-moment observations and actions that are required to operate a bike on a public way.

In that sense, it’s very zen: there is no “me” there, there’s just the riding: when riding, just ride. It’s a time when the joys and demands of the road supersede the usual preoccupation with one’s personal storyline; for a while, you forget yourself. Which thought, in turn, got me thinking about a famous passage from Sōtō Zen founder Master Dōgen’s “Genjōkōan”:

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.

Such is the ride.