Bandido Ride

Each week I have a choice of who to ride with as my group ride. I can either ride with my club or I can ride with my informal club, the Bandidos, who are a group of expatriates living here in France. It generally depends on how the weekend pans out as to who I choose, as the Bandidos ride their long ride on a Saturday and my club rides on a Sunday. This week I fancied the Saturday ride as one of the Bandidos, Jerry is leaving Paris and going back to the U.S. at the end of April, so there won’t be many more opportunites to ride with him.

The weather wasn’t great, but I had my rain jacket with me so I was happy enough. It was the first time I rode up the long hill out of Bougival with the Garmin, and as expected it turned out to be the longest and highest hill of a day of lots of hills! I thought I would be very tired after Thursday’s hill interval session, but I felt pretty good that early in the morning and by the time I arrived in Versailles I reckoned on riding quite well. It was a fivesome today, myself, Jerry, Jochem – the big German who is getting stronger each week, Brian riding one of his THREE carbon fibre Colnagos and Lionel, the indestructible Lionel! We set off under darkening skies along the usual route through the Chevreuse, and it was fun (sort of) to see the total ascent on the GPS continually rising, it wasn’t too long before it had reached 500m! My early morning legs had gone by the third hill, and basically during the course of the day I “lost” every hill to Lionel, I was even struggling to hold off Jochem, I was far from flying, but then I should have expected that after the very hard training weekend. It’s a great route, and the rain never really got going, although the icy wind was a bit of a bother. St.Remy, Dampierre, Aufargis, Les Mesnuls – all the old favourites.

We were going back via Brian’s for coffee (how civilised), so we took a slight detour, and to add a bit of spice I took them on a detour of the detour up the very short 18% climb near Pontchartrain, at last a hill I could win, even if it was only 200m long. Jerry wasn’t best pleased, judging by the expletives he uttered at the top. Jerry was having a bad day on the bike and we kept having to wait a little and shepherd him along, so when we got near to Brian’s, and the other three shot off into the distance, I waited for Jerry and let him slipstream. It’s a long downhill on the main road near to Brian’s, but unfortunately I don’t know the exact turn, so I sped off down the hill and the next thing I know, there is no Jerry and I am near the bottom. I had missed the turn! Well I had a choice, ride back up the hill or ride home. After 3 hours and the rain drizzling and only 15 minutes from my home I chose the later! Although I got lost in St.Germain-en-Laye on the way and ending up riding the wrong way down several one ways to get home.

It was one of those days that needed a hot bath and a cocoa when I got in! Only 91km in just under 3.5 hours, but 1000m of climbing and I was all buty gone. Half of me says I should worry with the 148km La 77 race next weekend, while the other half says its all good training and only to be expected after this weeks hard work on the bike.

Trainer Session

Type: Recovery
Duration: 39 mins

Music: Auf der Maur – Auf der Maur

The Garmin Edge springs to life

Well I carried out a fair bit of research on the malfunctioning HR monitor / strap on the Edge. First I tried the Garmin strap with all my other HR monitors. It didn’t work with any! Then I tried my almost identical Sigma HR strap with all my HR monitors, it worked with all of them except the Garmin. I thought that was curtains. Finally, as a last resort I swapped the batteries around in the two straps. And lo, the Garmin strap and Edge worked! It seems the Garmin strap will only work with the Garmin Edge, which is a bit strange since the Sigma strap works with HR monitors from Sigma (obviously), Polar and Tacx. Nevertheless, I have at last got the HR sorted out. Mind you, its a bit poor for a brand new device to come with a flat battery.

Call me Mr.fairweather

Type: Muscular-Endurance
Duration: 91 minutes

I got up yesterday morning nice and early, thought the weather looked dodgy, but still had a bowl of porridge. By the time I had finished it, it had started raining, so adding that to the wind and the cold I just didn’t fancy the club ride. So I went back to bed and slept till nearly 10am!

Well I had to make up for it, so I got up again, had a coffee and went and rode the hardest trainer session I have on the list. Simply known as T08, it involves a warm-up followed by 25 minutes riding at 80% MHR, then without a break or pause, 20 minutes @ 85% and finishing off with 15 minutes at 90%. It’s a damn hard hours riding, and you know it’s bad if your legs start to go during the first 25 minutes. In fact I felt a little at around 22 minutes, a bit more at 35 minutes, but not much else. I even felt my best during the last very hard 15. Nevertheless, I have ridden a couple of ks further (nominally according to the trainer) in an hour doing this session, so there is still room for improvement, but I’ve never had my legs feeling so good during this session.

Music: A Retrospective of House Vol.4 Disc 2 mixed by Tony de Vit

Two training sessions

Type: Sleep
Duration: 1hr 30mins.

There I was yesterday afternoon, thinking about the training session I had planned for the day. A session described as a Testing session in the Friel book, but I did feel tired. A week of normal life and getting up early was taking its toll, so I thought I would have a little kip first. Well I ended up sleeping for 90 minutes in the middle of the day. And I always say the only thing better than training is sleeping, or put another way the best training session you can do is to sleep for a little while. I certainly felt better afterwards. So that was the first session, 90 minutes of shut eye. And you don’t even need a bike!

Type: Testing
Duration: 50 mins.

The second session was the Testing session, and it was amazing how good I felt on the trainer. I didn’t believe how easy it was so after the warm-up, I recalibrated the trainer, and it still came out with a setting of +1 (resistance slightly high!). So with that I rode the nominal 10km at a heart rate of 160-163 and felt great. Blasting through it in just over 15 minutes, and way quicker than ever before. I’m not sure what relevance to a 160km mountain cyclosportif a 15 minute testing session on the trainer is, but it is reassuring that each month I seem to be riding these testing sessions quicker and quicker.

Music: The Refused – The Shape of Punk to come

Training

The first two rides with the GPS:

Tuesday:  60.8km / 2hrs 12 mins. The Crespieres 60 route. Approx. 600m ascent.
Wednesday: 50.65km / 1hr 46mins. The Maison-Laffites 50 figure of8. Approx. 150m ascent.

Garmin Edge 305HR a review on first impressions

There’s nothing like a new piece of gadgetry equipment to get the bike riding urges going, so as you can imagine I was pretty excited when my Garmin Edge 305 arrived. It comes in a neat little cubic box that promises great things, which when you open it up you find the unit itself, an HR chest strap, a USB cable, 2 bike mounts (one for the crossbar, one for the stem), training center software and the manual.

Setting it up is a synch, though you need 3 hours to charge up the battery before you are up and running, but then before long you have your Edge hooked up to your bike, your user profile entered and are ready to roll. The first thing you notice is the altimeter is very variable, the first day’s ride I set off supposedly at 4m and arrived back at the same spot at 28m, and the second day I set off at -75m and came home to 25m!! I know my house is actually at 33m elevation. One cause for this is that you really need to wait a minute or so for the device to find the satellites, I was a bit too eager to get going and was wondering why my speed stayed down at 0. Patience boy, patience. Nevertheless, the altimeter is very variable, and more of a guide to particular climbs than a perfect reflection of a days riding. The total ascent feature is neat though, so when your legs are getting tired you can look down and hopefully see why. You can even see a graphical view of your days efforts, which is neat.

It gives you lots of info, all you would ever want, and you can choose what to display, I chose, elapsed time, speed, distance, HR, elevation, time (day) and total ascent. Unfortunately, after two rides I am yet to get the HR to work at all. I always have trouble with HR straps, I think because I am so narrow bodied. The strap looks EXACTLY the same as the strap with my Sigma HR which works quite well, so I am going to do some testing on that.

The software was a pain for me as I have French PC and it AUTOMATICALLY defaulted to the French language version, and I couldn’t change it (and I am quite techy). It’s good software though, once you download the free mapsource you get a little (but a bit pathetic) map of your route, and all the data you want, height, speed, incline, and heart rate. Well of course I don’t have heart rate and to be honest the speed and incline stuff is pretty erratic looking, so the best part is the altitude and that’s a bit ropey as I said before. But all your rides are neatly organised in a calendar format. And you can export it to google earth, using a nifty little program called Foreconv. Except, I think its because of the version of training center I am using, it exports ok, but no path appears in Google Earth. More work needed on that too.

I’m not making it sound very good am I? But I imagine these are all teething troubles. I mean its great except the altimeter is a bit dodgy, the heart rate monitor doesn’t work yet, the free map is crap and the export to google earth doesn’t work! Oh and you do still need your speedo if you want to be sure of all your distance data I guess. Well, I am reluctant to lose it so far. The Garmin only ways 88g so for all you weight weenies out there, that’s pretty good. I haven’t tried some of the “ace’ features like setting up a route and then racing yourself against your last ride on that route, or setting up any of the training sessions with intervals and such like. So clearly there is a lot more to come.

I’ll come back when I have some success with the thing!

River ride

Duration: 45 minutes
Distance: 16km
Every couple of weeks or so I like to go for a ride on my 15 year old hybrid bike. I take it down along the path by the river (Seine) and it’s a good recovery style ride. Just for the fun of it. Especially today, as the sun was shining really bright and warm. I was also trying out my new toy; my new Garmin Edge 305 GPS. More in the next post.

Goals for the season

I have made a pact with a cycling friend of mine who we shall call Neil, seeing as that is his name. He has been riding since his teens, has been very good in his time and was a second cat. racer in the UK. You could say as far as any of us amateurs go he has seen and done it all. I being a late starter, have only been riding seriously for about 3 years, since I came to live in France in fact. Nevertheless, Neil always encourages me to believe I might one day be as good as him. Personally I doubt that, but I might come close. Certainly, I like to feel responsible in rekindling his enthusiasm since he came to live in France. Evidenced by the fact that this year he has been training for some bike racing for the first time in 5 years. I think once I started to get close to his level he really thought he needed to do something about it.

So, his goal this year is to win a UFOLEP (a French cycle organisation) race, and to that end he set up a winter training program using the Friel book. His encouragement and the lending to me of his book has helped me to follow a similar program through the winter, with the aim of achieving my goal, which is to get a gold award in a mountain cyclosportif. To achieve such a thing you have to finish approximately 10% behind the winner in terms of time. A much harder than you might think thing to achieve. In fact in the 5 previous cyclosportifs I have ridden I have achieved silver each time. There is also a bronze award for finishing further behind the winner, around 30% I believe.

I am writing this today because Neil rode his first race today. And despite being still some way off his best form managed to finish third! Surely, he will win one during the season, which gives me added incentive and encouragement in my training for my cyclosportifs. The gauntlet if you can call that has been put down!

Trainer Session

Type: Muscular-Endurace, Tempo.
Duration: 1hr 17mins.

I finished off the 3rd week of the Build 1 period with a muscular-endurance session on the trainer. This session is called the Tempo session by Joe Friel, and involves a warm-up followed by 30-90 minutes in zone 3 at a cadence of around 90. Today, I did 20 minutes warm-up, followed by 50 minutes in zone 3, which for me means an HR of around 157. I felt pretty good, although started a little tired. In all it means I have completed each of the three 10 hour weeks in Build 1, so I am pretty pleased. Next week is a light week (5 and a half hours), and I think I deserve it and need it.

Music: Nite-life vol. 1 mixed by Jon Marsh