crankarmbreaker

Yes, High Pass Challenge is an excellent ride. I've done it three times and finished at the very end. And the demand is lower for it than RAMROD, so you can actually get in.

Carbonfiberboy 

Yeah, weight loss and more miles/year. Since you ride STP and RR, you must live in the PNW. Around here, your get your mileage up by riding long distances, regularly. Say a 40-60 mile ride every weekend, year 'round. Yeah, buy rain gear. There are only two types of riders in the PNW: the wet and the weak. Cascade has free group rides. Ride them. Misery loves company. If you do a 60 mile ride and two 20 mile training rides during the week, that's 5200 miles/year right there. That's how it's done and all you need. In winter in the PNW I ride a little shorter on the weekends but make up for it with more frequent indoor roller rides and strength training at the gym. Yeah, you have to have a trainer or better, a set of resistance rollers. Spend the money. The payback is immense.

I'm not a talented rider, just well trained, but I rode STP in 11:55 in my late 50s, and RR in 9:30 in my early 60s. Last year I had bib #10 and finished in under 12 hrs, 10:17 in the saddle. (that's ~1:45 stopped, how you get your LD times down.) I was sick, hope to do better this year.

I have a 6'7" riding buddy, also with a custom bike - a Ti bike. It's a full-on road bike with clip-on aerobars and 700c wheels running fast tires. He's a very strong rider, in his 60s, rode the last PBP, probably weighs about 215. We run our tandem - 285 lb. team - on 28mm Conti 4000IIs tires, which measure 32mm on our 23mm rims. That's the sort of tire you want. We don't run latex tubes in them.

You lose weight by being pretty hungry for an hour or so before you eat. That's the bad news. The good news is that as you decrease portion sizes, your body and hunger adapt to them. Weigh yourself every day on an accurate scale and try to lose ~1 lb./week.More that than and you'll be doing an unsustainable diet. Don't diet, just eat less. No soda at all. Little sugar. Look for places you can cut calories and cut them. Eliminate stuff that's not part of a a healthy meal. Throw out any candy, cookies, and soft drinks, even the diet ones. No alcohol. Never have ice cream in the freezer. Eliminate temptation. Accept that it's a long term plan and will take years to get the results you want. It's a long life. Take advantage of that.

Hope to see you on the course this year. Ride the hell out of that bike.

One thing I'd like to mention: a few years ago I was on a group ride in the Park We came up Cayuse Pass from the north side, from the Deli Stop. We took a short break at the pass. As we stood there, a very, very large woman came up from the south side on an MTB, pedaling away. I have to say, I've never felt more respect for a person in my life.

Carbonfiberboy 

SIR

Yeah, ride the WTS! Gets you out there and gets the year off to a good start. We usually ride some of them on our tandem. They're all great routes. I don't know if we will this year or not, since I"m still recovering from being sick. Getting stronger every day, though!

crankarmbreaker

So how much advantage do you get from having narrower tires? I've wanted to go narrower, but going from 26 x 1.5s down to 26 x 1.25s made my destroyed-tire rate go way up, and now I'm back to 26 x 1.5s. I could try again with 1.25s or narrower, but then I'd probably have to be carrying a spare with me on the major rides. Which I might do, if it were worth it... so how much average speed do you gain from something narrow?

TimothyH

Carbonfiberboy 

None. Advantages in rolling resistance come from more supple casings and thinner tread. At your weight, you might even be better off with wider tires. Take a look at the Conti Speed King 2.2:
https://www.continental-tires.com/bi...speed-king-2-2
Though these are heavy tires - almost a pound each, not exactly supple tires. OTOH, they might take care of your durability issue. I'd say that you'd be faster on tires which didn't flat as often. It takes a heckuva effort to take 10 minutes of time out of a route.

Except for durability/reliability, you're not going to get much speed out of lighter or faster equipment. You get speed out of losing weight and getting more aero on the bike. The effort it takes to do those things will automatically make you much faster.

Reality: 18 hours on RR is a in-saddle average speed of ~8.5 mph. Increasing that by even 1 mph will take over an hour and a half off your time. Plain to see that's not going to happen with equipment changes, no matter what they are. I did a quick calculation: losing 60 lbs. might increase your speed on Cayuse pass by ~1 mph. That's a big deal.

crankarmbreaker

I'm ok changing a flat for a thorn in the tube or something like that -- my main concern is a giant hole in the tire itself, rendering the tire unusable, and that's happened several times on major rides. What's a "casing" on a tire? And I'm assuming by thinner tread, you mean fewer grippers for when you wander off to gravel?

RAMROD is a 15-hour ride, of which I'm spending 12 hours in the saddle. I've tried mightily to reduce rest-stop time, but you just have to go No. 2 in the porta-potty, and it's darned near impossible to get enough calories on that ride, (and they don't have much in the way of serious protein) so you really need to take the time to stuff your face.

Carbonfiberboy 

Sorry that I misremembered your ET. My remarks on reducing that time stand.

Tire casing: "The main body of the tire exclusive of the tread , tube, etc." For road tires, you want no tread at all, IOW tires as smooth as a garden hose. They have the best traction on asphalt and concrete, wet or dry, and the lowest rolling resistance. They work OK on hard gravel. Road tire selection is pretty limited in 26". OTOH, tires for your weight are pretty limited in 700c, so I understand the builder's choice of 26". Do try those tires I mentioned before.

I've never had to take a crap on RR. Reduce the fiber in your meals prior to the ride and have coffee a couple hours before the ride. I use a 400 calorie liquid breakfast that day, 3 hours before the ride. I never eat any rest stop food except for a Coke and sandwich at the Deli Stop. You don't need more than ~250 calories/hour on the bike. You don't need any protein or fat at all on a ride that short, only carbs. A little of each is OK, but no more than 10%-15% of calories. Eat on the bike. Carry Clif bars with you. At each stop, open the packaging on maybe 3 bars and put them in your jersey pockets. When you take a bar out, break it into quarters. Eat 1/4 every 15 minutes. For a change, grab something else at a stop and put in a pocket, too. Use a 70 oz. plain Camelbak full of water. Refill at the stop before the park entrance, at Box Canyon, and the Deli Stop. Other than a pee at Eatonville, don't stop anywhere else. There's an hour and a half right there in this paragraph.

An Ortlieb large saddle bag will hold everything you'll need for RR and it's light and waterproof. If you run out of space, put something in one of your empty bottle cages.

crankarmbreaker

Ok, thanks for that advice. Wow, I guess I have a lot to learn about nutrition, cause I read your paragraph on not eating rest stop food as a sure-fire recipe for bonking about four hours in to the thing. I mean, when I do a 92-mile training ride from Seattle to Centralia on not-too-hilly terrain, I have to stop at Puyallup (35 miles), and Spanaway (55 miles) for the equivalent of a full meal's calories, otherwise I get ravenously hungry and can't keep going.

Also, why are you saying you don't need any protein or fat "on a ride that short" in regards to RAMROD? That's kind of confusing. It's 154 miles.

I will go look for wider, lower tread tires. I had not thought about that option before.

Carbonfiberboy 

Warning: I am not a doctor nor a nutritionist. My advice is to see both of those about losing weight. What I know, I've learned from others on this forum and from personal experience.

First of all, read this: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/072...4ea2f823dc.pdf
Then google "lleptin and ghrelin" and read at least the articles on the first page.

None of that may be of any help, but maybe.
My guess is that you are so heavy because of exactly what you are describing: ravenous hunger. Usually this is a result of basically eating too much. Besides ghrelin, I find that hunger comes from low blood sugar. Low blood sugar between normal-sized meals might just be the lack of ability to burn fat.

Cycling can suppress hunger. It just needs a little help. My prescription is to go out on the bike for some time period without eating and without eating beforehand either. Start by trying for an hour's ride. I take a bottle of sports drink with me when I do this, just in case I start to feel woozy. I usually start to feel hungry at ~45' but can ride through that and keep going for 2 or more hours without eating or drinking or being particularly hungry. This is something one has to work up to.

When exercising, on the bike for instance, one burns a mix of carbs and fat along with a comparatively small amount of protein. The idea of the above is to increase the share of fat in that mix. It's completely possible to ride all day, burning almost entirely fat if one keeps the effort down, but you have to train your body to do that.

It's important, both during a ride and after, not to eat too much. Eat slowly and just enough to make the hunger stop, then quit. Train to eat on the bike as I've described above for RR. Like all training, it takes time, but it works. It doesn't have to be only Clif bars, but it does have to be carbs and at about the 250 cal/hr rate, not more, preferably less per hour. Don't get frustrated, just keep trying.

In terms of long distance riding, 154 miles is pretty short. LD riding starts at ~200k and goes up to 1200k. A century is looked upon as an ordinary day ride. As the rides get longer, precise nutrition becomes ever more important.

Carbonfiberboy 

OK, here ya go, something hopeful: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0182801
A bit of a tough read, but not too bad. Basically, overeating is due to leptin resistance. Lowering leptin levels reduces leptin resiistance. Exercise lowers leptin levels, but serious reductions only from extreme aerobic endurance exercise and heavy resistance exercise. Greatest reductions in leptin levels were observed following many weeks of heavy resistance training, greater than from aerobic training.

That all makes sense and correlates with current thought in the cycling and weight training communities. I would hazard a guess that best results vis a vis weight loss and fitness and thus reductions in RR cycling time by:
1) Strength training in a gym 3 times/week, about 1 hour/session, using several sets of various resistance exercises, starting now. After a few weeks of conditioning, weights to be increased sufficiently to cause failure near the end of the last set. I recommend using the strength training approach in Friel's Cyclist's Training Bible. If you've never lifted before, best to hire a PT at the gym to help you get started with each phase of Friel, but don't let her sidetrack you into BS exercise. Lift the weights.

2) Ride as much as possible each week, focusing on rides in hilly terrain. Lay out routes in RidewithGPS (yes, pay for a premium account) which have ~50' of elevation gain per mile.

3)Cut the strength training down to twice a week on April 1. and down to once a week on June 1.

4) Do that every year, but starting October 1, reducing to twice a week on Dec. 1 and once a week on April 1.

5) Goal is 200 cycling miles/week starting April 1.

If you PM me (click on my screen name), I can tell you how to find my routes in the greater Seattle area (only useful if you live around here)

crankarmbreaker

Burning fat if one keeps the effort down... how does this work? I've been trying to keep my heart rate in the "hard" zone of 151-172 bpm on the heart rate monitor. I bought that monitor a few months ago and discovered that my habits right now are to lazy around in the "fat-burning zone" of less than 137. Since then I've been making the effort to keep it in the "hard" zone as much as possible to build stamina. I would think, though, that going slower would burn less fat. Does it?

Carbonfiberboy 

That's just in the context of learning to ride without eating. The harder you ride, the more fat you burn, AFAIK up to the point of going anaerobic. I can ride for 2+ hours without eating, no matter how hard I go, but that's after training to do that for years. I was advising to ride moderate without food until you build an ability to do that.

Important to this discussion is the fact that the harder you ride, the more calories you burn, regardless of source. Caloric deficit is how one loses weight. However to reduce hunger during the ride and thus reduce calorie intake, it's good to train in a manner which increases the body's ability to burn fat rapidly, thus hopefully increasing the amount of fat in the mix at all effort levels and as a side benefit, making one less susceptible to, shall I say, inappropriate hunger off the bike. One of my little truisms is that our bodies are simply trainable chemical factories. They get better at doing what we train them to do - for good or ill.

rubiksoval

Yep. The harder you ride, the more calories you burn, but the more calories that come from carbs. "Fat burning" is a low-intensity endeavor.

Averaging 278 watts in an hour uses 1 mJ of energy, which is roughly 1,000 calories an hour. Takes a lot of calories to keep that intensity up for very long. Suffice to say that significantly less wattage requires significantly less calories, so overeating can be a hard habit to break if weight loss is the goal. And though that should take place primarily off the bike, you don't want to be overeating on the bike, either.

delbiker1 

I do not know how old you are, what you weigh, your riding intensity, eating habits, etc. I do know that 2-3 mph increase for a ride of a lot of miles is no easy task. In 2017 I put 6,000 miles on bikes. I was doing intervals and fast paced longer rides, eating well, and I purchased a used titanium bicycle in June. My average mph went up 1 mph through June and another 2 mph from beginning of July to the end of the year. The last half of the year I was 15 pounds lighter and the titanium bike is about 4.5 lbs lighter than what I was riding before. At the start of the year I was 162 lbs. and by June I was at 147. The bike I rode the first half was about 22 lbs and the titanium bike was 17.5. I and my early bike weighed 184 pound to start the year and end of June the weight was at 164.5 Rounded off that means myself and my bike were 20 lbs lighter at the start of July. I held that weight through the rest of 2017. That is an 11% weight difference. My avg. mph went from 14.5 to 17.5 an increase of 3 mph. That equals an increase of 21% in the mph. What does all of that mean? It took an investment in time, work, discipline and money to get there. I am 66 years old and, trust me, it was not easy. But it sure was worth it!

srode1

Impressive improvement!!!!

TGT1

There's some metabolic or psychological weirdness here. That's not normal at all. Have you had your blood sugar checked out?

One thing that no one has mentioned is how efficient is your pedal stroke? Are you applying maximum torque all the way around or just mashing down on the front 120 degrees or so?
Just concentrating on pedaling circles with torque all the way around will produce an almost immediate jump of a mile or two per hour and a commensurate jump in heart rate, breathing and cadence.

Most of us clydes start out like diesel engines, firing explosively on the downstroke at low rpms. You need to pedal like a steam locomotive with power all the way around the crank.

Pedal faster, not harder! this helps with that too.

This isn't something that you can do without a long conditioning period for very long. Start out in small steps. Think in years not months. Pay attention to your knees in particular. You will get sore in places you never thought possible at first. Sore muscles are a good thing, sore joints are not.

rubiksoval

Not true. Debunked. No one pedals circles. Not a single person. Most efficient pedaling style is pushing down.

asgelle

Actually, everyone does pedal circles.Not even the strongest track rider can generate enough force to deform a crank so the foot doesn't move in a circle. Also, I know the fastest pedaling style is pushing down, I don't think I've seen any data on efficiency. Unclear language just adds to confusion and misinformation.

crankarmbreaker

OP here -- in my case, my feet are too big for clipless pedal shoes, so I'm using a "power strap," one strap that goes over the foot. It helps keep my foot on the right point in the pedal and lets me do a little up tug on the back part of the circle, but steady torque the whole way round is not going to work.

As for the stopping for food thing, I have had my blood sugar checked and it's ok. I think it's more of a case of a huge guy who's not well trained burning a whole bunch of calories. I've done calorie journals on myfitnesspal.com and a century day adds up to 5,500-6,000 calories and a 150-mile day adds up to 8,000 calories. (That's the entire day from waking to sleeping, not just on the bike.) It is something I'm going to be working on over the next few months, trying to stretch my calories and stop less.

TGT1

Try it and see what happens!!!

rubiksoval

I have. Nothing happened except I pedaled faster. Not something I care much about.

rubiksoval

Okay. How about "Noone applies equal force completely around their pedal stroke. At best, even the most "efficient" pros are merely unweighting one leg slightly more."

"Scraping the mud off your shoe", "ankling", "pedaling in circles" isn't productive. Focusing on doing those things is a waste of time.

TGT1

Just proved my point!

Pedal faster, go faster.

Concentrating on pedaling circles will lead you to pedaling faster.

asgelle

You think going faster is important? I can almost always go faster. Just like I can produce the same power as any Pro Tour rider and probably more than most. The question is how long can I go that fast or produce that power before fatigue causes me to slow down.