fstrnu

Internal data is data internal to organizations that find aerobic decoupling to be of benefit based on that data. PB Science is one. TrainingPeaks is one.

fstrnu

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Bandera

A BF example of the collision of the Dunning-Kruger effect, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.

-Bandera

gregf83 

Perfect. Please share. PB Science doesn't exist as far as I can tell.

Carbonfiberboy 

Data internal to TrainingPeaks (the only data I have is mine), shows that CD is uninteresting.

fstrnu

Ok

fstrnu

You're clearly undertraining.

fstrnu

Done. Available on soundcloud. Thanks for the suggestion.

Happy Feet

I think Cardiac Drift could be more interesting as a punk band name or the 8th installment of the Fast and Furious franchise.

fstrnu. I know I am going to hate myself for asking but what is the goal of this training for you, both on the spin bike and in relating it here. Training implies preparing oneself for a goal. Do you have a goal other than the training itself? One problem with only indoor spinning is there is no end point other than say maintaining X rpm for Y minutes or some other such thing. Undefined fitness goals as you seem to be chasing only lead to overuse issues and fitness addiction disorders. Concrete real world goals moderate those tendencies. Otherwise you are training to train which is an unending cycle.

If your goal here is to relate an idea you are doing a terrible job by ignoring all the questions being asked of you. It sounds like you are driven only to communicate your opinion one way regardless of the audience and that clearly influences their reception of your ideas. From a communication perspective it's a fail. In communication courses you would be taught something like:

1. This is who I am.
2. This is my experience.
3. This is what I hope to teach you.
4. This is why it's important.
5. This is how I will do it.
6. Are there any questions.

You've just skipped 1 and 2, and danced around 6 so that people are openly challenging 4.

Carbonfiberboy 

Like the doctor who writes without seeing the patient.

Au contraire, I've come into fairly decent condition for February. Which reminds me . . . I had to do some indoor cycling today and noticed that I was a little tired. It took maybe 20' for my HR to come up to normal for RPE, maybe 10 beats over that time of steady state. One doesn't count that for CD! That's just the sympathetic system being slow to ramp up because it's tired. That's not real CD.

In this instance, after my HR came up, I had maybe 3 beats of CD in an hour. I went in the gym and lifted heavy afterwards, had a good workout. See, CD is not a training aid. Pay attention to your CTL and TSB. Those numbers are all you need to know in terms of training load. FTP is how you know if acquiring that training load did you any good. I don't ride with power. It'd cost me about $3,000 to equip with power and I don't have time to amortize that. I ride with long-time friends, look at my VAM and PRs, and see how I feel after 3000'. That tells me close enough how it's going for my purposes.

CD is more likely to tell me if I overdressed. That's really noticeable. It takes more metabolic effort to get rid of heat than most folks realize. Riding hotter than absolutely necessary for the conditions drives me nuts. OTOH, if I under-feed, I have reverse CD, which also tells me nothing about my fitness, other than well, I'm probably pretty fit. But I knew that.

Carbonfiberboy 

This is an interesting observation. I think most of the other posters on here have outlined their current goals, which is kind of them. I suppose I should follow suit. My main goal is not to wind up a weak old man who can't do for himself. I'm into putting that off as long as possible. In pursuit if that goal, I have intermediate goals:

I'd like to keep on keeping up with folks 10 years younger as long as I can.

In pursuit of that goal, I train for some long endurance rides every summer, down to a 154 mile max now. I've quit the doubles and 400ks. The local double's gotten ridiculously expensive and the mountain 400s are really too hard for me now, at least to ride them the way I'd want to. I never enjoyed just pootling along, beating the cutoff. I don't love riding in the dark. I do like to rock 'n roll.

Machka 

I've asked her/him for her/his goal several times now, but have not received a response.


So that the request is not one-sided ...

My goal is to build up to distance cycling again ... after a rather rough year.

Right now I'm in an enforced "ride easy" mode because of a hip/back injury, but thankfully I have been OK'd to ride some. So this past weekend, we cycled 15 km each day. That's practically nothing, but right now it is what I can do and we will gradually build from there.

I am also incorporating other activities such as the exercises my Sports Dr has given me and some carefully executed upper body weights. Also a bit of walking and some slow stair climbing.


That's my goal. Others here have different goals. Some want to race. Some want to be fit enough to tour. Some want to be able to commute comfortably year round. Some may be using cycling to train or keep in shape for other sports.

So a person can suggest a training plan (I'm guessing that's what this is all about), but you've got to be able to tailor it to a specific goal.

Right now, for me, for example, doing intervals would be a very bad thing and not at all a part of my plan. But gradually building a base is part of my plan. And just because that's where I'm at, doesn't mean that's where everyone else is at.

fstrnu

This is awesome. Thanks. I'll update the OP to this format but some quick answers...

I'm 48 years old and have spent much of that on two wheels, starting with BMX and motorcross at a very young age. I discovered mountain biking while I was in college and spent as much time as possible riding trails that were OK but never long enough. I'd lap them dozens of times but never got bored. I could never do that again, however, after being spoiled by the North Georgia mountains after moving to Atlanta in my twenties. I was pretty busy building my career at that time but never missed a weekend in the mountains. If you ever visit Atlanta and are a highly-accomplished mountain biker, I highly recommend the Windy Gap trial. Also, vacationed quite a bit in the famous Tsali Recreation Area of the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina. Good times, man.

As my mountain bike rides became bigger and longer, some of my friends began cross training on the road to be able to keep up with me. I'm not that strong but I was a good climber and also avoided alcohol and paid attention to the basics like hydration, nutrition, sleep and alcohol avoidance before our rides while my friends were slamming sake the night before.

When I finally grabbed a road bike, mainly to shut my friends up and also liked the idea of being able to ride out of my driveway, I was instantly hooked. Road cycling became my life with the the Six Gap century ride in North Georgia being my favorite event. I also enjoyed and placed top ten in the amazing Cherry Blossom Festival bike race in Macon, Georgia. I was so inspired by this event that, 15 years later, I decided to create the following for a data visualization competition.

In the early 2000s I moved to Lexington, KY and fell head over heels for the rolling terrain through endless, beautiful horse farms and incredible century rides around Kentucky. I also rode year round and with all the proper clothing it was great and I was never alone. There was always a group leaving out of Keenland race course every Sunday as long as the ice was not too bad. My first daughter was young at that time but I was able to get out often enough to stay interested and fit.

When my son came along, however, I struggled to maintain interest in cycling as I wasn't able to get out very often. Winter came and my motivation sank even more.

Enter Computrainer.

The Computrainer changed my life forever. What began as a curiosity grew into an obsession. I did not buy the Computrainer for structured training, but merely to help stay in the saddle over the winter. Structured training was still outdoors. I began by using it to simulate my local rides but soon began downloading files of other real world courses, especially large events like Ironman Hawaii, Tour de France stages, etc. It wasn't long before I got frustrated over how clunky it was to find, download and load a course into the CT software just to see the profile and still not be able to see the statistics. It was medieval. So I founded performancecentral.net to catalog all publicly-available computrainer courses with visual profiles and all statistics like elevation change, etc. and to allow people to upload courses which would be automatically added to the catalog, etc. It was awesome and people loved it. I also hosted an annual virtual time trial series each winter with stage winners, GC, king of the mountains, age categories...you name it. We'd battle for position from stage to stage. It was glorious. People could also share performance files and race against each other. I even had a "programmable pacer" where you could race against your ERG program. All the while I was working with the most amazing Russian programmer. It was awesome.

Sadly, it was never the same after Racermate copied my idea for the catalog and I instantly lost all motivation to continue to develop/innovate if they were just going to steal and divide the community. It was over. I keep it running for another year as-is but then shut it down because it was simply a thorn in my side and a bitter reminder of what we all could have had.

Incredibly, during this entire time I never really got bit by the ERG bug as, ironically, the indoors was more focused on fun and all my structured training was still done outdoors.

Around the time I shut down performancecentral.net, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky and, somehow in the transition, new job stress, a third child, my wife becoming ill, her dad becoming ill, (other) freeloading in laws, etc. I stopped cycling and fell into the weirdest hobby ever, sim (auto) racing, for several years.

Fast forward and my basement floods, ruining my dusty Computrainer which I decide to replace it with a smart trainer but before I do, I grab my old trusty Performance Bike fluid trainer and give it a spin to make sure I still got it (not ability, but the fire). And, yes. Yes I did!

I also learned about this new thing called Zwift which I thought might get me interested again in virtual competition, etc. but I hated the way it felt and the "whole thing" just rubbed me the wrong way. I then learned about this thing called TrainerRoad which I thought might be more my style but it turned out to be exactly what it needed to be to make money instead of what it could have been. Disappointing, but I was even more disappointed in myself for expecting more given how much money was now involved vs when there were only about ten thousand or so of using hammering out in our basements.

Having already bought the equipment and not wanting to give up. I decided to go it alone. I had more than 20 years of structured training experience and was now an analytics architect and, while I had no idea even what I was doing was called when I built performancecentral.net, I now had all the chops required to find a way to crack this nut or I knew it couldn't be cracked.

All I had to do was read every book on power that I could get my hands on so I could add that to the mix of what I already knew about training. Then it was like. Oh no. These books are TERRIBLE. These ideas are ANCIENT. These people are completely trapped by their own success and utterly incapable of innovation. These books...RECOMMEND TRAINING INDOORS LIKE YOU TRAIN OUTSIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If not for one man (read that in a dramatic movie narrator voice). One man so sincerely and genuinely interested in making things actually make sense. One man so gifted with communication. Ok I'll stop. This dude named Joe (Friel, I think ; just kidding I still have my original Training Bible with all my zones, schedule, etc. written all over it) filled in all the gaps for me.

The End.

Wait, what was your question? Oh yeah. Ok #3 ...

1. This is who I am.
2. This is my experience.
3. This is what I hope to teach you.
4. This is why it's important.
5. This is how I will do it.
6. Are there any questions.

#3 is easy. I believe (and I will be completely rewriting OP accordingly) that the internal to external load ratio, cardiac drift and MSI can be used to great effect by anyone already using ERG mode to train. Anyone not already using ERG mode or open-minded to the use of ERG will get nothing out of this thread other than the twisted amusement they get from jamming the signal as much as possible with trolling because they "just like to ride their bikes", etc. The internal to external load ratio is used by Joe Friel. It's used by TrainingPeaks. It's used by everyone whether they know it or not. How can they not make sense? Indoors using fixed power under controlled conditions merely makes it an even more reliable indicator for obvious reasons. The education part is, sadly, required to counteract the nonsense that the trolls are spewing. The main theme when talking about the training on the internet used to be "there's more than one way to skin a cat". Toss a few billion dollars into the market an you have rabid dogs everywhere with giant balls they can't keep in their pants. And those are just FANS of the companies making money. Why? I never understood being a sports spectator either but the weird connection that you are somehow responsible for the success of TrainerRoad and Zwift is downright weird.

Back on topic. Cardiac drift.

Without fail I can reproduce 100% the relationship between workout frequency and cardiac drift. Increase frequency and cardiac drift goes up. Decrease frequency and cardiac drift goes down. The other side of volume is the same. Increase duration and drift goes up and so on. Thus, even without the well-established and generally-accepted physiological and anecdotal evidence, a purely empirical approach can be used to link cardiac drift with fatigue and endurance. Why would anyone already doing ERG training ignore that? How could any person who is even remotely open-minded about ERG training ignore that? The truth is that they can't and the only people you hear from in this thread are people hostile toward ERG training or in some twisted way intimidated by it.

Next up. MSI. This is laughably simple. You have to challenge the body in order for it to adapt. MSI = The workout was challenging. What's the issue? It power is too low because workout too easy, increase power. What am I missing?

1. This is who I am.
2. This is my experience.
3. This is what I hope to teach you.
4. This is why it's important.
5. This is how I will do it.
6. Are there any questions.

This is both important and gravy. It's gravy because you don't have to change anything in order to use it. There's no downside. Do whatever workouts you want. Do whatever intervals you want. Periodize your training however you want. Nothing I am telling you requires you to train differently if you are already using ERG mode. My goals don't matter. It YOUR goals that matter. If you think your goals are inconsistent with this approach either don't use it or ask a sincere, constructive question. Challenge me. I can't improve if you fight me all day long. Help me for crying out loud. Help the community for crying out loud. What have you actually done to help your community? How to do think your behavior toward me is helping the community. Do you SERIOUSLY consider yourself a fact-checking watchdog? The YOU show ME the facts. The fact is that there is no downside to what I'm asking athletes who use ERG to do and there's plenty of upside to opening your eyes and paying attention to how YOUR body responds to training and even more so over time.

1. This is who I am.
2. This is my experience.
3. This is what I hope to teach you.
4. This is why it's important.
5. This is how I will do it.
6. Are there any questions.

I will be covering this in my posts in this thread with the title "Log".

1. This is who I am.
2. This is my experience.
3. This is what I hope to teach you.
4. This is why it's important.
5. This is how I will do it.
6. Are there any questions.

Are there any questions?

fstrnu

Just a quick post to report that I didn't forget to post an entry but that there simply isn't much to share that would be constructive since I had both technical and life-happening issues this weekend.

The only thing helpful that I can think of is to point out that I was deliberately splitting my (preferred) 1 x 120 workout into two 1 x 90 workouts because I didn't believe I was going to be able to squeeze in 120 minutes on either day, which turned out to be true since I had technical problems saturday (blown tire) and life-happening problems sunday and therefore only got 60 min in each day. Ouch. Had I known, I would have increased intensity dramatically but I didn't.

One other thing I can think of is that, to mitigate this problem I might plan for some additional intensity with less volume just until things calm down a bit because I'd much prefer 90 minutes at higher intensity than the chance of a 120 minute workout getting cut short and resulting in negligible stimulus. If things get too crazy I'll crank it up even higher for a 60 minute workout. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Actually, when I think about it, I might steer clear of the house/distractions altogether and just bust out a couple of hours on a spin bike at my gym. As much as I hate not being able to capture the data, failing to get the workout would be worse and flying blind for two hours in the gym would beat compromising duration any day. I'll just need to setup the bike as close as I can. At least for low intensity and one workout only it matters less I'd think.

fstrnu

OP updated based on feedback

Trakhak

Enjoyed reading your mini-bio very much; thanks for posting it. I hope other people who have been commenting in this thread read it, too.

fstrnu

Glad you liked it

rubiksoval

And he's still completely and emphatically missed the point.

Hondo Gravel

Machka 

Yes. What is your goal? An event? A personal accomplishment? Being able to ride your age on your birthday in miles year after year? What?


You also talk about personalisation as an aspect of your plan. How does your plan vary for various goals?


For example, some want to race. Some want to be fit enough to tour. Some want to be able to commute comfortably year round. Some may be using cycling to train or keep in shape for other sports.

So a person can suggest a training plan (I'm guessing that's what this is all about), but you've got to be able to tailor it to a specific goal.

fstrnu

I've been getting a lot of questions about how to setup a training plan. Anyone interested can send me a PM and I'll arrange to get you the materials using a medium with less noise.

rubiksoval

And this would be the point.

rubiksoval

Not by anyone in this thread (or any of your others).

Happy Feet

Thank you for answering. Even if one doesn't agree with all the ideas it's far easier t relate when you have the background perspective of where you are coming from.

When you said you in the above post I assume you meant the general you and not specifically me. I felt you certainly had a passion for what you were writing and wanted to transmit something but the technique was counter productive and simply suggested a possible solution. Otherwise, it risked sounding a bit nutball with the full throttle forward one sided dialogue. Kudo's for stepping up to the challenge.

Not all resistance to this highly regimented training is heel dragging though. My goals in training for cycling revolve around being able to maintain a sub maximal effort over an extended period of at least 12 and sometimes more hours per day for multiple days. Fast, long distance touring/bikepack racing and I suspect others who randonneur do the same. Building base makes sense, as does working on improving cadence to reduce unneccessary effort and of course overall cardio but for me there is also a goal of not reaching maximal intensity during the event itself for risk of burning out. I train so that I can maintain sub maximal intensity for many hours which I think is a different kettle of fish than what you are describing.

Although physical conditioning is important there is also a whole mental aspect to be considered too. Boredom, negativity, pain (discomfort) management and plain sitting in a saddle day after day for that long as well as nutrition and sustaining fuel through a multi hour/multi day event.

I describe those things not because any one program can or should address them but to illustrate that people may have real training goals that don't fit the indoor trainer route. If we imagine doing 50% distance training as preparation for an event one can see sitting in a basement for 6 hours to do a 12 hour goal quite boring.

That said, I am interested in the science behind training for extended periods at sub maximal effort beyond say 6+ hours repeated for multiple days. It's an area that slips between the traditional cracks with the result of highly individualized regimes. Lael Wilcox said she trained for the Trans Am mainly by riding to the the start in Portland from Alaska. The glitch comes when you don't have that much free time to do that sort of traditional build up routine.

fstrnu