Pakiwi

This is my first post here at the recommendation of others on the Clydesdale board.
I have been back riding for about 2.5 years now. I am 5'6" and weigh in at 215 lbs
Not at all the shape of a cyclist, but I am trying to get in shape, lose the weight and get some stress relief.
I rode several centuries last year and even attempted some with lots of climbing but bailed early on both of them. I just got to the point where I had no energy on one after 6500 ft and the other I hit the time limit. So to better prepare me for the same rides this year, I really focused on training throughout Winter and getting the miles in on the trainer and getting outside when the weather allowed.
So far this year I have 1600 miles in and last week was my first test on a hilly 75 mile ride. Fleche Buffoon Course | FlecheBuffoon.com
Its 75 miles with 5900 feet of climbing. I cut my ride short due to the same feeling of lethargy. I walked to the top of one of the hills and at the top, consumed 2 glasses of Coke, a banana and a gel at the rest stop. I then went down the other side and for 10 miles struggled to hit 80w (power meter measured) on the flat. We stopped again at a small town for the others to take a refreshment break. During this break about 10 mins I consumed a Clif Bloc and a muesli bar. Following the short break I was able to get back on the bike and hit 150w for the remainder of the ride and felt normal. So I am trying to figure out my issue if its physical exhaustion or a nutrition issue. My heart rate was normal, I just couldn't put any power down. Felt fine, legs weren't sore.

For breakfast I ate 2 pieces of toast with Peanut butter and grapes which is my norm. For every hour I consumed a gel and either a bar or fruit drops and at least one 24 oz bottle of water with scratch labs powder.
Trying to figure out my issue before I hit the 100 mile with 9500 ft of climbing.
Any help would be appreciated.
Allan

andr0id

STOP eating so much damn SUGAR on your rides.

You are carrying as body fat way more than enough nutrition to fuel you for hundreds of miles.

I'm not claiming to be the healthiest, but this is much closer to what you need. This is what I did Sat morning.

Breakfast. Black coffee, banana, 3 eggs.
Ride 34 miles to San Marcos from Austin at med fast pace. Drank only water with Nuun in bottles.
Coffee stop. Black coffee, 1 oatmeal/cranberry cookie.
Ride 34 miles back to Austin at fast pace because running late due to mechanicals. Drank only water/Nuun.
At 2 Costco fig newtons. Drove to San Marcos, picked up daughter. Drove back to Austin.
Had sandwich and a beer for a very late lunch around 4pm.

You are eating way too much.

Heathpack 

It sounds like you are taking in 200 cal/hr while riding and then more at your stops. That's plenty. I doubt its a nutrition problem, sounds like its a conditioning problem.

Since you are heavy for your frame size, hills are going to require that you ride at or over threshold. When you do this, your body has to deal with the acid component of lactic acid. The acid accumulates in your muscle and causes fatigue. The good news is dealing with this acid metabolically is trainable.

Much of your training so far this season should have been low intensity, zone 2 stuff. Hopefully you've gotten in 1700 miles of that kind of stuff. Now you need to take 20% of your time and start working close to your threshold- just below, above and at threshold. This will probably mean intervals although I am sure you can accomplish the same thing by riding hills or even flats. It sounds like you have a power meter? Do you know your FTP?

Pakiwi

Yes my FTP is 226.
I rode more feet climbed in less time 2 weeks earlier. So it seems like a time related and I need to lighten up on my sugars

Heathpack 

I disagree on the sugar. Sugar is fine on the bike.

You have a low watts/kg. Around 2.3 W/kg. When you hit a 5% hill, it's going to require around 215-225 watts to propel yourself slowly up that hill. Potentially way more if you're trying to be quick up the hills or for steeper pitches. Look at some of your recent power data and see if I am not right about this.

Everytime you do that, you're going to be tipping your metabolism more towards the anaerobic side of things. You will create lactic acid. As soon as you ease up on your effort, you will tip back more towards aerobic metabolism and you'll burn the lactate but be left with the acid. The acid causes fatigue.

What you need to do is to train your body to deal with the metabolic waste products of doing this- ie ride at threshold. Based on your response: "it seems like a time related", I'm not sure that you really understood what I meant or that what you want to do is establish a training plan.

When you go out on a ride right now, do you have a game plan in mind? Something like "I'm going out to ride 2 hours in zone 2"? What do you do with your power data now? Do you do any specific workouts, interval or otherwise?

Pakiwi

Yes you're spot on in regards to the hills. Typically ride around 200-225 watts.
I do have a training plan. Mixing zone 3 for extended time, hill repeats, low cadence high zone 4, hi cadence zone 4.
The hills this past weekend ranged from 8% to 14% so certainly pushed me, though I have been riding hills like this in my area for training.

Heathpack 

You should consider dropping your zone 3 stuff in favor of zone 2. Spend 80% of your total training time there, including warm up, cool downs and time spent in this zone during easy rides.

Spend the remaining 20% of your time riding in that 200-225 watt range. How exactly you do this is up to you- intervals vs climbing vs riding hard during group rides on the flat. Hopefully you are using a program to manage your data that will break down time spent in various zones per week.

Then give it time. These things do not improve over night. You will still be improving months to years from now. Expect faster improvement if you're young & male, slower if you're older and/or a woman. Also unfit people will have faster initial gains than fit people. Losing weight is the FASTEST way to improve watts/kg substantially but don't starve yourself. Lose weight slowly, it's more sustainable, and eat enough cal & protein to continue to build muscle while losing fat. I'd suggest no more than 0.5 pounds/wk for the weight loss, otherwise you'll compromise your training.

And remember to take an easy week every 3rd or 4th week, depending on age & gender (every 3 weeks for women & older men, every 4 weeks for young men)

Pakiwi

Thanks for the info. Yes using Training peaks /Strava for collection of my data. Nope not young. 46 y.o. male. I know the weight loss will help. I have a semi-flat century in two weeks and a 100/10,000ft in three weeks. Then nothing planned till much later in the year, other than lots of training.

Heathpack 

Also: try to increase your overall training volume, from 100 mi/wk that you're currently riding, to 150-175 miles per week. Try to get in one long ride per week, and increase that by 10% per week until you're getting in a 5ish hour ride once a week (if possible).

Heathpack 

It looks like we were posting at the same time, so I missed this comment.

For your KOM century, that's going to be tough because all your climbing is of necessity at threshold because of your power to weight ratio. Remember that in theory, you can only manage 1 hour of riding at your FTP (in reality this is not true, it depends on your physiology, some people can hold their FTP power for far longer) and its going to take you longer than 1 hr to get in 10K feet of climbing. So for the rest of the ride, you want to really conserve energy- draft off others whenever possible and generally ride the easier parts as easy as you can get away with.

Since you'll be a threshold or at least working hard on the climbs, the logistics of eating are going to be hard for you. You may have trouble eating on the climbs and descents. So be sure to eat in the flatter sections.

People with stockier body shapes also tend to not dissipate heat as well. I'm not sure where you are located or how you are in the heat, but if heat will be a factor, I'd start your KOM century as early as you can. Stay cool. Be in the shade whenever possible. Consider arm warmers that you can soak in water at stops and put back onto your arms wet.

Good luck.

Carbonfiberboy 

Another thing that's probably going on, looking at your current and recent past training, is that you aren't burning enough fat on your rides. The more fat you burn, the less glycogen you have to burn. This is really important when doing a series of long climbs. As HP says, do 80% of your riding in zone 2. That's out of your total weekly time as shown on TrainingPeaks. BTW, get a Premium membership if you don't have one now. Lots more tools to manage your training. Anyway, do some of that zone 2 time fasted, first thing in the morning if possible. Try for 2 hour rides without eating anything or using a sports drink. Gear down on the climbs so that you don't go much over Z2. It doesn't happen right away, but over a period of a few months of doing that, your fat burning ability will go up considerably.

The second thing is that, if your FTP is really 226, you're going too hard on the climbs. Anyone would start to fall apart after about 45 minutes of climbing at FTP. Then you got nothing: at an hour you fall over. So don't do that. Don't climb at much over 200w, maybe even a little less. Spare that glycogen. The reason you were able to get power on the flats back after eating a lot is that you ramped up your blood sugar which mostly replaced your missing glycogen.

On these hilly rides, try to eat 200-250 calories/hour of basically sugar, but as much as possible try to spread it out over the hour. So if you're eating 1 Clif bar per hour, eat 1/4 of it every 15 minutes. I pre-open my bars and then break one into pieces when I extract it from the package and then back into the jersey pocket. That's not too hard to do while riding if you're careful about when you do it. Or you could use Shot Bloks, 2 every 20 minutes. You want to keep your blood sugar as even as you can. On long rides, I start eating after about 1/2 hour and just keep it up. Unless it's something like a double century, I don't eat any more at rest stops, I just keep up that steady rate.

Pakiwi

Is there a place I can find if a comparison of length of time vs FTP threshold that one can ride at. Because of the hills I completed this weekend, I was climbing them at very low cadence even with a 36 x 32. I am looking at alternative gearing so I can keep my cadence up and lower my percent of FTP.
I know ultimately my biggest hindrance is my weight. I am working on that a I go.
Century is in Lynchburg VA. Hopefully it should be cool with an early departure.
Never even considered heat dissipation. Thanks

Carbonfiberboy 

One more thing: if I'm doing a ride that I know will be long with a good bit of intensity, I eat ~300 calories of carbs with some protein for breakfast and finish eating at least 2 hours before the ride. 3 hours is even better if it doesn't cut into your sleep too much. That tops up your glycogen for the day and you start with normal blood sugar.

Carbonfiberboy 

You should be riding a triple. My climbing bike is 53-39-26 in front and 11-25 in back. Your gearing should be even lower. Our tandem is the same gearing in front, but 12-34 in back.

Carbonfiberboy 

Oh . . . and that immediately explains what's happening to your glycogen. Low cadence just eats it up. High cadence increases HR but decreases glycogen usage.

Edit: it's fairly easy to see what your gearing should be. Enter this calculator:
https://www.machars.net/bikecalc.htm
with your current climbing speed in mind. Using the Speed tab, mess around with the gearing until you find a gear combination that will have you climbing at that speed at ~85 cadence. You actually want to climb at more like 80, but it's good to have a bail-out gear. When you find a gear combination that does that, use the Gearing tab to find the gear-inches of that combination.

Then enter this calculator:
https://www.gear-calculator.com/
and with that gear-inches number in mind, find a chainring set and cassette that will produce that gear-inches number in the lowest gear.

Heathpack 

FTP by definition is the max power output that you can sustain for 1 hour. In theory, everyone can only ride 1 hour at FTP. In reality, some people can hold FTP longer than that, but you should probably count on an hour. That leaves a lot more century-riding to do on your KOM day and you won't have much left for that (plus the climbs are going to take you more than 1 hour). I agree with @Carbonfiberboy that if possible, you should do the climbs at a lower power if the FTP of 226 is correct. I was assuming that you really could not do them at a lower power output on account of your power to weight ratio. But I'm bad at mechanical stuff like gearing, by all means if there's some way you could change your bike so that you could ride well below threshold on your climbs, do it.

Pakiwi

I climbed the big hill last year at 150 watts with a 36 x 28. This year I should have a 36 x 40. This last weeks big ride was shorter punchier hills that just did me in over the morning.

RShantz

You need easier gearing. On the steep bit your cadence must be crazy low - which will cause muscle fatigue

Heathpack 

Perfect, that is a very sustainable power output for you. Use your PM to pace yourself up this hill and try to keep it at 150 watts +/- 10%. Avoid power spikes like the plaque. If someone drops you on the hill, let him/her go. Ride your own pace.

Pakiwi

I will ride my own ride. I do most of the time for training as nobody wants to ride the hills I ride. I have put in wsy more miles this year as well as more focused training. This last week was a test in prep for future rides. At least I can make the needed changes now.
Thanks for everybody's feed back.

Heathpack 

Rock it!

And be sure to come back & let us know how it went.

jsk

I don't really see the logic there, given the definition of FTP. If you can hold a certain power level for longer than an hour, there must be some higher power level that you can only hold for an hour? I find it hard to believe there are people out there who, for instance, can hold 300W for 70 minutes, but can only hold 305W for 50 minutes.

IMHO the people who say they can hold FTP for longer than an hour just haven't pushed themselves hard enough to find out their true 1hr power.

gregf83 

I think the point is the power curve can be pretty flat around 60 min and some may not see much of a drop between 50 and 70 min. Riders with a high anaerobic work capacity will see more of a dropoff. Diesel engines with no sprint will have a flatter power curve.

When you ride at FTP for an hour your body doesn't shut down. It's no different than going all out for 20 min. You can still ride and recover at a lower power level and then go hard again once you've recovered.

Heathpack 

Bingo. Give this man a prize.

Even though I think the 70 min number may not even be correct for some people. There are just huge variations in physiology and the FTP concept applies mostly to the middle of the bell curve. And it was a concept developed to be applied to people doing traditional USAC cycling type of racing.

jsk

I'm not suggesting there is anything magical about 60 minutes or that power suddenly falls off a cliff at 61 minutes. So if you want to say that FTP is sustainable for "about an hour", I could agree with that. But using your example of 70 minutes vs 50 minutes, I find it hard to believe there are people out there who can't maintain a higher average power at 50 minutes versus what they can average for 70 minute. It might not be a big difference, but there will be a difference.

Anyways sorry for taking the thread off-topic.