wens

Freezing rain here. Going to be low cadence trainer intervals, then a switch to rollers to get a little more time that at least feels like riding a bike.

wens

When I popped my collarbone I would have paid less if I'd been on the high deductible plan I'd just gotten off. Of course since I was unemployed at the time, I was just happy I ended up paying $3300 or so instead of $33 grand or so. Legitimate thanks Obama for that one, since cobra would have been super expensive. I would have made it happen, but it would have been painful.

gsteinb

I'm away teaching since last Saturday. I get an hour to train from 6-7 am. Rollers outside. Challenging when it's so cold.

mattm

lol I wish I knew what this means!

Ygduf

2 x 20s are too hard for me to do, but I do think threshold work has helped me in racing...

Ygduf

gotta get yourself one of those Amazon Echos! Just ask it!

globecanvas

Just got back from 2+ hours, 17F when we started, all of 25F when we got back. I swear by chemical toe warmers, which I put in my shoes and gloves. They are completely harmless despite the scary word "chemical", it's just iron powder that is literally speed-rusting over the course of a couple of hours and putting off heat. You can get them for 50c a pair.

carpediemracing 

For chem warmers I found they got damp and then cold. Does that make (chemical) sense?

Anyway I bought heated insoles but haven't used them yet.

Also I thought my size 42 winter Sidis (bought them when I was in London many years ago, got a size up as I figured that would be sensible for a winter shoe) were too big. Ends up the shoes are cut a bit bigger for thick socks etc. I found my "size 40" winter shoes that were too small and they were actually size 41s, same size as my regular Sidis. So I may put the heated insoles in the 42 winter shoes for whenever I might get out on the bike.

globecanvas

Beats me about the chemistry, but I can say I've never experienced that, and I went through over 50 pairs last winter. I never put them next to the skin. For feet I stick them on the top of my wool socks, under my Shimano winter boots (love those too); for hands I stick them to the inside of my lobster gloves, and wear thin liners.

Let me know how the heated insoles work out. A friend bought some heated glove liners last year but was disappointed in them.

tetonrider

What if those ARE the edited versions?!

Sorryiusetoomanywordsforyou.

carpediemracing 

I should clarify. "When the chem warmers got damp they got cold". Typically I used them when it was wet and cold out, since the "dry cold" temps I rode in I decided I could tolerate.

You motivated me to try on the winter shoes with the insoles and they fit pretty well. If/when I ride outside next I'll be using them, both the winter shoes and the heated insoles. Apparently the insoles turn off once they reach a certain temp so if it's not too cold then the last much longer, if it's bitterly cold then they'll discharge quicker.

tetonrider

i know lots of folks who have (in the past, before the affordable healthcare act) gone into hospitals uninsured and gotten the services they need. when it comes time to pay, they get a bill, then they negotiate with the hospital. the hospital drops the price a bunch, and these people have said "i can't pay that."

they get on ridiculous payment plans like $5 or $10 a month. seriously--seen it happen many times.

the big HC companies have more clout in negotiating a rate, but in the end if the customer says "i can't pay what you're asking now, but can i spread the payment over 30 years" the facilities have taken the stream.

there was just a great article on how it is nearly impossible to find out what hospital full rates are and what every insurer has negotiated as they are all different by insurer/facility/procedure. people are trying to crowd-source this to expose the truth.

i was always amazed by this. i've been someone who has paid into the system for 20 years, with the exception of a year or 2 when i was skiing/climbing/living out of my truck and was self-insured. (my internal compass would not allow me to ask for that kind of break on services.)

bmcphx

shovelhd

Ho ho ho

shovelhd

They are key. I also overdress and sweat. Heat is easier for me regulate than cold.

echappist

the way i look at it, 2x20s, especially the way most people do them, rarely deviates 10% high or low. It gets people good at one thing and only one thing: riding steady at threshold. Only thing is that there's no race situation like that except a flat ITT, and even driving a break in a race requires one to go into VO2max territory and then recover when sitting behind the rider currently pulling. The time spent doing 2x20's could be better spent doing other things that seeks to train for what one needs in a road race.
you are more generous in spirit than I, and for that all of us should be thankful. but on the other hand i think you give yourself less credit than what you deserve. You may view the advantages as inconsequential, yet it often represents an investment in time or money. There were many things about coaching and training plans that i've learned in the past few years after hiring a coach, and i personally they represent an approach drastically different from what i once practiced. Copying such an approach is really easy, but at least for me, the results are not inconsequential, and as such, i prefer to keep mum about things. I'd never knowingly spread misinformation, but there is also a middle way.

oy, i meant flowery ass kissing

i picked up the term "oi" by watching BBC shows

globecanvas

Thumbs down. In the software world there is the expression "implementation is everything." The tendency toward coveting an idea is a step down the path to considering an idea to be property. But ideas are worth nothing, ideas are free like air is free. No matter how clever an idea is, unless you can do the work to apply it appropriately, it's just ether.

Not meaning to bash on you in particular, but also, in my experience, people who place a proprietary value on ideas, tend to value the most uninteresting or uncreative ideas. For example, in the cycling world, there is nothing more unseemly than Hunter Allen protesting that everybody has stolen his ideas about training stress and load.

In my opinion, the true unit of accounting for human output is the work, not the idea.

Homebrew01

Dedicated winter shoes let me ride about 5 degrees colder than before. I put my booties over them once on a really cold day.
I get by with $20 LL Bean winter gloves on the coldest days. I prefer to be a bit over dressed & too warm. Easy enough to unzip or remove a layer as needed.

tetonrider

i'm with you.

i used to work with some people who might say something like "i have an idea to build a flying car" and approach me for "just implementation." they'd want to retain 95% ownership. the whole key is figuring out how to build the damn flying car.

(yeah, it's different if "implementation" is setting up wordpress for someone or "implementing" quickbooks.)

i tend to believe that more free exchange of ideas helps improve the collective quality of everything, but i guess it means that there is less opportunity for the generator of the mediocre idea to make money in the short run, and that is why those mediocre ideas can be so heavily guarded.

back to what i said earlier...if an innovation can be so easily copied/stolen, it probably wasn't so innovative after all.

ps i think coggan is the one who is more vocal about TSS & stuff than allen is, but it is mainly in the context of "y'all think you have new ideas and i was doing this 10, 20 years ago" type of stuff. he does acknowledge his work was based on that of others and just applied, mathematically, to cycling, though i don't always like his delivery. i think training peaks holds licenses to some terminology (we can discuss whether our system of registering marks is dumb, but it is legal, so i can't really fault a company for protecting one).



though training peaks does have some rights to theirand i actually think he

shovelhd

I'm not going to give out the workouts that I pay money for. They are the property of my coach. It's his IP. I just rent them along with a plan and monitoring. However I see nothing wrong with sharing generalities like I just did with Hack. He's smart enough to use my examples to create something that works for him.

tetonrider

yes, but for some folks bike racing IS time trials, so 2x20s are very effective (maybe the most effective). also, there are some very good cyclists (think cat 1/masters national champs in *RRs*) who pretty much only do those 20' intervals....but they have 25, 30 years in the bank and have perfected their style of racing. there are no absolutes.

i agree fully with you that for most amateur racing it's the short, sharp stuff that influences the outcome....the 2-3' surge at the base of the hill or the repeated accelerations out of corners, and for that exclusively training 2x20s is not ideal.

my point was that 2x20s do achieve a purpose and can have some place in a plan, but without knowing more details about any rider, their capabilities, and their races no one can say whether they are the best thing or not.

it's probably true that most people who express love for 2x20s (exclusively?) are not training optimally, but who knows. also, if one is arguing RR training on a triathlon-focused forum...hell, if one is arguing any training on any forum...it gets into pretty silly territory quickly.


not sure it's generous...it just reflects my beliefs about the world. when we apply it specifically to cycling, one aspect of my world, well...i just think that the world of cycling is so damn small and we have way more in common than we have differences. that's why i don't get situations where all cyclists are not friendly toward one another. i'll see someone with attitude out at the TT at valley of the sun...and i'm like "really? we're a couple hundred people in really funny costumes an hour into the desert riding so hard for 30' we want to throw up...most of the people on the roads hate us...and you really need to throw off a vibe to someone else out here even if they're your cat 3 competition?"

i think it has to do with the fact that there is very, very little that differentiates the abilities of any two amateur cyclists, so instead people magnify these tiny differences and desperately cling to them. that's where you get the stuff like the guy who upgraded to cat 3 last week who complains loudly about the cat 4s who can't handle their bikes.

it's just a funny, fringe hobby.

anyway, i think people are within their right to guard their IP, but something like a coaching plan is valuable because a coach knows the athlete and tailors things for him or her. a lowly amateur like me copying the brad wiggins plan is silly, and even contador wouldn't train off of another pro's plan.

and, yes, i often invest my own time/money/energy in learning things then share that with people. maybe some of those people use that info to beat me in races, but whatever. i've freely told people (even direct competition) how i'd prepare for an event, or how i'd pace a time trial based on the wind or terrain, or which helmet might work best for what i see of their position based on my own experiments..... but maybe i do that because i feel it all comes down to execution anyway. someone will always be there who can beat me, and i've made some pretty tight friendships that started out with helping people improve in a meaningful way when there was no real reason to do so. i know i've been super grateful when someone helped me out just for the sake of it; haven't you?

i do this with most things in the world, but in the case of amateur sport i really think there should be an element of sharing knowledge with those who want to learn. i take my own training/racing seriously, but it doesn't define me.


i was thinking oi music. i can read lots of words, but the smaller those words are, the better odds of me understanding what you are saying without looking it up. i'm not the sharpest tool, though.

tetonrider

fully agreed here. giving away someone else's IP (burning the DVD one paid for and putting it up on a fileserver, or giving away a coach's plan) is not something i advocate.

giving away my own time/research/creation is something different.

WRT coaching, i think the truly meaningful value is in 1:1 adaptation of a plan to an athlete, so in theory just giving away a plan without the personal side is not giving away the magic -- but IMO it is not up for me to decide whether or not a coach views his plan as proprietary.

a sad thing is that i've seen coaches who literally just apply someone else's 90-day plan to their athletes, spoon feeding it a few weeks at a time. of course, some athletes are happy with those 90-day plans, but that practice is deceptive. IME the ones who most tightly guard something like a particular workout, i find, are the cases where there is truly less than meets the eye. the best coaches (i know of a few on this forum) tend not to be threatened as a copied workout misses out on the psyche and collected experiences of the athlete.

tetonrider

can't speak for globe, but it's a forum and somehow a topic was teed up that lead us to a tangent. i'm just laying in bed, icing my hip and killing a bit of time.

i said that i often give away information (my own time/money) to other riders

i agree, but what is right for echappist may not be what is right for tetonrider, as athletes. further what is right for echappist in 2014 may not be right for him in 2015. what is right for tetonrider pre-femur break may not be right for him post-femur break.

that's why i feel like a plan that is not directly connected to the athlete, loses its magic.

doesn't mean i'd give away someone else's plan if they are in the business of selling it, but i'm not worried about telling someone else a workout that i have created for an athlete. if my services as a coach can be that easily copied, i'm probably not valuable to my athletes.


i absolutely believe in the value of coaching for many riders -- and i have my own coach. i have self-coached before and thought critically about the value the right coach brings. also, as a coach i have told some potential clients that they are either not a good fit with me...and in some rare cases i have told a person that they would be just fine with something generic given their goals and level of engagement.

i don't give away my coaching services (as i've said above my services are more than just a series of workouts), and while i pay for coaching myself i do not give away someone else's IP. then again, it would be impossible for me to give away my coach's services because there is way more than could be written down. how do you give away something like reminding an athlete of their strengths and helping them achieve the right mental state to get into race-winning mode when they might have temporarily lost this focus?

so, too, with the coaches i know on this forum...the good ones.

there ARE plenty of coaches who view athletes as cash flow and are happy to prescribe 2x20s every tuesday and thursday, but to me that ain't coaching.

i don't see a discrepancy in me buying services, selling services, and freely giving away information in the parking lot prior to the ITT about wheels, tires, wind direction, strategy, what i ate for breakfast, etc. perhaps you see something in my behavior that i don't?

echappist

umm, damn you are quick. i deleted that post but you got to it!

the line i was referring to is follows. THe discrepancy is what makes coaching, which is essentially a series of ideas, different from what is described below?

furiousferret

Being an amateur writer I've gotten a ton of ideas from people. Most are really committed about their idea and some are very good, but I always balk. For their 20 minute pitch and maybe a few other additions of no longer than an hour, I'll spend somewhere in the area of 200 hours to write it, a few thousand to hire a proofreader, and another 300 hours to edit. That's not even including hardest part which is selling the story.