In 2007, he said he didn't believe he had had the illness at all, blaming his condition on over-training. [2]
I want to read that article. Seems to have come out of PROCycling in the Dec 07 or Jan 08 issue?
Somewhere in that article he belittles the base mile idea, favoring fewer miles at higher intensities with more recovery. But I'm basing it on a friends conveyance of the information, not on actually reading the article.
It seems even pros get to questioning their regimes, often, it sounds, pining for the joy and pleasure they found at the Church of the Big Ring. Wondering how even after following a precise training plan the results are no different than after just screwing around riding all season?
So what is the answer? I don't know. I suppose maybe those who stick with it will find out far to late for it to matter, or to make up for the errors they made getting to the point of realization. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it really doesn't matter a whole lot. Just doing it. Having fun. Making yourself hurt. That counts.
The wondering about categories has me thinking, what is the difference between a slow 2 and a fast 4? Not much it seems. Maybe just race experience wins as a 3/4 back before the sport was popular and wins were handed out like medals at a charity "run."
Anyway, Anna's entry got me thinking a bit about caloric consumption and basal metabolism. There are cool somewhat relative calculators out there to figure out your BMR (or here giving a few calories higher than the first). One like this says if i stayed in bed awake all day I would still burn about 2000 calories. That's actually quite a few calories.
Now over here they have a caloric need calculator that factors in activity level. And this one lets you divide up the day with types of activity. All of it pointing to the fact that personally I need about 3500-4000 calories a day. To maintain my weight when I am commuting. Add a couple hours of training in there and stick an extra thousand or more calories to it.
No wonder I am always hungry, always thinking about food.
To wrap up this nonsense I laughed my ass off when I noticed O'Grady's new image up on his side bar. Seems somewhat appropriate to put on here maybe, although I do try to keep the language somewhat clean. Sometimes. Having a little 40# someone sitting in a trailer behind me on the way in certainly curbs the vocal condemnation of random driver stupidity. That's a good thing.And yes. Velonews has turned into the CNN of Cycling. Meh. Cool, it works, content hasn't really changed and it is still Velonews.
It appears to be raining outside. Gonna be a wet ride home.
but lets end with these:
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
- Samuel McChord Crothers
In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
- Johann von Neumann
And finally, best quote of the week (from the church)
Try not. Do…or do not.
There is no try.
-Master Yoda
Heddwch
G
1 comment:
For what it's worth, I don't really do base and I've been making fairly substantial performance gains year over year. Last spring over the course of three months, I made a big leap and then pretty much stagnated the rest of the year -- including through cross season.
The thing I didn't do was to rest. I came off a two month rest (January and February) and rode progressively harder until I was flying. Since I didn't build enough rest into the plan, I ended up over trained by July. I didn't do base like everyone suggests doing base. I did start out with a little less intensity but I didn't really vary the number of hours per week from March through June.
This coming season, I'm going to try to pay a lot more attention to rest. I'm also going to break my year in two. The difficult thing is that I want to take some time off in July when the weather is great.
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