The Pain Cave

A brief description of The Pain Cave by one of my favorite bloggers:

Sal and his cycling teammates talk about the “Pain Cave” a lot. It’s that place you go where you are enveloped by a complete and raw brand of pain. You reach it after feeling the seering inside of you and then ignoring it. You reach it when every voice inside of you has screamed for you to stop and you have silenced them all. The quiet of the pain cave is eerie and horrific.

It’s still but not calming. It’s excruciating and peaceful all at once. It’s simultaneously transcendent and brutally immediate. The agony is almost tangible.

It is the best and the worst feeling.

So, that's where I was for a much too short a time yesterday during the race. But I should start from the beginning. The group decided that since it was going to be the most daylight we'll have all year that the men would do 5 laps and the women would do 4. I'm sitting there thinking, "One lap almost killed me last time, how am I going to do 4?" But then they suggest that the first lap be neutral because there were enough new people that we didn't want anyone getting lost. So I think, "Okay, one lap will just be an easy warm up and then I can do the other three. No problem."

To put it bluntly, I was wrong. The neutral lap started off pretty easily, with the experienced racers showing the newbies how to ride a paceline. But once they got the paceline (sorta) down, things started to speed up just a little. Then a little more. Let's just say that our supposedly neutral lap averaged 18.5mph on an 9 mile course with 2500ft of climbing. That's pretty fast. I was starting to get left behind on the hills. So much for neutral.

As soon as we crossed the line to start lap #2, the experienced ladies just took off. I don't know how they can accelerate like that on hills, but all that mattered is that they could and I couldn't. I was completely and utterly shot off the back by the second hill. Which left me to do another individual time trial to try to catch back on. Someone else got dropped too, but she wasn't time trialling like I wanted to, so I passed her and did my best to keep the pack in sight. That's where I found my pain cave. Nothing hurts like chasing a group that's always just barely in sight. I couldn't gain any ground, but for about half a lap I didn't lose any ground either.

I did finally lose them when we hit the hilliest part of the course again. By then I had done some serious spelunking in my pain cave and was forced to back down because I knew the situation was hopeless and I really wanted to get in at least 3 laps. When I had almost finished lap #2 the other one that had been popped off on the hills caught me and we rode together for the third lap. I didn't have the energy or motivation to go for lap 4, especially because that would just force the other women to wait for us after they had finished.

So, it's time to do some even more serious goal revision. And some serious recovery. My legs are trashed.

Back to the races

Bernie and I had a nice ride on Sunday. We were both tired, but it was clearly affecting me more than it affected him, since after an hour he was dropping me on all the hills. I was very well behaved and didn't kill myself to keep up, even though it was awfully tempting. Luckily for me Bernie was a gentleman about it and waited for me whenever necessary. We did about 2 hours at an average of 17mph. That's pretty fast for me while tired, so I'm happy with it.

I'm going to race tomorrow night. No excuses this time, the weather looks good and I've got the zipcar already booked. The only potential problem is the course will be the same one that I DNFed on last time I raced. So, I set my goals nice and low: Finish the race. I'm throwing in an additional bonus goal: Stay with the pack for at least 1 full lap. I think I'm getting better at realistic goal setting. Neil would be so proud.

I was feeling some pretty serious leg fatigue today while just riding to school, and my resting heart rate is up about 10bpm (OMG it's over 60!). That means that I haven't recovered enough from the long hours of riding this weekend. I calculated over 10 hours on the bike since Thursday evening. That's a lot for me right now, so I'm going to make sure to get a lot of sleep tonight and take it very easy on the way to school tomorrow. On that note, I'm going to go shower and head to bed. Good night!

All it takes is the lycra

Yesterday I felt awful. It was the end of my hell week, I had just had two exams, I was getting my usual stress letdown headache that frequently becomes a migraine, and I hadn't been sleeping enough. But I had promised myself that I would go for a ride that evening. So when I got home from school I gave myself until 5:30 to sleep, and then woke up still feeling tired and awful. But, I was determined to at least try to get a real ride in before the thunderstorms hit. So I start to change into my team kit. Like magic, as soon as I'm dressed to ride I feel energized and motivated. I go out there and get on my bike and my mood seems to improve with each pedal stroke. Instead of the ordeal that I had been expecting, that ride ended up being exactly what I needed. My headache went away, my mood lifted and the world just disappeared for a little while.

Fast forward to this evening. The plan was to meet Bernie for a ride around 5:30 after my class picnic. I got home and seriously considered calling and canceling because my headache was back and I was tired again. But, I had made a commitment so I started to get changed. Once again all it took was getting myself into the lycra cycling gear and I felt just fine. Once on my bike I felt even better. By the time I got to the designated meeting spot, I was feeling up for a couple hours of riding. I told Bernie as much and so he picked a route from his mental repertoire and off we went. Around mile 30 and close to 2 hours into our ride I was completely lost and Bernie asked me how far we'd gone. Turns out he doesn't have a computer on his bike so he had no idea. I told him and he was surprised, to say the least. I think he said something like, "Umm... I gues we should start heading home then..." I'm thinking that we're probably just doing a big loop and home should only be about a half hour away. I was wrong. Home was another hour and a half and almost 30 more miles away. Luckily Bernie is like a superhero and pulled almost the entire way back. So my nearly canceled ride that should have been a couple of hours ended up being about 60 miles and 3.5 hours. But I was smiling at the end and Bernie and I plan to do it again on Sunday. All I have to do is put on my lycra and I'll be ready to go.

Riding less, lifting more

I haven't really had the time to ride much over the past week. The motivation is tough when I don't have people to ride with on short notice. The thunderstorms don't help either. Bernie and I will be riding together this weekend, which will be good.

Instead of riding I've been lifting. I shifted from 2 sets of 20 to 3 sets of 12-15 and upped my weights accordingly on Tuesday. A shift like that always means a day of pretty extreme soreness and stiffness. That should be mostly gone by tomorrow, though, which is good because I'll be lifting again. It is very encouraging, though, because I'm lifting weight in sets of 15 that I was only able to lift in sets of 5-8 before I left Portland. I'm also starting to see real muscle definition in my arms and more definition in my legs. As I continue with the lifting I'll slowly replace fat with muscle and should see a very visible difference. The lifting isn't going to make me shrink, necessarily, but it will definitely help get my percent body fat down.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been trying calorie counting for the first time in my life. I've decided that I hate it and it doesn't work for me. Maybe for someone that has a regular schedule and does the same amount of exercise daily it would work. I lift a couple of times a week, do one race pace workout, try to do at least one long ride, and who knows what else I'll throw in there. That means my daily caloric needs can vary by 2000kcal or more. I'm just not willing to put in the effort to keep track of that kind of thing. What I discovered is that I kept underestimating how much I should eat throughout the day and would either eat a lot at night or wake up starving, or both. Overall, I think I actually gained a couple of pounds in the past two weeks. So I'm going to stop listening to the part of my brain that buys into media hype and go back to Neil's diet plan. Eat healthy food whenever I'm hungry and ride as much as possible.

The big sticking point with this plan is making sure that I bring enough food with me to school, especially on lifting days. For example, on Tuesday I brought: a tuna sandwich, a PBJ with banana, an orange, a bag of trail mix, and a muffin. That was supposed to be enough to get me from 7:30am to 4pm with an intense workout in the middle. It didn't work. And when I run out of food at school, the only real options are vending machines and the cookies at the coffee stand. So for tomorrow, which is the same schedule as Tuesday, I will pack: a burrito, a bagel with cream cheese, an orange, a bag of trail mix, two muffins, a nutrigrain bar, and some cookies. We'll see how that goes.

Random thoughts

1. I'm getting faster. Today I rode 22 miles at an average of 18.5mph, and I wasn't killing myself to go that speed. Yay!

2. I really need some chain lube. I'm becoming that person with the noisy bike.

3. Eminem is excellent workout music. If anyone else has suggestions for good workout music, preferably with a pounding beat, please tell me!

4. When it's hot out, my jersey stayed half unzipped. If it's also buggy out, they tend to fly into my jersey/sports bra and collect there. I dunno if they die on impact or drown in sweat, but it sure makes for an interesting find when I strip down for a shower.

Something clicked

My ambitious plan for the weekend fell through, and I didn't get on Paris until this morning, so I decided to make the most of it. I rode down to the course that so thoroughly beat me up in the last GVCC race. It was about an hour ride to the course, each lap would take about 30-40 minutes, and an hour back home. I planned to do 2 laps, but had to cut it down to one because I wouldn't have had enough gatorade. In heat like this the last thing I wanted was to be in the middle of nowhere with no liquids.

When I got to the course I decided to sprint up every hill (read: Fartlek workout, painful, but effective). There were probably 10 small hills, often called power or sprinter's hills, along the 9 mile course. All were steep (10% or higher grade, I would bet) and short (less than a minute to the top). I would usually pick a landmark at the crest of the hill and try to sprint to that. The goal with a sprint is to keep accelerating the entire time. Letting speed fade away just means that in a race people will be passing you.

The first 5 or 6 hills went okay, but I couldn't maintain my speed to the top. My legs slowed down, I had to drop into lower gears and if I had been in a race I would have been shelled off the back. Then there was a long, painful, false flat section into a brutal headwind. False flats look like they should be flat and easy but are actually uphill. They're awful, and compounded with a headwind are even worse. I'm going to once again state how bad the winds are out here. I've never seen anything like it in Portland. The gusts blow my bike all over the place, and I frequently have to lean my body into the wind just to maintain a straight line. It's crazy.

Back to the hills. After terrorizing my legs with the false flats, I reach another set of little hills. I expect them to go worse than the first ones, since I'm now tired. So I start in a slightly easier gear than I would normally. I stand, and try to maintain both my overall speed and a high pedal turnover. Somehow, something in my brain and legs clicked. I flew up the hill, accelerating the entire way, even managing to shift UP a gear before the top. My legs were still moving as quickly as they had been at the base of the hill. I was ecstatic.

This probably seems like a very small thing, but for me it's a pretty big deal. I'm not a hill climber and never will be, but I'm strong and should be able to use pure power to my advantage on these "sprinter's hills." Finally, I managed to get to the point in my training where I've got the right combination of fitness, muscle strength, and technique to do what I know I should be able to do. If I've done it once, I can do it again.

At least in theory, I didn't manage it on the last few hills of the course. But I'm okay with that, I'll make it happen again soon.

The entire ride today was about 42 miles, in a little less than 3 hours. I'll be going for a short ride tomorrow morning with Katharine from school (the one who's husband is a Cat 2 roadie), and then racing on Tuesday. We'll be racing on a course I've never seen before, so I have no idea what to expect. My goal: Stay with the pack for at least one full lap.

Types of workouts

By request, here's an explanation of what I mean when I mention what kind of workout I'm going to do.

Intervals: As the name suggests, this workout is intervals of hard effort interspersed with recovery. For example, 2 minutes on followed by complete recovery. When I say "on" I mean putting out as much effort and power as I can sustain for the length of that interval. Therefore, a 1 minute interval will be extremely fast, whereas a 5 minute interval might be a little slower but it has to be sustained longer. Recovery doesn't mean stop, it means slow down and keep the legs moving quickly, but in smaller gears so I reduce the effort and let my heart rate slow. A subset of intervals would be a ladder interval workout, 1min on, 1 min recover, 2 min on, 2 min recover, all the way up to 5 min, then back down to 1 min. Those are hard. The goal of intervals is to increase anaerobic fitness and power.

Tempo: Tempo workouts are like time trials. Pick an amount of time, usually 45-60 minutes, then go as hard as can be sustained for that entire length of time, also known as the aerobic threshold (where you stop being able to supply oxygen to your muscles at the rate they want it). For me, these workouts are a mind game, constantly reminding myself to keep pushing hard and not ease up. This kind of workout gets the muscles used to working at threshold and can increase aerobic threshold.

Fartlek: It's a Swedish word, apparently means "speed play", probably really means pain and suffering. This workout is like intervals, but without full recovery. So, I would do a 3 minute all out effort, then rest for 30-60 seconds, then another 3 minutes, rest for 30-60 seconds, etc. Another option would be to ride somewhere with varied terrain and push hard up every hill, recover on every descent and alternate hard efforts and recovery on the flats, continue until puking or passing out. This is much harder than either regular intervals or tempo because without full recovery it takes more effort to get the power up during the hard interval. Unfortunately, this is also what road racing is like, short bursts of speed followed by minimal rest and more bursts of speed. So the purpose of fartlek is to get used to race conditions, learn how to deal with suffering, and increase anaerobic power.

Anaerobic power is what will win a race, and what I'm lacking since I've never done any real athletic training before. That's why I do a lot of interval workouts and should do more fartlek workouts (they're just so hard to do by myself).

Today I was going to do intervals on my bike, but then the weather decided to turn ugly. It's currently 95 degrees and 60% humidity, not good outdoor workout weather. So instead I did intervals on the elliptical in the gym. It's better than nothing, but really not the same as on the bike training. Being on the bike works slightly different muscles in slightly different ways, enough of a difference that I wouldn't get too much benefit from doing regular elliptical workouts. Which is too bad, because it's going to stay hot here for quite a while.