Wacky Wednesday Wandering

Too many things tumbling around in my brain to continue with C++ so howz about some bloggin...

Yes, I admit it... I'm a Walker Stalker. I was out on the bike path on Monday doing a little easy ride by Goleta Beach when a bunch of women riders from the UCSB team pass by going the other direction. Cool. Glad to see that. Then, 30 seconds later, I see good ol Chris Walker coming at me. Hmmm. Coincidental timing?

Anyway, I hadn't talked to him since his New Zealand race so I flipped it around and caught up to him. He immediately confessed that he wanted to catch up to the UCSB girls, but he chose not to because it would have put him above his 90 bpm recovery pace if he sped up. I submit that even if they were going slow and he caught up, simply talking to them would have elevated his heart rate beyond that!

So we putted around Goleta together for the next hour.

Coupla tidbits: the NZ race had brutal crosswinds and blizzards, and the Kiwis are extremely aggro in their echelons. CW was getting headbutted out of line by the big brawlers, so he cracked one day and lost a half hour. OTOH, Tilford and Thurlow fearlessly fought for position, and both ended up in the top 15 g.c.

Another tidbit I learned... Doug Knox and the Time Factory Team may be taking on Aram Dellalian formerly of the Amgen team. I don't know the guy, but I find his blog interesting. He'd probably work well with Chris.

CW and I rode together yesterday also, though not so leisurely... four hours at ~20 mph with five (!) Ladera intervals in the middle. Now it's been awhile since I did Ladera--the last time probably was with Chris Hahn--so I had forgotten how to pace them. I stayed with CW for the first one but man did that put me in debt. We climbed the 0.9 miles and 500 ft elevation change in 5:30, which I think is about 6 W/kg! I never fully recovered, and did the rest in the 6:00-6:30 range. Walker otoh ripped off all five in times within 10-15 seconds of each other. Amazing. He's gonna hurt some people at Boulevard in seven weeks.

Tower of Power training guru TnA has been patiently explaining some of the latest concepts to me and one of them is finally sinking in. Namely, the concept of functional threshold power (FTP) and anaerobic work capacity (AWC) and the cool relationship between them when you do maximal efforts for durations more than a couple of minutes. It's taken me a while to accept that a person can only do a fixed amount of anaerobic work (in the physics sense) during a maximal effort, independent of the duration of the effort. In other words, you can blow it all in five minutes up Ladera, or use it up at 1/3 the rate going up OSM in 15:00, or 1/9 the rate going up Gibraltar in 45:00, as long as those are all maximal efforts. And the aerobic contribution to work in those efforts is simply your threshold power multiplied by the duration of the effort ...i.e., Work = (FTP x time) + AWC. Makes me want to get a power meter because I know this must be useful! When will they get cheaper?

Are we spoiled or what? If you doubt it, read Jake Erker's latest diary entry. By leaving Santa Barbara, he and Laura not only lost access to all of us witty, charming, and good-looking training partners, they also gave up 70-degree December days like today. Fenders? Plastic baggies on your feet? Full bib tights? What is this stuff he speaks of? (I hope I didn't just jinx us and bring on a massive El Nino!)