BikeSheet: "...in the final stage of the 1989 Tour de France, Greg Lemond averaged 34 mph with a 5 mph tailwind. ...he was putting out 513 watts."

This past week was psycho-busy – CIRA Board meeting and Annual General Meeting, employee reviews, all on top of my regular day job stuff! Needless to say, I haven’t posted much, never mind trying to keep up with my aggregator – email and voicemail are challenging enough.

I’ve been desperately trying to get back into a “fitness” state of mind. The intent is there, but for some reason I haven’t been able to work a regular routine into my day-to-day activities. I like to exercise on according to a preset schedule – it makes it harder to fall off the wagon. But for some reason, since I banged up my knee, I haven’t been able to get back into the swing of things. Most of my physical activity has been far too ad hoc for my liking.

This past week, I did manage to self-propel myself almost 150k. This consisted of 30k of running – two 10k runs and two 5k runs – and roughly 120k on the bike – three days of commuting at 20k each and a 60k ride last Sunday.

I’d like to get this up to 230–240km per week before too long. Not as big a stretch as it might seem. In a normal week when I don’t have “out of office” commitments, I’ll do at least 100k on my bike just going to work and back. The stretch will come with extending my weekend long ride to 100k and moving all my runs to 10k.

A while ago I started looking for a cycling training guide. Something meaty that would not only help me layout a training program that would help me develop my cycling efficiency, style and training program, but also provide me with a fairly high degree of technical background to help me form my own conclusions about what might work best for me. I tend to perform best when I’ve had a chance to consume a whole bunch of data and draw my own conclusions - the “lernun” tends to sink in a bit deeper.

Anyways, I think I’ve finally found a decent guide. “Cycling Performance Tips” is a very detailed and engaging online book that should give you more information than you will ever need to improve your cycling performance. For instance, this little tidbit –

“In the well fed and rested state, the human body contains approximately 1500 carbohydrate Calories (stored as glycogen) in the liver and muscle tissue “

I’d always known that alcohol consumption lead to decreased performance, and in fact, I’d observed that even extremely limited intake would lead my to sluggish performance “the morning after” but I never knew *why*. This little bit of physiological trivia gave me the final bit of data I was missing - the liver stores energy. If the liver is busy or stressed with detoxifying your blood it probably isn’t too busy storing energy. Suddenly, hangovers make so much more sense!

This coming week should be equally busy. I’ve got a ton of ICANN related work to do, an election bid to prepare for and a quick trip out to the B.C. interior next weekend to visit family. I’ll be in the office all week, so hopefully I won’t be as disconnected as the past week or so…