Crank Cycling

Recently, on a ride, I was told that “it is hard to mimic race efforts in training”. When it comes to mimicking speed-work , many find this to be true. However, there are ways produce speed-work training but you need to have the resources. The easiest way to practice going fast without racing is motor-pacing, or just the right kind of group ride. . Motor-pacing is drafting behind a motorcycle or scooter to mimic racing speeds, its hard,  and its fun, but  it frequently requires a velodrome to do it safely and may be difficult to do on open roads.

As far as mimicking non speed-work efforts,  you just have to fin the right terrain.  The right hill  can help you  accomplish most if not all of your training goals. In a race, you should only be pedaling, working hard, or going hard when  the time is right.  Working in the correct break, working for a teammate,  jockeying for position before the field sprin, or making sure you arr int he right spot before the big climb so that you don’t get caught out   when the field splits. The rest of the time you should not be pedaling or going hard. You should be drafting, sucking wheel, hiding in the field, and conserving energy.

In training, it is frequently the opposite.  You should be going hard! This is not to say you shouldn’t have rest days. But if it’s not a rest day, then HTFU and do the workout. If you are training for a race with 10,000 feet of climbing, you’d better get your butt up some hills. If you need to hit 400 watts repeatedly over a 30 minute period, you’d better find a way to make it happen!

Personally, I’m trying to race more competitively this season. This means on days when “I’m just not feeling it”, I need to suck it up, and make it happen. Cycling is a hard sport and on the days I decide not to do my training, there are 80 peers of mine that chose more wisely. Like coach Chris Daggs always says, “There is no try, only do”.

Below is a video of my repeat climbs.

If you need help to get motivated contact us

See you on the road,

Coach Jesse Eisner

What is TSS?  TSS stands for training stress score. If you use Training Peaks or own a copy of WKO for your PC you will see a the TSS acronym with a correlating number in the summery of your workout TSS:239.04

“While exercise intensity is clearly an important factor in determining the type and magnitude of physiological adaptations to training, exercise frequency and duration – which together determine the overall training volume – are important factors as well. However, there is obviously an interaction between training intensity and volume-that is, at some point as intensity goes up volume must come down, and vice-versa, or else you will become over-trained. To quantify the overall training load and hopefully help avoid such a situation, The authors developed training stress score (TSS) for every workout, that provides a graphical summary of your recent TSS”   Training and Racing with a Power Meter ~Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggen~

Physical exertion leads to training stress. The quote above talks about training stress and how it is accounted for when using a power meter. Power meters are one of the easiest ways to quantify training load and the stress that comes from said training.

Although Stress from training becomes more easily quantifiable because we can measure power, (intensity, volume, and workload) these metrics do not take into account all factors of stress, physical and mental fatigue.

When you lift weights you create physical training stress. If I lift 450 lbs 40 times I have lifted the equivalent of 18000 lbs or 9 tons. This type of workout done 2 to 3 times a week can end up averaging out to 27 tons of weight lifted in a week. This adds obvious training stress to our overall workload as an athlete. These conclusions can apply to all of the differing workouts that you do i.e. running, kettlebell, swimming, or even yoga.

It is also important to remember that there are other forms of physical exertion that would not be categorized as working out, but will cause stress. For example, have you recently done a home improvement project that involved manual labor? From 2005 to 2009, I spent part of my time working in the construction industry. On some days, I used a Jack hammer for four or more hours at a time. I would say that those days were as hard or harder than a 40k time trial or 90 minute criterium.

The final type of stress (I’ll talk about) to account for is mental fatigue. It is easy to forget the stress that is created by our minds or by what are minds are working on. Especially, when correlating those mental efforts to working out.

As athletes it takes quite a bit of mental discipline to train our body’s day in and day out to achieve goals that are beyond our immediate abilities.

If you receive a promotion at your job, work on a big project, or have a deadline to meet, stress will be increased. Having a child, becoming the head of an estate, or other life change also will increase your stress. Changes like these will most likely have added and new responsibilities that can even effect sleep patterns. These new responsibilities will take more of your mental discipline and focus. These responsibilities should be considered when thinking about your training and stress.

Knowing that there are other factors of stress is important, but what do we do with that information?
One of the major things you can do is account for all your stress. If you lift weights, cross-train, or don’t ride with your power meter on a specific day, add your own TSS Score to your workout.

In Training Peaks Software, for your TSS score to be accurate your threshold power must be input correctly into the software . A TSS Score of 100 is considered to be one hour of all out effort or equivalent to a 40k time trial. If your threshold power is input accurately Training Peaks will tell you what your TSS is on any given ride.

One way to calculate your own TSS is to use similar duration, terrain, and fatigue as a model. When it comes to weight lifting or cross training you can judge/estimate by how you feel. For example, how did your effort without a power meter (non cycling) compare to workouts with a power meter? Are you less, equally, or more fatigued? When building an annual training program, more information is better. Your best guess, even if it is subjective, is good enough.

In conclusion, share with your coach any life changes that are effecting your training, sleep patterns, or performance. Coaches are here to help you objectively balance your training so you can accomplish peak performance.

See you on the road
Coach Jesse Eisner

Would you like to rent a power meter? Do you need coach? Contact us. We can help.

We’ve all been sidelined with an illness or injury and getting back to a good level of fitness can be tough. Don’t despair, you’ll get back to peak fitness, but it takes hard work, discipline, and, above all, a plan. Here’s some tips on how to make your comeback successful.

1. Have a plan. Failing to plan is planning to fail; it sounds cliche, but it’s true. Talk to your coach or hire a coach. If you don’t have a coach; reach out to a trusted training partner for some ideas.
2. Select a target event. Pick an event or race 4-8 weeks out that suits your ability. A goal event gives you purpose and provides extra motivation.
3. Put your comeback training schedule up where you can see it everyday. Put it someplace like your bathroom mirror or your refrigerator.
4. Get disciplined. Schedule your rides in advance so there are no excuses or conflicts.
5. Clean up your diet. You probably gained a few pounds (or 15…) and dropping the weight is part of getting back to peak fitness.
6. Spend some extra time on recovery. It’s going to take a few weeks for your post workout recovery time to improve so devote some extra time to your recovery routine.
7. Document your comeback! Post your progress on your Facebook, Twitter, blog, or website. Sharing your training with others will keep you accountable.
8. BE PATIENT! It’s tough getting back in the saddle, and the first few weeks will be difficult and you’ll question your choices. After a few weeks you’ll feel better and your legs will come around. Keep the faith; good results are around the corner!

On a personal note: I am coming back from a long layoff due to injury and illness. In late August I suffered a broken finger and hand during a training crash and soon after I was forced off the bike for months due to an illness. I’m following my own tips and I’ll be documenting my progress on Crank Cycling’s blog. Check back for more updates, and don’t hesitate to share your own comeback stories with us!

Coach Chris Daggs

It is coming. It sneaks up on us every year. That first race. We told ourselves that we were going to be ready. We drew up a plan, bought a new training journal, and made a list of goals.

Unfortunately, the off season is filled with holidays, friends, family, and fatty foods. None of these things are truly bad. However they can put a hamper on our best laid plans.

With our friends and family requesting our presence, and commitments filling our time, training can be nearly impossible. This is a time when your own creativity can help you meet your goals.

The majority of cycling disciplines (at their core) rely on our aerobic engine. Training that engine should be a priority during the off season.

Below are some training tricks that can help you. Before you start, you will need to know your upcoming events and the longest duration (time, not distance) you will be competing. Find a date in the future that you will hit that longest duration (date of race) and work backwards, subtracting time trained at your aerobic capacity to the current date. For example, if I am planning to do a 3 hour road race in June, I will plan to ride 3 hours at maximum aerobic capacity in April and subtract 10 minutes every week till I get to the current date.

Block out your training: Find the times that will work best for your personal training. Sometimes that means you will miss your Saturday club ride. At certain times of the year I get up at 4:30 am to be on the the road by 5:15 am. This affords me two hours of uninterrupted training.

Do Doubles: Some days squeezing an hour in before work and adding 45 minutes on the trainer after the kids are in bed is the way to go.

Build a camp: If you have multiple days off and you need to work on climbing, get up early (being up early is good for meeting other obligations, too) and drive to an appropriate cycling terrain on consecutive days. If you build multiple camps over a period of two to three months, you will see your fitness grow by leaps and bounds.

Since the majority of cycling disciplines (at their core) rely on our aerobic engine, there are a multitude of alternative aerobic activities that can help us build our aerobic foundation. Go for a run, it’s easy to get out the door quickly and be back before anyone notices your gone. Does your work have a gym or offer membership somewhere? Take a spin class or kettle bell class before work or at lunch.

Maximize your training time: If you are set on meeting specific goals, don’t go do the epic ride with your buddies and stay away from the super slow ride that does not give you any training benefit.

If all else fails you can race into fitness. Make sure to adjust your goals, planning to do better the second half of the season. Don’t stress, cycling calenders usually have a long season with multiple disciplines and lots of racing options.

Crank Cycling can build you a training plan and even offers cycling camps. Let us know how we can help you reach your goals

See you on the road,
Coach Jesse

Recently, Crank Cycling Coach Chris Daggs sent me a list of   supplements that were tainted and recalled by the FDA. . You can find the list here.     The list is an excellent reminder that there are tainted supplements out there, and that   an athlete is responsible for anything that winds up in his body.   If a substance that is on the WADA banned list winds up in your body, you will get a suspension.    It doesn’t matter if  it was an accident or not.   Some of these  supplements may even be purposefully tainted in  in order to increase their efficacy.    Most of the supplements on this list are bodybuilding supplements, and are unlikely to be taken by cyclists, but the other common classifications  are basically penis pills and weigh loss supplements.  I know many cyclists that might be tempted to try at least one of those…..  And cyclists have been banned for  unintentionally ingesting a banned substance in a tainted supplement.  In 2002, professional rider Scott Moninger received a one year  suspension when he  tested positive for a metabolite of anabolic steroids.   Moninger  had unopened containers of  the amino acid that he  purchased  at a local health food store.  He took  those unopened packages and had them tested  at an independent lab, where they found the same anabolic substance that was in Moningers sample,  giving pretty strong evidence  that Moninger did not knowingly take the substance.     Moningers 1 year suspension was considered a slap on the the wrist because he unknowingly  ingested the substance.  If he hadn’t proven that  it was taken on accident, he likely would have received a much longer ban.    More recently in the Fall of 2011,  an amateur racer in Florida received an 8 month ban for a banned substance  that was apparently   in an over the counter mass marketed energy drink he bought a local  drug store.

Tomorrow….. how often are supplements tainted?

Crank Cycling Athletes and freinds. We are planning on doing a Crank Cycling road ride on Decmber 3rd at 9am. We will be leaving from the Performance Bike Shop in Sorrento Valley. The ride will be lead by Coach Jesse Eisner.
This riding is aproprieate for all crank cycling athletes. It is an endurance paced ride. There will be no hammering on the ride. Hope to see you all out there.

Cheers Coach Jesse

Performance Bike Shop
11675 Sorrento Valley Rd., Suite A
1/4 Mile South of Carmel Mountain Road
Sorrento, CA 92121

Crank route

http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/59080432

So it is the end of your season and it has been a long one. You just finished the Everest Challenge which has 30,000 feet of climbing. Or maybe you just did a five day UCI stage race in the Caribbean. For some of the riders I coach, this is the way their season ended. When your season has ended with such lofty goals, you can be left with a lack of drive to continue training.

Some riders force themselves through periods where they lack motivation. This can, and usually does, lead to overreaching and eventually burnout or over training.

It is important to give ourselves time to relax from the rigors of training and racing even if you have come off a stellar season, accomplished your goals, and have a new level of fitness. It is important to remember that even if you are not physically overreaching or over trained, that you may be mentally tired. Our minds need just as much care as our bodies when it comes to recovery.

There are always alternative training methods to maintain and rebuild a high level of fitness. These alternatives can give us a break from a rigorous training schedule and still be fun. One method that some cyclists use is Cyclo-cross. Cyclo-Cross is like mountain biking and running mixed into the same workout on road style bicycles. Cylco-cross race courses are run on road, grass, and single track trails with minimal technical sections, but have areas where the rider must dismount and carry his or her bike while hurdling barriers.

Mountain biking is also another good alternative of riding. At the end of a long season, our training and competing can become only a means to an end. Sometimes this leads us to forget about the fun aspects of riding bicycles. Most of us started riding bicycles because it was fun and our competitive natures pushed us to compete on our bikes. Mountain biking leads us back to trails, keeps our brains engaged picking good lines on technical sections of these trails, and usually leads us to mud; and everyone knows that getting muddy is fun.

If you want to be as functional as possible in your off season, lifting weights is also a good thing to take up at the end of your season. Weight lifting is something you should talk with your coach or trainer about as you can very easily injure yourself lifting. Lifting weights should also incorporate the same movements that your cycling discipline does.

When starting to rebuild your overall fitness and transitioning into the off season, it is important to break up the rhythm of your training to include cross training and conditioning in a fun environment. Allowing your body to rest and recover from anaerobic efforts is important. Allowing your mind to rest from pushing yourself to accomplish your workouts is also very important. Training comes in building cycles. All building cycles whether weekly, monthly, or yearly should include rest periods.

Our long term goals as athletes should include rest, recovery, and relaxation at the end of a long season and taking that time will renew our inner drive. I am writing this blog post from Monterey, California, where I just took a few days off to relax, read books, and ride a mountain bike on beautiful Fort Ord, and believe me, I got muddy.

If you want to take your training to the next level, let the coaches at Crank Cycling know. We can help you meet whatever training goals you have!
See you on the road,
Coach Jesse Eisner

About 2/3 of the athletes I coach  use power meters to train, and the majority of them use heart rate monitors as well.  But even with athletes that use all of this fancy equipment, sometimes a  “Rate of Perceived  Exertion” (RPE) scale  is the best way to explain  the subjective  intensity of the workout.       This a basically  how hard  you are going on your own personal 1-10 scale.   While  the scale is 100% subjective, it winds up being quite reliable, and has been validated in multiple scientific  studies. ( you can do a Google Scholar search for GAV Borg or Gunnar Borg)

The scale is typically given like this:

• 0 – Nothing at all
• 1 – Very light
• 2 – Fairly light
• 3 – Moderate
• 4 – Some what hard
• 5 – Hard
• 6
• 7 – Very hard
• 8
• 9
• 10 – Very, very hard

But I also sometimes explain it like this:

• 0 – Nothing at all
• 1-2  Super easy, like a slow walk
• 3-4 Moderate effort, you  aren’t going easy anymore, but you can hold this for a long time
• 5-6 Hard  holding this for an extended period is difficult,  at or just below   race pace
• 7 -8 Very hard     race pace, as  you can only hold this for a couple of minutes
• 9 Almost as hard as you could possibly go
• 10 – This is as hard as you’ve ever gone your entire life, like someone is chasing you with a cattle prod.

This is  useful for large groups of people such as stationary  cycling classes ( such as the classes I teach at the  Navy and VA hospitals), or situations where athletes don’t have have access to, or don’t want to use devices such as power meters  or heart rate monitors.  It is also     frequently  use the RPE scale even with athletes that DO use these training devices.   The fact is, that an athlete needs to know  how to go off of feel,  to gauge their own physiological  responses,  just get a  handle on  what they can do,  and when they need to do it.      Don’t get me wrong.  I love training, coaching, and racing with power.   But if you you don’t know and  understand what  your boy is doing at the moment, and what you are capable of on a purely primal level.   You’ll never really reach your maximum potential.

Crank Indoor Cycling opened  in August 2009.   After 2 years, we have decided that the original  concept  location are  not the best for us, and it is better for us to concentrate primarily on coaching individual  athletes  The  last class   at our downtown location was  on July 14th 2011.       We truly enjoy teaching the classes, interacting with the athletes, and helping them meet their goals.    We intend to have some sort of cycling classes beginning again in the fall of 2011, but the exact location, time, are format are still to be determined.

Crank Cycling as a coaching and training organization is going strong.  Sean, Jesse, and Chris are here to help you meet your training, racing and fitness goals.  You can visit us at the Crank Cycling web page for more information.

Thank you for your patronage,

Sean

It is essential to know your strengths and weaknesses before adding specificity to your training plan. There are two common approaches, 1) further develop your strengths, and 2) focus on your weaknesses. Riders training to their strengths dedicate time and energy where their skills and abilities already lie; others, focus on their weaknesses in order to develop a well-rounded set of abilities. The Crank Cycling Climbing Camp can help both types of riders.
The Crank Cycling Spring Climbing Camp is where a dedicated rider can harness the power of specificity in order to achieve new levels of performance. After determining a focus area and attaining a base-level of cycling fitness, adding training specificity complementing and stretching your abilities is the next step. If you are a climber, more climbing and specific gradients that mimic upcoming events, including appropriate duration and intensity, is essential. Planning on competing in a century race with a 3-mile climb? If so, then you will want to reflect that exact effort in your training. Do you have upcoming touring century rides? The first goal for specific training is to start with duration barely exceeding your existing limits. To maximize your training, the goal is to incrementally extend that duration until reaching the desired effort level for a given event. Accurately answering the following questions will effectively shape your training program:
1) Does the event have repeated efforts such as a circuit race?
2) Is the event a point-to-point event with continuously rolling terrain?
3) Are there repeated climbs?

After these efforts are added into your training plan you can take specificity a step further
by adding continuous blocks of the chosen discipline to stimulate further adaptation—a training camp is a perfect opportunity for this. Training camps can be as simple as a long weekend with multiple days of riding, or as intricate as choosing multiple specific climbs over 3 to 5 days while maintaining specific power or heart rate output.
Crank Cycling just completed a spring climbing camp in some of the most challenging and beautiful terrain in Southern California. For three days riders enjoyed a FULLY-SUPPORTED experience including a follow-vehicle, food, drinks, spare clothing, mechanical support, expert coaching, and evaluation. Riders climbed over 21,000 feet, sped down winding descents, and pushed themselves to new levels—all developing their riding skills and pushing their physical limits.

“It felt like I was on a 3 day vacation, except I was never more than an hour away from home. I got to push my body over some of the most beautiful climbs San Diego has to offer, while feeling very “pro” the entire time. There is nothing more relaxing than knowing you have a support vehicle near you at all times. A raise of your hand gets you anything you need, water , food, a jacket, a wheel change, sometimes just a word of support, or the directions to your next turn. I will be the first to sign up to Crank Cycling’s next climbing camp!” ~Jose Cepeda~

Summer Climbing camp

Jose and Coach Jesse

Coached athlete Justin Farrar

If you want to take your training to the next level, let the coaches at Crank Cycling know. We can help meet whatever training goals you have!

See you on the road,
Coach Jesse Eisner