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Today Today - July 2014

Half-Fast Mike

Lanterne Rouge-et-vert
May 22, 2007
4,644
3,700
It's my first day back to cycle commuting after our Tokyo-Aomori odyssey. I took yesterday off work for general mental and physical maintenance.

After 5 days of touring to and through Tohoku… Tokyo roads suck. Route 246 sucks. But this is home. <sigh>
 
Welcome back, Half-Fast Mike! :)

The first half of the year is over. I rode about 740 km in June, which made it an average month for me distance wise, but that was after only 120 km in the first 20 days. I'm pleased about catching up a bit in the last 1/3.

With the longest brevet of the year behind me and no more brevets until at least September, it feels a bit like I'm on summer vacation.

I'm looking forward to the Half-Fast Norikura weekend at the end of the month. Besides the fun of spending time with a lot of nice people with good food and great scenery, Norikura is always a good excuse to get out and ride some hills for a couple of weekends before it.

On my last ride of the month (to the Imperial palace and back before midnight) I set a new PR crossing Shinjuku from the east side to the west side. Going under the pedestrian bridge that links the north and south side, I couldn't help thinking about the poor guy who recently set himself on fire up there to protest Abe dumping article 9 of the constitution into the rubbish bin, a move opposed by the majority of the population. It's not exactly a common form of protest here and yet NHK didn't mention the incident at all in their evening news. None of the major papers ran a picture with their articles. That tells you something about the state of the media and the health of democracy here.
 
Got out for an endurance ride today. The legs took a good 15-20km to get the tiredness out of them following yesterday's hill repeats. Up the Tamagawa to the Asagawa, then on the road that heads towards Miyagase, but detoured over Makime Pass and then up the west side of Odarumi and back down the rivers to home.

Nice to see my base fitness/efficiency increasing. Could ride a steady 200W without going into HR Z3. A couple months ago it was about 180W.

Great weather and missed the showers that seemed to be following me on the way home.

5.5hrs in HR/Power Zones 2(average).
 
After a fit with @ProRaceMechanic on Sunday I had the fork cut down to size yesterday and a short spin this morning. All feels good and will be better when I get the correct stem on the bike.

One thing Chuck told me, which I was aware of to some extent, was that I am right side dominant, so much so that my position on the bike is affected. So, to combat this I will be running errands and doing any commutes on the six speed mamachari in the lowest gear using only my left leg. I am two days into this and it is quite the workout. Time to bring some balance to the force.
 
Chuck has good insight on this. I'm quite leftside dominant trying to compensate for basically severing my left leg at the knee in a MC accident years ago. Bad habits develop and it takes constant attention and coaching to keep from falling into old patterns. @grant - Orthopedists tend to look at the body in a static position, while a proper bike fitter looks at it dynamically (in motion). As above, even though my left leg is structurally shorter - I extend it farther than my right. Therefore, my fit is adjusted to compensate / train to more balanced effort. (Thanks, Chuck)
 
I'm rolling around giggling at this as I'd been looking at the dirt inside the top for sometime wondering if I should buy a new bottle or not. Steeping didn't seemt to work. Only 2 weeks ago, I went online to see if there were some cleaning tips and yeah - the top comes off! They are so clean now that the water even tastes like water again.

Realized today that the top of the camelbak podium bottle comes off for cleaning.
 
The third month in a row to top 2,000 km (April 2,155km, May 2,810km).
Out of interest/curiousity, I compared your totals to a pro - Ted King. He updates all his rides to Strava which you can access from his website. His totals for the 3 months come to 6565.7 km, 199 hours 49 min. So for the last three months you have ridden more than a pro who rode in the spring classics e.g. Paris Roubaix, did the Amgen Tour of California, Tour de Suisse and has/is just finishing up preparation for next week`s Tour de France....whilst working full-time. Something wrong there methinks when an amateur rides more than a pro who has all the time to train and can spend the rest of it recovering.

Apologies for the unsolicited advice, but I strongly recommend you hire a coach (preferably vastly experienced), get regular medical checkups (if you don`t already) as such volume can mess up your endocrine system (especially for those of us no longer able to replenish ourselves in the fountain of youth, plus keeping an eye out for heart irregularities. Have a rest, put your feet up; you`ve more than earned it.
 
Got out for some standing hill intervals at Yomiuri Land. Was planning to do 2 sets of 4, but had to cut it in half after getting called home urgently. Luckily nothing too serious.
Was pretty consistent with the 4 efforts, 359/358/363/352W for 2.5minutes.

Interesting. I`ve never done just 2.5 mins for VO2, as always feel like I am cheating if I do less than 3 mins, so last week which was supposed to be the start of a new block was 3 x 3. Ended up as 2 x 3 + 1 x 5 as just climbing up the hill 3/5ths of the way got kinda boring. Let`s see, maybe 2 x 3:30 or 4 + 1 x 5 next time.

Got out for an endurance ride today. Nice to see my base fitness/efficiency increasing. Could ride a steady 200W without going into HR Z3. A couple months ago it was about 180W.
5.5hrs in HR/Power Zones 2(average).

Well done. I`ve switched to a purely polarized approach now I`ve logged up the 3 years of training, and yes, it`s interesting seeing how those long rides change. Sadly, I`ve only been able to find the time to hit the 5-6 hr ride time once though.
 
Out of interest/curiousity, I compared your totals to a pro - Ted King. He updates all his rides to Strava which you can access from his website. His totals for the 3 months come to 6565.7 km, 199 hours 49 min. So for the last three months you have ridden more than a pro who rode in the spring classics e.g. Paris Roubaix, did the Amgen Tour of California, Tour de Suisse and has/is just finishing up preparation for next week`s Tour de France....whilst working full-time. Something wrong there methinks when an amateur rides more than a pro who has all the time to train and can spend the rest of it recovering.

Apologies for the unsolicited advice, but I strongly recommend you hire a coach (preferably vastly experienced), get regular medical checkups (if you don`t already) as such volume can mess up your endocrine system (especially for those of us no longer able to replenish ourselves in the fountain of youth, plus keeping an eye out for heart irregularities. Have a rest, put your feet up; you`ve more than earned it.

Sikochi, cheers for the concern. I'm not dying yet. But appreciate the advice!

2000 km a month is the old school amateur target. Nothing more than that. Personally I'm not chasing kilometres. Just trying to get to where I can physically. I tot up the kms each month and see how much I've done out of interest only.

I've gone a bit old school this year. Putting the miles down. Big distance. Low intensity.

First time to wear the HRM in June. And first time to do serious climbing.

As a result, I feel I've got the best conition I've had in years. But yeah, it's a tightrope between overtraining and not doing enough.

I would guess TK is on the lower end of the range for pros. Should you try to ride the same distance as a pro? Most of my amateur peers do similar distance. Others like ace climber Tazaki san or Okinawa champ Takaoka san are reliant on their home trainers. To the extreme, on the road, Ovest's Nishitani san will do 3000 km plus. Our very own Mr. Hillclimb Murayama san does about the same (54 years young!)

Regardless, total kms don't mean much really. Like you say, rest is paramount. But also the type of training you are doing. Intensity. Rest between workouts. How much of your training is racing ... etc etc

All these things to think about... Maybe a professional coach is the way forward... Doug3 step on up!

Andy

www.jyonnobitime.com/time
 
I'm pretty sure I just saw that 2800+km in a month was a new world record set. GCN YouTube newest news video.
 
I'm pretty sure I just saw that 2800+km in a month was a new world record set. GCN YouTube newest news video.
I'm looking at the Strava MTS results for June and my 1,673 km comes in 2,437th out of 137,527 participants. The top 100 are ALL over 2,800 km.

I realise that we should take what Strava tells us with a liberal dose of salt, but even so this seems to cast a little suspicion on the new world record to which you refer.
 
I'm pretty sure I just saw that 2800+km in a month was a new world record set. GCN YouTube newest news video.

Ah . . . no, not quite. How about ten thousand kilometres per month, every month for a year? (Tommy Godwin.)

("Steel is real", but maybe a bit too real when it extends to one's rims.)
 
Almost back on home soil: currently at Paris waiting for a connecting flight to Newcastle. Got a whole week's worth of riding in the Yorkshire Dales lined up, beginning with a couple of TdF stage 1 recon rides. Plan on taking in two of the categorised climbs, Buttertubs Pass and Grinton Moor, over the next couple of days. Not usually one for major photo-taking, but will try to post some on here over the coming days.
 
It's not exactly a common form of protest here and yet NHK didn't mention the incident at all in their evening news. None of the major papers ran a picture with their articles. That tells you something about the state of the media and the health of democracy here.

I was complaining to the wife about the same thing, along with the intelligence insulting segment about how wages had risen 2.2% on average but neglected to show what the net effect was on household income given the rise in inflation/sales tax. But as for the self-immolation story, the wife said it was covered on the 9 o`clock edition. Perhaps 7pm news is a `lite` version, and they don`t want to put people off eating their tea (evening meal to those non-Yorkshire folk).
 
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