Roger Bikes

Category: Daily Ride

Everyday I go for a ride on a bike. These posts are about those rides.

  • Force Reps Thursday

    Force Reps Thursday

    It was a beautiful ride this morning. Temperature was comfortable and pretty much no wind or clouds in sight. I was able to sneak out without waking the dogs up but was still able to make my cup of joe.

    We will be leaving Tubac on Saturday and I will miss this sleepy little town. The RV park we have been staying at is anything but a normal RV park. It is much closer to a hippie commune with irregularly placed camping sites and bird feeders liberally placed throughout. The nearby roads are a bit rough but quiet and with enough varying grades to build nice workouts around.

    Today’s Workout Details:

    One of the challenges for mountain biking over road cycling is that the terrain is widely varying. Besides a lot of ups and downs there are also varying sizes of rocks, roots, and other obstacles to rode over. This requires short bursts of intense power to ride through smoothly.

    To train for this type of riding regular intervals are not enough. While intervals help raise your ability to ride with a sustained heart rate or power they don’t necessarily help build the specific strength needed to have short bursts of power.

    Enter the force reps workout. While similar to an interval workout force reps are more similar to weight lifting where a short burst of energy is used to move something heavy. In this case the short burst is 10 pedal strokes and the heavy thing is being in a large gear.

  • For the Recovery

    For the Recovery

    As someone over the age of 40 it is important to focus on recovery as much as if not more than my hard workouts. If you are over 40 you should understand the why of this. If you are not yet 40 then get ready. 😂

    Snoozing Dogs

    As we age our bodies get slower and not as good at recovering from injuries. Exercise is in effect a mild form of injury. In order to grow muscle you have to push it to its limits and cause small tears in the muscle fibers. The muscle repairs itself and overcompensates to make itself stronger than it was before the exercise.

    If you don’t give the muscle enough time to repair then you make no progress in gaining strength. If you do this often enough you can achieve something known as over training. Generally the rule of thumb for endurance training is 3 weeks of progressive overload followed by 1 week of recovery.

    I say generally as this is applied to athletes in their 20’s and up broadly, but if we circle back a few paragraphs we see that as we age our ability to recover gets worse. To compensate for this the training program I am currently following does 2 weeks of progressive overload followed by 1 week of recovery.

    That was a long way of saying that this week is my week of recovery. 😎

    Today I had a 1 hour recovery ride which means I pedaled about as easy as I could without falling over for 1 hour on a flat road. My heart rate stayed in Zone/Level 1 and I could have easily held a conversation for the entire ride.

    It was a beautiful morning with a light southerly breeze. Riding around Tubac for the last 5 weeks has been really nice and I will miss it, a little. The roads here are not in the greatest of conditions and there isn’t a lot of shoulder. The nice thing is that the drivers have pretty much all given be a wide berth which is always appreciated.

    I listened to a number of podcasts this morning:

    ReWork – The Soul of an Entrepreneur – Great discussion about entrepreneurs from an angle that is less typical these days. Turns out we don’t all have to be Elon Musk or a Kardashian to be successful.

    Short Wave – On Earth Day, What You Can Do For The Environment – 50th Anniversary of Earth Day is tomorrow. 3 things to focus on: 1) Educate yourself, 2) Make conscious purchase decisions, and 3) Reduce travel. While individually we might not make a huge impact on climate change we will change our thinking and perspective. This will then force our representatives to adopt our thinking and perspective. Maybe.

  • Strength Training Monday

    Strength Training Monday

    Happy Monday everyone! I hope you had fun this weekend. Did you get any bike rides in?

    Since its monday that means I am doing strength training. I have to admit that today I was feeling about as excited as Dazey and Enzo are in the featured image for strength training. That is to say, not at all.

    In this current training program the strength training is more focused on movement and repetitions over getting buff. So high reps and low sets is the prescription.

    There is also a lot of core workouts cause you gotta use your guts on the bike a lot.

    Anyway I really wasn’t feeling super energized about today’s workout but the good news is that Audible has Core and Yoga courses included with a subscription for free. I used a few of them to put together about an hour of workout and felt pretty good about it.

    See you tomorrow for the 1 hour recovery spin.

  • Sunday Ride – 3 hrs of riding

    Sunday Ride – 3 hrs of riding

    In a few religions Sunday is a day of rest. In the world of Roger’s cycling training Sunday is a big day of riding. While we aren’t going for crazy hard efforts like in intervals we are riding the longest and biggest ride of the week.

    There are a few reasons for this: 1) Its Sunday so I don’t have anything else to do besides some chores and 2) I gotta get in my long rides sometime during the week. Kinda the same thing but I needed a list in this paragraph for SEO.

    Since we have been parked in Tubac for about 5 weeks now there has been a pretty consistent use of heading south on the I-19 frontage road to start a ride off. This is because the wind is generally southerly and the road does not dead end at a US Border Patrol station.

    For today’s ride I need a 30 minute warm up before I climb for 2 sets of 15 minutes. It just so happens that about 30 minutes south of Tubac there is an exit for the I-19 that has a dirt road which climbs to the west of the interstate. This is perfect for our needs.

    The climb ranges from 5˚ to 12˚ grade and gets pretty scrappy at points with large loose rocks. Staying in an L2 to L3 heart rate zone is a challenge but that fits well with the slow RPM’s around 50 to 60.

    I did well on both climbs and managed to keep my heart rate from getting too high. The view from the top was pretty awesome:

    Time for an apple flavored power bar.

    Once the climbs were done I returned to the Frontage road and kept riding south for another hour and 20 minutes. Then I headed home and ended up with 35 miles of riding and just over 1300 feet of climbing.

    I felt better after today’s ride and attribute that to eating more while on the ride. I had 2 apples and a bag of dates with peanuts. I also added some powdered Gatorade to my second water bottle.

    Next week is a recovery week so the overall time on bike will be shorter allowing my body to recover to the work the last 2 weeks have done.

  • Today’s Ride: HR Level 2 Long Ride

    I am near the end of my second week of the Masters 40+ Mountain Bike Base Mountain Bike Training Plan. The Saturday rides are called Tech skills refined: Observe, visualize, ride, rest, refine, repeat and for a good portion of the ride you are supposed to ride a challenging portion of a mountain bike trail and practice riding smoothly. Then you ride in your heart rate level 2 for the rest of the ride.

    Whoa there feller! Slow down!

    Since we are currently in a pandemic so I am trying to practice smart riding. Which means I am not currently riding on dirt trails or minimizing it to only essential trails. So the optional version of this ride is to go for a longer road ride and then practice some skills like figure 8’s, track stands, and anything else you want to work on.

    Today that equated to a 2 hour and 30 minute ride. 😎

    Ride Summary/Notes:

    Some local stores along the way.

    Nice ride from RV park in Tubac south towards Rio Rico and surrounding area. Headwind going south so hitting L2 was pretty easy going out. Went further than I have gone down this road before. Crossed the valley at second Interstate exit and continued south on the road across the valley there. There is a path but it ends after no very long so just stayed on road going out and back. Coming back had tailwind and went too quickly even though I was still L2. Had to go past turnoff and then get some more headwind to get the time in. Listened to The Great Influenza and learning more about viruses and how the US in 1918 was in perfect shape for the pandemic. Many ties to today with Wilson and Trump. Propaganda for the war and censorship of any dissenting voices. We really do not learn. For the last 40 minutes of the ride my butt was pretty tired of being in the saddle. I had an apple and a banana and 2 bottles of water.

    Testing out the new banana flavored powerbar. Organic and the packaging is 100% recyclable.
    Apple flavored powerbar. Also organic and 100% recyclable.
  • Force reps training ride

    Force reps training ride

    Today was the first ride of week 2 of the 40+ 12 week base mountain bike training program that I started last week. The plan today was what the plan refers to as a force reps workout. Basically the workout is focused around 10 reps of maximum effort for 10 pedal strokes. Then rest for 3 minutes before the next rep.

    Overall the workout was hard but enjoyable. It started off with a 20 minute warm up that builds into a level 3 heart rate effort. Thanks s part of the ride was good but I did find that I had to try pretty hard to get into my level 2 heart rate which starts at 122 bpm. Then further into level 3 which starts at 137 bpm and goes up to 142 bpm.

    After the warm up I cooled down for 3 minutes before a 1 minute max effort trying to get into level 5 heart rate zone which for me starts at 153 bpm and goes up to whatever I can do. Then I rest for 3 minutes before starting the workout.

    The workout requires slowing to a walking speed of 2 to 3 mph and shifting into a big gear. Then you press as hard as you can for 10 full revolutions. Once you hit 10 you shift down and rest at a level 1 heart rate zone which for me is under 122 bpm. The idea is to do these on flat ground to a slight climb.

    Overall it was a great workout and was over within an hour.