The new mountain bike toys finally arrived about a month ago and I dropped the whole kit and kaboodle off at Wheat Ridge Cyclery at their brand new store. Seeing how it had been two years since last servicing the bike it was not cheap, but a needed full tune up. Once home the only difficulty was setting up the Garmin Edge 350 cadence/speed sensor component that I promptly managed to break while removing the rear tire to clean the cassette. $60s later and a week later the replacement part was in and I was ready to ride.
The first ride of the season felt like having my lungs electrically shocked at a low voltage for an hour to produce an intense wet burning sensation. It didn’t help that I had done zero athletics in the past two months and it was a fairly cold morning.
I don’t have any background in bike training at any level even though I have biked recreationally almost all of my life including early youth years. The mountain biking pattern the last seven years is usually in mid May, when things dry up, I head out for dawn patrol rides before work. I always sensed a pattern of starting off the season weak and finishing stronger in all respects, but this year I am going to try to verify those gut athletic instincts with hard data from the Garmin Edge 350. For example, the first five rides of the season find me struggling on uphills and taking it easy on the way down, although, the last few years my technical downhill skills come back to near peak form rapidly (e.g., not uncommon to do harder downhill rides early in the season with few to no dabs). I always sensed that early in the season my cadence and heart rate were erratic. Sure enough the data from the Garmin for the first five rides shows my suspiscions are correct - cadence and heart rate look like tightly crunched sin waves when plotted against elevation. However, for ride number five there is a visible evidence that the sin waves intervals are lengthing and the ride times have already dropped significantly. The key quest now is to discern how to use the Garmin to get better faster and train smarter. I don’t know anything about this yet, but I intend to find out. Compared to climbing it seems like the training scenarios for biking are almost limitless. Climbing just doesn’t seem to lend itself easily to any sort of number based feedback regime like biking does where the number of inputs (e.g., cadence, watts, heart rate, time, distance, etc.) can all be measured and recorded easily.
On a side note the elbow is still bugging me. Getting the last 20-30% healing accomplished is looking like another few months away at least. Heavy things like groceries, pots and pans, and furniture are handled regularly without pain but some positions still bother it when weighted. Also, I get minor flare ups that require icing and Vitamin-I. My current treatment regimes looks like this daily:
Every few days I still message with Ben Gay and I am using a Band-It elbow brace when I type both at home and work.
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