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AG: Taking it Easy isn't Easy
The hills on one ride weren't as steep as I expected. As I climbed, I wondered: Is this a particularly easy route that I can recommend to others, or are my quads building up faster than I had hoped? I concluded that the main factor was that my two previous rides had been a little longer than I thought I was ready for, so I'd recently had a lot of intense practice in taking it easy on myself. ---------- Just going slow won't do it. You can ride so fast that you fall over in exhaustion before the end of the first mile -- and you can ride so slowly that you fall over in exhaustion before the end of the first mile. (Well, a track cyclist could ride that slow; most of us would fall over for other reasons.) Somewhere in between there is a sweet spot, and only experience can tell you what speed is least tiring. The optimum speed varies with time of day, terrain, current condition, what you've eaten lately, and everything else. Fortunately, once you have had experience, you can tell cruising speed from too fast and too slow continuously. ---------- One rule of taking it easy is don't strain, don't strain, don't strain. Shift down a little sooner than you absolutely have to, switchback when you could still keep climbing straight, rest when you come to a comfortable place. But sometimes a tiny bit of peak exertion can save a lot of low-level exertion. You have to learn to recognize those times, save the overdrive for when you need it, and space out the efforts so that you'll be recovered when you need to do it again. ---------- Since this essay is already too long, I'll make my comments on hills into a separate post. -- joy beeson at comcast dot net http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/ The above message is a Usenet post. I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site. |
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