Tricks for keeping cadence?

Badger_South wrote:
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 00:21:38 GMT, Blair P. Houghton wrote:

Badger_South wrote:
So Terry, do you strive to ride -both- mountains and fast flats so that you
keep up both types of riding? I'm experiencing this need to go ride the
flats after about 4-5 days riding hills, and when I get to the flats, my
speed has dropped way off, and I take a full day, sometimes two, to get
back up to former spin speed?

You should probably only train in the hills 1 day, with
1-2 days of aerobic (flats) work in between, if you ride
at all off the hills.

Hmmm. Hard to do b/c of my terrain here. Generally what happens is that
'rolling hills' become the 'flats'. IME, most bikers who have no hills
(Fla) wish they lived in the foothills, as I do.

Yep. I live in the perfect spot (and kick myself every
time I ride for not noticing it for 12 ****ing years)
with hills and flats in any direction.

If you do the hills in lower gears you should be able to
avoid too much "heavy" work on your legs. Training at
higher gears on "hill" days will act like high-intensity
gym training to build the muscles up for strength.

You're tearing down your muscles in the hills so they
can grow stronger, and your muscles need about 48 hours
of rest after a high-intensity workout.

Well that's generally true, but it takes a -lot- to tear down my quads and
I'm probably not able to tax them harder than my lungs at this point.

Lungs? You should be doing some anaerobic activity in
those hills; that is the sort that causes strength gain
in your type IIb (aka "fast twitch") fibers.

If your lungs are involved, it's aerobic, and you're talking
type-I ("slow twitch") fibers.

And then there are type-IIa fibers, which are in between.

IOW,
my quads can -easily- handle the ride I'm doing now. But I get your drift.

If you hit them with high-intensity effort every day,
you'll overtrain them, give them no chance to rebuild
properly, and you'll get poor results.

I'm getting steady improvement in my times doing hill repeats at this
point. Remember this is only a 2 mile long 5% grade with one short summit
at about 6% for 200 yds.

I got one of those. I might ride it tomorrow. Actually,
I think it's like 4% to rolling 6% and 8% bumps...

I did this twice a day two laps each workout last week and quads are fine.
Calves have obviously respondingto this regime though.

Calves are near impossible to train. One reason even competition
bodybuilders give up on them.

In this case, it's affecting your normal riding.

I'm not sure why it takes two days to ride the flats at normal spin up
right after spending so much time in the hills. But it's more a 'mentally
switching gears'. After one or two rides, I'm spinning up as usual. That's
too soon to have 'affected' my riding by non-optimal training

Just stretching can affect your riding. A day of light
work after a day of heavy work can act like rest.
But non-optimal rest in terms of allowing the heavy
training to "take".

The thing is I live and train in a hilly area (Central Va/Piedmont), and
group ride in a flat area (Va Beach)

curve to intermediate rider. Once there, I'm sure one's cycling transforms.

Sure. You start beating more people.

Works for me.

I need some work.

--Blair
"I know. I'll put a magnet on a stick
and hold it out front of me and it'll
suck my fat ass around the loop..."