It’s Not Just Getting Enough Sleep, it’s Getting it at the Right Time

I’ve made an experiment this year of trying to get as much of my exercise as possible in early in the mornings. The general idea is to be up at 5:45AM and on my bike or the yoga mat by 6. I need pretty close to 8 hours of sleep per night, so this means I really need to be asleep by 9:45.

I thought this would be hard, but doable. My kids go to sleep a little after 8PM, so closing down my day and getting into bed by 9:30 is challenging and not possible 100% of the time, but it is doable.

The problem goes deeper, though. I’ve realized that my body just doesn’t want to go to sleep then and I end up lying awake. Sometime between 10-10:30 seems to be my natural “go to sleep” time.

This is inconvenient. I’m well short on hours in the day to accomplish everything I need to, and spend enough time at work, with my family and working out.  Fitting in a decent chunk of time for exercise is much harder to do any other time of the day.

Still, I know people who have managed to reconfigure their sleep schedules- people who work “market hours” on the west coast for example, have to be at work before 5AM.  Do they manage because they like the job, or are their bodies just more amenable to that sleep routine?

Redux: Training Peaks vs. MotionBased vs. Homebrew Training Log

I have been experimenting with a couple of different training software programs and the more I experiment, the more it seems like my rudimentary Excel spreadsheet does the best job of them all.

Training Peaks
I had heard really good things about TrainingPeaks so I checked out a trial version. It seems like it may do a really good job for pure cyclists and probably triathletes as well. Its real strength seems like the calendar planning features, where you can build training plans or drop in premade ones without an enormous amount of effort. The ability to manage HR and power zones is also quite good.

However, my main sports are cycling, alpine skiing and yoga. To enter a workout in either of the latter two, I need to select a workout type as “Custom” or “Other”, and even then the s/w seems bike-driven. I.e. it preselects a bike for the workout. There is no ability to build my own custom workout types.

TrainingPeaks also doesn’t track vertical gain (or descent for skiing). I like to climb on my bike and I want my training log to keep track of this data over time.

TP also doesn’t support Macs, which is a pain in the neck for me. Finally, I find the software really clunky and ugly, which just bugs me.

MotionBased
MotionBased is clearly aimed at a different audience. It is slick, easy to figure out and works well (mostly) with Macs. It also tracks altitude (ascent only) and has categories for lots of different sports, with ability to filter and aggregate data in lots of ways. These are all strong points.

MB is a division of Garmin and seems to have been created to help people get more use from, and build a community around, their GPS devices. As such, it is really a location-based service designed for downloading Garmin GPS data and laying it on top of maps. Some of the newer GPS devices (Edge and Forerunner) are intended as training tools, so MB has added functionality to track HR data, but otherwise the s/w is really about keeping a record of where you have been and how far you have gone.

As such, MB is essentially a retrospective tool. There is no calendar, no planning or scheduling of a training program. There is also no way to enter a workout except by uploading data from a device- i.e. unless I bring my GPS to yoga I can’t add up yoga practice time. And it only tracks vertical ascent, which is pretty much beside the point for my resort-based skiing.

Back to Excel
While experimenting with these services I stopped using the spreadsheet I have developed over the past 4 years, but I decided to pull it back out the other day. I have spent a bunch of time over the years developing the functionality I need and it seems like it works best for my idiosyncratic needs. As I have it set up, I enter my daily workouts, sleep time & notes, and the sheet automatically counts workouts by activity, total time spent, distance and vertical climb/descent. The major downside is that building in a training program is extremely time-consuming and a pain in the neck, as it needs to be done day-by-day, week-by-week.

I also can’t download data directly to it, as I can from my Edge computer to both TrainingPeaks and MotionBased. Sometimes seeing a graph of the workout is a lot more valuable than the summary data.

Video Games Help my Cornering Skills

I talked to DP today about cornering on bicycles. He has had a couple of bad spills in the recent past and we have both been analyzing our cornering techniques to try to get confidence back. He told me that someone followed him recently and observed that in right-hand turns he does fine, but he doesn’t set up properly going into left-hand turns- he enters the corner too far to the inside rather than taking the width of the road to set up for the apex. This is an interesting thought. I would love to get someone to follow me, or even better follow me with a video camera to observe my technique.

The conversation also made me think about Grand Turismo. I am not much of a video game player, but I have always found driving games fun and I own GT4. It isn’t a great game, but it has an interesting skills feature: you have to earn “licenses” by completing timed runs on mostly twisty courses. Most of the tests involve difficult course(s) where you have to figure out how to set the car up properly to get from corner to corner without losing speed or crashing.

I don’t know that it is the best kind of training, but it has made me think more analytically about how corners are formed and how to find the fastest lines through them. Some corners are long consistent curves and you can just lean the bike and go. Most, though, have multiple radii and you have to figure out the trick. Sometimes it means coming in a little high and cutting the apex a bit early so that you have enough road on the other side to get through without scrubbing speed. I usually end up getting late on those- waiting a moment too long before diving into the apex and running out of road on the other side. Still, now that I know what to look for and think about it seems to help. Cornering is really almost all in one’s head, so having these things to think about helps a lot.

I guess it goes to show- you never know when you might actually learn something.

Ode to an Armwarmer – or My Favorite Piece of Cycling Equipment

Elden Nelson posted a question on his blog a while back asking readers about their favorite cycling items. It takes me a while to figure these things out sometimes, so I missed Elden’s deadline by a wide margin. Nevertheless, here is my “submission”.

I live in San Francisco, where the weather is predictably cold for a good part of the year. Not *really* cold, but summer is generally foggy and unlike most conventional definitions of “summer weather”. However, a mere handful of miles in any ridable direction gets me out of the fog and the temperature can easily jump 15 degrees or more almost instantly. Winter days start out cold and sometimes warm up, sometimes not. On top of that, I generally ride early in the mornings, when it starts out cold almost every day in every season and often warms up over the course of a ride.

Do you detect a theme here? Flexibility is key for me. Most of my rides involve significant temperature variation, so I need clothes that can accomodate. My favorite piece of cycling equipment, therefore, is my armwarmers. My rough calculation is that I wear them on at least 75% of the rides that I do. Really, the only times I don’t wear them are when I drive somewhere else to ride, and the rare days when it is warm out and/or I ride later in the day.

I took this for granted for a long time, until I read a column by Joe Lindsey where he mentioned the subtle signs of a changing season- it was cool enough in Boulder, CO to feel fall coming, but not cold enough to require arm warmers. “Not require arm warmers?”, I thought to myself. “What an idea!” It stared me thinking about how often I wear my arm warmers and realized that I do, in fact, wear them just about every day.

I used to have a pair of Swobo wool arm warmers. For the longest time I was doggedly convinced that wool made the best material for arm warmers. Wool jerseys get too hot for me many days, but arm warmers seemed just right. You can wear them over and over without washing and they don’t get stinky like lycra- an important consideration when one wears them almost all the time. In addition, I really liked the way the wool would collect little droplets of condensation on foggy days. They looked almost like they had a layer of frost on them.

Alas, the achilles heel of the Swobos was that, being made of wool, they didn’t stretch much at all. This meant that they had an elastic sewn into the top to hold them up. The warmers must have been designed for someone with much larger biceps than me, because I had to double them over and pin them with a safety pin to keep them from sliding down. Over time they also shrank until they only reached my wrists.

Now I use lycra. Not much to say about them except that they do their job quietly and well.

I wonder who invented arm warmers and how long ago. Did Fausto Coppi wear them? Did Maurice Garin when he won the first Tour de France? Hmm.

Training Peaks vs. MotionBased

I’ve been doing my best to put data on my Garmin bike computer, and the challenge now is to figure out what to do with all that info. Garmin includes software with the unit that seems useful, but far short of comprehensive. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time with it, but it seems like it is mostly there to store data off the GPS unit itself. I can download rides, then store them as “courses”. It may be that I can compare my performance on the same course over time. The unit comes with a “Virtual Partner” function that lets me race myself over the same course on different days, but I haven’t tried that feature out yet.

The Garmin software also lets me create “workouts”, meaning I think that I can pre-program a set of intervals or something like that. I may find that useful someday, but it seems simpler to me just to know that I am going to do (e.g.) 3 x 5 minute efforts with 3 minute breaks in between, and use the clock/timer to measure.

So looking for more advanced training options I have found Motionbased and TrainingPeaks. They seem to offer overlapping sets of features and I need to work with both some more to figure out which is going to be the most useful. MotionBased definitely wins the award for better-looking & smoother software. It is more graphically oriented and a little easier to figure out. It also incorporates lots of data easily, like vertical ascent and weather conditions and the tables for viewing all of the data are pretty easy to figure out. Better still, it uploads directly through my Mac.

On the other hand, I am not sure what to do with the data once I have it uploaded. I suppose I can keep a catalog of rides and it looks like it will track cumulative mileage, time, climbing etc. It is not a full-fledged training too, though, mostly because it seems strictly retrospective. There is no ability to set workouts into a plan.

The other interesting aspect of MB is its community features. When I upload workouts, I have the option to mark them public or private. Public data becomes visible by anyone on the site- Here is a recent bike ride. This is pretty interesting and it potentially seems like a fun way to share interesting bike rides, ski trips, etc. I am a little surprised that they haven’t done more to build out the community features given the amount of hype around social web and user-generated content. I can sort the database of public workouts by username, but there is no “profile” page for users that I can find and no way to store information about specific people. If my friend has an account I need to remember his/her username in order to see any data s/he has uploaded.

TrainingPeaks is the opposite in many ways. The software is a little less intuitive and much more text-heavy. It doesn’t upload from my Mac at all, so I have to borrow my wife’s computer to get workouts into it. However, it is designed as a training tool. I haven’t set up a training plan yet, but it is built around the idea that you plug in your entire training calendar, then compare actual performance against the plan. Individual workouts are meant to be scheduled, and it will email a reminder every day of what is on for that day. There are lots of graphs to compare actual vs. planned time, and fields to record and track criteria such as sleep quality/quantity, stress, fatigue, waking HR and other data I don’t even understand. There is no community aspect that I am aware of, which makes some sense. Most people probably see their training data as very private.

I suppose I need to work with both systems for a while in order to figure out which one I find most useful in the long term. They definitely seem to overlap a lot, but serve different purposes using similar data.

Garmin Edge 305 Initial Thoughts

I just got a Garmin Edge 305 cycling computer. It is a pretty amazing piece of of equipment, and a bit dorky at the same time. I was pleased at how small it seemed when I pulled it out of the box, and I had exactly the opposite reaction when I installed it on my bike- it looks huge sitting on top my my stem!

It seems to work nicely, though. Having a computer that downloads data and can show every part of a ride is a huge change from just reviewing summary data from a bike computer or heart monitor. The GPS data is neat, too, though I am undecided whether it will be useful for training. My wife and I have a project that may involve GPS data, so this will be nice to have. Otherwise it seems a bit gimmicky.

The real downside- apart from the bulkiness- is that it is really not Mac-compatible in a serious way. It comes with software that is PC-only. Garmin says the Mac version is due around 1/01/07, so we’ll see.

I tried a bunch of workarounds, then gave up and installed everything on my wife’s PC. The difference was amazing- it works so much better with the installed software!

I also checked out two online applications: MotionBased and TrainingPeaks. MotionBased, which appears to be owned by Garmin, actually has reasonable Mac support and I could upload to it straight from the unit. Unfortunately I don’t see as much value in that application as the other one.

TrainingPeaks looks to be the best, most detailed training log/scheduler application around. It has the ability to monitor, graph and track past data and also to develop really good training plans. Sadly, it completely lacks Mac support and doesn’t seem to have any really burning desire to change that.

Bike Rides to Look Forward to

So I am stuck. My kids are now old enough that I can think about consistently getting exercise again. However, time is still limited and juggling work, family and personal time is hard. At the same time, riding the same roads over and over with no real goal isn’t that exciting- it is more fun having goals to work toward.
All of which is to say that I want to figure out how to actually train for things instead of just riding around. But how far should I go? The easy choice is to focus on the Death Ride next summer. I rode it once before and it would be fun to do it again and see if I could go faster. Since I am going to the effort of getting that fit, I figure I might as well do some other events as well.
There is a thing called the California Triple Crown for people who ride 3 California double centuries in one year. That might be fun, and you can get a snazzy jersey for completing it.
And of course, I have developed a longing for a Leadville belt buckle that is wholly disconnected from the fact that I don’t have a mountain bike.
So the real question is- with all these goals in mind, who can I talk into doing the events with me? Riding around all those miles (not to mention the travel time) by myself doesn’t seem nearly as exciting.