Spring Mileage

The Giro Ride rolls out along Marconi on Saturday.

It's the end of March, which means it's time to put away the long tights and winter jackets and winter gloves and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, it's also that time when I always seem to have entire days off the bike. If it's not officiating, or travelling, or holidays, it's rain or work. Seems I've had a little of all of that in the past month. I have to go all the way back to mid-February to find the last time I had a full, solid week of riding. Granted, the riding I have been doing the last few weeks has been getting progressively harder, partially because I'm intentionally doing more work on the group rides, but also because the group rides have been getting a little faster and more competitive. That's normal, of course, and I guess if I was using a power meter I might not have this nagging feeling I'm missing out on some important training. Compared to prior years, thanks to the neat Stravistix plug-in, it looks like I'm pretty close to where I've been the last two years at 2,581 miles, but a couple hundred shy of where I was at this time back in 2013 and probably even farther behind where I was a couple of years before that.

Last week was going pretty well training-wise until Easter hit. I got in a good Giro Ride on Saturday and was hoping to sneak in some miles on Sunday morning but of course it was raining during my only open window and the rest of the day was already booked.

After Saturday's ride we had some family over for crawfish and stuff, so I had to run out and get a new pop-up shelter since my old one hadn't quite made it through last year's racing and officiating season. On the plus side, Saturday's weather was great, which meant we could sit outside and eat tons of crawfish, drink a lot of sangria and beer, and eat way more cookies, cupcakes and pie than advised by the healthcare community. After some impressive thunderstorms on Sunday, Monday turned out to be so nice that I not only got in a ride in the morning, but I went back out after work for a few more miles. This morning the temperature was around 70F with a pretty significant southeast wind blowing. I overslept and had to rush out the door about fifteen mintues late, racing down Carrollton and Marconi to try and catch the group on Lakeshore Drive.  When I turned off of Marconi onto Lakeshore I could see the flickering lights of the group about 40 seconds up the road, but I was riding into a strong headwind and once they put the hammer down after the Bayou St. John bridge any hope of catching them quickly evaporated. They were probably close to two minutes ahead of me by the time I made a u-turn and inserted myself into the paceline somewhere out past Harrison. By then they had picked up a nice tailwind and it stayed fast all they way down Lakeshore Drive and along the bike path all the way out to the casino boat in Kenner. The average speed from Causeway all the way out to the casio was a bit over 28 mph despite a fairly sedate average heart rate of 144. So it seemed like a hard stretch but really wasn't as hard as it seemed.

I was really sad to hear about a fatality at the University of Washington collegiate race last Saturday. I went and looked at some of the course with Google Maps and then tracked down the Strava data from some of the riders to try and figure out what happened. The reports said that the rider had lost control and hit a guardrail in the Category D race. It looks like the speeds on that curving downhill section of the road course were in the 48-51 mph range, which could be a little scary for some new riders. I don't know any details about what precipitated the crash, but hitting anything at that speed would be terrible. I'll be helping with officiating at the Midwestern State collegiate race in a couple of weeks, but that course should be pretty flat. Even so, it's scary to consider what could happen at pretty much any race. Nobody ever said bicycle racing was the safest activity, of course. Even worse, this came in the same week as two fatalities (a crash where a race moto ran over a rider, and a heart attack at Criterium International) in the Pro ranks, and not long since the near-fatality involving ex-pro Phil Zajicek who literally had his arm ripped off in a downhill collision with a truck and is still fighting for his life.

So another masters racer got suspended, and this one's a real classic. The guy was on a public forum saying he was a 40 year old Cat. 1 masters rider and asking for advice about a doping regemin he'd gotten from an "Age Doctor" who had prescribed the following for him:  ".5ml depo-test 200mg/ml 1x per week, .1ml HCG - human chorionic gonadotropin - /arginine 6x per week, .2ml sermorelin 6x per week, .5mg arimidex 2x per week, 25mg DHEA daily, 25mg pregnenolone daily, 5g d-ribose before training daily, 500mg microhydrin 1x daily before training daily."  Holy crap. His stated goal was Masters Nationals. Well, fortunately somebody must have contacted USADA because they showed up at his door for an out of competition (OCC) test where he tested positive for a number of things indicating anabolic steroid use. At 40 or 41 years old, there's really no excuse for this kind of stuff. I can almost see it for somebody in his mid-60s and up, but even then, if you're being advised to do this kind of hormone supplementation it's time to stop racing against people who aren't. This is going to be a continuing problem for masters racing in all endurance sports, I think. I don't know what the answer is, though. If it turns out to be the standard of practice to put older men on these kinds of programs in order to improve their general health and longevity, there's going to be a big conflict between the perfectly valid goal of staying healthy and the equally desirable goal of being able to compete.