Year: 2016

Well thank goodness. I was just getting sick. That was why I was feeling so tired. Two days and three nights of low-grade fevers, aching legs, headache and fatigue. Then … nothing. My immune system seems to have won.

So, this is my bike trainer. I got it last summer, used, for $150. It’s a CycleOps Fluid2, which attaches to my rear axle and has a flywheel with silicon-fluid resistance. It’s amazingly quiet. I can watch episodes of The Wire on my little MacBook and can easily hear everything through its wee speaker. It has a really natural feel to it. As I increase my pedalling speed, the resistance goes up, just like wind resistance would go up in real life. It is stable, and smooth, and doesn’t slip.

What I can’t do is ride on Zwift, which I had really wanted to do. It’s a virtual social riding app which plops a Virtual You into various simulated cycling courses, with the scenery whipping by you in immersive virtual reality. Sadly they don’t yet support 650C wheels, the size that I have on my slightly smaller than typical road bike. And they don’t account for the aberrant decrease in viscosity of fluid silicon as it nears the 0ºC temperature of a Canadian garage in the depth of winter. That’s a double-whammy that means is that the calculations they do in order to determine my virtual speed and virtual power err on the side of the exceedingly generous. Because of the social nature of Zwift, the result is that when I drop my avatar into the environment — as I did during my free trial — Virtual Me begins merrily whupping all the other riders on the course. Which a few of them don’t take kindly to.

I changed my username to Sorry 650C-Tire. But people still didn’t get it; a few of them still nagged at me to “fix my power settings,” which unfortunately there was no way I could do. It would require some considerable explanation about my set-up to make them understand why, not something I wanted to have to do repeatedly in a tiny chat box, during a ride. And I couldn’t ignore the comments and just enjoy myself despite the snark, because I hate having negative vibes aimed at me. Too bad, because I really really loved the app.

A $600 power meter would fix the problem. Or a $1300 smart trainer like the Wahoo Kickr. But, well, no, not happening. Someday Zwift plans to build wheel size options into their app.

Until then, it’s okay. If I was riding long hard distances five days a week in my garage I’d be desperate for it. But I do at most three short easy rides a week, and that’ll be dropping as my running mileage increases. So I watch episodes of The Wire and I’m fine.

It’s a good thing, supposedly. At least in this case. But I’m feeling it today!

The idea is to train your body for endurance without doing outrageously long or difficult workouts, but by simply doing them frequently enough that your body doesn’t recover completely in between. By pushing your body to do more work before it is thoroughly recovered, you are encouraging it to adapt to these new, tougher conditions.

In preparing for a marathon I need structure. This time I’m basing my structure on Hansons Marathon Method, from the book of the same name. I’m now 5 out of 18 weeks through the program. The first 5 weeks are about building a base and acclimatizing to daily running. The next phase adds speed intervals and tempo runs, as well as longer easy runs. The third phase changes speed workouts for strength-based runs, and the final 10 days are of course a taper to the race.

Having finished the first phase the meat of the program hasn’t really begun. I’m doing pretty well; I find the easy runs easy and I am not experiencing any over-use symptoms from running every day. But because I’m combining the six prescribed runs a week with three bike rides a week on my trainer, I’m starting to experience the fatigue.

There’s no doubt I’m going to have to give up the bike rides soon. The alternative would be to use them as substitutes for runs rather than additional workouts, but except for the fact that I can watch Homeland episodes on the trainer, I prefer running.

So far, haha.

I took the plunge the other day and signed up for a marathon at the beginning of May. The idea had been rattling around in the back of my head for at few months and I didn’t feel like I was getting any closer to committing, but then on a whim I clicked on an email link and within a couple of minutes that was that. Gulp.

The last time I wrote about running, I was pondering relatively low-mileage marathon training. I’ve kind of shifted my thinking since then. While I’m going to keep my Weekly Long Runs fairly short, maxing out at 16 miles, I’ve been getting into the habit of running (or alternatively riding my bike trainer) every day. I’m finding that it’s easier to start my day asking myself when I will do a workout, rather than whether I will do one, and if so, when. As the length of my daily runs builds from 5-7 km to ~ 8-20 km, that means my weekly mileage is going to end up being pretty typical for marathon training, peaking at around 90 km in March/April.

Here is where I’m running four days a week. It’s a perfect route, flat as a pancake near the lake with a bit of elevation loss and gain getting to and from the green-dot start point (which happens to be where Fiona’s dance studio is). It’s about half well-trodden footpaths and half roads-and-sidewalks,. The lake tends to moderate the temperature, helping to melt snow fairly quickly even along the footpaths. A single circuit along the red route totals ~7 km, but by using the blue section I can create perfect 2.0k loops in the park to add to that. Until the snow is gone from the rail-trail, likely in early April, this will be my main Nelson stomping ground.

I’m home in New Denver on the weekends when I do my longer runs. I’ll have to run on the highways there until spring. “Highways” needs to be interpreted in a Kootenays context, of course: they’re two-lane winding mountain roads that are very scenic and little-travelled. I shouldn’t complain. But they’re full of hills, more open and much less interesting than trails, and there are no options for loops: always just out-and-back. So I’ll be very happy when the trails open up in the spring.