I’ll be closing this site down. Ultimately I just split my writing efforts between too many endeavours so I’m moving all the content to curtismchale.ca under the Cycling category. I’ll be redirecting all the posts here to their new home this week, I’ve already moved them.
I will still be writing about cycling.
For the month of May I set a goal of 1000km of riding in the month. This month I’ve decided to up the ante a bit by going for 1000km and 10,000m of climbing. I managed to get 6700m of climbing last month. So it will be a bit of work.
The reality is that I’ve set a goal of 10,000m per month for 12 months. Unfortunately Strava doesn’t start it as of the current month which means I’ve got to get more than 10,000m a number of months to actually meet the goal of 109.8k meters of climbing.
The hardest part about getting that much vertical is that it’s pretty dang flat around Chilliwack. Sure I’m in BC and I’ve got mountains but I’m in the middle of a valley, I’ve got 20km of riding to do before I even get to a hill of note. To accomplish this goal I’m probably going to have to ride loops once I get in the mountains or drive out to Abbotsford and ride loops around Sumas Mountain.
In all honesty my secret goal is to train hard enough to win the Strava monthly challenge which means I’ve got to beat this guy who had something like 31,000m of climbing last month and is a Cat 1 racer.
Well wish me luck and follow my progress on Strava. If you’re not familiar with Strava then check out my recent review.
If you haven’t heard of or seen Twin Six gear then you’ve been missing out. Twin Six is a four person operation that has some awesome cycling wear. While they always support cancer through the Livestrong donations they make today they’re giving 50% of gross sales (not profit) to cancer. If you’ve been wanting some new kit today is the day to check out Twin Six and get some.
If you’ve got limited time then ride hills or do intervals. If you’re weak climber ride hills. Well I’m both so I try to ride hills lots (well often but not as often as I’d like). I also live far enough out in the Fraser Valley of BC that I’ve either got flat or mountains. I’ve got no rolling hills to sprint up and down.
Today I did one of my favourite shorter hill rides. Elk Mountain is about a 40km round trip from my door with 583 meters of climbing. Not a bad little hill. Probably the most punishing part is that when you’re 2/3rds of the distance to the top you’ve only gain half the elevation. Yeah that last bit it steep.
The challenge of this hill isn’t it’s only draw though, it’s dang beautiful. On the way up you get to struggle slowly past beautiful vistas of snow capped peaks and then fly past them on the way down. Today I decided to stop and take a few pictures. The fog is from the iPhone case (need to find one that doesn’t do that in the back pocket), it was clear coolish morning.
Second last house from the top of the climb with an awesome view in to the Chilliwack River Valley
After running away the horses came to visit. One got a bit frisky with the seat and it was really really wet from being loved.
About 1/2 way back down on a different route from the one up. Many more views like this can be had.
Oh and here is the ride profile from Strava.
As I recently mentioned I got a proper bike fitting. I’ve always been an advocate of getting a proper fit on a bike while skipping it myself. I just figured after riding for 15+ years I had the bike fit fine, boy was I wrong.
As I said in the fit we moved me much lower and further forward in the saddle. We also moved the handle bars down since I could reach it without discomfort.
All told the changes gained me about 60 watts on a ride and added about 10rpm to my spin. Those aren’t small changes at all. The best comparison comes from the same ride about 10 days apart. I know it says they’re a bit different but trust me I was on the same roads each time. The second ride (faster) was really really really raining (seriously wettest I’ve ever been on a ride, there were even huge puddles to ride through) which is known to screw specifically with the altitude sensor on a Garmin. I also tried the ‘course’ feature for the first time on the Garmin Edge 500 which thought I was off course a few times (I wasn’t this is a regular loop for me). Those two items may explain the slight differences in distance/elevation.
Not only are the rides the exact same, the rides the day before are roughly the same so I was going in to it with about the same level of fatigue. I don’t track sleeping schedule but my kid is sick this week not in the last few so I probably got the same amount/quality of sleep. Looking at the ride after the fit (May 7) you’ll notice I cut 20 minutes off and added 69 watts over the course of the ride.
Even more telling is the segments from the ride. On the Climb in to Cultus segment (May 7 | April 26) you see my times are exactly the same. This is a steeper climb that requires seated spin or standing, it’s just hard.
Now move on to the Cultus Lake segment (May 7 | April 26). This is more of a gradual hill, not much standing involved (if any) and cut almost a full minute off the time.
The final segment in to Columbia Valley which has a mix of standing and sitting (May 7 | April 26). Again here I cut a minute off the previous time. If you look at the comparisons you can see that each time is flattens out a bit I gain more time. I gain a little on the steeps but not near as much as the flatter portions.
With all of that information I’ve concluded that I haven’t gained much overall power. My standing climbs are pretty close to what they were. This makes sense because I’m in 90% the same spot while standing. Seated is where the fit yields the biggest rewards which again makes sense because we moved my seat lots.
Even if you’ve been riding for years and ‘know’ how to get a good fit, go get a proper professional fit. I thought I had myself in a comfortable position but it would seem that I had lots of power to gain by getting things right.
Now, I’ve got my cleats off the rusted plates. The fitter thought I could get some more pedal torque by moving the cleats back. Did it last night, lets see if I pick up some more speed.
I recently published a review of RunKeeper during which I concluded that it really was mostly useless to me as far as tracking cycling performance.
Strava’s big feature that set’s it apart from other offerings is their focus on climbing. Strava categorizes climbs on your route and will find out who is the King of the Mountain (KOM) or Queen of the Mountain (QOM). You don’t even have to be on the same ride as the other people (meaning the same day) just ride the same ‘segment’ and Strava will figure out who did it the fastest and award the championship title.
Strava Segments
One of the issues I had with Runkeeper was its lack of support for cycling power meters, well that’s not an issue with Strava. Just like your cycling computer Strava will read any data from our ANT+ power meter and chart it out.
Even if you don’t have a power meter Strava can produce reasonably accurate power readings of your ride. Because they have enough information about you (weight, height…) your bike (weight…) and the elevation they predict the power output of the bike system. This is different from a Power Tap hub or SRM crank power meter. In the case of the SRM it’s measuring power at the cranks which can be robbed in a poorly lubed chain, low tire pressure…and similar issues can affect a Power Tap. All this really means is that the power readings for the whole system can be different from the readings given by the devices measuring at the specific points in the system listed above. But it’s at least consistently in error so you can compare your power over time. Of course if you get a proper power meter you’re not going to be able to use the numbers from Strava.
Watts and more
For those that don’t have a GPS based cycling computer Strava also provides both iPhone and Android apps. One of the really nice things about the iPhone version (don’t have an Android phone so can’t test that version) is that rides recorded with it don’t count against your 5 ride total as a non-paying member of Strava. Using the iPhone GPS on rides brings up most of the same issues battery issues I mentioned in my RunKeeper review. I did find that over the same 4 hour ride the Strava app left my iPhone with more battery but it’s not enough more to just keep using the phone for a full day or normal use.
The iPhone App
One of the items I felt was missing in RunKeeper was the ability to track bikes/components. Strava lets you do that. You can set up a number of bikes and then assign components to it so you can track how many kilometres you’ve put on your wheels and how many total miles you’ve put on the bike. Outside of judging the reasonable failure distance of a component I’m not sure what the utility of this is but as a stat junky I like it.
Tracking Bikes in Strava
As a web designer I greatly appreciated the awesome tutorial videos provided when you log in to Strava for the first time. Way too many applications just leave you to flounder at first but Strava went the extra mile and had a comprehensive tutorial just waiting for you if you had no workouts online yet.
If you haven’t always been using Strava the application also supports uploading of GPX and TCX and FIT files. There are a few caveats, which we’ll address later. Strava also has native support for FIT files (unlike RunKeeper). I’m not really sure how Strava supports it (since they ask for the Garmin browser plugin just like RunKeeper) and RunKeeper doesn’t, really it just seems like an oversite with RunKeeper.
If you don’t have an iPhone, Android or GPS based cycling computer you can’t use Strava since it doesn’t support marking out maps of your own. I realize that most people will have one of the above but it’s still annoying if you don’t have it.
Even is you have a cycling computer, if it doesn’t have heart rate support Strava won’t let you upload it. Even if you have a heart rate monitor that’s on it’s own (like an older Polar watch) you’re just out of luck. I’m not sure why Strava makes this choice since it just adds purchase requirements to their potential clients (hence limiting their revenue). So if you want to track heart rate you’ll need to purchase the premium version of the Garmin 50 or do without heart rate stats. Of course it is possible to upload the files to another service (like RunKeeper) then export the resulting TCX/GPX file and upload that to Strava. Hacky I know but it would work.
As with RunKeeper Strava has no way to build a workout plan for the future. You can’t set workout types and then put them on a calendar so your training is planned. All Strava does is record your workouts.
Strava is totally focussed around climbing. While it does track your distance all of the goals are to do with climbing. In fact I haven’t been able to find a way to set personal goals. I was able to join a climbing competition which allowed me to set a yearly goal of vertical gain then broke it down in to monthly targets needed to hit the goal but that’s it. I’d love to see the same feature for distance and the ability to set your own goals.
climbing competition
Depending on your region you may or may not find that there are a lot of Strava users to compete/compare with. In my area there seem to only be two others (which is more than RunKeeper). One guy has an impressive 386 watts as a best effort so that’s a good person to try and beat but I’d love to find more local users, climbs, and rides. Again this issue will change depending on your area, when I was in Seattle I found a number of rides/climbs that I could try out.
Unlike the RunKeeper iPhone app Strava just tracks the rides. It offers no ability to program workouts nor does it support other activities like running or walking, this is a straight up cycling application and site. I suppose they assume most people using the site will also have an advanced cycling computer like the Edge 500 and will be doing all their workout planning on it.
Another iPhone app (or mobile app) bug that will affect non-US users is the fact that Strava can’t be 100% sure on your elevation gains when using the apps. While it will count the climbing against your own profile it won’t count any of those rides against challenges. They do this in the interest of fairness and there is at least one longer discussion on the technical issues surrounding the what/why of the issues in their support forum. Sure it’s still frustrating but with a reasoned explanation from staff and the fact that they state what they need to accomplish it it’s not all that hard a pill to swallow, just be aware of the ‘snag’.
My needs only extend to cycling so Strava fit my needs but if you’re a triathlete Strava is not a total solution for your workout tracking since it doesn’t support running or swimming. If you’re still interested in the KOM competitions then just upload the cycling portion of your workouts.
Strava doesn’t track weight over time. Sure you can enter your weight, but there isn’t any graphing of the changes over time (like RunKeeper and Garmin Connect).
While Strava will let you set a monthly goal of climbing distance that’s all the goals it will let you set. If you want to set distance, time…you’re totally out of luck.
While I don’t blame Strava for trying to make money (heck I’m paying for it) I find that the limit of 5 rides per month for non-paying users doesn’t seem like the best way to go about it. If I was making the decision I think I’d make the premium content the KOM stats and further ride stats. That’s just a little quibble on my part and not everyone will agree. Just remember if you’re interested that you’ll need to pick your ride carefully.
I think that Strava has a number of extra features that put it a class above RunKeeper for tracking cycling. Specifically the KOM competitions are totally awesome. It’s great to have a bit of competition with others in your area and even yourself. The segments are also awesome for tracking your improvement since you can see all of your rides over them and see if you’re faster/slower.
I started out reviewing options for workout tracking because I wanted to train more efficiently and know if I was improving. I’m not sure that Strava really fits that and I’m not sure that any app I use will. Really tracking stats on an individual workout does’t show improvement, it’s all about analyzing the workouts over time and I’m just not sure that I know how to do that for myself. Any good recommendations so I can learn how to analyze the my training over time?
As I mentioned recently I’ve been experiencing some pain on 100km+ rides and I certainly don’t want to stop riding them. Knowing that my fit job was totally a personal endeavour and thus probably not nearly as nice as it could be I set out to get a professional bike fitting and was sent to SpeedTHEORY in Vancouver to get it. I figured that once I’ve got fit and used to the new position, if pain persists it’s time to look at bio-mechanical issues with a physiotherapist but a proper fit is the first step in getting efficient.
The ride all setup to start the fit
We started off by seeing how high my seat was in relation to my cranks. Ends up that I had it about an inch too high. Now I did just get a new seat before the fitting and have only put about 100km on it so I really hadn’t figured out exactly where I liked it but and inch is really really far off. The extra height in the seat was causing me to ‘ankle’ at the bottom of the stroke thus robbing me of some power. This bad position would also explain the behind knee pain issues I’ve had on my left leg but not the front of knee pain on the left (yeah that’s odd I know).
Once we got the seat positioned at the proper height we moved it way forward. Looking at it now I had it back about an inch which means I was sitting way to far behind the cranks, again robbing me of power.
Hard to Tell but the seat has been adjusted
Now we’re on to the shoes/cleats and we hit a snag, my cleats have been on the shoes for a few years and they’re rusted solid. Now I have a total replacement for the cleats, bolts and mounting plates so I tell them as long as the shoes survive and we can get a fit I couldn’t care less about the long term cleat and bolts. With about 20 minutes of rust breaking spray and a hammer we….didn’t get it at all. Forging ahead we made some approximate notes on the adjustments the cleats will need. Seems the right knee doesn’t have enough inside float so not only do both cleats need to be moved back but I need to turn the right one slightly to give the foot a bit more float on the inside. Moving them back should let me put a bit more torque on the cranks which should obviously give me a bit more ooomf. Fixing the cleats is something I’ll have to work on myself over the next few days. Obviously the shop didn’t want to strip the bolts then be on the hook for getting them off and replacing them. Working retail for a while I totally understand so once I’ve got them off I’ll use my spare set and remind myself to pull them every 6 months, use new teflon tape so that this doesn’t happen again. If I’m having issues getting the cleats right I’ll just head back in for a fitting again.
With 20 minutes wasted on a set of ‘welded’ cleats we moved on to adjusting my overall cockpit length. I’ve got a really strong core from all the whitewater kayaking I do and I’m pretty flexible. We started off by just adjusting the pitch of the handle bars to test out how the brake hoods felt in different positions. One thing I had certainly noticed on my bike is that when sprinting in the drops my arms would hit the flats of my bars. Certainly not hard enough to stop me from doing it but enough for me to remember doing it. We also noticed that I’d lock out my elbows (not good) and I know I often hunch my shoulders during a ride. Some of this is bad posture and I need to unlearn it but some is also the cockpit length.
The easiest way to test out shortening/lengthening the reach to your bars is to replace the stem. My 2008 Trek 1.5 came with a 31.8mm stem so we swapped it out for a shorter 28mm (or something like that) stem. First impressions said it wasn’t a big deal though the fitter thought I looked more relaxed (didn’t bunch my shoulders at all). Swapping it back was the real test, right away I thought the other way (shorter reach) was way more comfortable than the way the bike came from the factory.
Accounting for the fact that I hit my arms on the bar flats when sprinting we went with a new handle bar that had a short top and longer drops. It’s also 41 at the flats and 42 at the drops so this slight ‘flare’ just provides more clearance and the shorter top pull the hoods in to reduce the overall reach. The only bad part about this swap is that they didn’t have the tape I like in red so I got stuck with black. Still looks okay but the red had a bit more sex appeal.
Installing the new handlebar
We also used the fact that I’ve got a flexible strong core to get my bar about an inch lower. While I did come from a MTB background I’m totally comfortable sitting solely in the drops for a 50km ride. Moving me down reduces my wind profile and shouldn’t decrease any of the power I can put to the pedals (yeah that means faster again).
The fact is that I’ve probably ridden in this terrible position for years, at least with the saddle position. Since you’re not sitting and spinning for such a long time on the MTB I just never noticed how terrible it was or suffered any pain from it. Thousands of pedal strokes built up over 4, 5, 6 hours certainly brought out the issues on the road. As an experienced cyclist I just figured over 15 years of riding I had my position down solid, but I was obviously sorely mistaken.
Now that I’ve got a properly set up bike it’s time to get used to the shorter cockpit and lower seat. Tomorrow will be a 30km hill ride (I’m not getting home till at least midnight) and Saturday will be at least 60km so I’ve got two good rides before I start pushing it on Tuesday with my typical split 90km (40ish in followed by 50 home with a group most of the way) which will really help test out the long term suitability of the new setup.
While I obviously don’t have hard numbers yet the sum off all the changes should increase my comfort, decrease my wind profile and give me more power at the pedals. I’m super excited to spend some rides getting use to the new setup and then start pushing myself on some of my normal routes to see if we’re seeing improvements. Even if I don’t see more speed I’m totally happy with a 100km+ ride and no lingering pain (seriously it’s lasted a few days).
Big shout out and thanks to the guys at SpeedTHEORY for the awesome service and fit. Many enjoyable miles will be ridden because of you.
I’ll leave you with one last pick of a sweet BMC bike. I really love how BMC styles the bikes, that squarish top tube is pure awesome.
BMC hotties
Oooops, totally meant to post this on Tuesday to go with the ride in question. While I’ve read Joe Friel’s blog on training for a while his recent posts on LHT tests have piqued my interest so I decided to get out and try it. I’ll admit up front that I don’t have a perfect grasp, really even a fleeting inkling, of exactly how to use this information to gauge my training goals but I figure that as I learn more I’ll be able to return to the data and draw some conclusions.
Unfortunately the Garmin Edge 500 doesn’t let you set laps by times (I believe this can be accomplished with the desktop software though). I remembered that my 10km intervals were about 20 minutes which would line up to the time that Joe says you need to track to gauge your LHT in this 30 minute test.
I started out with a 10 minute warm up then spend 30 minutes going as hard as I could and took my 2nd lap (as denoted by the 10km distance) as my 20 minute test showing my LHT. My second lap did involve two stop lights so I’ll also admit that it may not be as accurate as we want but we’ve at least got something to start basing numbers off.
I used the rest of the ride to enjoy the scenery and get real tired (since I knew I’d be taking 2 maybe 3 days off).
Overlooking the Local River - Yeah I paddle that lots
With a great sense of accomplishment I rolled in to my home after a wicked 112km ride. I enjoyed 1200m of climbing and some awesome scenery and then climbing the stairs for a much needed shower it hit, knee pain. Figuring it was really just left over tired from a long day I thought little of it.
Sitting 5 days out from the ride and still having knee pain I’m thinking this is probably a bigger issue than originally anticipated. With that in mind I’ve booked myself a fit with SpeedTHEORY in Vancouver. SpeedTHEORY came highly recommended from some of the local racers so I’m pretty excited about the fit (my first professional fit).
I’ll take some pictures of the fit next week and everything we did.
If you’re training with any amount of seriousness you start tracking the distance, time, heart rate and anything else that you can. For a while now I’ve used RunKeeper to do all my tracking and workout comparison so let’s take a look.
Second up is the awesome iPhone app. It’s easy to use and will track your elevation and pace so you can have a good hill comparison over multiple rides. If you’re an Android or Windows Phone 7 user there are also apps for both platforms which seem to have the same functionality. I’ve found that I can get a 4 hour ride in while listening to something and going through a few areas of spotty cell coverage and still have a bit of battery left. I need to charge my phone to have use of it for the rest of the day but it’s got enough to keep playing till I get to my desk for the day.
Want to do a set of intervals? Well the RunKeeper iPhone app lets you design interval sets and will provide audio triggers during the workout. It’s a bit short on options (can’t set warmup interval and you only have 3 speeds) but it’s enough for a basic interval session.
RunKeeper iPhone Workout Planning
Not everyone has a smart phone so RunKeeper also provides manual mapping. I’ve found this useful when I’m racing since I’m not carrying my iPhone. Once I’m done I plot the course and record my time and heart rate during the race. Sure I don’t get a full profile of pace at different points in the race but it still gives me some data for later.
Build Your Route Map with RunKeeper
If you have a GPS based tracking device (Garmin 500, 800…) you can also upload a GPX or TCX file. This will track most of the data provided so you can map your heart rate against climbs against speed… This also presents a few issues which RunKeeper claims are not totally their fault, but we’ll get in to the specifics later.
RunKeeper also integrates with both Twitter and Facebook and while that may not be a selling feature to some I like it. I work from home so getting some extra interaction in my life in the digital realm does help keep me sane. There are also a few cyclists that live just far enough away that we can’t ride together regularly so having our workouts posted helps keep us all training so we’re not the weakest on ride days.
Keeping Up with the Jones's Workouts
Finally RunKeeper also supports uploading of heart rate data from Polar devices. So even for an indoor ride it doesn’t have to be all manual. Theoretically (though I haven’t tried because my HR monitor is way to old for anything fancy like a file you can get off it) you could sync up the uploaded GPS data with the HR data to get a good profile of how hard you worked for each change in grade.
What No Classes for Other Sports?
Second up is the fact that snap to road isn’t the default setting when building a manual map. At the very least it should remember that you picked ‘snap to road’ in your last session and have it on by default, but no you’ve got to manually click the box every time you enter a map manually.
Snap to Road????
As I stated above you can import your GPX or TCX file to RunKeeper but the Garmin Edge 500 and Edge 800 both use FIT files. Without delving too deep technically, FIT files are just more flexible than TCX files, we can get more different types of data for all our sensors in to a FIT file, you can read more about FIT files here. According to RunKeeper the issue sits with Garmin’s Connect plugin not working with FIT files. While this may be true other sites, like Strava and Garmin Connect support .FIT files so there is obviously some way to do it that RunKeeper hasn’t got to yet. In fact both required wanted me to install the Garmin Connect plugin so they could access the FIT files on my device. It’s still possible to get information from your FIT files in to RunKeeper but it takes the extra step of uploading it to a site that supports FIT files (like Gamin Connect) then exporting the GPX, or TCX file after they have done the heavy lifting on the FIT file. I’m not convinced the stats from RunKeeper are so ‘unique’ that it really warrants this extra work.
While this isn’t currently an issue for me, many cyclists will find the fact that RunKeeper doesn’t work with your power meter a non-starter. Sure you could fill the numbers in to the comment field but that’s of little use long term since it isn’t mathematically tracking it so you can’t really do any comparisons. The fact that power meter tracking is so widely available now for anyone training with a middling level of seriousness means many can’t even look at RunKeeper as an option.
I'm sure I train with more information than that
RunKeeper also doesn’t track your cadence data. This is a good stat ‘in the moment’ while cycling and may or may not have long term tracking value but if the data is in my cycling computer I’d like to see it stored and tracked.
A feature you see in many other fitness tracking applications is the idea of a ‘ghost run/ride’. Typically you’re comparing the current effort over a given course with a previous best effort over the same course with audio cues letting you know if you’re faster or slower than the other efforts. This can be done with your own efforts or trying to beat efforts of other athletes on the same course. Unfortunately this is not a feature of RunKeeper, though it’s been a request for a while.
Sure this last one will change depending on your location but for me there is little regional information. 99% of the routes I find in their system are mine and the others just aren’t all that long/hard so I don’t really bother. The route information also lacks some of the extra details that MapMyRide has like who’s fastest on a given route. I know we’re not all in competition for real but if we’re honest all of us like to know how we stack up against others.
How are you tracking your cycling?
