7 Changes

So here are 7 things I'm going to change in light of my ride Sunday. None of them are huge, they're just tweaks in the program so to speak.

1. Water

Going to try and drink a gallon of water a day. I'm already up there in the 12-14 cups range. But a few of the guys I talked to said they drink huge amounts of water. So I'm going to up it again in the hopes that will ensure I stay properly hydrated once the temps start to get up there.

2. Coffee/Tea

I'm going to scale back the coffee and tea consumption. For a while I was good and I only drank 1 cup of coffee a day. Over the past few months I've crept up to like 3 a day. It's fine to have an extra cup or even 2 on the weekend. But every day is too much. I would often top it off with 2 cups of tea. What's more is that the free coffee at work is just brutal awful. So 1 of each every day from now on.

3. Empty Calorie Foods

Even though I exercise a ton, there are probably still too many empty calorie foods in my diet. For instance, the bagel with butter in the morning is basically a zero nutrition food. It certainly doesn't count as nutrition dense. I eat a lot of sports drinks before/during/after exercise so I get enough "hot" calories to burn in association with my riding.

4. Endurolytes

Finally bit the bullet and bought Endurolytes last night. This Hammer Nutrition product is pretty popular in the endurance world and a lot of people who cramp start taking these and stop cramping. I probably could get away with salt tablets but I'll cede to the masses and give these a shot.

5. The Friel Approach

My training in the past 2 months or so has been the Greg LeMond approach, which is basically an effort scale which goes lower in the week, such as hard/medium/easy on T/W/T. Mondays and Friday are off. Saturdays is another hard-ish day, usually my mountain bike ride. And Sunday is your long road ride of the week, lower paced obviously.

I'm going to look at the Friel approach which is generally the same but there are more mountain bike specific workouts in his plan, since the book is a mountain biking specific training book. So we'll see how that goes. In general it's the same with minor differences. Plus it's a shakeup of the same boring structure since Friel has all sorts of different ways to get the same training effect.

6. Hard is Hard, Easy is Easy

I think my easier-to-medium workouts tend to be done at a higher pace than they should be, which tends to fatigue you more than intended making it harder to complete the hard workouts. The result is that every workout becomes a generic middle-of-the-road workout that just fatigues you and doesn't target anything properly. So hard is hard, easy is easy.

7. GPS Training

I recently bought an Edge 205 GPS which allows me to race myself or follow courses and all sorts of things I haven't figured out yet. This will help on item 6. When I need to go hard I can race myself from another hard day. When I need to go easy I can make sure I don't go faster than myself on some other easy day.

It also allows you to pull courses from other users who have ridden other parks. So I can go ride the Darkhorse 40 course and follow the tracks on the screen. This is really why I got the GPS and it opens up a huge amount of possibilities in learning new places to ride.

Other Stuff

I may look into some more vitamin supplements though I'm not a big fan of that idea, just because it's usually the case that you waste your money on that stuff. I already take a low-dose generic vitamin so I'm not sure how much more potassium, magnesium, and calcium I need. Given that I don't eat a highly processed diet I may actually be a bit light on the salt side, as odd as that might sound.

Today's ride

I banged out a 19.2 today according to the GPS. That would qualify as "hard is hard". Ride details here:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/2814805