How to upgrade categories faster, getting rid of saddle discomfort, and how giving blood affects fitness. All of this and more in Episode 130 of the Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast!
Topics covered in this episode
- TrainerRoad Party at Cyclocross National Championships!
- We’re hiring software engineers! Apply here.
- Why you should sync Strava and Garmin Connect to TrainerRoad
- Everything you need to know about category upgrades in road racing
- How many points do you need to upgrade to the next category?
- Do you get more points for a road race than a crit?
- How to upgrade road race categories faster
- What is a good FTP?
- How fit are professional motorcycle racers?
- How to fit big weekend rides into your training plan
- What to carry with you on long rides
- Should you carry your spares in your jersey or saddle bag?
- How to extend base training
- How to extend your training plan
- Why your saddle is uncomfortable
- How to find the right saddle
- Why your saddle isn’t the cause of your discomfort
- What makes a good saddle
- What makes a good bibshort
- Stretches and exercises to fix saddle discomfort
- How to maintain cycling fitness while training for a marathon
- Does giving blood make you slower?
For more cycling training knowledge, listen to the Ask a Cycling Coach — the only podcast dedicated to making you a faster cyclist. New episodes are released weekly.
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Hey Jonathan, I’m looking forward to listening to the new podcast. I’ve been listening to it for a while now and I love it. I’m about to start the Half Distance Triathlon Base! Talking about the podcast, I have a suggestion. Sometimes not all questions are necessarily important/related to me and I usually skip a few minutes until I find some interesting. I don’t know if you guys know, but some podcast players (like Overcast) support chapters markers and other metadata options. If you guys supported this feature (chapter markers), each question could be a chapter and it would be incredibly easy for the listeners to go from one chapter (aka question) to another. I think it’s also possible to add links and pictures.. so when you are talking/promoting a product/article/anything, it would also be possible to add that to the metadata. Sometimes you guys mention a cool product or link and then I need to write it down and then google it later. You can find more info here: https://overcast.fm/forecast (I’m not related to this product at all, but I love to liste to podcast that support those features.) That’s it! Keep up with the excellent work on the podcast and TR of course!!
Hey Guillermo!
Thanks so much for the tip, we’ll look into that 🙂 We currently have bookmarks implemented in Soundcloud, so for now that is the best option for picking and choosing the topics you want to listen to.
Cheers!
Re blood donation….
I used to donate whole blood often. Never deferred for low hemoglobin, but over time my ferritin — a measure of iron stores _outside_ of circulating blood — dropped. So I stopped. I still wanted to help. The answer I found is donating platelets. For super-sick people, this stuff is liquid gold. And it’s always in short supply. Donating won’t touch your iron stores (oxygen-carrying capacity). Fluid loss, minimal. And you regenerate new platelets within days. The catch? Donation takes a few hours! So this is my off-season drill: Rent a movie, empty that bladder, and get comfortable. Yeah, you sit with needles in your arms a long time, but endurance athletes are supposed to be good at suffering. Just like with interval training, you get used to it pretty quick. Soon it’s no big deal.
Hey Adnrew,
Thanks for sharing, that is a great tip from a blood donation pro 🙂 Your dedication to such a noble cause is really admirable.
I wish you the best!