Another very informative podcast and I love the way the conversation flows between you all. Amber has some brilliant little side-stories than really help contextualise some of the topics.
The sunscreen topic did catch my attention as I was blessed with ginger hair and Casper white skin. Over the past three years I’ve had three moles removed and had surgery for early stage skin cancer on my nose. From an early age I accepted the the sun and I have a difficult relationship and Factor 50 is my best friend and I always check the UVA and UVB ratings on everything I buy.
For the majority of my training, I would use a hydration mix during training. Every trade team has a nutrition sponsor, so I got to experiment with many different brands and formulations.
Truthfully, I don’t think a fancy mix is necessary, but they offer many benefits: an array of electrolytes usually in well-tested evidence-based ratios, nice flavor, and some CHO. The two big intake challenges in training and racing are fuel and hydration, and I always found that having a little CHO in my drink not only helped it with flavor but also added to my total CHO intake - always a good thing, since I could rarely take in as much fuel as I was burning.
I currently use Clif Lemon Lime Hydration mix and really like the flavor and balance of ingredients. Full disclosure: I am sponsored by them, but I’m a stickler for only making honest recommendations.
The water trick is one that I would use when I ran out of hydration mix and wasn’t going to get a refill in time for a training session. I would also use this trick at team dinners during stage races. We would lose so much salt in sweat during the races, that I’d just top up a little bit the night before at dinner by adding a pinch to my table water and/or salting my food a touch (just a touch!) more than usual. The extra salt in the system would prime you to retain more water when hydrating the next day (another trick I learned in early days from Stacy Sims).
If you’re looking to make your own drink mix, water and salt are the main things you need, and I always found it surprising that I couldn’t taste even a generous pinch of salt in a regular water bottle!
Re: cramping, I recommend looking into some of the recent evidence showing electrolytes may not be entirely to blame. Increasingly, evidence points to nerves at the mechanism, where, e.g. capsaicin can help reset the nerve to relieve cramping. Very interesting stuff! Regardless, your hydration/electrolyte status are incredibly important to performance, so best to stay on top of those regardless!
My bad. I was trying not to be TOO close to the mic, because last time I was laughing straight onto it and blowing out eardrums… still working on getting the hang of this, so I was a bit too far from the mic on the live cast. Tucker is a wizard and probably fixed this on the audio to make me look good.
But I only remember to take my supplements every day because I put the bottle of pills on top of the coffee filters. I’m somewhat forgetful by nature, but I NEVER forget to make coffee in the morning . With the pills on top of the filters, I have to handle the bottle before I can make coffee .
I’ve been accidentally doing it right by taking my pills with dinner. I have them set right on the counter next to where we plate our food, so it is an immediate reminder each night. The only time I forget is when we eat out
I actually came to talk about this. “Land” based sunscreens that most people use to get in the pool or just go outside are a much different creature than surf screens, and the differences within surf screen types are quite varied as well.
Personally, I’ve never found anything that beats original Headhunter fwiw.
I like headhunter, but honestly my favorites are Manda and Surf Mud. Surf Mud is like wearing a mask and I only use in in the water and when I know its going to be a 3+ hour session.
Great episode as always when @ambermalika is part of the line-up. Perhaps she can answer a question I was having for quite a while: what motivates domestiques? Most of the time at least, they aren’t meant to win anything. Is it satisfying to implement team strategy on point and help someone else win? How are they judged professionally? (After all, this is also a job, and not every domestique can be expected to eventually upgrade someone contending for the win.) Us amateurs have very different sources of motivation, e. g. we may have power targets, the desire to upgrade to a higher category or aim for improvements in skills and placement. But we are not getting paid and it doesn’t matter if we place 5th or 50th.
Chad has mentioned several times on podcasts (again on this one) that 2 (at most 3) intensity workouts is enough training stimulus for adaptation. More than that runs the risk of burn out. This is consistent with many other coach’s opinions and my personal experience. However, most mid volume build and specialty plans have 3 intensity workouts + 1 longer sweet spot workout (this could be considered by many as “intensity”) as a default.
@chad Do you mind clarifying why the plans seem to differ (on the surface) from what you have mentioned on podcasts? If someone wanted to adjust a mid volume plan to have 2 workouts of intensity, how would you recommend making that adjustment?
If not addressed here, maybe a question for a coming podcast? @Jonathan
Hi @aboaz. Yep, 2-3 is the sweet spot, and I try to lean more toward 2 than 3 in most cases, the Short Power Build being the exception since short power is the focus. There’s also the challenge of keeping the weekly training hours within certain limits which tends to shift the emphasis from quantity to quality.
I tried to make those Shot Power Build workouts a little heavy on the recovery too, so they’re each what I consider to be pretty manageable workloads, even 3 times a week.
Like anything else, the plans have to be tempered with your own understanding of how much stress you can positively tolerate, so never feel obligated to perform a third day of intervals if experience has shown you that it’s more than you can productively accommodate.
Thanks @chad. Appreciate the reply! If I look at sustained power build, for example, there is a day of V02 work, a day of over-unders, a day of threshold (or slightly above threshold) and a day of 90-120min sweet spot. If I removed a day of intensity, what workout would you recommend removing and still getting the benefit of the sustained power build plan? (General build has a very similar format with one threshold day being swapped for a day of shorter/higher intensity intervals)
Also, I see in the weekly notes that there is a longer endurance alternative to the Sweet Spot weekend workout. Do both have the same (or similar enough) benefits to be fully “swap-able”? I’ve read over and over that there are adaptation signals made with LSD rides that can’t be gained any other way (no shortcuts). Is it that black and white? Which is preferable?
It occurred to me while writing this that it might be beneficial to have different versions of the plans, or at least comments in the weekly description, suggesting which intensity day to drop if 3 days is too much. Just a thought.
They talked about concussions in this episode, and I just wanted to share a link (below) for anyone looking on information on how to get back to riding with a concussion. I crashed in the 4/5 race at the Giro Di San Francisco, and was diagnosed with a concussion. The link below illustrates what to do and how to get back into riding in a safe way. This has been a real useful tool for me by helping me not push through symptoms and really trying to understand the process of recovery vs being a stubborn person. Hope this was useful to anyone!
I love the Giro di SF! (I won that race with Palo Alto Bicycles back in 04 or 05… haha) I do not love hearing that you got a concussion there, though. This is a great resource - thank you for sharing here. It’s important with all injuries to give your body the time to fully recover, and especially when it comes to the brain. It’s SO easy to fall into the trap of believing that the harder you push to recover and faster you return to racing, the tougher (read: better) you are. It’s yet another way that we weigh our worth as athletes/people. The truth is that plus or minus a few weeks or months won’t make the difference in your athletic career, but it might be the difference in whether you suffer long-term repercussions. Plus, once you’re healed and back to your old self, that time off the bike feels like a blip on the radar, while at the time, even a few days can feel like eons. I wrote a piece on this a while back when I broke my pelvis at US Crit Nats. Injury is not a test of how tough you are, but it is an opportunity to honor your body and to show yourself the care you deserve. Sounds like you’re doing it right, and I hope you continue to recover well!
I love this question! Thank you for asking! My response will clearly be biased given how much I love this role. I think what motivates us domestiques is really quite similar to anyone else - we want to get better as athletes and people, and we use many of the same metrics you mention - power targets and skills. Rather than upgrading, we’re looking to earning contracts and in some cases bonuses (depending on contract structures). But ALL of this comes back to how well we can execute in service of a team goal. The fitter, more skilled, and more savvy I become, the better I can serve my team. And that’s probably where the confusion may lie - why get so excited about sacrificing my own chances to win so that my teammate can stand on the podium? I was very fortunate early in my career to race with teammates who sacrificed for me. Those wins were far more meaningful to me than any I earned on my own. I knew absolutely that I could not have won without the sacrifice of my teammates. And they did so with such joy and enthusiasm, without question. It was incredibly powerful. I also had the opportunity to be the one who sacrificed. And because I had experienced both sides, I knew how much it meant to our team leader for the rest of us to sacrifice for her. And those of us sacrificing knew exactly how hard it was to get the job done and saw and appreciated that in one another - we had each others’ backs through incredible effort and suffering. Rolling across the finish line with a teammate after you’ve both emptied the tank for your teammate who won the race minutes ago … there is no better feeling the world. It is as good as the feeling when you win. Because the truth is that at the pro level, no one wins without help. The level is just too high. So whoever lands on the podium knows she did not get there alone, that we all share in the effort and result. The word sacrifice comes from the latin meaning “to make sacred.” I really think that’s it. I’ve won a lot of races, some without help. I can tell you that the races that move me most are those in which the effort is shared, those that involve sacrifice – either mine or my teammates’. Because the result becomes sacred. That motivation is intrinsic, but your question also asks about extrinsic factors - how are we judged professionally? This is a great question. The short answer is that everyone sees what happens in a race, which racers put their teammates in the best position, which racers cover the key moves, or shut down the key gaps; similar to counting “assists” in basketball. We all know who we would love to have on our team. If you’re consistently contributing to team results and making those key moves to enable team goals, everyone knows and sees. The same goes for strong riders who are selfish and can’t seem to let go of their own egos to be team players. Ultimately team directors usually have final say on who gets a contract. You see some teams where the directors hire based on results on paper – these are usually teams that don’t gel or work well together, because they’re filled with riders who all think they should be the leader; these teams often have pretty toxic environments. Other teams hire based on who they know will gel well together and work toward a team goal. Those directors are looking more at how races unfold throughout the season, how the presence of some riders seems to elevate their teams, even if that rider isn’t the one on the podium. Those are the teams that get consistent results, that have the best performance environments, in which everyone lifts and appreciates the contributions of everyone else. I’ve been part of both types of teams, and it’s like night and day. You learn pretty quickly that a director who starts putting down your personal results in a contract negotiation is probably not someone for whom you want to work. Sometimes, they’re serious (because they’re hiring based on results on paper), and other times, they’re using lack of results as a negotiation tactic to lowball your value and salary offer. The domestique role used to be more revered, but a long time ago the UCI implemented a points system in which individual riders earn points toward a team total, the team total determining race invitations. This cast the domestique role in a new light, and not, in my opinion, for the better. It’s an interesting history, but the point is that for most domestiques, building a reputation as a reliable team player of high integrity is the key to longevity. Which all comes back to consistently seeking those improvements in the same skills, savvy, power, and positivity that we all chase!
Thanks a bunch for the post. I still find it hard to think of road cycling as a team sport to be honest, but that is just due to my own, very limited experience. (I originally come from the mountain bike side and have only competed in my first races this year.)
I find your comment regarding the UCI point system very intriguing: such rule changes have the potential to completely alter the dynamics in the sport. If you were in positions of power at the UCI, what changes would you suggest to make then?
Haha! I would make so many changes! Most of the changes I envision have to do with what I experienced and saw happening in the women’s pro fields. I wouldn’t be able to speak as well to the men’s or junior’s sides or other disciplines. That said: I’d increased the distance limits on women’s races (they increased the max from 140km to 160km in 2016, with an increase from max average daily of 120 to 140), increase the maximum number of days for a stage race (currently 6, with exceptions like the Giro Rosa which is 10; limit for men is 23 days), and create a different points structure, where teams treat points similarly to prize money, sharing the total earned among all riders on the team who contributed to the result at that race. This would more accurately reward the team aspect of the sport, which is, IMHO, absolutely foundational to road cycling. I’d also implement changes that offer free or low-cost independent legal counsel for athletes. Many athletes end up with no options for holding teams accountable to contractual agreements. This could be a whole separate thread!
. With the pills on top of the filters, I have to handle the bottle before I can make coffee .
