Musings on New Year's Goals and Cycling

I'm not immune to the compulsion that many of us feel at the end of the year to reflect on the past 12 months and evaluate changes for the future.  There is some actual value in this, though it may seem annoying and useless.  If you think about it from a business perspective, the old adage 'you can't improve what you don't measure', it makes sense.  In business or engineering, practitioners are constantly defining metrics, setting goals, and measuring their performance against those goals.  Based on the metrics, they make adjustments to their business process or engineering methods, measure again, and so on ad infinitum, in their quest for continuous improvement.  This is exactly the purpose that the traditional year end reflection serves; you evaluate your progress against goals and adjust your goals accordingly.  Sometimes you make those goals more modest, more achievable.  In the business world they call these SMART goals (specific, measurable, realistic, and time bound).  There is no point in making a goal that is unrealistic.  Chrysler, for example, shouldn't set a goal of toppling Toyota in its quest for manufacturing excellence, or BMW as the undisputed king of the sports sedan by the end of the year.  They instead might set a goal of turning a profit, or getting all of their cars to 'average' on a reliability rating.  Similarly, our own personal goals can be adjusted from year to year to be more SMART.  I have made a similar move this year as it relates to cycling.

Cycling is one of those things that brings true enjoyment to my life.  Strava and competitive events provide hard data to track my performance on the bike, the number of miles, my average speed, watts, rankings on segments, place finish in races, etc.  By those measures, I've ridden a lot of miles, almost more than I've logged in a car this year.  I've set many PR's on Strava segments and, in most of the races I entered, I didn't come in dead last. In short, cycling gave me a lot this year.  But I think I can do better by focusing on my strengths.

Cycling is one of those sports that has many disciplines, each favoring a different sort of physiology.  It's a little like American football in that sense.  It takes all sorts of body types to make a successful football team.  There are the gigantic linesman.  Their job is to be as close to either the irresistible force or the immovable object as possible on the line of scrimmage.  Then you have the running backs and half backs who are either extremely fleet and quick with their feet, or they can smash through the linesman, finding holes to gain a yard or two.   Then you have the tight ends and wide receivers who are tall  with good hands for grabbing balls from the sky, but also fast in order to get open down-field.  And of course there are the defensive ends who are matched up with them physically.  You get the idea.  Cycling is somewhat similar.  I might also compare it to running.  In running, you have the lithe, lean, sinewy distance runners who amaze us by their ability to run at amazing speeds over distances that boggle our minds.  At the other extreme are the more heavily muscled sprinters with their explosive speed and mind bending leg speed.  In between there are the middle distance runners who have very nearly the same speed as the sprinters and can suffer incredible anaerobic pain for 800 meters to a mile.  Finally, there are the quarter milers.  At the world class level, these are sprinters who can suffer unimaginable pain, and extreme anaerobic activity for 45 seconds of hell on earth. 

Cycling is a little different from these events in one crucial way.  There is a machine involved.  The machine is human powered, but it is a machine nonetheless.  In running, for example, almost all elite male 400 meter runners have the exact same physiology.  Regardless of their race/ethnicity, they are about 6' to 6'3" and weight 165 to 180 pounds.  The size and shape of the body and the type of muscle fiber influence the outcome greatly.  Sure, there can be very fast 400  meter runners of different sizes, but when you look at the very top of the sport, the pattern is clear.  In running, the body is the entire machine, and the design of the machine is very important to the outcome.  In cycling, the man made machine removes many of the variables.  The total machine is the human body and the man made machine together.  The interface between the human machine and the man made machine reduces the variables three; 1) how much power the rider can produce and for how long, 2) the weight of the rider and bike, and 3) the wind resistance produced by the rider and bike.  Since the bicycle bears the weight of the rider, and the weight of the rider far outweighs the bicycle, rider weight only comes into the equation during acceleration and climbing.

If you've ever watched a grand tour closely, such as the Tour de France, you'll notice that there are many rider types on a team.  There are sprinters, who tend to be more heavily muscled.  These riders sit in the peloton for the entire stage and shoot out of the pack at the very end in tremendous bursts of speed.  At the opposite end of the spectrum are the lightweight climbers.  These 130 pound riders dance up the mountains while the sprinters, no less fit, fall farther and farther behind, hoping to finish within the time limit.  There are the time trial specialists.  These are the big diesel engine riders that can produce tremendous amounts of power on solo efforts over relatively flat, short courses.  They can cover that distance faster than the pure sprinters or pure climbers.  Then there are the very rare all around riders who can do everything reasonably well.  Those are the special few who have a shot at wearing yellow into Paris and becoming household names despite the relative obscurity of cycling as a sport.  Even more obscure than road cycling and the grand tours is the sport of track cycling.  Once the most popular spectator sport in the the USA, there are now only a handful of velodromes left. 

What does all of this have to do with me and my annual cycling goals?  Quite a bit actually. At 6'3" conservatively and hovering around the 200 pound mark, I am very far from the ideal climber.  Even though my size enables me to produce much more power than a 130 pound rider, the power to weight ratio is not in my favor.  However, I do have a slight aerodynamic advantage to the lighter rider.  So, on a flat surface, with more power on tap, an aero advantage, and no climbing to slow me down, I have scenario that suits my physiology.  This past year, I tried some time trial races.  Though with a 13 year old road bike with no aero technology and no organized training, I was a mid pack finisher.  This is where my muscle fiber type comes into play.  As a predominantly fast twitch, tending towards mesomorph body type, the ideal event for me is also short.  The typical time trial is at least 12 miles long.  My ideal event would be a minute or so or less in length, and flat.  Where does one find such an event in cycling?  On the velodrome of course!  Luckily, Portland has a lovely velodrome at the Alpenrose Dairy.

So, for 2013 I resolved to do something crazy; focus on my natural strengths and train and compete as a track sprinter on the velodrome.  As part of this effort, I've started working with Brian Abers' BRIHOP program. It's been a couple of weeks so far and I've already learned a lot.  It's a great group of folks.