Finding fossilized fitness
I decided to chase big athletic goals. Now what? Also, and I can't believe I am saying this, Kendrick Lamar
There is inertia in everything. Or kinetic energy. Or potential energy. I never took physics, actually, so these metaphors can’t go on very long.
Anyways, INERTIA! There is inertia or whatever the accurate science terms are, in every object. There is the capacity for any given thing if acted upon by the right force, to move, to travel, to change location. Other things also have inertia in a less literal sense. Ideas, for instance, gain momentum. Positive energy is contagious. Creativity breeds more creativity. Etcetera.
In my life, fitness and training are where inertia is most consequential. My life as viewed by training logs is a set of mountains and valleys that track the ups and downs of my cycling experience for years. Percipitious climbs bolstered by audacious training blocks and massive ramp rates, 25-hour weeks, 30-hour weeks, 40-hour weeks, and fantastic fitness that follows. These climbs are euphoric, buoyed by what seems like boundless inertia. Fatigue, in a roundabout way, feels like strength. The suffering becomes meditative. What is easy is suddenly hard and the hard things come freely and without the mental toil that normally a seven-hour training day would entail.
And then comes free fall. Something – and this something I’ve learned can be so many different things – first causes a bobble. The bobble becomes a wobble. The wobble becomes a fall and the inertia turns negative. The same audacity that brought me to the previous heights turns around and instead becomes melodramatic misery. Oh, what was! I guess we begin again next week, next month, or next year. Slowly the interia can turn around, but typically the fall is more prolonged than the climb.
For my past two and a half years of cycling, there has been more falling than rising. What’s more, the falls have all corresponded with trackable, understandable Life Events where no amount of grinta would have saved the inertia of my fitness. That do be the way the news goes at times.
Nevertheless, I have given myself time to regroup this past summer. I have given myself time for the inertia around my fitness to bottom out, to be fully at rest, before trying to build the energy in the climb. With that time I have decided to probe into my past and to take lessons from the rises and falls of my past fitness journeys.
I don't want to do the same thing and be restricted by the same inertia. I know I have a bigger capacity, the challenge is just managing how the energy flows and sustaining the forces that move that illusive fitness value up, down, and hopefully to the transformative improvements I know I have yet to hit from my inability to be truly consistent.
Introducing Ricky Arnopol!
In this article I will dig into what these conclusions have been, what I hope to accomplish with a couple of tweaks, and articulating some of my goals before wrapping up with the staples. But first, I have got to give a big plug to my coach Ricky Arnopol. Ricky was my coach last year as a part of a coaching program. Since then, the program has ended, but both Ricky and I felt as if there was potential for more with our pairing. So, as I build towards the racing this spring, there will be regular articles around my training and fitness that will be presented by his coaching and the conversations we have in tinkering and tweaking my approach for 2025.
It has been a joy to work with Ricky, who in his own right is one of the top road cyclists in North America, and I would highly recommend him to anyone who is trying to increase their level over the next few years. He is a true partner in this pursuit and has deep knowledge of the language of gains so be sure to shoot him a message, spots are available.
Contact: ricky@fascatcoaching.com
A hard reset
In August I was at the point of exhaustion. Not from training, but from not being as fit as I thought I would be. Throughout the season, from March to SBT GRVL in late August, the inertia was never going in the right direction. This all came to a head at SBT where many flat tires in the first 30 miles of the race just absolutely broke me. It was an emotional meltdown that was rare and that was precipitated by a lot more than just the flat tires at one bike race. It was as if the air had been fully let out from that internal vessel of motivation and excitement.
There was no amount of bike riding that would refill that vessel for the remaining few races left in the year. 2024 was fully and totally cooked. Onto next year, I guess.
Quickly that disappointment faded, however, as I saw joy in the time I had to play with. I had moved to Arizona and instead of September being the last vestiges of the joys of a Colorado summer, September was the final boss of a long, record-breakingly hot Arizona summer. The good times were coming during the months I had always dreaded. I had time to not only gain the fitness I had been unable to find for a few years but also gain fitness I had never seen before. Transformative fitness, as I like to say.
In that time when I was holding myself away from the productive distraction that is training, I went back into the archives and looked at the last times I had found transformative fitness. I took the time to spot trends and to find the moments where I converted on inertia and the moments I missed out. Most of all, I deduced a couple of takeaways that I could use to rebuild my fitness from the ground up within the confines of a set structure.
When the volume gets big, the fitness follows fast
Generally, when the volume of training goes up, fitness follows. Obviously, this is not groundbreaking. Ride bikes more and you’ll get better at riding bikes. The difference here for me is how riding more bikes seems to make almost every aspect of cycling fitness better.
Set aside intervals, just riding at zone two well beyond my previous volume of training has caused a massive bump in all of my zones beyond neuromuscular power. Anaerobic, aerobic, tempo, and endurance levels can go up 10% in a period of just 2-3 weeks of intensive zone two training.
For instance, most of my all-time absolute power values (ie not watts per kilo which would’ve had a bigger discrepancy since I lost a significant amount of weight) came in the summer and fall of 2020. All of these numbers were in the few weeks following what I called the “Grandest Tour.” The Grandest Tour was a DIY grand tour I did throughout the American West during the pandemic where I rode the equivalent time of a grand tour stage every day for three weeks. In the end, logistics caught up to me and I had to cut the final half a week. Nevertheless, in the week directly following the two weeks of 30+ hours of volume I set PRs for 5 minutes, 10 minutes (twice), 20 minutes (twice), an hour, and 90 minutes.
Since 2020 I have only bested two of those values twice. One of those changes was the 5 min PR’s which I reset later in 2020 and has yet to be topped.
The big volume boomerang
2020 is a big data point for the value of volume, but also how that volume interacts with the rest of previous months of training. 2020 is not an anomaly in the volume of the three weeks. I have had other periods with similar loads, both from the standpoint of hours and from a TSS perspective, however, most of the time those periods have had massive ramp rates. This means that the volume follows periods of relatively low overall fitness.
2020 was different. That year, with the pandemic ending all racing opportunities, simplifying life, and creating the ingredients for better health, I had a consistent build from April through to the start of July when the endeavor began. There was none of the training panic or cramming that seemed to necessitate the high-volume periods. That is not to say that those other volume blocks didn’t work, it’s just much less consistent and hasn’t had the same range of physiological impact. Those other periods also have had frequent drops in fitness directly afterward whether it be from a loss of weight, illness, or doing all the other life things that I had been ignoring to ride the equivalent time of a part-time job.
Building a strength base before adding volume
These two major considerations have brought me to the philosophy behind Ricky’s training this year. Instead of starting with the conventional base period of volume that comes from standard periodized training, we have begun with a long, iterative period of strength building.
For the first ten weeks of the cycle, starting with mostly mountain bike rides and short tempo intervals in late September, week after week we have added strain via low-cadence work and tempo training while keeping cumulative fatigue and aerobic stress low. Hour totals have ticked up, but have stayed below 20 hours despite my availability to do more. Rest sessions have been frequent. Nutrition and form have been at the top of my mind more than maximizing suffering, as is the temptation with other types of training.
Additionally, the emphasis has also included deep thinking about my position on the bike, the saddle I should use, my hood position, what seat post I need to have to get my saddle further forward over the bottom bracket, and, as is the law in 2024, crank length. All of these considerations and tweaks have been easy to digest with shorter, low cadence work than they ever would be doing long-drawn-out hours of base training and all of those variables are significantly different from what they were in August.
All of this culminated in the final test of strength two weeks ago with a 20-minute power test to set the benchmark for the rest of the season. On the same road where I have been doing the majority of the strength sessions, I tested for 20 minutes at 363 watts at a weight of 72 kilos, bringing the watt per kilo to a nice round 5.1 figure. That overall number was short of what I thought I could do after riding for ten minutes at 375 watts, but as is standard practice for me and 20-minute tests I was unable to sustain what seemed like a very sustainable power beyond 12 minutes.
In the end, I did feel like my strength got me home in good stead especially as my aerobic system seemed to fail me. Ultimately, that aerobic system was always going to be short of the strength system as I had what was a pre-season level of aerobic fitness. For the number nerds out there keeping track, this pre-base fitness means a CTL of 79.
Questions for the future
With those three considerations as my guide, I can’t help but be excited for 2025 as we turn towards the key holiday period of training. Without any true base aerobic fitness, I have tested at the sixth highest value of my recorded life. Yes, the watts per kilo is a different story as I have a bunch of figures from my junior days that are a notch or two higher, but the kilo portion of the conversation is waiting for good reason. With volume increases comes weight loss in line with the power gains.
Yet, to have an uptake before either of those values changes is the first step to making the transformative shift I am hoping to accomplish.
My question, and it’s not really a rhetorical one, is what can I or should I hope for? The easy way is the play the watts per kilo game. Six, for instance, is a great number and is often cited as the threshold professional cyclists often have. But gravel cycling is not an FTP test and confounding variables like fatigue resistance and metabolic threshold are as important. I could seek six watts per kilo, find it, and still get sorted out in the end. So instead my focus is on the process and staying with the lessons of my past training logs: volume is good, consistency is better, and without strength, work transformation isn’t possible.
For your eyes and ears
Last week I sat down with Ryan Simonovich for a podcast discussion about my year ahead. We covered some of the things I wrote about here, but Ryan also dug into some more in-depth aspects of my last year as well. Check it out here!
On the podcast I host for Rodeo Adventure Labs I dug into the new Flaanimal 6 Titanium with Drew van Kampen, the head of Product Development. It was a great conversation about a really striking new titanium frame and you can check that out here.
In the wider world of tech, Pogačar has a new bike…maybe. I really enjoyed the details of this new bike and what it means for road bike design moving forward. Ronan at Escape Collective, my favorite reporter for these kinds of stories, broke down the rumored changes over on their site.
A side of something else
Kendrick Lamar is an artist who I can track life by. Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City was the first rap I loved. To Pimp a Butterfly changed the way I considered race. DAMN shaped the way I considered my future and the paths on can take through life. Mr. Morale helped me process failure. It is impossible to understate how much this music has meant to me and impossible for anyone else, and I do mean anyone, to top it.
That is except King Kenny himself.
GNX, his most recent album, and a shocking out-of-nowhere surprise, does this. In GNX Kendrick is simultaneously fresh and timeless, he is the victor of the rap game and still striving to meet his legendary predecessors. He is himself as a contemporary hitmaker, Kendrick Lamar the legacy, and K Dot the past pretender – all at once, all over again.
He also reminded everyone that perhaps nobody is as good at anything as he is at creating rap music.
Is that hyperbolic? Probably, but then again probably not because have you listened to reincarnated? Or gloria, or tv off? If you think that is hyperbolic then you probably haven't listened to those songs, dude, because they are electricity personified. They are the platonic ideal of musical creativity. They are tapestries of totemic writing, lyricism, and production that position Kendrick Lamar to follow the lineage of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones as much as that of Tupac, Biggie, and Jay Z.
Consider reincarnated. Throughout the song, Kendrick sorts through the reincarnated figures of the past lives of a blues guitar player and a female vocalist after a bad experience at therapy. Kendrick, who is the third character in the story as a modern rapper, takes lessons from each and converses with God after experiencing tragedy throughout and splicing together sounds of each of the ghosts that currently inhabit his conscience and sub-conscience. Altogether, the song rips. But constrained within that song is one line that has reverberated in my mind since I first listened to it.
About one minute and six seconds in Kendrick hits with the line “And so I’m off in the sunset, searchin for my place in the world with my guitar up in my hip, that’s the story unfurled”. Rapping the lyrics in a raspy tone like they are coming from his actual subconscious, Kendrick isn’t just reflecting on being a hypothetical guitarist with rock star problems, he manifests himself as a true former rockstar who has lived and died by those problems already.
What’s left is the legacy that Kendrick wears in the song, both in the reflective lyrics and deeper, subconsciously, in a few repeating strokes of a guitar that rip through the rest of the song like hits of adrenaline to the rhythmic bloodstream.
If that’s not the best music has to offer call me crazy.