From: Jim Logan
[mailto:jimlogan@verizon.net]
Sent: Sunday, December 29, 2013 11:22 AM
To: randon@googlegroups.com
Cc: pittsburgh-randos@googlegroups.com
Subject: Fitness is cool ... hang in there
Sent: Sunday, December 29, 2013 11:22 AM
To: randon@googlegroups.com
Cc: pittsburgh-randos@googlegroups.com
Subject: Fitness is cool ... hang in there
Short version:
A time capsule
message to send back to riders who struggle with riding ultras now as I did in
2007.
Detail:
Back when I started
riding brevets in 2007, I thought a lot about comments about endurance and the
body’s reaction to ultras I read on randon that didn’t seem to apply to me.
And since I lived 5 hours from the nearest series, everything I
learned about riding ultras I pretty much learned from randon. After
riding myself into endurance fitness over the years, I found my original
hypothesis correct. The bodies of people with endurance fitness do react
differently than an ex couch-potato riding into fitness – how my body reacts to
recovery both on and off the bike is different now than 7 years ago.
Bottom line –
endurance fitness is really cool. It took me 3-4 years to obtain
it. This is a time capsule message being sent back to riders in their
first year or two of ultra-riding, for which it is doesn’t feel natural, you
are only finishing with a goal-focus and grit, and you wonder if it will ever
get better. As long as you use the suffering to spur you to training and
education, I can say yes.
One metric – how
long it takes my body to recover from long brevets:
2007
– three weeks
2008
– two weeks
2009
– one week
2011
– days
Another metric is
distance to first pain meds. My progression was something like this:
2007 – 75 miles
2008 – 125 miles
2009 – 400 miles
2011 – only to sleep
The pain medication
metric is analogous to how long it took my body to start to irrecoverably break
down in some way. Except my body broke down after 600 miles in 2011,
though I didn’t need pain meds for riding that year.
While I learned the
mechanics of sports nutrition early on, it took 4 plus years to feel sports
nutrition, and make it a natural part of me. Ditto for equipment choice
becoming a non-issue. Ditto for training.
There are some
lucky people for which ultras are a natural experience and who’s first reaction
is to post wonderful travelogues about the countryside and people you
encounter. This post isn’t for you. This post is for riders who
focus the entire ride is on the minutiae of surviving to the finish. That
while it never gets easier, it does get more familiar, and your body does learn
how to recover better as the years go by.
Happy new year and
happy riding.
Jim Logan
Pittsburgh
Ancien 2007, 2011
RAAM qualified 2012
