Cheers

Out for a walk in the neighborhood.

Deep in thought!

Our guard dogs :)

When winter arrives in California

When winter arrives in California (it drops below 70!) and your riding buddy John Stark moves to Bend OR, it's time for a little technology. Wahoo Kickr => laptop=>TV - TrainerRoad software with a Sufferfest video in the background. Of course, we have the iPad with FaceTime up and running so we can make fun of each other :). Not sure how I ever rode a bike as a kid!

Testing New Photo Software - Looks Pretty Good!

When your teenage son comments that he has never been to KFC, it’s time for a road trip!

Hanging with Mrs. G.!

Beauty sleep

Dropped off our ballots today. Doing our part! (Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash)

The end of a long walk!

The end of a long week!

Cooking Class

Turning Parker into an Executive Chef!

Time for Crepes

The people you meet in downtown Kona!

Longtime Endurance Nation friend Nemo Helen Brauch and her husband Joe, she was one of the EN original crew, now volunteering race day. Patrick McCrann, you put together an awesome group of people, proud to be friends with so many, all these years!

Race day gets a little closer!

First major stop in Kona - shaved ice!

Can’t beat this place at 2:00pm any day of the week!

Fleet Week in San Francisco. Blue Angels were amazing

Playing with the camera on my new phone.

Unfortunately, the photography subject left fairly quickly 😁

Class Photos - STEM style

Class Pictures - STEM Style!

Riding with the fast kids! Dora Jih sporting her new #DixieDevil gear.

Madison at the MVHS Invitational

"How Can I Make it Better"

Because you can never have enough data :).

I actually learned a lot!

The equipment belongs to a friend. I spent 2 minutes looking into purchasing the equipment years ago and when I found out it costs about the same as a small car, I moved on to other gadgets :)

I’ve never had this type of testing done. I use proxies to estimate fitness. With running I use the results of 5K and 10K races. With cycling, I use power meter data.

With this testing, I was hoping to better dial in my estimates and to hopefully validate some other toys I have acquired.

I tested for VO2 max, aerobic threshold, anaerobic threshold, calorie burn at different intensities and the ratio of fat to carbs burned over those intensities.

I’ve never really tested my VO2 before. Scientists believe there is a high correlation to VO2 max and longevity, many now believe there is a causation. Who doesn’t want to live longer :) I know it’s mostly genetic, but untrained athletes and those that don’t train it much may be able to raise it with some blocks of training. I never train even close to my VO2 max so I was wondering if this is something I should be doing. A low number and I would consider modifying my training at times to potentially up my score. I actually stopped the test shortly after passing my anaerobic threshold, so didn’t cap out at my VO2 max, but at 59.3 ml/kg/min, that puts me at a pretty elite level. Conclusion - no VO2 work for me in the near future.

I’ve always had a pretty polarized training plan. Lots of easier Zone 1 and 2 stuff, and some harder efforts, trying not to spend too much time in the middle effort. Data on world-class endurance athletes suggests they spend 80+ % of their time under the aerobic threshold, then 10%-20% of there time over the anaerobic threshold with almost nothing in the middle. Dialing in my zones will see how I compare. I’ve created a bunch of charts in WKO and at first pass, it looks like I spent the right amount of time under the aerobic threshold, but I’m not pushing hard enough on the hard stuff. Too much upper-end Zone 3.

I recently attended a talk by Freddie Rodriguez, an American cycling legend and he put up a bunch of data comparing non-athletes, recreational athletes and world-class athletes. One of the charts showed fat-burning percentages at various levels of effort. Recreational riders burn a very high percentage of carbs very quickly and go to 100% with relatively modest efforts. World-class are really fat adapted. Freddie stated this was from a ton of endurance zone training and training with little to no calories at times (not racing that way). Test results show I am a pretty good fat burner. I don’t go to 100% carbs even at the threshold. I can’t find any benchmark data on the web to see how I compare, but it’s out there somewhere.

When I start to tire in a race I always wonder if it’s mental, calories, hydration or something else. This calorie burn analysis tells be exactly how many carbs I’m burning through and it can help me with calorie planning. Last year I did a bunch of testing for hydration and discovered I was way under drinking. It’s made a huge difference since. First pass at the data and it looks like my calorie intake is pretty good.

I’m also interested in validating other data. Last year I tinkered with a device that measured heart rate variability (HRV) as a sign of fatigue. Lots of professional athletes are starting to use it in training. I found the data interesting but not predictive. My HRV wouldn’t plunge after long or hard workouts and when I would seem fine it would tell me I was too tired to train. I gave up on it.

I recently purchased a muscle oxygen sensor (of course I did!) that measures in real-time your oxygen saturation in your muscles (SmO2). Running this at the same time as my testing allowed me to see if the data made sense. One interesting comment the tester stated was that my test results were very clean, due to a variety of factors including a good warm-up and a smooth pedal stroke. One of the things I’ve noticed with my Sm02 device it that a good warm-up makes a huge difference with muscle oxygenation. If I do the same workout on different days, one with a good warm-up (10-15 minutes), one without, there is a huge difference in the Sm02 variation. A good warmup allows oxygen to surge in when you get going. No warmup makes for a really narrow band of oxygenation. I also wanted to see how the Sm02 data compared to the power and HR data. From the graph below you can see the green area with a good warm-up, oxygen surging into the muscles and then as I go harder, it starts to drop quickly and I quickly go into the red zone. I also wanted to figure out how long I could ride with the dropping Sm02 levels. That data is a little harder to access so I’ll need some work to figure it out. Having real-time data like this to show how hard I’m pushing looks to be valuable.

Still pondering the data, but so far, money well spent!

Nothing beats a Sunday ride with her!

Summer officially comes to an end with the annual photo shoot.

Conner grade 11, Parker 8th grade. Kona 4, Cooper 9 months :)

Father Son Bonding

Conner decided to go with the earrings.  I went for the parental consent :)

Rugby World Cup!

Spending the next few days at AT&T Park. It’s not very often you get to cheer for Tonga, Samoa and Fiji all on the same day :)

Cycling in Farm Country!

The Great Alone - Riding Diablo

Beautiful day for a bike ride. Hard to beat the views from Mt. Diablo!

Just wrapped up a wonderful vacation in St. Maarten. Back to routine!

On vacation wandering around San Diego. Wandered into an active shooter incident. Time to move along!

She's the One

Tagged! The people you meet riding up the mountain!

Spent the morning being inspired by Kara Goldin, CEO and founder Hint, and Heidi Zak, CEO and founder of ThirdLove - these ladies rock #thirdlove, #drinkhint, #pressforprogress, #EY

Livermore Half Marathon

Congratulations #1093 TOM GLYNN!

Here are your results for the 2018 Livermore Half Marathon & 5K.

Your final time is 01:30:09 at a 00:06:52 pace.
You finished 25 out of 1942 in the HALF.
You finished 1 out of 142 in your class M50-59.

Aero Testing

Thank you, Andrew for a fun day at the velodrome!

Results:

In plain English, your best setup seems to be LG helmet, sunglasses, 2 bottles behind, bento, and 2-piece suit.

The quoted time differences (in seconds) are assuming a speed of 20 mph.

The cost of sitting up is quite high, on the order of 17 Watts, which translates to almost 20 minutes over the course of an Ironman!

I'm a little surprised that the 2-piece suit is faster than the 1-piece, but I can't ignore the data! It looks like it could save you ~3 minutes in an Ironman.

You said you don't usually wear sunglasses, but adding them would save you ~1 minute.

Keeping the bento on your bike saves you ~4 minutes.

The Nopinz had a negligible effect.

The big takeaway for you, it seems, is that storage on your bike (2 bottles behind, bento) is faster, so that's good news for Ironman!

Let me know if you have any questions about the results, methods, etc.

I had a lot of fun on Sunday and I hope you did too!

Nothing better than flip-flops in Feb - going to be sad when next weeks cold front comes in .... need to move to the beach!!!

A boy and a puppy - ❤️

Time to rethink dinner plans. I think I'll start with a glass of wine!