Race tapering

- The case for pedaling cold turkey

The miles have been bagged and sacrifices made. Now, how to get in the best possible race day condition.

Taper, you say.

The popular practice is to reduce training volume, but maintain intensity. This way, you’ll keep your body primed with all the right enzymes to cope with race intensity.

If it’s good enough for Jonathan Vaughters it’s good enough for me.

But is this advice the product of a rampant cycling obsessive disorder that renders cyclists powerless to resist continued pedaling motion for fear of somehow losing power?

Possibly.

Doctor of Bicycle Engineering and Lunn Ave rider Mike P offers an alternative view.

He writes:

My approach is miles away.

Habitual athletes (with cyclists the most so, due to the length of both their training sessions and events) have developed a self-supporting and self-sustaining cultural excuse to avoid going pedal-cold-turkey at any stage.

Perhaps it stems from an unquestioned belief set up in our formative years, when a bit of hard training rapidly improved things for the up-coming school event.

It makes fast and even winning improvements, and therefore the corollary must be true. But not so.

So my thoughts are, as a long-term hard-training cyclist, you should have much more faith in yourself. That hard-won condition is lost at the same speed: slowly. So slowly that a week and a half of total-rest taper will have a minimal degradation factor.

But still degradation you think?

No, because there is another factor or two to consider. At the end of a totally guts-out training build-up, the immune system is at its lowest.

Muscles, tendons and ligaments have been ripped and stretched and hammered to the max. Time is required for healing (and at a point the body is least able to provide it) for scar tissue to form and then be shed.

Time to sleep, where the repair and rehabilitation is mainly done. Time to re-fuel and de-lactate to the max. Time to feel free in every joint and muscle like you can't remember. "Taper", and you interrupt the healing process.

Of course, during this time you are likely to continue eating like a cyclist (why else do we ride)? That makes the feeling of fat, the bloat, and the notching back out of the belt, feel like the pits.

Psychologically the mind goes down proportionally. And the daily fix is not there, so shit on top of shit. So the average cyclist goes and spends some of the lollies saved for Lent, and then makes great claims when a bit of the lost high returns in flashes of euphoria. And the others believe, and all go do the same - or more. So tapering continues.

So - what to do? Be tough. Really tough. Hold out on cycling. Eat to (reduced total calorie) plan, And if you over do (the eating that is), swim in sea water. Freeze it off, and at the same time (in the early stages of the shut-down), work the other muscles: the ones that cycling uses only indirectly, for cycling glycogen stores (in other words, don't be a scab-scratcher - leave the hammered part of the system alone).

Then roll to the line. If you feel like shit, feel really despondent, wonder why in such bad condition you are fronting up at all, you are in for the best performance you are likely to do.

Getting fat on food insecurity

-- Pedaling insecurity for fatter research budgets

Cyclists know a thing or two about hunger.

At some stage we’ve all suffered the dreaded hunger knock and had to improvise sports training survival tactics.

But it turns out we’re not the only ones worried about sustenance.

A Canterbury Community and Public Health report says 10 per cent of New Zealand households have "low food security" and that one in 10 of us are hungry, malnourished or nervous about where our next meal is coming from.

Terrible stuff, and not just for the desperately hungry faces in our midst, but also the cruel irony of their expanding girths. The report says limited access to culturally acceptable foods encourages the consumption of high-sugar, cheap and filling foods.

Turns out the fear of not being able to eat makes us eat more of the wrong stuff.

Otago University Health Economist Des O'Dea is on to this and has already floated his cure - the Food Insecurity Card, making the right foods cheaper and, so the theory goes, reducing our anxiety and propensity for fattening foods.

But, like the hungry cyclist, the one in 10 New Zealanders gripped by food insecurity won’t be reassured knowing that carrots and cauliflower are now on permanent special.

Anyone steering down the barrel of sugar low is seduced by the closest convenience food wrapper.

Forget about health foods.

No one, least of all the anxiously hungry, is interested.

They’d rather eat burgers and get scurvy than entertain archaic practices of vegetable-based food preparation.

"Low food security" is the concoction of a cardigan wearing researcher punting for new funding.

Food has never been as abundantly available, which is why New Zealanders are so fat.

Try researching ways to get people off their arses.

Cycling Sauce: Chopper Guard Bicycle Lovelies

-- October Sauce – The Cykelkongen girl

Big ups to Danish online cyclery Cykelkongen, whose nautically themed latex mash-up is this month's clear winner.

The Google Monkeys in the department of translation services tell me the picture title is in fact the Danish translation of Beverly Hills Cop. Only, the English translation of their translation apparently reads Illegally cocky.

I’m unsure what to make of all this. And its relevance to online bicycle retailing remains a mystery. Nevertheless, this sort of detail shouldn't complicate our celebration of bicycle marketing excellence.

Striking for cyclist safety

-- Unions to the rescue

Ordinarily, I don’t pay much attention to unions. Too many of these types, aw-right.

However, the squalid small mindedness of union organisers and their close cousins, rabid taxi drivers, can sometimes be revealing.

The protracted dispute between NZ Bus (including Metrolink, North Star, Go West, Waka Pacific, LINK and City Circuit services, used by 80,000 Aucklanders everyday) and the Combined Union (representing Auckland bus drivers) has moved a stage closer to custard, with a union issued directive for a work-to-rule day, this Thursday.

This, I gather, is designed to put more pressure on NZ Bus to “come to the table” by delaying normal services, as bus drivers take their time to “follow the company's handbook to the letter.”

I figure we’re safe assuming that under normal circumstances drivers don’t follow the company’s handbook. After all, if sticking to the rules is being used by unions as an instrument of coercion, not following the rules must be business as usual.

So it’s worth looking at the rules and mulling the implications of NZ Bus’s business as usual endorsement of their breaking.

In accordance with the work-to-rule notice drivers will not:

- Sign on to commence a shift of work earlier than required. (No problems. Who likes starting work early?)

- Adhere to the media communication policy as it is prescribed in the NZ Bus Operator reference handbook dated March 2008 and will speak to the media without specific authority of the board of directors. (Fine, knock yourselves out).

- Drive any bus, which is without a working radio telephone. (Business as usual: Some buses are without working RTs).

- Drive any bus, which is without a current certificate of fitness or a current road user certificate. (Business as usual: If it goes, drive it. Certificates are so overrated)

- Drive any bus, which has a safety defect the driver is aware of. (Business as usual: Safety smafety. If it goes, drive it.)

Drivers will:

- At the commencement of their shift, carry out full pre-shift bus checks as described on the defect card supplied with each bus. (Business as usual: Checks smecks. If it goes, drive it)

- Spend 5 minutes at the end of every time-tabled trip carrying out full terminal duties, including lost property checks, using toilet facilities if required by the driver or service person operator, performing stretching exercises and preparing the bus for the return journey (Bummer. ‘Lost’ property is one of the perks of the job. I’m sure absentminded commuters will be much more at ease this Thursday. Oh, and don’t forget to take a toilet stop and a stretch. There’s nothing more dangerous than a tense bus driver holding on till the end of the line.)

- If there are no toilet facilities available at any terminal at the time a driver or service person operator requires them, then he or she will comply with the policy as it is prescribed in the NZ Bus Operator Reference Handbook March 2008 at clause 9.12 (Wonder what this is? Activate the special emergency trapdoor?)

- Keep to all lawful speed limits (Business as usual: Speed limits are for eejits)

On reflection, I’m a big fan of the Combined Union. Because, as a bicycle riding work commuter, nothing scares me more than sharing the road with poorly checked and maintained buses driven at illegal speeds by overworked and tense bus drivers busting for the toilet.

Postponed: GBC's Spring Tweed Run

-- Inclement weather sees organisers pull the pin on Saturday's event

New date to be advised, say organisers.