Boning up on bicycle breaks

-- Building strong ‘landing’ bones

Lycra and a plastic lid offer little protective comfort to riders unlucky enough to experience an involuntary road dive.

When you hit the road at 40km, something – usually a collarbone – gets broken.

Turns out that cyclists could do themselves, and their bones, a favour by cross training.

Apparently the act of cycling fails to offer riders sufficient repetitive impact to stimulate maximal bone density.

One recent study found cyclists to have lower bone density than the study control sample.

So, while cyclists are quite good at self-inflicting physical pain and suffering, the duress isn’t the variety that keeps bones in top-notch condition.

As a sporting group, we are in fact more predisposed to bone breaks than other codes, like, for example, rugby, where the hot embrace of manhandling offers a fantastic volume of repetitive impact; or league, which offers repetitive headline grabbing impact by attracting players prone to manhandling both sexes.

Direct weight bearing exercise is what’s needed. And the pure cyclist doesn’t get it perched on the saddle.

Cross training is the answer, weight training and running specifically. Mineral supplementation doesn’t work.

I put these thoughts to Lunn Ave rider and Doctor of Bicycle Engineering and Performance, Mike P. While he agrees with the sentiment, he says the study shows that not all cyclists suffer lowering bone density and the cure might be simpler than we think.

He writes -

The study suggests those affected:

- Don't do much else other than cycle

- Maybe are also cosseted by their mums and all the other modern inconveniences that minimise non-cycling effort of any type

- Are more likely to be spinners than shovers

- Maybe the big milers, but do not necessarily work really hard

- May alternatively be young, still developing skeletally, and suffering the consequences of loading brilliant natural cycling capability on top of an already demanding growing process

- Maybe professionals, sleeping twice a day, with no other interests or hard activity

Mineral loss through sweating is a factor, supplements don't solve it, and calcium uptake is reduced by a lack of vitamin D.

I suspect the answer is to eat foods high in calcium, as opposed to swallowing calcium pills. In line with my last outburst, pills appear high by chemical analysis in terms of what is required, but appear to be correspondingly low in absorbability e.g. munching down a shell off the beach might put the grams of calcium ingested right up there, but it doesn't mean the system can metabolise it as it does milk.

Ditto vitamin D. Take the pill by all means, but it might be better to expose some skin to direct sunlight for a few minutes each day. And given a cyclist's extreme requirements, make that more than one time during the day.

Bone loading is what is really required (as opposed to bone shocking, via running, as the article mainly points to). Jarring provides high peak loads of short duration, so is the most obvious fast track to getting the system to recognise the need for more bone strength, and act on it.

However, running jar-loads only some bones - but what about the rest? I doubt running will ever strengthen collarbones, and they are the first to go in a cycling pile up. The only way to strengthen "the landing bones" is to work the muscles that lever across their ends. Gym shit. And if that works, so will cycle sprints.

All that is required to increase bone strength (density) is to load the corresponding muscles. While physical shock treatment may accelerate the process, and perhaps even take it beyond what controlled loading could do, shock is not necessary. It has been shown that sedentary geriatrics exercising at snail pace with tiny weights can reduce their osteoporosis with even that bone loading, so why can't a hard-arse cyclist stay on top of bone density?

My conclusion is, the modern global encouragement that gets couch potatoes out there in flash lycra and on techno carbon has exposed the wine-set. As always, there are some short-cuts, but the reality is no real pain, no real gain. Put another way - those that mow their own grass will be just fine.

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.

Guy King: Tallying up Tamaki Drive cycling sins

-- Not happy: St Heliers/Glendowie Residents' Association member Guy King (pictured).

When a young female driver inexplicably accelerated through a stop sign into the midst of 20 or so Tamaki Drive cyclists, hospitalising four of them, one of whom remains in an induced coma fighting for life, Mr King said he didn’t know who was to blame for the crash.

Presumably, in the rush for a clipboard and one of those scout masterly idiotic clicking counters I suspect he used to capture, document, and then broadcast (albeit in print media) his evidence of Tamaki Drive Cyclist Sins (TDCS), sympathy for injured cyclists was the last thing on his mind.

“I have started counting and the biggest group has been 52 cyclists in one hit, riding three abreast," he said.

I was genuinely impressed by his powers of observation, knowing just how hard it is to accurately tally a marauding three-abreast bunch of cyclists.

Consider that many motorists struggle to see, let alone count, just one cyclist.

But Guy King is no ordinary contender. In the 10 years he’s spent escorting VIP visitors to New Zealand shores, he’s received a number of professional accolades for his professionalism and CARE.

However, as a self-professed former cyclist, it seems his care and professionalism is no longer extended to cyclists, who doubtless impede the progress of his preferred commuting style.

Perhaps during one of his Bentley parades, when cyclists overtook his cavalcade of waving dignitaries and VIPs, he was able to point a radar gun to measure the dangerously high speeds Tamaki Drive cyclists sometimes attain.

I have seen cyclists speeding, he said, frantically thumbing his Dignitary Personal Protection handbook for the right procedure.

Safety and discretion at all times please, Mr King.