Cola Causing Problems

For your weekend enjoyment, here's something I posted over on The Real Fitness Nerd.

I shortened to title of the latest study to blast our soft drink habit to make more colloquial sense. A Greek study showed that people who drank between two and nine liters of cola could suffer muscle problems, from minor weakness to serious paralysis. Yet more bad news surrounding the world's number one source of calories.

Too Much Cola Can Cause Muscle Problems

Really, people were having issues from drinking on two to nine liters a day? Shocking. And y'all thought Denis was exaggerating about how much Red Bull Americans drink.

The two examples used in the article drank three and seven liters of soda a day and suffered from muscular weakness, as well as appetite reduction, heart blockage, and persistant vomiting. Both were female.

Well I'm no Greek scientist but it doesn't take a PhD to figure out one of these women was drinking more than 100% her RDA for caloric intake from cola. And, gosh, she didn't feel good on a diet with a primary component is all sugar, with zero proteins and fats?! Go figure.

What this study concludes, more than anything else, is that people can withstand a massive amount of torture. It's really a testament to the human body that it can survive for so long while being poisoned daily.

Riding Cobbles

Cobbles

(click on photo for a slideshow)

Travels with Romney, Part II, is recorded here:

The Battle of Belgium

When I heard my friends Bruce and Alisa were spending a year in southern France and had a house with plenty of room for visitors, the only choice became which bike race to visit during. Like me, they’re both climbers turned cyclists, and there was no question that our holiday had to be during a race. Having been to Le Tour, the next choices were the spring classics or the Giro. Given Bruce was a cobble crazy as I was, we set our dates to include Paris-Roubaix, better known as the Hell of the North.

The trip had originally been set up to include loads of training as my final prep for the National Championships at the end of April. Post injury, the schedule changed to include loads of eating and a recreational climbing & riding schedule to build up our appetite. But back injury or no, if I was in Belgium, I was going to have a go at some cobbles.

Riding in Belgium, well, specifically Flanders, is amazing. Everything is set up around bikes. There are cafes, museums, bike shops (that are a lot like museums), and bike routes everywhere you go. All of them include stretches of famous bike races that take place on tiny rural roads. And almost all of them include cobbles. We had our choice of a stack of different classic routes, each marked by an artistic colored plaque. We began on the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders) but once we’d had a taste of cobbles, we amended it to include the steepest and most famous sectors we could get to the quickest.

On the longest sector of the day, we were passed by a guy hammering in his big ring. Bruce and I were quickly on him, my own curiosity being how it would feel to ride these things at race pace (the girls were having none of such nonsense). I was worried about my back, but after a kilometer of rattling along my vision was blurred, my head numb, and my hands, arms, and shoulders felt like I’d been going full bore with a jackhammer, so much so that I couldn’t be bothered to think about the back at all. Paris-Roubaix includes over 100k of cobbles. We’d just raced one. The horror of that race is so acute that I absolutely must come back and try the amateur version of it sometime.

The Koppenberg was, by far, the hardest climb we did. It’s not even 500 meters but the cobbles are uneven, wet (I’m sure they never dry in Belgium), and hit an angle of 20%. I quickly realized why there were so many pics of pro racers walking up these inclines. It wasn’t that they couldn’t ride them. It’s just that they’re so steep and rutted that anything causing you to lose you line or change cadence might force you off your bike. And in a pack these things are constant. And once off your bike you can’t remount, so you’re best off to just run to the top and get back on. You’re not riding that fast anyway.

Well, at least not on the Koppenberg. For our next ride we scanning the distances and grades of the cobbled climbs and choose the Muur de Geraldsberg as one that looked the fiercest. Cobbles for 1.3K that hit 19% promised to be horrible, so we tooled around at a pedestrian pace for most of our ride so we wouldn’t burn out all those fast twitch fibers we’d need to ride all the way to the Muur’s famous summit church.

Turns out that cobbles aren’t created equal. Those on the Muur are smaller and closer together. Not only could we ride it but we could hard. On a subsequent ascent, in my big ring, I could hardly imagine how fast Divolder must have been going on these narrow roads to drop everyone, as he had done a week prior en route to winning the Ronde van Vlaanderen.

Food and beer are at least as important in Belgium as riding. And, of course, there’s a pub at the top of the Muur. We recovered with Frittes and “the world’s best beer” (according to our waiter), and contemplated if Heaven was just a bit like Belgium.

Amore di Giro!

The Giro is featuring some exciting and brutal racing. It may not be a traditional grand tour this year but I'm in total agreement with this perspective.

Amore di Giro

The virtually Giro has turned more into a prep phase, but given it's the first block of the 90-Day Challenge, that's what it's really supposed to be. The pull-ups and all the climbing had aggrevated my elbow, so I'm in full and agressive rehab mode and I'll post that program if it works.

Yesterday it rained, postponing climbing plans and giving me a serendipitous rest day. Well, not rest exactly. It is the virtual Giro, meaning that I needed some aerobic training. So besides my rehab and core work, B and I went out to explore some new trails in the mud/rain. Good stuff.

Travels With Romney: England

Since my blog is all about fitness n’ stuff, I’ll leave it to my wife’s wit to recount our recent excursions. Here is part I of her journal on England.

Assault on Western Europe, Part I – Conquering the Empire

I’ll add a little fitness background on our Albion hosts, Todd and my brother.

In the early days of Beachbody, Brian was one of my earliest test subjects. When we were designing X, we were putting our graduate members through about any combination of exercise and diet as they would stand (which was a lot, I might add). We experimented with amalgams of all of Beachbody’s products to that time, which led to some grueling training schedules. One of the craziest of the bunch was called “Cindy and Pixie’s Really Hard Program”. This became rather absurd in the latter rounds, with a schedule that made P90X look like a warm-up. Of note, the only two people not to finally drop off the pace were Brian and one other girl, who were the only two of the group using creatine daily—a nice bit of anecdotal support for that supplement.

Todd has been my partner on many an adventure, including the making of Icarus Descending. On a fitness note, he’s rather well known for his birthday challenges. They include all sorts of bizarre feats of strength, such as locking off at the top of a two-finger one-arm pull-up and drinking a beer(pic), following probably the hardest bouldering circuit ever done at Devil’s Lake with a 32-mile run that stopped at 16 bars, where a shot of whiskey was consumed at each, and doing 716 pull-ups in an hour.

The Beauty of Being Sore

I’m sore a lot, and I’m getting to like it. When I’m sore I know it’s because I’m training. And while it’s always possible to not be sore, it’s the only true indication that you’ve pushed your boundaries. Not being sore leaves questions about whether you’re training hard enough. Soreness leaves no questions.

The virtual Giro is workin’ its magic. Increased time both in the saddle and running has me in a state of breakdown similar to last year’s X off the couch cycle. This extra work has allowed me to tone down my climbing training to allow my elbow to heal. Pushing on the tender tendon now induces only a dull pain. Another hard cycle is right around the corner.

The latest bout of soreness was induced on Sat morning from this:

Grandeur Fun Run

Having barely started running again it promised to double my longest run and add, oh, about 7,000’ more feet of elevation change. I probably shouldn’t have done it but it’s such an aesthetic loop, and practically in my backyard, that I just couldn’t resist.

To offset my penchant for competition, I left late as to avoid any temptation. I must say, seeing a horde of runners stampeding (hmm, more like crawling or slithering, as there’s hardly a step of runable terrain) up the west face of Grandeur Peak was pretty cool.

Beata and I joined in 20 or 30 minutes later and kept a steady and conversational pace throughout. It was also B’s first long run of the year and she was pretty cooked by the end, but happy to get some training in to defend her title at the Doggie Du. The morning was stellar and I finished with a couple of blisters but barely feeling winded. Seeing Mick’s time (like 3rd overall) made me exceptionally happy not to have started with everyone. He’s one of my main training partners and trying to keep up could have put some serious hurt on. I like to think I would have been restrained, but glad I didn’t put my patience to the test.

As it was, I’m still hobbling around and will be on the bike for a few days. But it was a perfect test run. My back feels great, so do my knees, and my elbow. Definitely, I seem to be on the road back.

pic: "you know, some people wouldn't think this was fun." b looking like a lizard slithering up a very steep game trail.

Out Of The Pack; Not The Race

Like the Texan tailing off in the Dolomites, I’ve dropped the pull-ups from my challenge. I have a twinge in my elbow and, though I’m rattling off pull-ups pretty easily, doing 100 or so a day is making it worse, not better. Like Lance, this virtual Giro’s aim it to train for other objectives. Anything that’s breaking me down to the point that there is no long term benefit is being axed. Training can only be called training if it succeeds in making you better.

Other than that, the challenge is going well. The daily biking/running has me pretty sore. I’m going to swap rehab work for pull-up work since my back still isn’t 100%, nor is my elbow, and running/riding has one of my knees feeling slightly tweaked. I have one “big” climbing day, so far, where I did my traverses into all of the existing routes in Deaf Smith (and even found a new project that should be dispensed with soon). But, like the Giro, there are bigger days ahead.

vid: romney calls this guy “mozart on a bike”. inspiring, even if, like me, you'll never aspire to anything remotely like it.

5 Rides in Less Than 2 Days

Normally my time in the office is spent working long hours where I’m barely able to squeeze in a few sets of pull-ups. With the 90-Day Challenge in full swing, this trip has been a little different. The gym is being used non-stop, the junk is gone from the kitchen, and everyone is walking around drinking Shakeology.

On a previous trip, I’d made a bike swap with a friend which resulted in getting my old race bike back. He needed a cross bike, and I needed something to leave in LA to commute and train on, so it made sense. Especially since this bike and I have a so many memories together. It was good to see her but, last trip, I never found the time to give ‘er a spin. This trip I had a schedule to keep, so I knew I’d get some saddle time, but I had no idea what was in store.

After a long day filming for TBB, I got to Jon’s house with just enough time to dust her off, inflate the tires, and sample the local—very hilly—neighborhoods for an hour or so. It felt great to ride this bike again. The aluminum frame is harsh, but responsive, and the Open Pro wheels buffer a lot of the road chatter. Mainly, it was nostalgic to be back on the bike I’d begun racing on.

The next morning, after a core/pull-up workout in Jon’s garage, we were back together riding on the terrain the used to make up my team’s morning workouts. A swing by the old coffee house led me through Tony Horton’s neighborhood, then through a commute that was very much like the one I did to the office way back when our only product was Power 90.

Lunch hour arrived and I met Carl, Andrew, and Brian for an “easy” spin down to the beach, or so I thought. But Carl had other ideas and we headed towards the beach “hoping to beat my best time”. This resulted in a 55 minute time trial the left my legs feeling like concrete all afternoon.

The commute home wasn’t hard enough, I guess, as I opted for some hills just to check out new routes for subsequent visits. The hills I remembered being “easy” were feeling mighty grim and I was cramping by the time I arrived back at Jon’s, just as he was finishing his evening workout.

In the morning I was stiff and sore but headed out nonetheless. My Giro simulation for their final climb was Palisades Drive, which I never remembered as being so steep. It seemed like the last couple of miles would never end. But the views at the top were revitalizing, and on the ride home I barely noticed the little 20% berg getting up to Jon’s.

I think 5 rides in under 36 hours is a record for me, and it’s certainly the most fitness-oriented work trip I’ve had. I think we might have to turn this 90 day adventure into a standard day at the office.

pic: just like old times, looking out over the santa monicas.