Hydration for Zwifters

That hydration is key to optimal performance is no mystery. Some (myself included) would argue that water is one of the most effective performance enhancing substances on the planet. Perhaps this is due to the negative effects we begin to feel with even mild dehydration. The science behind this phenomenon explains that this is not just something athletes have made up. We sweat to help keep our body temperatures down during exercise. According to many studies (like this one), when we lose as little at 2% of our body mass/weight due to sweat, our performance can suffer.

Math time: How much water can a cyclist weighing 75kg (about 165lbs) lose before exceeding 2% of their body mass/weight?

With all of the wattage figures Zwifters throw out, I know your math skills are amazing, so you immediately came up with 1.5kg or 3.3lbs of water, right? So, how long does it take to lose this much? Given that people sweat at different rates, the range between .5L to 2.0L per hour is most often used. That means that our 75kg cyclist could lose up to 2 kg (4.4lbs) per hour under the most demanding circumstances (intense ride in hot weather), or .5 kg per hour if just cruising around the flats of London in zone 2. Extend the ride to 2 or 3 hours, and the sweat volume has the potential to really add up.

Great, but how can you turn that into useful information? Your scale. This is perhaps the best use for your bathroom scale aside from tracking long term fluctuations in body mass. Since every person has a different sweat-rate, and every ride has its own intensity level, your scale is the answer. Of course, this system assumes that you are starting the ride well-hydrated.

Step 1: Weigh yourself nude immediately before kitting up to ride.

Step 2: Estimate your liquid needs based on your ride length and intensity (overestimate).

Step 3: Ride, trying to consume .4-.8L of fluid per hour (1 medium bottle per hour)

Step 4: Weigh yourself nude immediately after ride (after urinating if need be).

Step 5: Replace liquid at a rate of 1.5L per kg lost (roughly one large water bottle per pound, or 2 per kg)

This system can determine how your current hydration strategy is working. Did you lose water? Were you balanced? Based on this, you can adjust your liquid intake while you ride, increasing intake for higher intensity workouts. And for your next Three Sisters ride or Zwift race, you can line up those bottles proudly!

Many add carbohydrate, protein, and sodium to the liquid they drink during rides and for post-workout recovery. While this is an important part of an athlete’s nutritional arsenal, those topics will have to wait until further articles.

For now, hydrate well and Ride On!

100 Miles to the Pacific with PR Lotion

After the results of my first and second hard rides using Topical Edge’s PR Lotion, I was looking forward to trying it again. This time I would be riding one of my favorite routes: an imperial century from my hometown to the Pacific Ocean.

See the ride on Strava

The Warmup

The legs felt fairly fresh, the weather was perfect, I was fueled and hydrated. Once more I rubbed the PR Lotion into my upper legs about 30 minutes before the ride began, then my buddy Zane showed up and we were off. It was a little after 9AM on Friday, September 8, 2017.

After a ~7 mile warmup we hit the first climb of the day, known by locals simply as “Hopland.” It’s actually two climbs, the first 1 mile long (6% grade) and the second 2.7 miles long (5% grade). I felt good up the first climb, but didn’t push it hard, averaging 307 watts for 6 minutes to get the legs warmed up.

Hitting It Hard

As we started the second climb I ramped it up a bit, because the legs felt good. At the halfway point I looked down at my Elemnt and saw I was ahead of my PR for this climb by over 30 seconds… and I was feeling good! So I kept pushing it. Zane (who is a stronger rider than I) commented, “Man, you’re really hammering this morning!” He stayed behind me the whole time, and I kept pushing it to the top.

My finishing time was 14:18, a 9% improvement on my previous PR of 15:38. I’d been hitting a PR ceiling on this climb for a long time, with my last 5 hard attempts over the past year or more all coming in at 15:38 or 15:39.

An Ill-Fated KOM Attempt

I was blown away and excited as we descended the backside of this climb. Felt so good, in fact, that I told Zane I wanted to try to take a KOM on the next flattish section, which was actually a slight (-2%) 5.4 mile downhill into the town of Hopland. Zane said his legs weren’t feeling very good so I would have to do most of the pulling, and I was OK with that.

The problem was, I didn’t know when the segment began, and road construction meant we hit a stoplight that stalled us for a few minutes at the beginning of the segment. No KOM for us.

Realization Sets In

We made our way to the next climb of the day, Mountain House Road, which is almost 9 miles long. At this point we were 22 miles into a 100 mile ride, and when we began the first climb, Zane and I both realized we had a problem: our legs were cooked. Oops.

We spun it easy up Mountain House, but it was clear to both of us that I had hammered too hard up Hopland and on the flat section KOM attempt. This ride was going to hurt.

We stopped at the next store we could find, drinking Cokes and scarfing snacks in the tiny town of Yorkville (population 188!) in an attempt to get some energy into our bodies. It helped a bit, but it still felt like a slog as we made our way along HWY 128 to Boonville.

Boonville is a quaint town whose most interesting feature is the fact that its inhabitants created their own language, Boontling, in the late 1800s. We grabbed lunch here and headed out.

The rest of the ride was fairly unremarkable: we both knew we had overcooked ourselves, so we weren’t pushing too hard. I did make one 30 minute effort on a segment I had spotted the day before, only because former pro Ted King had the KOM and I thought we could take it from him. I ended up pulling most of the way because Zane was cramping hard, but in the end of the KOM was ours so that felt good. (It certainly felt better than my legs, which had begun to cramp during hard efforts.)

We made it to the ocean, turned turn on HWY 1, and pulled into Mendocino for an ice cream cone. Century complete.

Lesson Learned

What did this ride teach me? You’ve got to be careful with long rides and PR lotion, because you may feel so good that you’ll overdo it early and pay for it later. I should have learned this lesson from the Dunnigan Hills Road Race, but apparently I need to be told these things a second time.

Apart from this negative outcome, I was pretty stoked from this ride, as I was able to set a lot of PRs and even grab a KOM. Those always feel good, even when you know in your heart that the former pro you grabbed it from could kick your butt any day.

---

Where to Buy PR Lotion

Buy PR Lotion here. It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and shipping is free on orders over $75.

---

Zwifting my way to the Boston Marathon (Part Two)

Since my first post the training has continued apace, with Zwift mileage coming in at around 100+ miles a week, while running mileage was 50 last week and well on the way to 55 this week.

The tough thing about this period of time is that there is quite a high frequency of local running races. Time off with an injury (see previous post) creates a ‘triple-whammy’: I want to race (having had time off), but am in poor shape, and this is made more complicated by the fact that racing forces me to alter my training to accommodate it.

Nonetheless, I raced anyway last Sunday, an undulating multi-terrain 8.2 miler on the Exmoor coast, the Ilfracombe ‘Combe Crawler’ (alliteration in running race names is a pretty big deal round here). Last year I had won it unexpectedly, so despite the promise of some fairly stiff opposition I went along to see how I’d get on. I had my fingers crossed the ‘Zwift effect’ could help me pull something out of the bag.

In the end it sadly wasn’t to be. A young runner, a real whippet of a teenager, led from the start and pulled off a great win, setting a new course record in the process! But it was still a great run for me. I never go into races pinning all my hopes on a top 3 finish, I just want to have a good race and feel I ran well. So I was delighted to finish 3rd overall and most importantly, secure a big PR on last year, improving from 1:00:53 to 59:26, an improvement of 1 minute and 27 seconds. In my previous race a 20 second PR had provided some evidence of a boost from the Zwift training; this was really unexpected.

Zwift training continues, not without hiccups…

I’m on the penultimate week of the 6 week FTP builder and some of the sessions have been quite a step up! A lot of sweat has been produced and my craving for savoury food has gone through the roof.

I scared myself quite spectacularly at the end of last week with a condition which I shall christen ‘T.E.D.’. It should be enough to say that the third word is ‘dysfunction’, but fortunately the first word was ‘temporary’. There is a lot of information about correct bike fitting and this is an area which I’m taking my first baby steps into. Suffice to say I set the saddle a little too high, but rode on for an incredibly uncomfortable workout.  Afterwards I found myself without full feeling in a certain part of my anatomy which I’d rather retain full feeling in! This only lasted about 3-4 days and the benefits of having a best friend who is also a doctor are many!

The good news is it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm, if anything I should really have given my body more time to repair, but a little perceived improvement was all I needed to be back on the bike the next day. I’m desperate to get this training program finished off and get into some races! There are some great Zwiftblog.com articles about racing and teams and this is what I’m all about. The FTP boosting is a means to an end. I want that sweet reward of throwin’ it down against other Zwifters around the world! One more week and I’ll be free.

Next week

Before I can focus on the Zwift racing, there is the small matter of another running race this weekend, the Devon county cross-country championships in Exeter. While this probably doesn’t attract the same number, or calibre, of runners as other cross-country events around the UK (or the world), it holds significance for me as it could provide a passage to competing at county level. Following the race, a team of the six fastest ‘senior’ men (18-34) will be selected for the upcoming South-West Inter-county championships.

In last year’s race I only came 9th in my category. I think it’s probably a little too soon for me to make much of an inroad into that at this stage in the training, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that the Zwift magic will continue. Even a decent PR will be good enough for me.

I’ve structured my training to try and get me to the start as fresh as possible, with the bulk of the week’s mileage run and cycled between Sunday and Wednesday, with only easy 30 minute runs Saturday and Saturday, and an easy 45 minute Zwift. Balancing Zwifting and running races is something I still need to figure out, but as this is a race I’d like to do my best at, I think a little discretion will be best.

Keep your fingers crossed; it’s going to be a tense day on Sunday…

It’s that time: the end of the off-season

Editor’s note: Ian Murray is using Zwift to train for the International Triathlon Union Long Course World Championships held in Odense/Fyn, Denmark July 2018. His weekly Zwift Insider series discusses the previous week’s training and the plan for the upcoming week.

So, the last three weeks have been great. I finished up with my season on 12 November, and I set about enjoying myself. But all good things must come to and end, and unfortunately now, my off-season is over. It’s time to get work. No more slacking. No more ice cream dinners. No more lying around being lazy. Nope, those days are gone. We are 31 weeks out.

The glorious days of yore

For the last three weeks, I have done very little other than eat and relax. Seriously, I ate all of the things that I have been missing. Most have been missing due to availability vs limiting myself, but I also ate them in quantities that I would not have allowed during the season. Yeah, we’re talking lots of ice cream, oysters, all manner of fish sandwiches, drinks, desserts, etc. If I felt like eating it, I did. It was awesome. Of course, I am now 64kg, up from 60kg. That’s not that great, but it was needed.

On top of eating and drinking a bunch of wonderful things, I did very little working out. During the first week, I rode around Key West on a conch cruiser and did one easy run with one of the athletes I coach. That was it. Oh, I also slept a good bit. In the second week, I ran about 24 miles, but I did it with my wife at a pretty easy pace. So, it wasn’t taxing on my body. By week three, we were back from vacation, and I added a little bit. Three strength workouts, a couple days of commuting via bike, and a short swim to help loosen up the arms made up the last off-season week.

Well, maybe that’s not the whole truth

I guess I have to be honest. I did add one hard effort. On Saturday, I could not resist, and I did the TeamODZ Goats & Bears ride. I love to race, and I had not done anything hard in three weeks. Oh yeah, recipe for disaster! With my new-found kilos, I found myself relegated down to the B group. Let’s be honest, though, I was in no shape for the Bs, let alone the As.

The day started off pretty rough, as I could feel the squats and power cleans from the day prior’s workout in the legs before the race even started. Yeah, it hurt from the beginning.

Just as we hit the castle on the front side of the Epic KOM, I pulled the plug. I was in full implosion mode, as the first 25 minutes of the race had been at or near 4.0 w/kg, and I was in no way ready for that. I ended up recovering a bit before attacking the radio tower. I was grateful for the chance to recover on the downhills, and I limped home in 35th position or so. It may have been 36th, but who cares at that point. Not my best result, but meh, who cares? I’m still in the off-season!

Training begins! Time to destroy my body

December is not normally a great time for most people to train. This year, it has turned out to be a wonderful time for me to train. I have to stay here and work, but my wife has to travel to visit her mom. She’ll be gone for about a month, including over the holidays, so I have nothing else to do… really. Thus, I will train my face off! Here is what we have this week:

The first block of training will focus heavily on running and strength. Both are areas in which I need to work. Well, I am actually known as a strong runner, but ITU Worlds will have a 30K run vs a 21K run. That extra 5.7 miles is a big deal at the end of the race, so I want to build some of that strength early. Plus, it gives me time to ramp up the running volume before the extra cycling fatigues the legs even more. As you can see, the only riding I am doing is commuting, the TeamODZ SkillZ and DrillZ Ride, and the TeamODZ Saturday morning rides.

Week 1 of training will be about 760 TSS. It’s not as much as you will see later, but it’s going to hurt, especially coming off three easy weeks. I will be live streaming most of the workouts on Mixer, or on Facebook on Zwift Live by ODZ. If anyone wants to join in the fun, I will do the Monday and Friday runs at 5:15 AM EDT. The pace will be at around 7-7:30/mile.  I’ll try to check in mid-week to let you know how it’s going. Until then, Ride On!