Thursday, November 12, 2009

Hip/Knee Pain Info

Recently, I've been having some pain in my hips (bilaterally, although worse on the right). I know my flexibility is horrible, so I've started stretching more than usual, but probably still not enough. I did some digging around on the internet, and found that oversized crank length can lead to knee and hip pain. This is interesting, because when I built my bike, I initially had 175mm arms (WAY too long), which I downsized to 172.5mm. For the race season, I'd like to switch my setup from a triple ring to a double, so I'm faced with the issue of deciding crank length once again. I stumbled across an interesting read....here it is:
http://www.cptips.com/crnklth.htm
According to the author, at 5'10" I'm exactly borderline between 170mm and 172.5mm proper crank arm length. It does say, however, that too short can be inefficient unless you spin at higher cadence. This still doesn't help my decision, as I'm comfortable around 90 rpm. Why can't the technical stuff ever be easy?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The past couple weeks

It's been a few weeks since I've updated, but I'm still training frequently. In 3 weeks, I will switch from my "Foundation" period, to my "Preparation" period. Basically, my intensity will increase, and my training hours will decrease slightly. I recently had ANOTHER cycling computer take a dump on me, so hopefully I will be able to replace it soon. If anyone can recommend a reliable computer with HR and cadence, I'm all ears. And don't say the Garmin 305....that's what just broke. On the indoor trainer, I've continued to combine workouts #1 and #3. This has been amazing. The past few days, the weather has been great, so I've gotten out and put in some good "hammer" miles, too.

Recently, I've been working on getting my nutrition squared away. I've managed to put together one hell of a workbook to help me track my intake (ok, so a couple of my computer savvy friends helped a little).  If you've ever worked with syntax in MS Excel, you'd appreciate how tedious this has been! I also received some info and recommendations from my nutritionist, so I'll be putting her stuff to the test. Hopefully, this keeps me from overtraining (underfueling, actually).

I also recently started working with a sports psychologist to work on eliminating competition anxiety, and maximizing mental performance. Y'know, David Goggins says that once your mind makes you want to quit, your body is only 10% finished. So far, we've talked about things like visualization, positive "self speak", focused thought, and eliminating comparison-based evaluations of performance. It's pretty interesting stuff.