The Shoes …

I have been riding in some old sneakers. Real cycling shoes have very stiff soles so that the force you put on the shoe is in turn put on the pedal with no losses in the process. They also have the means to fix the shoe to the pedal until such times as you want to put your foot on the floor.

That is ideal. Unless you want to walk in them, which you might want to do when you’re mountain biking or taking part in cyclo-cross style activities. In those cases you’d like some flexibility and some grip for a steep muddy surface.

The last time I used real bike shoes the toes were strapped into contraptions that we fondly referred to as rat traps. You don’t see those any more. These days shoes are married to pedals by a system derived from ski bindings. Cleats fixed on the shoe click into place in the pedals and stay there until you swing your heel laterally to unclip. Forgetting to unclip leads to your shoulder heading towards the ground at 9.80665 m/s2 (32.1740 ft/s2).

In ideal circumstances the furthest you walk in your road bike shoes is from your bike to the barista. Cleats and pedals are broad, shoes are stiff and flat. Mountain bike shoes range from stiff to flexible and have a bit of a heel. Cleats are narrow so that they can be recessed into the sole. Mountain bike shoes are incompatible with road bike pedals and vice versa.

Does this mean that the well-rounded cyclist with both a mountain bike and a road bike must have two sets of shoes? Do I need even more trouble with the wife? Fortunately not. Pedals are unconcerned whether they are attached to road bikes or mountain bikes so a reasonable compromise is within reach.

The terrain I tackle on the mountain bike doesn’t normally require me to walk therefore a stiff mountain bike shoe is the go. It has the added benefit of protecting the cleats from the cafe floor when I buy the road bike and venture into town.

I toured the bike shops of Ballarat and settled on the Bont Riots.They are made of carbon composite  and can be heat molded. The retention is by a velcro strap and the Boa quick fastening quick releasing system.

Bont is a little Aussie company. I feel good about that and I don’t need to feel like I’ve made a sacrifice. So far the company trophy cabinet holds :-

59 World Track Championship titles.
3 UCI World Road/ TT champions.
12 x Olympic Gold Medals.
A TDF title (Sir Bradley Wiggins).
1 x Paris-Roubaix win.
2 x Tour of Swiss.
3 x Ironman World Championships.
3 x 70.3 World Championships.
2 x UCI BMX World Championships (Caroline Buchanan).
Numerous Grand Tour Stage wins, classics and countless stage races.
If you add silver and bronze you could probably triple those figures.

I’m sure they can barely wait for me to add a top 1000 finish in next year’s R3R.

One quibble with the design. As you insert your foot the tongue tends to recede into the nether reaches of the shoe. A tag on the front of the tongue would make that easy to prevent.

They have now made approximately 63,680 revolutions on my pedals and are as comfortable as my old sneakers.

Buying Speed …

Being old enough to know better must be something that comes to different people at different ages. I doubt that my life expectancy is so great that it will ever come to me.

As a saxophone player I know the temptation to buy a better sound. I also know, from experience, that having made the investment you sound just like you. The horn that you’re trading in can, in the hands of a better player, sound better than you will on the horn you’ve just bought. A well maintained instrument and a great deal of practice is the starting point. Once there the law of diminishing returns will deliver small gains for large outlays.

So, I’m a cyclist now. I really must buy some speed!

What for? Will I race again? Maybe. Will I win? No. Come on, McGee, why is it that your money is burning a hole in your pocket?

It’s that bloody charity ride., the R3R. Maryborough has a 108 km ride that tours the three local reservoirs. I completed the training wheels version (R1R) recently at 22 kph on my shiny new mountain bike. Given a year to prepare how much better can I do?

I could certainly do it quicker on a recumbent bicycle or even slower on a unicycle but either of those would seem eccentric. Five hours in the saddle of my mountain bike is an option but if I chose the right tool for the job it could be considerably less.

Choose the right tool. That is an excellent choice of language. Gayle is well in tune with the notion that you must have the right tool to get the right result. I’ll work on that.

Fat tyres and forgiving forks are certainly the right tools for our local riding. We live on a gravel road and the corrugations round here are cruel. We are nicely placed to ride through some very pretty forest tracks and listen to the birds.

But the race, sorry, charity ride is on bitumen. If I’m going to take a chunk out of that five hours there are a number of places I might find it …

  • More training
  • More weight loss
  • A lighter and …
  • more aerodynamic bike
  • appropriate gear ratios
  • bike shoes
  • road craft

The road bike is on the shopping list. The things to take into consideration are endless. In order to keep some sense of proportion I’ve decided that it will not cost more than our last car! Somewhere on the curve of diminishing returns is the Goldilocks bike. The choice is delicious and totally immune to buyer’s regret … That doesn’t happen until after you’ve parted with the money.

Where Dreams Go To Die …

As mountaineers ascend the world’s highest peaks they know that above 8,000 metres they have entered the death zone. At this level oxygen is so scarce that the human body can no longer acclimatise. Indeed the highest permanent human habitation is a fair bit lower – La Rinconada in the Peruvian Andes at 5,100 meters.

Time in the death zone is at a premium, the climber must achieve their goal and descend. To remain long is to die.

So it is with my weight loss diets. Somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 grams my body ceases to acclimatise. Progress ceases and the journey downhill begins. The summit beckons, I linger hoping that I will find the strength to continue but alas it was never to be.

In this I am not alone …

A search was conducted for weight-loss-focused randomized clinical trials with >or=1-year follow-up. Eighty studies were identified and are included in the evidence table.

… A mean weight loss of 5 to 8.5 kg (5% to 9%) was observed during the first 6 months from interventions involving a reduced-energy diet and/or weight-loss medications with weight plateaus at approximately 6 months. In studies extending to 48 months, a mean 3 to 6 kg (3% to 6%) of weight loss was maintained with none of the groups experiencing weight regain to baseline. In contrast, advice-only and exercise-alone groups experienced minimal weight loss at any time point.  Franz et al.

I started cycling five months ago. The distance covered each week has slowly increased. Last week it passed 200 km for the first time. The one long ride each week has also increased. The longest so far is 80 km. A kilogram a month melted without conscious dietary modification over the first three months. I have now been on a low carb high fat diet for two months and a further six kilograms have departed.

Is my diet in the death zone?

It doesn’t feel like it. My trousers are walking around looking for a decent bum to fill them, my belt is distraught at the loss of the companion that for so long bore its imprint  but I feel good. Per ardua ad astra. Carpe diem. Et cetera.

The greatest challenge is ahead.

Durability …

I have a buddy who lives in Queensland. We had taken a little time off our regular careers to study something totally unrelated and met at Charles Sturt University. Roy and I have a lot in common including a passion for birds and live music. It was not in the least surprising that we enjoyed a yarn and a beer.

When I signed up to the cycling app Strava up popped Roy’s visage and we have followed and encouraged each other since. Roy has clocked up more than 35,000 km since he started using the app. I am most impressed.

It got me thinking about the sort of distance Grand Tour professionals accumulate over their careers. Or what about a single big year?

When Strava got started the bench mark to aim at belonged to Tommy Godwin a native of Stoke on Trent, UK and a professional cyclist. Back in 1939 he rode a staggering 120,805 km (75,065 miles) in a year. Since 100,000 miles was a good round number and not far off he carried on to nail that landmark in 500 days!

The record stood until 2016 when the American Kurt Searvogel edged him out with 122,432 km (76,076 miles). The Ultramarathon Cycling Association logged his efforts on its website and vouched for his achievement to the satisfaction of the Guiness Book of World Records. His Strava trophy case is stacked with badges although it seems that he is not currently active.

Nor is his record. That was eclipsed by another American, Amanda Coker, the very next year. She blew it away with 139,326 km (86,573 miles) about 382 km a day. By then she was in the groove so she took the opportunity to knock off Tommy’s 100,000 mile record in just 423 days.

Bird watchers like to go for a big year so what about a cycling big year? I think there is a great opportunity there for you Roy.

Glycogen Dethroned …?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote Running on Fat in which I said that glycogen was king. The current paradigm can be summed up as things go better with carbs. That is before during and after. Muscle glycogen depletion during  exercise is the main factor in the onset of fatigue.  If you want to exercise again in a hurry you need to get some carbs down in a hurry. The amount and type vary from paper to paper and there is an unresolved debate about the addition of protein. Overall though it is suggested that 6 to 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram within 30 minutes of completing an exhausting workout should have you ready to go again the next day.

Since my muscles are not being rewarded for their efforts with a jar of marmalade after every session I have been wondering how much of a disadvantage I’m putting them at. And it’s not that easy to find out.

Some short term research has been done putting normal (high carb) athletes on low carb diets for three weeks and watching their performance suffer. Hardly surprising that it goes down hill it takes a few weeks to sort out your fluid and electrolyte balance and adjust to ketosis.

The body can make it’s own glucose from fat and if it’s starving it can turn to protein. In the absence of ingested carbohydrate does glycogen replacement grind to a halt or does gluconeogenesis step into the breach?

I was pleased to come across a paper by Volek et al describing research with 20 well matched elite athletes 10 of whom were regular high carb guys and 10 were low carbers (and had been for at least 9 months). Naturally, when you get your hands on such a group, you take muscle biopsies and put them on a treadmill for three hours, take more muscle biopsies and measure everything you can think of. Then you give them two hours to recover before taking another muscle biopsy!

The rate of fat oxidation was two to three times higher in the low carb athletes and it peaked at a higher level of effort. Glycogen stores, usage and replacement were very much the same in both groups.

Their conclusion …

Compared to highly trained ultra-endurance athletes consuming an HC (High Carb) diet, long-term keto-adaptation results in extraordinarily high rates of fat oxidation, whereas muscle glycogen utilization and repletion patterns during and after a 3 hour run are similar.

At the ultra marathon level the benefits of using fat as fuel are appealing to more and more competitors, you just don’t run out.

Metabolic Goodness …

It was my long ride this morning. In fact my longest in this incarnation of my cycling career. 80 km. Thirty years ago I would have made sure I ate a good breakfast and would have taken a banana or two and some other snacks perhaps. This morning was devoid of breakfast and there were no snacks en route. I just took plenty of fat, all stored internally and it will be a long time before that runs out!

After my low carb lunch my ketones were ~6mm/litre. My fat cells are throwing ketones around like the missus spends my money, my muscle cells by comparison are as tight as Mr Scrooge. (Forgive me Gayle I know you are very sensible with our money and I’m the one that throws it around).

The reason that fat cells waste energy when ketones are present whilst muscle cells, including heart muscle, are very efficient are complex. Dr Bikman explains this as clearly as is humanly possible …

He has a book coming out in a few months entitled Why We Get Sick. Spoiler – it’s because of insulin resistance but it will be very interesting to read what he has to say about that and I expect it will be remarkably lucid.

Ketosis …

In my recent reading I came across a paper in the medical literature than mentioned ketosis and followed that in brackets with ketoacidosis as though the two were synonymous. How dumb is that I thought and moved on. Now I can’t find it again and dumb is not a useful search term – way too many results.

On a carb restricted diet the body produces a group of chemicals called ketones, hence the keto in keto diet. Ketones are excellent fuel for the brain and heart in the absence of normal amounts of glucose. Our ancestors went through lean times it was ketones that got them through. Nutritional ketosis is a normal response to fasting and carbohydrate restriction.

Ketoacidosis on the other hand is a medical emergency. It occurs mostly in people with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Ketones are present at more than ten times the quantity found in dietary ketosis along with very high blood sugar. The combination causes a pH change in the blood which will bring liver and kidney function into a downward spiral. This is sometimes the way that diabetics first present and remains a risk if patients fail to manage their insulin properly or hit the booze. Death is the likely outcome in the absence of prompt treatment.

Type 1 diabetes occurs because the islet cells in the pancreas that make insulin are snuffed out by the body’s own antibodies. If there are still some functional islet cells ketoacidosis is less likely.

What stops the enthusiastic keto dieter from slipping into ketoacidosis? Two things. On a low carb diet blood sugar is not through the roof. Secondly functional islet cells mean that insulin is available when needed. Insulin doesn’t only regulate glucose it can also turn down the production of ketones. Ketosis is a normal functional response so it is hardly surprising that it is well regulated.

My low carb diet is rolling along quite nicely. A reduction of five inches off my circumference is evidence enough that I am maintaining an effective level of ketosis but it is easy to check. Ketones can be measured in blood, breath or urine. There is a good article on the available technologies at Diet Doctor. Given that I have no interest in checking every day for the rest of my life I opted for the low tech urine sticks. The brand available at the local pharmacy is Keto-Diastix which measures glucose and ketones and gives a numerical result. I am pleased to say that glucose has been absent from my urine, as it should be, whilst ketones have ranged from 1.5 to 4.0 mm/litre.

I have departed the ranks of the obese and I am now proudly overweight!

Stretch …

This article does not concern itself with my impact on Lycra. The world is not yet ready for that experience, getting there though. No, today’s analysis concerns the enormous benefit the cyclist can expect from stretching.

Athletes stretch for a number of reasons principally

  • to enhance athletic performance
  • prevent injury
  • prevent muscle soreness
  • improve flexibility

Let’s deal with the last first because this is purely an opinion. If you search for bike fit on Youtube you will be able to occupy hours of your time, hear the word flexibility frequently, learn the importance of a professional bike fit and learn virtually nothing about how to do it for yourself.

How much flexibility does a cyclist need? If you can bend at the waist, stretch your arms out in front and send your feet once round the pedals you’ve got it. What’s more repeating it will not increase it. Strength and stamina will help you keep at it longer but that comes from training not stretching.

So flexibility is not high on my list of concerns but I would definitely like to perform better whilst avoiding injury and muscle soreness.

Esposito and Limonta investigated the effect of passive stretching on performance. Nine males exercised at 85% of VO2max until exhaustion with and without pre-exercise stretching. A good stretch prior to exercise decreased endurance by 26%,  increased the oxygen needed by 4% and decreased efficiency by 4%. No, I haven’t reported the results round the wrong way …

These results are suggestive of an impairment in cycling efficiency due to changes in muscle neural activation and viscoelastic characteristics induced by stretching.

It’s not an isolated finding. Here’s another Wilson et al. It also goes for sprinting but here’s some good news – dynamic stretching doesn’t hinder athletic performance as much!

It might be worth sacrificing some performance for insurance against injury. Pope et al …

investigated the effect of muscle stretching during warm-up on the risk of exercise-related injury. 1538 male army recruits were randomly allocated to stretch or control groups. During the ensuing 12 wk of training, both groups performed active warm-up exercises before physical training sessions. In addition, the stretch group performed one 20-s static stretch under supervision for each of six major leg muscle groups during every warm-up. The control group did not stretch.

The protective benefit? Nil.

Muscle soreness has been investigated sufficiently often for there to be a Cochrane meta-analysis on the subject. Twelve studies including over 12,000 participants were included in the review. The conclusions …

The evidence from randomised studies suggests that muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed‐onset muscle soreness in healthy adults.

So there you have it. If you see people stretching before your next race or charity ride give them a a few words of encouragement and a big smile.

Volume vs Intensity …

Cycling does you good. Does more cycling do you even more good?

Given my advanced age the effect of cycling on all cause mortality is of urgent concern. Research on older folk getting off the couch and onto their bikes is scant. The obvious advantage of such studies would be the relatively short time the researchers would need to wait for the endpoints. In the absence of old folk as guinea pigs  we can look to wise coaches for opinion or extrapolate from studies that draw their participants from a wider spectrum.

Joe Friel is wise and famous and a prolific author. In Fast After Fifty he tells us that long slow distance will set you apart from the guy next door. It will also set you apart from the guys on the podium. In other words he damns it with faint praise. His prescription is to go for the intensity.

This is borne out by findings from the Copenhagen City Heart Study (Schnohr et al)

Relative intensity and duration of cycling were recorded in 5106 apparently healthy men and women aged 21-90 years drawn from the general population of Copenhagen, and followed for an average of 18 years. Total number of deaths during follow-up was 1172, of these 146 were coronary heart disease deaths. For both sexes we found a significant inverse association between cycling intensity and risk of all-cause and coronary heart disease death, but only a weak association with cycling duration.

If you want to live longer ride faster not further. QED.

Charity rides are a fun way to spice up your riding program. They’re better than races because they are races really but a large proportion of the riders don’t realise it and are therefore easier to beat. These events have succumbed to the Corona virus for the moment but they will return one day. The one I’m looking forward to is Maryborough’s R3R. I did the short course last time. Next time my goal is the full 109 km.

Can I prepare for 109 km by doing interval sprints? Well not on their own. Volume is vital, the effort though must be at a certain intensity. The “fat burn” zone doesn’t cut it. Joe again …

Very low heart rate training is often referred to as the “fat-burning” zone. This is another case of a myth that refuses to go away. Low intensity, slow exercise does not burn more calories or more fat than does high-intensity, fast paced exercise.

In fact high intensity exercise will have a greater impact on body fat than low intensity junk miles even if the calories consumed during the exercise is less because of the impact on metabolic rate during the rest of the day.

Which leads us to the real point. Volume is a fairly meaningless metric. What matters is effort versus recovery, training versus over-training.

Salt …

It’s been traded, taxed, fought over. It’s been ploughed into the fields of defeated city states. It is used in some religious ceremonies. It is essential to life and one of the fundamental tastes mediated by the human tongue. It’s the difference between a herring and a kipper, pork and bacon because it is an effective preservative.  It has been used as currency and it gives us the word salary (although the Roman Army was never paid in salt).

Solntsata in Bulgaria was possibly the first city in Europe. The name translates as salt works and they have been in use since 5400 BC. There is evidence of even older salt extraction processes in China.

Cheetham Saltworks, Victoria

It is essential to our physiology, without it we couldn’t even generate a nerve impulse. But In excess it increases blood pressure which in turn increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. So how much is the right much?

The Australian guidelines are formulated by the National Health and Medical Research Council and can be accessed at this government website which also sets out the logic behind the recommendations. They deal in milligrams of sodium. Salt is sodium chloride. 1 unit of sodium = approximately 2.5 units of salt once you add the chloride.

The suggested daily target is 2 grams of sodium a day for adults (roughly 5 grams of salt). The NH&MRC wrestled with an upper limit but concluded that

…  because the relationship between sodium intake and blood pressure is progressive and continuous, it is difficult to set a UL precisely.

So no upper limit was set.

The average Australian is ingesting about 9 grams of salt a day currently. Some is an inescapable part of the raw ingredients of our diet but much of that figure is added to restaurant and take away food, processed and packaged food, and drinks such as Coca Cola and sports drinks. It makes food more palatable by dialing down the sensations of bitterness and over sweetness. In the case of drinks it increases thirst – how convenient for the manufacturers.

So far as it goes the NH&MRC guideline purports to have an evidence base, is easy to understand and is aimed at getting the community’s blood pressure down.

The low carb intelligentsia seem to give the issue very little concern. How come?

A low carb diet has a real food base. McDonalds is out. Most packaged foods are out. If you start with the raw ingredients of a keto diet the challenge is to get enough salt especially if you are also into sweaty exercise.

The phrase lower limit doesn’t occur in the government website. Whilst the essential nature of salt is acknowledged the assumption seems to be that less is best. There is evidence to the contrary.

An article by Mente and an insane number of other authors (28 other authors – I imagine they wrote every 29th word and then had a committee meeting on where to put the punctuation marks) )from the Lancet May 2016 entitled Associations of urinary sodium excretion with cardiovascular events in individuals with and without hypertension: A pooled analysis of data from four studies, reports on a study of 133,118 individuals roughly half of whom were hypertensive. The daily intake of salt was compared to the likelihood of death and major cardiovascular events and blood pressure over a median period of 4.2 years.

Compared with moderate sodium intake, high sodium intake is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events and death in hypertensive populations (no association in normotensive population), while the association of low sodium intake with increased risk of cardiovascular events and death is observed in those with or without hypertension.

There is a subtlety there that I will return to but first let’s take a look at the results as a graph …

On the vertical axis we have the hazard ratio, on the horizontal axis the daily excretion of sodium in mg. Daily excretion of sodium is pretty much the same thing as daily intake of sodium. The amount of  sodium in blood is regulated by the kidneys and there is no storage mechanism. The U-shaped curve comes as no surprise, sodium is essential therefore as you reduce the intake you’d expect to reach a point where risk starts to increase. Excretion of less than 3g of sodium a day increases the risk of cardiovascular catastrophes and death. The graph shows that the risk increases above 7g a day. The lowest point of the curve falls between 4000 mg and 6000mg of sodium or ~11 grams of salt.

If instead of looking at the whole cohort we look at the hypertensive and normotensive subgroups steepness to the left of the low point stays the same for both but to the right it rises more steeply for those with high blood pressure. Why should this be?

The kidneys play a pivotal role in the maintenance of blood pressure and not all kidneys are equal. Researchers have bred salt sensitive rats that develop high blood pressure. If their kidneys are transplanted into normal rats the recipients develop high blood pressure on a high sodium diet. Normal rats receiving kidneys from normal rats do far better. The problem follows the kidney. This is borne out in human transplantation as well. If the donor has a family history of hypertension the recipient has a ten fold increased risk of developing hypertension.

Mente et al looks like a pretty robust study. If we accept their findings it follows that –

  • The Australian public are not far from an ideal salt intake.
  • The NH&MRC guidelines are set at a level which will increase risk.
  • and unless you have hypertension there are more important things to think about.

If only things were that easy. Not all studies bear this out. Cook et al …

found an increased risk at high sodium intake and a direct relation with total mortality even at the lowest levels of sodium intake.

They suggest that other studies are in error …

While several studies suggest beneficial effects of lower sodium on cardiovascular disease, the relationship with total mortality remains controversial. Some have reported a J-shaped curve, but this may be due to poor quality measurement of sodium or confounding bias.

Clearly the definitive answer still eludes us although I am suspicious of any study of an essential nutrient that doesn’t find detriment at a low level of intake.

Which study do we choose to ignore?

I think the best strategy is to ignore neither despite their contradiction. Rather we should take our blood pressure. It’s easily done at home. The hypothetical guy I studied in Physiology weighed 74kg had a pulse rate of 72 and a BP of 120/80. Blood pressure tends to rise through life and the doctor tends to reach for his prescription pad at about 140/90. If you’re border line and want to stave off the pills there are some non-drug remedies to consider …

  • Lose weight
  • Exercise
  • Reduce your salt intake

If you’ve got it to lose then 10 kg off should drop your BP by about 10 mm of mercury. For each gram reduction of salt a hypertensive person can hope to drop about 2 mm of mercury.