Amber, Ivy, and Nate join Coach Jonathan for discussions on rider type discovery and development, as well as riding the line between functional and non-functional overreaching. Listen now for these discussions and much more!

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Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Jonathan Lee: Welcome to the podcast is dedicated to making you a faster cyclist. The ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road with coach Jonathan Lee. We’re joined by Canada on Trina roads, Amber Pierce. Good morning, hand up plus plus the black vans. Racing’s IVL drain almost got it all has got it. Good morning.

[00:00:27] Jonathan Lee: Good to have UAV and our CEO, Nate. Here

[00:00:30] Nate Pearson: it is. Yeah, it is. And what’s funny is that before each one of these he practices and Ivy reminds him and then it messes it up still and she just

[00:00:39] Jonathan Lee: did this. Some of us struggle when it comes to game time, you know that that’s just what happens. So good thing I do podcast.

[00:00:46] Jonathan Lee: We’re going to talk to, or we’re going to answer a whole lot of questions that you have today. We’re going to talk about rider types. What happens in you don’t fit into a rider. Uh, what you should pursue, what you shouldn’t pursue, how you develop as a cyclist, the things you focus on, it’s going to be fantastic.

[00:01:00] Jonathan Lee: We’re going to talk about over-training we’re also going to talk about functional versus non-functional overreaching, which will be interesting points of discussion and differentiation there. Hopefully allowing us to recognize when we’re doing too much in too little, and that’s going to, I think, take some surprising twist for some of us, because it’s not just going to talk about training volume in and of itself, which usually that conversation is purely focused on that.

[00:01:22] Jonathan Lee: And then we’ll also talk about plateauing, how each of us individually, when we have plateaued things that led to it, when we, uh, when we didn’t plateau thereafter and what changed, how to avoid it, all those things, it’s going to be a great episode. Um, Nate, Nate’s never plateaued, so he might not be able to provide a whole lot of insight in that they just he’s like stocks always up.

[00:01:42] Jonathan Lee: So

[00:01:42] Nate Pearson: no, no, my potential not always up because I just used a, a new feature on, I haven’t been training since Cape epic and I use a new feature to, to, uh, detect my FTP is, and it went down a lot, like, because like 2 83 now, but, uh, yeah. That’s yeah. That’s what I said at the forums. Can we talk about that now?

[00:02:07] Nate Pearson: John’s big

No more testing! AI FTP Detection is available now

[00:02:09] Jonathan Lee: deal. Yeah, let’s absolutely. Let’s do it. AI FTP detection. We’ve talked about it loosely before on the. Uh, the name is super descriptive, uses AI to detect your FTP, Nate or Amber, who wants to talk first on this?

[00:02:23] Nate Pearson: Can I start Amber? And then I’ll give you the details. I get, sorry. I have to I’m so excited.

[00:02:32] Nate Pearson: One

[00:02:32] Jonathan Lee: quick thing, sorry, Nate. Before we get into this, um, the other day, somebody on the forum said that this podcast is turning into a morning talk show. There were a lot of people that just disagreed. I want something to be clear really quick. When we talk about things in the beginning, we don’t just talk about our day.

[00:02:46] Jonathan Lee: I’m not like, Hey, Ivy, your hair looks great. Although I might actually say that we might talk about that on the podcast, but instead it’s always discussions that are driven toward answering questions that we get from people like, uh, I don’t ask Nate about his coffee and said, I’ll ask Nate. And this is just an example about how his training has been going and I’ll drive the discussion toward answering questions that we get that week.

[00:03:06] Jonathan Lee: So if you feel like this discussion on AI, FTP detection is a morning talk, show thing. I welcome you in. First of all, it’s fantastic. Water’s great. And then also something to keep in mind is that this is going to answer questions that we get from athletes. That’s the whole point. So with that said, Nate, let’s dig into

[00:03:24] Nate Pearson: it.

[00:03:24] Nate Pearson: You’re showing them behind the curtain. You mean? Sorry. Sometimes the things we say, like we have it all planned out and it might like it’s just off the cuff, but it’s not weird. I wonder why we do that. Okay. So what this is is, uh, let me give you a little history about this. This is something like from day one, like.

[00:03:44] Nate Pearson: Back in 2010, dreaming about it is can you get a machine to like tell you how fast you are or tell you what to do to be fast. And what we originally did is we had an ML engineer, mini machine learning, uh, with the goal was to predict your FTP based on what training plan you did, what was on your calendar at different states, looking ahead, because that’s really cool.

[00:04:07] Nate Pearson: It’s like, if you do that step one, it’s motivating for athletes, right? You could say, oh, as I train closer, there’s, there’ll be like a, a window here of what the range have to, you will be, FTP will be in as I get closer, it’ll we’ll know more and more and more until you get to the day and you’ll actually know what your FTPs, that is a whole bunch of implications of like, well then can we run Monte Carlo simulations and figure out like, uh, what would be the best actual training plan for you?

[00:04:34] Nate Pearson: Right. This is like one step in that. So we’re building that. And then I think in a meeting, we’re like, well, why don’t we just predict today? Because we’re waiting, we’re just did that thing where you step through it. And then you get to know at the end what it is. And we’re like, does it work if you just predict today?

[00:04:48] Nate Pearson: Like, yeah, it does work. So we did some tests and we’re like, wow, we can actually detect what your FTP is on a day. And then we thought, well, What if on the ramp test, you just get a choice of either, let us detect your FTP or you do a ramp test. And, uh, that is what we have built in amorous team has launched this in early access yesterday to go into early access.

[00:05:10] Nate Pearson: You have to go on the website, actually, I’ll let her explain that stuff in a second. I want to tell you a little bit more about how the feature was built. So what you do and machine learning is you, uh, first you, you do, as you build what are called features, which are like summaries of data, about an athlete points.

[00:05:26] Nate Pearson: Cause you know, if you look at your history and you might go back 10 years with thousands of files, I mean, there could be like there’s billions and billions of points, right? For like every second and all that stuff. And how do you analyze that? Um, so what engineers do is they, they massage the data and do calculations on it.

[00:05:43] Nate Pearson: And then they, they train on a certain subset of data. They train a model with it, which brings up the machine learning model and then they apply it to another set of data. And so for us, we applied it to another set of data and we could go back in time lucky for us because we have so much history and run through it and see how accurate are these predictions.

[00:06:02] Nate Pearson: And then the engineers come back and they make them more accurate and more accurate. And they put in different inputs, right? So they put in more things to make the, how accurate our AI FTP detection is over and over and over again. So even right now, as we launch this, they’re putting in more stuff into it.

[00:06:17] Nate Pearson: And I think on the forum. Uh, there’s other things we can do on this technique of pulling in data from outside sources. We’re not ready yet, but that’s something. So, uh, why this is really cool is, you know, you might say, well, their software detects my FTP. As far as I know all of those, all of the software that does that.

[00:06:34] Nate Pearson: It looks at your power curve and needs some capacitive efforts. So it needs you to like, uh, do an all out something or at different ranges. And some of them do really well if you, if they have that, right. And it’s an algorithm, the difference between us is we will detect or predicting the future. And I want to be clear predictions, not out yet.

[00:06:53] Nate Pearson: We’re, that’s a thing that Ampere’s, team’s working on after we used some more stuff on, uh, a AI FTP detection. The thing that’s cool is you can do all sweet spot work and we can detect a higher FTP. You can do all endurance work all Z too. Cause we know if you like me off the couch, I do all Z too. I’m going to have a higher FTP other systems models won’t ever detect that.

[00:07:16] Nate Pearson: So it, it looks at both your inside train rod workouts and your outside unstructured workouts that aren’t to road. There’s nothing you need to do inside of that. So you can there’s someone on the forum. Uh, he actually did a hundred percent outside rides and we launched this and he said, that’s exactly what I thought my FTP was going to be based on how it feels and threshold as an experienced athlete.

[00:07:35] Nate Pearson: Uh, that is so like, I don’t know. I was so excited about it. And I know some people will probably roll their eyes at it, but this is a big, big, big deal in my mind. Uh, I think the ML engineer worked on it for a year with other people helping them to get the model. Is that right? So Amber, can you describe now the feature, like how do we actually use it?

[00:07:54] Amber Pierce: Yeah. So, um, it’s available to anybody. Who’s a train road athlete. If you’re train road athlete, go to your account account settings, click on early access and early access. You will see AI FTP detection click on enable just a little radio button. And once it’s enabled, when the ramp test is your next workout, go to your career page.

[00:08:13] Amber Pierce: This won’t show up on calendar right now, and it’s only in the app. So it’s not going to show up on web. You need to launch the app when I’m sorry, when the ramp test is your next workout, go to your career page and you will see a new button. And that button is right next to the load ramp test button. And that new button says use AI or use FTP detection.

[00:08:31] Amber Pierce: So clicking on that button will reveal, uh, your detected FTP. And at that point, you’ll have the option to either accept it or dismiss it. So you’re not locked into it. If you hit that button, um, you are still free to load the ramp test if you really, really want to, but that’s how you can check out what your detected FTP is.

[00:08:47] Amber Pierce: If you do decide to accept that FTP, we will replace the ramp test with a workout for you, and you can go on your Merry way. So you don’t have to do the ramp test. You can update your FTP and get a workout all in one, like just in a couple clicks. It’s pretty sweet.

[00:09:02] Nate Pearson: The parent on early access, that’s on the website, under settings, and then you go to the app under career and you just have to have a ramp test schedule that day.

[00:09:08] Nate Pearson: So Amber, this is right now, it is, we want to get out as fast as possible with minimum UI and we have big plans for this. Do you want to talk about what the kind of the follow on steps so people can set expectations and how this isn’t. This is just the first step of the UI portion of it. Yeah,

[00:09:25] Amber Pierce: this is, this is a very, very minimal version of this.

[00:09:28] Amber Pierce: So, um, it’s still super exciting to be able to see what your detected FTP is, but we have a couple more, we’re going to have some really fast follow on. So one is, um, if you get an FTP increase, we’ll be able to show your adjusted progression levels before you go ahead and accept that FTP. Um, so that’ll be really cool.

[00:09:44] Amber Pierce: You can preview how those levels are going to change. I know that that was something that, uh, some people in the form have already been asking about right now, we have a hard coded replacement workout, but very, very soon, we’re going to be able to give you a custom recommended workout. So based on your training plan, your progression levels, your new FTP, your goals.

[00:10:01] Amber Pierce: We will give a, give you a custom replacement workout. And so the hard-coded one, um, we will be bringing this into calendar and right now there’s just two options to either load the, the ramp test or accept the new. In the future, um, in a very near future, you’ll be able to ignore, uh, so you’d could skip the ramp test and ignore the new suggested FTP to just continue training, uh, to increase your progression levels, if you would prefer to do that.

[00:10:27] Amber Pierce: So we’ve got some really exciting stuff coming up in the pipeline. Um, that’s all going to be pretty soon. And like Nate said, predicted FTP is on the roadmap a little further in the future. There’s some really, really cool stuff we’re going to be able to do with this. And I just want to say a lot of people in the forum had been, um, congratulating me and my team and my team has worked really hard on this, but I really want to reiterate that this was a huge effort that didn’t just involve my team.

[00:10:51] Amber Pierce: This was a lot of work by the ML team. Um, the support team, the marketing team, everybody has pitched in to make this happen. And so, uh, I just want to give a big shout out to team tr because, uh, this was a huge effort and we’re really, really proud of it.

[00:11:04] Nate Pearson: That’s crazy. And then just even just pulling in the data over years, like the backend team, like you don’t realize how many steps there are and the building the calendar, and then just getting this data.

[00:11:15] Nate Pearson: Because again, we have all this plan versus actual data that other people don’t have that helps us do this, which is, uh, amazing to, uh, one thing to know is that if you change your FTP, you can not do this again for 14 days. You can keep peeking at it, but you can’t keep changing it. So that’s to know that right now.

[00:11:32] Nate Pearson: And then, uh, uh, the dream of the future. This is the vision. This is a little bit ways out, cause we have a couple of things inside of this. When you have plan builder, you have two options. One is the way today is I want to still have tests at this regular interval and I could still detect AIP if I want to.

[00:11:49] Nate Pearson: Or the other one is there’s no testing. And we will tell you when your FTP is higher. And also this is Amaris idea, which is so good, depending on where you are in your phase, what your goals are and stuff we will adjust, we will change it at specific, um, where we think you are at the right point in your progression.

[00:12:07] Nate Pearson: So for instance, if you are a 40 K time trial list and you’re on the 40 K TT plan, and you’re getting pretty close, like let’s say even have six weeks, we could even set you up to have the, to come into that plan with the correct time and zones so that when you hit that last, those last workouts, you’re doing those 50, 55 minute 40 K TT simulations.

[00:12:26] Nate Pearson: And we can work backwards in that. Um, what’s that what’s going to happen with that is we would have to manipulate your FTP a little bit with levels so that we get you at the right time zone. And that could be an ego boost or hurt for some people, depending on which way we go. Uh, but it is, that’s just like the next fine grain control of evolution of it.

[00:12:47] Nate Pearson: That is so, so cool where we think about the details. So you don’t have to, um, or you can trust that. Uh, to remember that this AI FTP detection works in tandem with adaptive training. So we get you your number and then we adjust your different, um, uh, zones to be correct for you. And those relationships to those zones, uh, will be different for, for different people.

[00:13:10] Nate Pearson: And that’s why we have adaptive training. So this is one step inside of our whole system that then, you know, gets the feedback of every workout, gets your RPE and then constantly adjust. It’s not just don’t look at just as a only a half to be texting you to look at the whole system together. So anyways, super exciting.

[00:13:27] Nate Pearson: Yeah, John.

[00:13:28] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. I want to share like a concern that I got on that very thing and how the, and that, um, and I’ve played say, Hey, I saw the FTP detection said that it was going to be 2 86. Um, but I didn’t accept that. So I took the ramp test and turns out that I was 2 88, so it was actually wrong. And I was like, well, let’s think about that.

[00:13:49] Jonathan Lee: First of all. Uh, firstly your power meter probably has fluctuation in, in reading even beyond two Watts. Um, but number two, the other side of this too, is you have adaptive training to make any sort of adjustments thereafter and there’s a window. And the more data you have and the more inputs that we have that window gets smaller and smaller or confidence rises in terms of estimating what your FTP is.

[00:14:11] Jonathan Lee: But two Watts, that sort of thing for most people that are experienced in training, you know, that two Watts isn’t going to make a massive difference particularly. And especially when you have adaptive training adjusting your workouts thereafter. So, uh, if, if you feel like if you’re, if you’re trying to, let’s really split hairs and see where it’s at, uh, that’s just some, a few things to keep in mind.

[00:14:32] Jonathan Lee: Um, it’s a really important part.

[00:14:36] Amber Pierce: I was just going to have a couple notes on best practices to get, you know, if you’re gonna use it right now to get the best experience, but they can go ahead and I can jump in. Yeah.

[00:14:43] Nate Pearson: Yeah. So if we could test everyone’s blood and we had a gas exchange and everyone wanted to do capacitive efforts and like just really hurt, uh, like the things that you see in like those old documentaries that people, uh, we probably have a different system.

[00:14:55] Nate Pearson: Everyone had those $10,000 machines. That’d be great. But what what’s really cool about this is let’s say you have two different methods of predicting FTP. One says 2 31 says two 20, uh, and let’s say the two 30 overestimated you. So that you’re really more like two 20. What adaptive training we’ll do is we’ll either at the two 30, it would put you at 95% repeat.

[00:15:18] Nate Pearson: At threshold to put you at two 20, or if you’re a two 20, it would keep you at two 20. So like it’s that number can be further influenced and, uh, adjusted with your progression levels with adaptive training. So that’s two, when someone says two Watts, when two Watts isn’t that big of a deal, but even some bigger stuff, uh, it can adjust.

[00:15:37] Nate Pearson: And that’s why adaptive training was really cool with, if someone doesn’t have a totally capacitive effort, like you can on a ramp test, you can still go forward and like, we’ll, we’ll get you just right. But now you don’t even have to do that. Don’t, you know, we should do a live ramp test where we just click the button and we go, oh, okay.

[00:15:53] Nate Pearson: And that’s it. That was

[00:15:54] Jonathan Lee: actually one of the marketing ideas that we have is to schedule a live ramp test and have us all kitted up and ready to go. And then we just did a screen share and we just use that, but detection.

[00:16:04] Nate Pearson: Yeah. And then it goes into beers with Chad

[00:16:07] Jonathan Lee: work is done. How are you not in the meeting?

[00:16:09] Jonathan Lee: This is exactly what

[00:16:15] Ivy Audrain: Is it just that Nate won’t do it anymore?

[00:16:18] Nate Pearson: Well, I was, I was pretty afraid that the, uh, company would go down in flames.

[00:16:26] Jonathan Lee: Did you not hung over? There’s a reason that those are not on YouTube. There’s a reason that those are posted as Instagram stories and then thusly disappeared.

[00:16:35] Nate Pearson: So I kind of feel like.

[00:16:37] Nate Pearson: Yeah, I don’t. Nevermind. I’ll I kind of want to do it though. I have alcohol here. I can remember,

[00:16:47] Jonathan Lee: you know, that Mario thing where he’s like jumping through all the levels and he’s trying to miss those like spinning sticks. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. That’s what I felt like during beers with Chad, I was like, we narrowly escaped.

[00:16:57] Jonathan Lee: We narrowly escaped just over and over. Like for

[00:17:00] Nate Pearson: those who don’t know, I drink so much, too much. I don’t even like to drink any more. Like one drink not makes me feel horrible right now, but that night I thought I had tanked the company. Like I went to bed so scared. I was like, then nested you, John. I was just like, lots of messages is over.

[00:17:17] Nate Pearson: Company is gone. I didn’t remember everything I said it was

[00:17:21] Jonathan Lee: we’ve learned. We’ve learned. Yeah. Uh, one thing maybe we have, I don’t know, Nate, just one thing, one thing I want to say before you go into this, uh, Amber, uh, this isn’t, so this is individually, uh, adjusted and Amber you’ll probably have a better way of saying this, but, um, so Nate and I could theoretically in this really weird world, Nate and I could put out the same amount of power during every moment of our training for the past two weeks or something.

[00:17:51] Jonathan Lee: But that doesn’t mean that we’re still gonna get the same. FTP detected because this system looks at me as an athlete over time, all of my FTP over time and the history of that, my training it’s it’s, it’s very individualized. So I’ve seen some people go, well, you must be just using ramp, test logic and finding like the fastest one or the highest one minute, and then reducing.

[00:18:13] Jonathan Lee: That’s absolutely not the case. It’s entirely different. And then on top of that, it’s also not using some sort of, um, basic non-personalized formula that then is applied to everybody the same. It’s very, it’s, it’s very different, right? Amber.

[00:18:29] Amber Pierce: Exactly. So number one, this is not using any single static equation.

[00:18:33] Amber Pierce: Um, so not, not that this is a, this is a pretty dynamic model. Um, number two, the model looks at your entire FTB history. Um, several months of your training history, it weights your more recent training, more heavily, but it contextualizes that

[00:18:53] Jonathan Lee: it’s like no secret sauce.

[00:18:56] Nate Pearson: Let me describe the Mo I, I don’t know where you’re going, but I made scared.

[00:19:01] Nate Pearson: Yeah, I’m just, this is a beer. So Chad moment, it is. So let’s just say it, it does look at your whole history and John and I could have the exact same workouts for six months different at the same, lots different predicted FTPs or detected FTP for each of us. There’s cause the whole thing with ML is like, Uh, so that the ML thing that learns is something off the shelf, right?

[00:19:25] Nate Pearson: Like Google, apple, like he’s AI researchers do it. The whole key of it is what data do you put into it? How do you, how do you categorize that data? And Amber just said a few things, but I didn’t know where she was going. And I would hate it to have it like, to be like

[00:19:41] Jonathan Lee: crawling in there, in there, like notebooks.

[00:19:43] Jonathan Lee: And then they just got really frustrated because you interrupted me.

[00:19:46] Nate Pearson: So sorry for interrupting you Amber, and I don’t know where you were going. Right. And I’m sure you wouldn’t have to send anything too deep, but, uh, in general as fancy.

[00:19:56] Amber Pierce: Yeah, no. So, so the point is that we’re not just looking at a single effort and the nice thing about this is if you do have an outlier effort, it’s very unlikely that that one outlier effort is going to sway the model too much and give you an overinflated or underinflated FTP.

[00:20:10] Amber Pierce: Um, so that’s a really nice thing. We’re taking into account a whole lot of data and it’s your individual data. So again, this is, this is a highly customized, highly personalized, uh, detection model tool, whatever you want to call it, we’ve gone through a few name iterations.

[00:20:26] Jonathan Lee: Another question I got on this, Amber it’s related to that is, uh, I’m really enjoying my training right now, but now I’m worried because next week I have a crit and during that Creek, it’s always super hard and I’m worried that it’s, that one effort is going to give me some sort of inflated FTP, because it’s an NP Buster sort of race, right.

[00:20:44] Jonathan Lee: Where it’s like really hard and I get a really high end P. Th that’s not really a justified fear, right? It’s not going to get completely distracted by just one effort.

[00:20:55] Amber Pierce: Exactly. It will. It will take that effort into consideration. That’s the important thing, because it’s important to know that you’re capable of doing that, but it’s not going to be something that overly Swayze

[00:21:04] Jonathan Lee: to the model, not going to go to two from 200 to three 50.

[00:21:08] Jonathan Lee: Yeah.

[00:21:08] Nate Pearson: But I mean, the goal is to get us to get to today doing productive workouts after the ramp test. So you’re at the right level to get faster. Right. And, uh, because this is a trait because this isn’t like an algorithm, it’s a trained model. It has looked in the past. And if, if in general looking at everybody, uh, if it has detected, if you did that one workout, then you would be able to do these, these harder workouts right.

[00:21:31] Nate Pearson: In the future. Like you did this one race and then everyone’s fitness jumped. It would have learn that and figured it out. But it has learned that that is not the case, right. There might be some other cases, or maybe it’s learned that in this many ones in a row, if you do this, then it’s the case that it does go up.

[00:21:46] Nate Pearson: But that it’s the cool thing about this stuff is the way that we wrote it. We have a little bit of visibility about what’s happening, but we don’t really know what’s happening, which is cool and scary. Uh, all we know is we can test to see how accurate is and what we want feedback from Amber on this part is if you, if you choose the AIP detection, you accept it.

[00:22:07] Nate Pearson: You, you know, the levels adjust and you start doing productive workouts and you think they are either too hard or too easy. Uh, you know, we’ll get that information with the RP survey, but please email us, right. Is that the way to do it? Email us@supportatrainer.com. Is that how you want the feedback?

[00:22:23] Amber Pierce: Um, you can do that and you can also on the early access page, there’s a little link that says leave feedback.

[00:22:28] Amber Pierce: You can leave feedback there too. Both channels will work. They will come back to us. Yeah. Either way is good. Save our

[00:22:33] Nate Pearson: support team and use the feedback one. So it goes directly to Amber’s team MLT.

[00:22:38] Jonathan Lee: There we go. There’s another question ever, do I need heart rate or like a heart rate monitor for,

[00:22:44] Amber Pierce: right. So we’ll just ask this in the chat and the answer is no.

[00:22:46] Amber Pierce: Um, so part of the reason for that is number one. Our model does really well just looking at power, but also heart rate is while it is valuable to know, there are a lot of factors that can affect heart rate that aren’t necessarily related to your current fitness. So for example, ambient temperature, hydration, status, caffeine intake, elevation, sleep.

[00:23:07] Amber Pierce: These are all things that can strongly influence your heart rate. Um, and so we’re not taking that into account right now. If our data shows we are,

[00:23:18] Nate Pearson: yeah. I rides without power meters, look at heart rate, and there’s a whole thing. There’s a whole new machine learning model around that. So I’ll just say, wear your heart rate, monitor.

[00:23:28] Nate Pearson: Yeah.

[00:23:30] Amber Pierce: Learn something new. It’s not necessarily,

[00:23:34] Nate Pearson: it’s not necessary. So if you did all your rides without a heart rate monitor, you’re fine. But if you, uh, if you do a lot of rides without a power meter where your heart rate monitor, that will then impact it. Yeah.

[00:23:45] Jonathan Lee: There’s

[00:23:46] Nate Pearson: less has changed recently, but that’s

[00:23:48] Jonathan Lee: who knows, but Nate’s alluding to down the road, exciting stuff.

[00:23:53] Jonathan Lee: Uh, very exciting stuff. So,

[00:23:55] Nate Pearson: yes, I think, I think going forward forever, just wear your heart rate, monitor on every workout. I know before, like years ago I was like, I don’t wear it because blah, blah, blah. But, uh, you’re not going to be screwed by not doing it, but I would start doing it now.

[00:24:08] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s not necessary.

[00:24:11] Amber Pierce: We’ll

[00:24:11] Nate Pearson: make that.

[00:24:12] Amber Pierce: Don’t have, you don’t have to run out and buy a heart rate monitor, use this feature.

[00:24:18] Nate Pearson: Not at all.

[00:24:19] Jonathan Lee: Yep. Okay. Another question on this one, you already mentioned this, but I want to be explicit. If I have been doing outdoor rides, it is taking those outdoor rides into account into the, into this right, Amber.

[00:24:31] Jonathan Lee: So yeah, some athletes are like, well, I haven’t done a trainer road workout in a long time and I want to sign back up with trainer road and I want to do that. The more structured work you do, the better it gets. Is it fair to say Amber, but at the same time, it’s still looking at your outdoor rides.

[00:24:45] Amber Pierce: Yeah, it does.

[00:24:46] Amber Pierce: The model does take into account, even your unstructured rides, whether those are indoors or,

[00:24:51] Jonathan Lee: yeah. And it’s also evidence because some people are like, well, when is it after training gonna look at my outdoor rides, we’ve been working on this and we continue to work on this. And we’re making a lot of progress on that all the time.

[00:25:02] Jonathan Lee: But this is good evidence of the fact that like, Hey, it’s like, not like it’s smoke and mirrors here. We truly are. And this is an example of a feature that is already using what we’ve worked on for adapt to train, to take into consideration your outdoor rides. It’s doing it. So

[00:25:16] Nate Pearson: yeah, this does contain consideration.

[00:25:18] Nate Pearson: And I think what they’re asking for is when will outdoor rides impact my progression levels and someone in here, Patrick, as a question of like, Hey, you know, I can put out more power outside versus inside. So won’t that mess things up. Got you covered Patrick. We understand that. And we. We do stuff for that.

[00:25:39] Jonathan Lee: I like that we do stuff. Yeah. That’s

[00:25:42] Nate Pearson: a very secret sauce thing though, too. Cause it’s not a easy thing that we’ve done. So that’s, but we understand that and we, uh, are aware of it and that has been, we work on it.

[00:25:52] Jonathan Lee: Another question to ask Amber, this is kind of like a theoretical question, I guess, should I consider a test result to be better than the AI FTP detected result from this cause that people are kind of like, well, I have a gold standard of a test that I’ve done over here versus AI FTP detection.

[00:26:12] Jonathan Lee: What are your thoughts on that?

[00:26:14] Amber Pierce: So testing is really stressful for a lot of people. Um, and what this does is it offers you a much lower, like it can take the stress out of the equation, hit a button and then you can do a productive workout. So, um, one thing that I’ve heard people say is like, well, you’re just making this too easy and it’s not meant to be easy is you got to do hard stuff in your training.

[00:26:34] Amber Pierce: And I agree with that, but most FTP protocols, even though they require an all out effort, um, they’re pretty short and they’re not necessarily going to be focused and, um, productive in terms of your overall goals. So what this offers you is the opportunity to update your FTP and do a workout. That’s going to be more productive and more focused toward, um, elevating your

[00:26:58] Jonathan Lee: fitness.

[00:26:59] Jonathan Lee: I would, I would love to rant on this. Contain myself. And I will perfor I will behave as gentlemen here, but, uh, we get plenty of people. In fact, I got a DM the other day saying like, you’re just making people soft, multiple DMS, uh, with this feature. And I want to reinforce this, uh, this is, this is, this, this matters deeply to me, harder training is not better.

[00:27:24] Jonathan Lee: Say it with me. Like harder training is not better, better. It’s it’s getting the right training is what’s better. So, uh, just because, and, and trust me if you’re training and doing it right, you will have plenty of workouts that will stress. You don’t have to worry about that. You also have races or events or big days in the saddle or whatever else that motivates you, that stress you.

[00:27:46] Jonathan Lee: So like you’ll still have those, uh it’s if you don’t constantly chase every workout, smashing me into the ground. That is not a sustainable trajectory. We’ve said this like a broken record too, on our podcasts. But the data shows that the athletes with the most training consistency and what I mean by that is.

[00:28:03] Jonathan Lee: Consistent amount of training over a period of time. And looking at that at short to long time skills, the most consistent athletes are the ones that get faster. And if you’re trying to just say, I need training to be hard every day and break yourself into the ground every single day, that’s not sustainable.

[00:28:20] Jonathan Lee: You won’t be able to do it, especially if you’re doing something like holding onto that, that very exciting 300 plus SWAT FTP that you want to hold on to because it really pads the ego, but then it makes your training compromised, adapt to training will do as best as it can with that. And it’ll make adjustments.

[00:28:36] Jonathan Lee: But if it’s way off the mark and you’re holding onto something, that’s way high, you’ll never get to that long time in zone that you need to work on with threshold or sweet spot or anything else. So this can really help. I know a lot of people, we looked at the data, a shocking amount of athletes.

[00:28:54] Jonathan Lee: It’s don’t take

[00:29:00] Nate Pearson: on for everyone

[00:29:00] Jonathan Lee: else. The amount of athletes that just froze up a little bit. Am I hearing my back?

[00:29:06] Nate Pearson: He’s back. A bunch of people don’t have.

[00:29:10] Jonathan Lee: Yes. Yeah. Huge amounts of them. And it’s a shocking amount actually, when we looked at the data for how many athletes get tests and I understand why you shouldn’t feel bad for wanting to skip a test.

[00:29:20] Jonathan Lee: That’s okay. Like, uh, I, for some reason, it’s almost like I did a ramp test in front of tens and thousands of people multiple times on the internet, but I can’t seem to get a good result with the ramp piss when, I mean, good. I mean, when that gives me productive training, not one that gives me vanity metrics, but one that gives me productive training.

[00:29:35] Jonathan Lee: That’s just, I’m broken in the head with it. So I understand you might have a good relationship with testing and this is a great way to get well calibrated training. Cause like Nate said, the point isn’t to get the highest number possible. Otherwise, trust us, we know how to give you a 300 watt plus Walt FTP and just make it say 300, right?

[00:29:53] Jonathan Lee: Like we could do that, but that’s not how you get the most training or the best training. Our goal is to get you well, calibrated training that’s whole.

[00:29:59] Nate Pearson: And that, that split between people don’t test is, um, there’s people who just don’t like to test or they’re new and it’s hard. They don’t understand it.

[00:30:06] Nate Pearson: The other side too, is the, the people who think they know their FTP and that the biggest or the. Oh, man, we we’ve seen pros. Can our system almost not you Amber, of course not you, but they put in these crazy FTPs and they get through like, you know, four minutes at threshold and then give up, uh, I don’t know if this is like a coach just telling them stuff or they had a hot power meter somewhere and it makes you feel good, but, uh, that’s total speculation, but in general, I’m very curious to see what would happen, uh, in the future.

[00:30:38] Nate Pearson: If we just on onboarding, you, pull your data in and we tell you, and if you do something different we could see afterwards versus us versus what you actually type in, uh, what happened. Another cool thing is after time ops. So Amber, you have taken time off and you had a bodybuilding program, you made a little bay, uh, and then you use this to tell her, tell that people how you use this.

[00:31:01] Nate Pearson: Cause this is another way that people might not know about.

[00:31:05] Amber Pierce: Yeah. So I actually use this to detect, um, an FTP decrease. So I had taken a lot of time off toward the end of my pregnancy and postpartum, and I was ready to get back on the bike, but let me tell you a postpartum, not excited to do a ramp test, like really, really didn’t want to do a ramp test.

[00:31:19] Amber Pierce: So I guessed at my FTP and I did a 30 minute sweet-spot workout, which I thought would be a no, no problem. Um, totally failed it completely struggle. Completely got my guests wrong. So then I used the AI FTP detection and it dialed me in and it was perfect. Like I was able to do a workout immediately productive workout.

[00:31:41] Amber Pierce: Um, and I will tell you, my drop was close to 70 Watts. Like it was a big, big drop, and that was a lot of time off. Um, but the model nailed it. It really did so, and it made it so much less stressful for me. I didn’t have to get in and do a capacitive effort when I’m just really building back pretty much from square one.

[00:32:02] Nate Pearson: The, the way that we could do that first is, uh, that can be a daunting thing to get that kind of training is to know that your first workout has to be a ramp test. And you’re like, well, I haven’t trained yet trained recently. So how could I do this? Right. And it’s stressful. I I’m in this case right now. I don’t want to do my, uh, I still have not the Gusto that I had right before Cape epic, but what’s cool is I just looked, we have almost 130 million rides in our system.

[00:32:29] Nate Pearson: So this is how we figure out is we have enough cases where somebody of similar stats to Amber has taken this much time off. And then they, uh, they came back on the bike and we can do all this math, crazy stuff to figure out where in the point like interpolate, where her FTP is going to be, and all this stuff has been learned about, uh, on the backend.

[00:32:49] Nate Pearson: So that’s another cool thing that I’m really send it to me in the form of another model can do this, but can you take off. I have a 70 watt decrease in Dale someone’s FTP without any like data, like any new data. That’s crazy to me.

[00:33:04] Jonathan Lee: That’s another question with this is, uh, will AI FTP detection work if I’ve never used Trainor road.

[00:33:11] Jonathan Lee: Um, and Amber that if you go in and you use ride sync, right? So you’ve connected your ride history, whether it’s through Strava or Garmin connect or anything like that, and you have those rides, it’ll still work for you. It’ll get better. As we’ve said, as you give it more data and more structured data, for sure it’ll get better, but it still will work for you, right?

[00:33:29] Amber Pierce: It works best if you have at least 12 training road workouts, but we can look at your data if you don’t have training road workouts. But if you bring those, if you bring that data in so best practices, um, this will work best. If you have a lot of structured training, it will work best if you have trainer rubber workouts.

[00:33:46] Amber Pierce: And I’m not just saying that as a marketing sell, that’s just a fact of how, because this is part of how we train the model. Um, it will work best if your age is accurate. So we have a surprising number of athletes who have birthdays in the future. It’s amazing time travelers. Why didn’t, y’all warn us about COVID

[00:34:09] Jonathan Lee: good to get information.

[00:34:11] Jonathan Lee: It would have been helpful yesterday. Yeah.

[00:34:13] Amber Pierce: Right. Uh, so anyway, make sure that information is accurate. Um, and then, uh, yeah, it should, it should be like.

[00:34:19] Nate Pearson: I want to say that a different way that Amber just said right now, I believe we have a gate in that you have to have 12 trainer had workouts before you can do this.

[00:34:26] Nate Pearson: And that is because we need to validate parts of this model even more with more people. And then if we can, and we validate it, we’ll step it back so that you don’t have to have any train road workouts, because just as we’ve seen in the forum, there are some people with no trainer workouts is working great, but uh, early access, we want to be, uh, more cautious than not cautious.

[00:34:47] Nate Pearson: And that’s also why we don’t let people change all the time. Uh, and we do that, but the goal and what we really want to do is because it doesn’t, uh, I don’t think Amber, we actually do need any training or workouts. And I, I know we’re just being cautious in the product manager for their. We’ll see what happens in the future with that, because that’s, that’s what John just said is what we want is that you just seek your stuff.

[00:35:09] Nate Pearson: You wait for account to sync, and then we start get your training. Uh, you don’t have to do any ramp tests.

[00:35:14] Jonathan Lee: One, uh, another point on this that you just made. Amber, I want to bring this in, uh, athletes that some masters age athletes, um, we’ve talked, we talked for, uh, geez, this is a few years ago. Now we talked about building masters plans and we didn’t do that because we also had this going and we thought this is a much better way to address this issue of athletes being able to train as they need and adjusting training for them.

[00:35:40] Jonathan Lee: So adaptive training, and this is another fantastic example, is AI FTP detection making it so that it works for athletes of any age and it will adjust for you. Um, it’s going to, like Amber said, it’s going to look at you in terms of like a profile, but it also looks at you in terms of an individual. So then it can really make sure that it’s making the necessary adjustments that get you the right training.

[00:36:00] Jonathan Lee: So masters athletes, Joyce, uh, adaptive training is going to constantly be making your training better for you. That’s the whole point of it. And that goes for young athletes to old, across the board.

[00:36:12] Nate Pearson: So pretty, there’s still a more things we could do for masters, just, you know, but this was the biggest impact that we could have at first.

[00:36:18] Nate Pearson: And no matter what we probably want to do this first.

[00:36:20] Jonathan Lee: Oh yeah, for sure. Yep. It all builds in steps. Right. Is there anything else. Is there anything else we should cover on this? Hopefully this is answering a lot of questions for a lot of athletes about FTP testing, about all that stuff. And also I want to cover one thing really quick with FTP testing.

[00:36:37] Jonathan Lee: Isn’t it silly that we think that like in one moment on one day we’re going to get a perfect, very accurate representation of your potential as an athlete at that moment. Uh, and we’re going to ignore the fact that there’s so many variables that could be affecting you in your life. Like if you think about it, testing is kind of a weird way to think that we’re going to get an accurate picture of who you are as an athlete.

[00:36:58] Jonathan Lee: We should be looking at much more than just like one effort from one exact moment in time. And that’s what this is really doing. Nate. It looks like you want to say something.

[00:37:07] Nate Pearson: Yeah. I mean, it’s just the, that’s the only option before, right? Like there, there was that you could look at workouts over time and stuff, but that takes a higher level of knowledge and the coach could do over.

[00:37:19] Nate Pearson: It looks at every single workout and talks to you about it, which is kind of what we’re doing now, but it does seem silly, but it also, I didn’t know, there wasn’t a better way. Sure.

[00:37:28] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Yeah. Really, really experienced athletes that are, uh, that are fair and objective. They might be able to say, I feel like it’s here because of just years upon years of structured training.

[00:37:38] Jonathan Lee: Right. Um, but even the best athlete can get fooled by their own perception on that at different times and you know, and frustrating your head yet. Uh, and it has a lot of experience, uh, much more than we do. So. It’s a really good thing to keep in mind is that this isn’t just putting all the pressure on one specific moment and you need to get absolutely everything out of yourself and it needs to be a perfect representation of your potential.

[00:38:03] Jonathan Lee: There’s no need for that sort of stress. This, it takes a totally different approach. It looks at you as a person and as an athlete on a much broader scale. So it’s cool stuff. I

[00:38:13] Nate Pearson: be good. She wouldn’t be here. She muted herself. That’s how much she was like, I’m out here.

[00:38:22] Jonathan Lee: The thing is Ivy’s, Ivy’s just as up to speed on all this stuff, because Ivy’s in the forum answering your questions and doing everything else.

[00:38:28] Jonathan Lee: Ambers, Ember, Nate have been in there yesterday on this specific topic, but, um, yeah, so Ivy, Ivy knows all that stuff, uh, and she’s going to be pitching in on it too.

[00:38:37] Nate Pearson: The last thing, if you do want to talk about this or discuss it with us, Amber and I are in the forums and IB, it is there’s a introducing RIFD P detection thread and the trainer.com/forum.

[00:38:48] Nate Pearson: Uh, by the way, that forms big w it’s like 3 million page views a month. Um, I think that’s big and cycling. It seems like a lot

[00:38:58] Jonathan Lee: the biggest cycling forum as I, as I, I believe, uh, just by the beliefs.

[00:39:03] Nate Pearson: So yeah, by how often people post. Cause I look at all the other ones, cause I have a big ego and I can see I’m doing market competitive research.

[00:39:11] Nate Pearson: Right. You can see that we get a lot of posting. That’s what it is. Yeah. That’s what I like. If we don’t have more posts, I just have a bad day. And like

[00:39:21] Jonathan Lee: Nate’s over there creating burner accounts and making more posts. Yeah,

[00:39:28] Amber Pierce: that’s right.

[00:39:33] Jonathan Lee: Uh, I don’t even know Ivy, Ivy, so clever and witty. Sometimes. I wonder if like when I see clever and witty responses and I don’t recognize the username. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that’s Ivy, maybe she’s created a burner account. I

[00:39:46] Amber Pierce: would say the things

[00:39:47] Ivy Audrain: that I want to say to athletes that I can’t really always,

[00:39:50] Nate Pearson: yeah.

[00:39:51] Nate Pearson: You don’t even want to say two more things. One is we saw someone on our forum, private messaging, people pretending to help them and then sending them to like competitors and stuff. So if you see this happening, please send it to us. I know I looked at somebody sent it to us and they did it to like 45 people.

[00:40:07] Nate Pearson: They’re like, oh, they act like they’re friends. And then they like slowly be like, well, I use this and you should go use this. And like, uh, it’s obviously someone from, I think from that company or really good friends with that company, or they’re just like the best evangelist ever. But I don’t personally, I don’t think they were really trying to help people that were trying things to make sales.

[00:40:25] Nate Pearson: So if that is happening, please let us know. We’ve found that person, but who knows, they come back need different ways. Like I say, the burner accounts, the next thing is that we did another small release, which is progression levels, hover state. So on the website. And if you hover over progression level, what we’ll do now is it will tell you what would they, what the change was that changed that progression level.

[00:40:46] Nate Pearson: If it’s training activity, what the workout was, all of that. And we did that because we had questions around people of like, well, why did this change? Right? They send it to the support. So now, you know, this helps you understand your progression levels better and what changes.

[00:41:02] Jonathan Lee: Awesome. Yeah, very cool. If you, and by the way, we have more planned on that down the road.

[00:41:07] Jonathan Lee: We, constant improvement is one of the principles that we talked about here, and we want to make it so that you feel like you have a really good fix and all the context necessary on why your levels are changing. So expect that to constantly improve. Um, uh, if you appreciate all of this awesome product development, all of this great stuff that the whole team and the people that are here at train road, that aren’t inside these four squares, or aren’t inside your ears right now, that’s creepy sounding.

[00:41:33] Jonathan Lee: But all the people that train a road that have worked on these things, if you appreciate that, there are a couple of things that I would love for you to do. Number one, you could rate this podcast, rate it five stars, or let us know what we need to do to get a five star review from you and we’ll do it and we’ll get there.

[00:41:47] Jonathan Lee: And then the other thing is you can rate the trainer road app and he can share it with people. Uh, in that process of when you do a review, you can also share the app and share the podcast with other people that would be hugely helpful. So if you appreciate all of this, that will be a great way to show appreciation or excited to make you all be faster to get into Craig’s question.

Functional vs. non-functional overreaching

[00:42:05] Jonathan Lee: It says, my question is regarding mood and mental health. When I hit a point in my training block where I’m overreaching, and those are, these are his words. It’s important to point out where I’m overreaching, my overall mental health spirals, and I become very irritable and potentially depressed. I eat when I’m hungry and nap.

[00:42:20] Jonathan Lee: When I feel I need it. I follow a mid. And so those are two, those are interesting things. I think that we’ll come back to that statement there. I follow a mid volume sweet spot based plan and I strength train three times per week. So that’s actually quite a lot of work, especially when you talk about an hour, that’s a lot of work for a cyclist, but that’s a lot of work, a huge amount of work for an average individual.

[00:42:40] Jonathan Lee: Um, even though like an average active fit going or like gym going individual, that’s a lot, Craig says, are there strategies to avoid this change in mood? Or am I just weak? Uh, Greg, I want to give you a hug. First of all, uh, you’re not just a leader. Um, that’s like a boy, the whole thing of like, you just need to train hard.

[00:42:59] Jonathan Lee: He’s, uh, you know, smash yourself into the ground, every workout, that’s the sort of mentality. And that’s what it creates is that we then think that we’re weak because we’re training, we’re falling in mid volume plan and restraint training three times a week. Like we should not feel that at all. So that’s the first thing internet hug to you, Craig.

[00:43:16] Jonathan Lee: Uh, you’re not soft. Um, can we talk, let’s break this down, like step by step functional versus non-functional overreaching. Let’s talk about that first because with training, you want to overreach at a measured amount, right? Like you want to get to the point where you are working, you’re stressing your abilities, but then giving yourself time to recover.

[00:43:38] Jonathan Lee: Can you talk a little bit about like nonfunctional overreaching or what that would be in terms of what it’s, what it’s felt like for you in the past. If you’ve gone through that, I assume you have,

[00:43:48] Ivy Audrain: uh,

[00:43:49] Amber Pierce: can you define non-functional for myself and also

[00:43:55] Jonathan Lee: Amber, how about you define it for us? And then we can go after that and you can share your experience on it.

[00:44:01] Amber Pierce: So, um, I’ll give you guys a very non-scientific definition of this, but functional overreaching is where, like we’ve said before, you want to stress your system in order to elicit adaptations, you have to stress your system enough that your system has something to adapt to. So if you’re only stressing your system to the point where it’s already adapted to that level of stress, you’re not going to get additional adaptations.

[00:44:23] Amber Pierce: You have to stress beyond what your body has already adapted to. So that means that there’s usually a little short period of time where you are functionally overreaching. So you’re stressing your system a little bit more than what it’s actually capable of right now. And then when you rest, your body will recover and super compensate to a point where now it’s adapted to a higher level of fitness, and then you need to stress it a little bit beyond that recover and so on.

[00:44:49] Amber Pierce: And this is what we call progressive overload. Um, so it’s an incremental stressing of your system. Allowing your system to recover enough that it can compensate, adapt, and move on. So that’s the real key here is making sure that you’re allowing enough for recovery for your body to make those adaptations.

[00:45:06] Amber Pierce: When you get into nonfunctional, overreaching is where you are putting too much stress and not enough recovery. So your body can’t adapt to the training stress that you’re putting onto it. And now you’ve gone from functional overreaching into nonfunctional overreaching, which means that you’re piling on stress in a way that’s not productive to progressing your fitness.

[00:45:28] Jonathan Lee: And that’s an Ivy. Have you experienced that before on the non-functional overreaching side as a pro athlete racing around? For sure.

[00:45:39] Amber Pierce: Um, and I think the

[00:45:40] Ivy Audrain: thing that sticks out to me about what Craig said that they eat when they’re hungry and nap, when they feel like it, uh, and feel irritable and depressed and their mental health spirals, I feel like this is something that I experienced when I just wasn’t nourishing myself in the way that I needed for my training volume and getting an oppressed and that rule of eat when you’re hungry.

[00:46:05] Ivy Audrain: That’s not something that we consider sufficient on the bike. And it’s definitely not sufficient off the bike either, especially when you’re training a lot. And Craig does so much between their strength training and I assume they have a life and a job and things to do otherwise. And. You know, worrying about the question itself was about mood and mental health, right apart from their training.

[00:46:28] Ivy Audrain: And I know that I definitely conflated depression with that fatigue and need for more food and rest. And there are times when, like this off season in particular, when I didn’t feel like skiing and didn’t really feel like doing weight training and didn’t feel like doing anything. And there are times when you definitely have, um, you know, clinical depression, and then when you start training and you see all those things and, you know,

[00:46:58] Amber Pierce: um, but you see all those things, you know, the irritability,

[00:47:01] Ivy Audrain: irritability, and being really tired, meeting a lot of naps.

[00:47:05] Ivy Audrain: When you see it in training, I complete the two and be like, oh my God, I’m still depressed. Like, um, and it takes having people in your circle, healthcare providers, counselors, other athletes that know us. This is to help. That helps me identify what you’re

[00:47:22] Amber Pierce: eating

[00:47:23] Ivy Audrain: like half as much as you should. You’re not sleeping enough.

[00:47:25] Ivy Audrain: Um, you’re and, and sure enough, as soon as I started eating more and taking care of myself a little bit better, um, I used to take like an hour and a half nap, like every day and I did not need it. And I thought I was depressed and I just thinking to eat more.

[00:47:42] Jonathan Lee: That’s a great point. Like it’s hard to, we aren’t, we aren’t perfect at being able to nail down the reasons behind everything.

[00:47:49] Jonathan Lee: Yeah,

[00:47:51] Nate Pearson: go ahead, Amber.

[00:47:52] Amber Pierce: Oh, I was just going to say, I, I totally, I want a second something that I have you said there, which is, um, sometimes when you’re in heavy training and heavy training is relative, right. It doesn’t matter what volume plan you’re on. If you are feeling that training stress, it could be heavy training for you.

[00:48:10] Amber Pierce: Um, sometimes those body signals don’t come across the way that they normally do when you’re not in heavy training. And I can give an example. Um, every time I ever, my whole career, every time I raised a heavy stage race multi-day stage race, they were always really, really high stress. Cause we’re stacking on that training stress day in and day out.

[00:48:28] Amber Pierce: And it gets to a point where it’s not physically possible to eat enough, to really keep up on those. And make sure that you have an energy balance. And I will tell you, even though I’m in a massive energy deficit in the middle of one of those stage races, my appetite is gone and it actually becomes really stressful to eat enough or try to eat enough because, you know, you can’t actually eat enough to, to make up for what you’re burning every day.

[00:48:53] Amber Pierce: Um, it gets really stressful. And if I were just going based on hunger cues, I would not be eating anywhere near enough to fuel my body through an effort like that. Uh, so you really, when you get into heavy training, you really have to shift your mindset and be really mindful and proactive about fueling your efforts and making sure not just that you’re fueling on the bike, that’s super important.

[00:49:16] Amber Pierce: But as we’ve said before, you need to make sure that you’re feeling throughout the day as well, so that your, your net energy balance is remaining positive, um, is just, it’s, it’s really, really important in that the heavier, the training is for you, the more important than it becomes, because that’s where as you get into that functional overreaching, you are really kind of walking a Razor’s edge between a functional overreaching and nonfunctional overreaching, and feeling yourself and getting enough.

[00:49:40] Amber Pierce: Rest are two of the things that can help prevent you from going into nonfunctional overreaching.

[00:49:46] Nate Pearson: Right? I feel you. This is my entire training career of my life. Eyes are too big for my stomach. I mean, I just keep booboo until a plug adapter trainings helped me on this of not going too hard and work.

[00:50:01] Nate Pearson: This is what, like the, the way training that is not to be overlooked, especially if you’re doing heavy days that are like the neuromuscular days. So the 1, 2, 3, even up to five reps that are really hard and I do those and I am like, I will not let him just weight training. I have nothing else in my life.

[00:50:21] Nate Pearson: I will do that. Not even that much volume, but the stress of that. There’s this, um, mental fatigue that is, uh, uh, I’ve got the system. Amber probably knows, but it will, you’ll be tired the next day for almost no reason. And it’s like a mental fatigue and not a physiological fatigue. And then I’ve done this before, where I’ve done that and then try to go into a cycling workout and your art, your motivation is so low going into that when you’re, when your brain is fatigued like that.

[00:50:50] Nate Pearson: And then the RPE goes up so much and then your RP goes up too. If you’re not eating enough, you need enough carbs or your protein is too low. And then that then makes that work out hard and you’re using all this mental energy. And then the next workout is hard and you just go down this spiral. It just keeps getting harder and harder and harder.

[00:51:10] Nate Pearson: So, Craig, what I would do is, uh, on the waitress. I’ve had luck with this where instead of going, well, it depends on what your goals are. If you’re going for strength, you’re going to need those low reps, but that is you can still get strong without doing that. And you can still get strong and higher reps.

[00:51:27] Nate Pearson: If you’re going forward, just overall fitness, what I’m going to suggest is going to work just fine. And if you’re going to be like, you know, I want bigger size muscles, you can actually go lower reps or higher ups. It’s, uh, you know, you can go as high as I’m going to say. And what I’ve had really good luck with is going in that 12 to 15 range for, um, for rep range for working out.

[00:51:49] Nate Pearson: And that doesn’t put as much mental, like the neuromuscular stress. I think that’s, I might be using these wrong, uh, Amber jumping, if I’m saying the wrong word or someone correct me later, uh, it is much better to do those higher rep things. And I recover a lot better. You get some muscular endurance, which is going to help you on the bike too.

[00:52:06] Nate Pearson: Cause you know, that’s, uh, that’s a big part is, um, not being tired on the bike. And then for muscle size, like it’s very similar, uh, at 15 reps is it is at, at like six reps, uh, which, which is crazy to make sure you’re getting the protein. Uh, I mean, sorry, the protein, which I think you guys covered last week, I’m guessing you said two grams, 1.8 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight.

[00:52:30] Nate Pearson: Something like that. I don’t, I didn’t listen to it, but yeah, everyone’s saying yes, I can’t hear you in that range. Um, and then, uh, I would drop the easy days on the mid volume. So that’s the next step? Change your strength turned a bit, drop those easy days. Like they’re not going to be really pushing you forward that much, especially if it’s pushing you into overreaching so that on those days you can rest and chill and you can eat some food and you can kind of catch up on your calories.

[00:52:57] Nate Pearson: The next thing is use our, uh, workout alternatives and on those on like the harder days, especially that Saturday, instead of being progressive, make it achievable, like don’t progress on that Saturday, less longer workout habits. Keep, keep it up the same level. So if you’re at 4.5, just keep doing 4.5 fives.

[00:53:17] Nate Pearson: Or maybe if you feel bad, go to a 4.0, this is going to put you ahead. Long-term it’s going to seem like it won’t but it will let your Tuesday after you have some time off, go ahead, push forward. And especially that Sunday too, that’s another one where you could drop it down. So have the weekend with a little bit more volume.

[00:53:34] Nate Pearson: You’re still going to cycle. And just because you’re down like one level, it’s still going to beat. You’re still gonna actually get faster, but make it a little bit easier for you based on what the volume you have. You’re not going to be able to, you’ve proven to yourself that you can’t, uh, that this pushes you too much to over.

[00:53:51] Nate Pearson: So this is when you want to step back. And again, every everyone has this point. Everybody does, and we should not be ashamed at where this point is in our lives. Some people it’s going to be two workouts a week. It just is because of lifestyle and everything. Other people like Amber, she was. W almost 40 hours swimming the crazy, uh, but her whole life was arranged around that and she probably was overreaching.

[00:54:14] Nate Pearson: Uh, yeah, exactly. So I just want to say that everyone’s going to hit this no matter what the training plan is, and you gotta be aware and step back. And if you do step back, you’re going to be faster. Your whole life’s better. You’re gonna be more motivated. You’re gonna more fun cycling. You’re gonna look better.

[00:54:30] Nate Pearson: It’s real hard to do. I fall in this trap over and over and over again. Uh, so I’m, that’s why I’m saying it.

[00:54:38] Amber Pierce: Yeah. I think it’s worth just jumping in and talking about one way of like, H how do you tell if you’re functionally overreaching or non-functioning overreaching? Like what, what are the differences there?

[00:54:47] Amber Pierce: And I think a really key differentiator there is if you do take some time off and you make some of these adjustments, like Nate is describing and you bounce back and you start feeling better pretty soon, that’s good. That’s, you know, that probably, you know, if the functional reaching of these symptoms that you’re describing last maybe a week, and it happens to be the week before your rest week, and then you have your rest week, and then you feel good again, that might be functional overreaching.

[00:55:10] Amber Pierce: Um, but if this is something where you take some rest, you, you dial back the training and you’re not experiencing. Uh, a decrease in these symptoms, then you might be functional. You might be overreaching and overreaching. If it gets too bad, you can literally take a year’s non-functional yet non-functional reaching.

[00:55:30] Amber Pierce: If you let it go too far, it can take years to recover from this. And I definitely have experienced that myself. It can take months. So it’s really good to be proactive about tuning in. When is your mood changing? And mood is a really, really good barometer for this. If you’re, if you really, like you said, feeling grumpy and irritable, um, your mood is really down.

[00:55:51] Amber Pierce: That is a good guidepost that something’s up and maybe take a look at your training plan. See if you have some reps coming up, if not build more in, see how you feel. Um, and that’s on the physical side of things, but to go back to what Ivy was saying, and Nate touched on this too, um, it might not just be physical.

[00:56:09] Amber Pierce: There might be, um, an underlying mental health thing going on too. So really experiment with this and be hyper aware and honest with yourself about how you’re feeling. Uh, the two will definitely the, the two, like your, your training and your mental health will definitely, um, influence each other. So it might be really hard to tease them out.

[00:56:28] Amber Pierce: Exactly. But it’s worth looking into getting some extra support. If you feel like that would help

[00:56:35] Jonathan Lee: Ivy, did you, uh, I couldn’t tell if you wanted to jump in and say something,

[00:56:39] Ivy Audrain: oh, Amber was saying that it can take years or months to recover that. And I was just going to add. Bike racing first or writing.

[00:56:49] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Yep. So I want to recap a few things here. Um, firstly, a great thing. This is actually one of my biggest gripes with the TSB chart and the concept of the TSB chart, uh, is that it’s just looking at physical stress and that’s it. And the difference between functional overreaching and non-functional overreaching and almost every conversation I’ve talked to or I’ve heard, discussed, and, and been a part of, it’s almost always talking about training volume, too much training volume or too little training volume.

[00:57:21] Jonathan Lee: And that’s the difference between it. But there’s so many other factors that affect this. Like Nate and Amber and Ivy have both mentioned, it could be a particularly stressful time in your life. And as a result, you need to train less because you have more stress coming into your life and you need to be able to sustain and, and be able to handle and process that stress.

[00:57:40] Jonathan Lee: Right? So if you’re just dosing your life with, with physical stress, from whether it’s training on the bike or training in the gym, whatever else it’s doing, and then you have more stress coming in your, I guess training stress balance would be off, but the chart wouldn’t tell you that chart would tell you, you’re fine.

[00:57:56] Jonathan Lee: If you look at past history, you may have been able to do it before. So you might feel like I’m fine. But like Nate said, you’ll always find that point. And that point is flexible. It will change from time to time. There may be a point in the future where you can handle way more than what you’re doing. Now.

[00:58:11] Jonathan Lee: There may be a point where you can handle less and the same thing goes for the past. But, but, and this is a key point that Ivy pointed out you. Yes, it’s extremely important to listen to your body, but it’s also extremely important to know that you may not be the best person to diagnose what’s going on fully.

[00:58:29] Jonathan Lee: And that’s where having support people around you and professionals can really help you ride this balance in life, not just in training, but in life of functional versus nonfunctional, overreaching, super important stuff. Really good tips, Ivy on, on building a circle around you of different perspectives to help with that

[00:58:47] Nate Pearson: for me too, was a third therapy.

[00:58:49] Nate Pearson: I’m sorry.

[00:58:53] Nate Pearson: Uh, I’ll say it to me, it was a third therapist that was like right away. She’s like, Hey, you’re depressed. You should start this. And I was like, really? She’s like, yeah. I’m like, I don’t think I am. And then she gave me the Welbutrin and. Okay. I was, that was this thing’s dope. I feel so much better. And to Ivy, we should like have a metric of like a tracking, like our forum stress of like typing in there, because that should be headed into your training plan based on like, who posts, what on that day and what happens.

[00:59:21] Nate Pearson: Uh,

[00:59:22] Jonathan Lee: that’s a brilliant idea at the top of the form. We should have a trading stress chart or not just a stress chart. And if people are like overly mean in the forum, because that happens at time, everyone’s workouts down. If they can see

[00:59:37] Nate Pearson: over the whole thing, we just are like, everyone’s training stress a little bit too high right now.

[00:59:41] Jonathan Lee: Everybody’s right there. By the way, if that’s

[00:59:44] Nate Pearson: interesting, we detect your tone in the forum. Sorry. We then know, Hey, you’re a little a Henry right now. You’re going to look too much. This is not constructive debate. This is getting personal. Therefore you are a little irritable and we need to bring you back.

[00:59:59] Jonathan Lee: But if we had like a chart that would be like, it’s too high, then everybody could be like, you know what? I’m not going to be mean on the form today. The stress input from the form is really high. I’m going to be nicer today. So

[01:00:11] Nate Pearson: at what if we had, what if this was a package you could get where as a partner, you could pay more.

[01:00:17] Nate Pearson: And if you want it to dial back your partners training. You could, or you could schedule last weeks based on days. Like you want to go do something actually going to Costco that day. Let’s not have the $5 ride in the morning. Let’s do a 30

[01:00:32] Jonathan Lee: minute ride. I’m thinking of Keegan and Sophia and how that would be an absolute war zone with those two.

[01:00:38] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. It’d be

[01:00:39] Nate Pearson: like, Sophia needs more. Let’s go, let’s go. Sophia needs you the six hour ride with,

[01:00:44] Jonathan Lee: and she just be turning him down because the more training he does, he’s broken. It just gets even more excited by the whole thing. So,

[01:00:51] Nate Pearson: yeah. And I think though, that’s a good point. It’s a joke. But sometimes to what Ivy’s point John’s point, your partner sees it before you do, you don’t think you’re w when, when you get air irritable like this, when it first comes in, you are certain that your partner is doing something wrong, right?

[01:01:08] Nate Pearson: It’s not you, they did something and you just are, and you are experiencing that emotion more where that partner could be doing the same thing all the time. And it’s because you are a tired overreaching, over-training some kind of state that you feel the emotion more, and you are not aware that your body is being impacted like that.

[01:01:29] Nate Pearson: And then you, you know, you could blame somebody who has no fault when it’s really, you should be looking internal. So the point of having that good relationship with your partner and say, you know what? I think you might, um, your mood’s a little bit different. Like, I, I noticed you’re feeling these emotions more.

[01:01:43] Nate Pearson: Can we talk about this? And you as a person, not. Nope, it’s you because you did blah, blah, blah, and not being defensive and really listening to that. If somebody else, uh, uh, detecting that you are, that you’re feeling emotions more than usual and what could be the root cause of that.

[01:02:00] Ivy Audrain: Yeah. That’s why I think this I’m so glad we covered this question because I look at what Craig’s narrative is about their training and their mental health and feeling like they’re weak.

[01:02:12] Ivy Audrain: And, um, so many parts of cycling don’t make us feel like you have to be like tough guy, right? It’s like cycling is so much toxic masculinity, honestly, that something is wrong with you. If

[01:02:25] Amber Pierce: you can’t bury

[01:02:27] Ivy Audrain: yourself constantly, that’s messed up. That sucks. And especially with stuff like food and nourishing yourself and resting, like you’re, you’re in the stuff we wrap up in our appearance and Whitesburg kg and how the last thing you think you should do is just like nourish yourself and like take a bubble bath.

[01:02:45] Ivy Audrain: Um, and you know, not all of us, like how not all of us are lucky enough to have, um, a partner or someone that we were close with or a family member that like sees us on

[01:02:57] Amber Pierce: a daily basis

[01:02:58] Ivy Audrain: that sees those trends and changes. And it’s really hard for someone that has this mindset that you’re weak. If you feel this way, that person probably isn’t the kind of person that would be like, Hey, I don’t feel good.

[01:03:12] Ivy Audrain: I need. What’s going on. Right. And so, and that’s like super hard to decide to do and to know how to speak to it and to tell someone the full scope of everything that you’re doing, especially someone that’s not a cyclist or, or not a competitive athlete, you try and go to your regular primary care doctor and be like, this is what I deal with on a daily basis.

[01:03:31] Ivy Audrain: And for them to really, really understand. So it’ll take some work to find someone that can look at the full scope of what you’re doing and what you’re eating and how much you’re resting and what your life looks like to really help you. But I urge you to do it

[01:03:47] Jonathan Lee: to quote, uh, forgetting Sarah Marshall.

[01:03:50] Jonathan Lee: Sometimes the best thing to do is to just do less and do nothing don’t do. But I think that this is a great example of where sometimes the best way to so look like let’s return to an assume. The goal of everybody with cycling is to improve yourself in one way or another. For some people that’s just achieving more balance and mental health, because that’s what the bike gives you for.

[01:04:14] Jonathan Lee: Some people it’s getting faster, um, whatever it might be. And if your goal is to do. Logically, we think I must do more to get more of the outcome, but sometimes just doing less actually gets us more in the end. And I’ve found more often than not with all of us athletes. Listen to this. There are well there’s, there’s pro athletes to listen to this.

[01:04:36] Jonathan Lee: So you actually, it’s probably the same for you to a certain extent, but especially for those with complicated lives and lots of demands, many times, the way to get faster is to do less than we think that we should do. And, or at least do less than we’re putting pressure on ourselves to do look at the successful athletes, podcasts.

[01:04:53] Jonathan Lee: So many of them just do low volume plans and they achieve a lot. So I hope Craig that this was a, this was helpful for you, uh, to get some different perspectives. And I would absolutely encourage, like I said, sometimes we don’t have the luxury of having a person close to us in our lives to be able to provide additional perspective, but that’s why also professional help is there.

[01:05:16] Jonathan Lee: So then we can speak with those individuals and we can build a relationship with them and rapport so that they can understand where we’re at. So I would encourage everybody to do that, uh, to consider that, uh, normalize that it’s, it’s, it’s a way forward. It’s a way to make progress. So, uh, Nate, do you have one other thing before Nikos?

[01:05:36] Nate Pearson: Yeah, I just want to say, uh, this is the general relationship thing and I have totally been, I did this in my marriage and I want to tell other people. To be aware of it is that when somebody is over-training over-reaching they haven’t slept and, or they haven’t eaten enough. Um, it’s easy when they get upset to say, well, you’re just hungry, right?

[01:05:57] Nate Pearson: Like you’re just this. And what that does is that invalidates their feelings. And I did that as a husband is I would be like, you don’t really feel that you’re just hungry and let’s get you some food to fix this. And that is, I’ve seen that all the time. I’ve seen that parents do that with kids. You’re just tired.

[01:06:12] Nate Pearson: You’re your emotions. Don’t matter. The difference is, uh, how now I am teaching my kids and I want to do that as, Hey, you are, you’re feeling this emotion. And in the moment, all I do is concentrate on the emotion of what she’s, what, like my daughter might be feeling. We get through it. Then afterwards I teach her and say, uh, she’ll even come to the realization.

[01:06:32] Nate Pearson: She goes, oh, I wasn’t really feeling that. I’m like, no, you were feeling that. But just when we’re in these states, we feel them more. And if we can be aware that we’re feeling them more, and then you as a partner or a person, you’ve, you, you almost validate the more you work through it with that person. And then afterwards, when they’re not in that state, you can talk about maybe you felt the more because of this.

[01:06:53] Nate Pearson: Not that they were invalid because you were hungry. Right. So that’s a huge, I wish I would have learned that when I was like eight or something, you know what I mean? Uh, totally through my marriage. It’s not a good personality trait trying to always see it. And, uh, because we are often around people who are angry or because being in the cycling community, um, That is a, that’s something to be aware of.

Discovering and developing rider type

[01:07:17] Jonathan Lee: Great insight. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate that. Um, Nico’s question, lots of advice for training and racing focuses on identifying your rider type thing. And Nico says that in quotes, then developing and using those strengths to win races. What if you don’t fit neatly into any specific category?

[01:07:36] Jonathan Lee: How do you choose? Sorry, say that again. You win them all. I like it. How do you choose what to focus on whether in training or in your race strategy? For example, because I come from a distance running background I’m most comfortable with long sustained or sustained threshold efforts. However, I am not a skinny featherweight, nor am I a large rider with high absolute power.

[01:07:57] Jonathan Lee: Uh, Nico says there are five, 10 and 150 pounds. Therefore I don’t feel confident. I can use sustained efforts to out climb climbers on the hill or power away from diesels on the flats. And I definitely can’t out sprint anyone. So any advice for the riders whose physiology doesn’t match their physicality, that’s a really good way to put it when your physiology doesn’t match your physicality.

[01:08:18] Jonathan Lee: First of all, you and. W we’re we are buds on this, uh, because I am five, ten, a hundred and fifty pounds. Uh, so I, I can, well, we’ll talk about this, but I, this resonates with me

[01:08:32] Nate Pearson: real quick. What you do, Niko is you cat down and clean up

[01:08:37] Jonathan Lee: cat down. Sorry.

[01:08:40] Nate Pearson: You guys go into the actual stuff.

[01:08:44] Jonathan Lee: Um, yeah. So, uh, is, uh, Amber I believe or no.

[01:08:47] Jonathan Lee: Is this Ivy, uh, D do you have some, this, I can’t remember the color that we have, um, who wants to jump in on this one first, Amber. Awesome.

[01:08:56] Amber Pierce: Yeah, I, um, to summarize my advice in a sentence, train everything, and question all assumptions, because I’m already, there are a lot of assumptions embedded in this, right?

[01:09:08] Amber Pierce: That my physicality doesn’t match my physiology. It says, Ooh. I mean, if we’re talking about or stereotypes, then yeah, I see where you’re coming from. But if we step back and we accept that stereotypes are not always, you know, the rock solid truth, um, then that opens up a whole, a whole new world of possibility, right?

[01:09:30] Amber Pierce: So you don’t have to be a pure sprinter to have a really good snap. And I can tell you, I have known some incredible peer sprinters who don’t have a sprinter physicality, right. Um, I was terrible

[01:09:44] Jonathan Lee: for those, for those watching IB was just doing like a, a finger pointing in from the side of the zoom frame.

[01:09:50] Amber Pierce: Yeah.

[01:09:54] Jonathan Lee: I, you can even say, sorry, but you could even say that for like Kerryn Rivera, like, um, yeah, she, she isn’t like this, like just this muscle bound, huge athlete. Yeah. Watch that woman sprint my goodness gracious. She can, she can take off and sustain speed. Uh, which,

[01:10:14] Amber Pierce: yeah. So such a slight

[01:10:17] Ivy Audrain: build, like does not look like attract sprinter and just absolutely roles.

[01:10:23] Ivy Audrain: Some of the world’s most stereotypical looking big sprinters. It doesn’t have anything to do with your build. Yeah.

[01:10:31] Amber Pierce: Right, right away. No, no, not at all right away. That’s a huge assumption. Right. So question that, train your sprint. Um, the other assumption that I see in here is the assumption that, okay, this is what I, this is what I tended toward in running.

[01:10:45] Amber Pierce: And so this is what I think I’ll tend toward in cycling. And I can tell you when I was a swimmer, I was a terrible, terrible sprinter. When I started cycling, I just assumed off the bat that I couldn’t sprint. It turned out that I could. And as soon as I started training it, I actually had a really good snap.

[01:10:58] Amber Pierce: And by the end of my career, I was known for actually having a good sprint, um, not appear. But with training, I was able to have a really good snap that helped me initiate breakaways, went out of small groups. So there’s a whole lot of there’s. There’s just so much here that if you, um, step back, question those assumptions and start training different things, adopt a mentality of curiosity, right?

[01:11:22] Amber Pierce: Don’t assume the outcome. Get curious about it. What if I started sprinting? What could I do? What if I worked on climbing? And another thing is, um, you mentioned that you, you don’t feel confident in your ability to, to maybe out climb somebody. I can tell you a similar build. I was racing I’m five, 10. I was racing a lot around 150 pounds among women who were a lot, lot smaller than I was.

[01:11:48] Amber Pierce: And I can still win on mountain, top finishes. It’s your, your physicality is not your fate. Um, neither are stereotypes. So I just, uh, I’ll conclude this by saying you don’t know until you go. So just give it a shot, like get curious, find out.

[01:12:05] Jonathan Lee: Yeah,

[01:12:05] Nate Pearson: this is a, this is a big reason why we don’t do Ryder typing in the app because I think there is a mental, this service to so many athletes to think this is what I’m doing inside of this.

[01:12:19] Nate Pearson: And this is different than progression levels. Cause that’s relative to what your FTP is. But the saying of like, Hey, you’re a climber, you’re a spinner, you’re a roll error or something like that. Same way as Amber, I’m big dude, 1, 1 90 or something and I’m. I dropped people on climbs and races. It’s so much the in racing, it’s so much about belief in yourself and the mental aspect of it, of I’m going to go for this daring move right now.

[01:12:45] Nate Pearson: And everyone else thinks it’s silly, but I’m just going to stick it and commit to it. It’s a lot of times doesn’t work, but sometimes it does. And that has so much more to do with it then. Oh, I’m not, I’m not, I wasn’t born light enough to win on a climb. So therefore I’m never going to start climbing. Like, it sounds like Nico, like they, before the race, they already think I can’t win these ways.

[01:13:07] Nate Pearson: You can win in all these ways. Every single way. I can’t sprint. Have you guys seen me sprint I’ve won. Like, it’s, it’s more of like, it’s you just be smart and you position correctly and you use momentum on the last turn. And I went with like a thousand, a lot seated sprint, like it is, uh, and, and I at 1 95.

[01:13:26] Nate Pearson: Right. So that might be a lot of words for some people, but for other people that’s not. And, uh, John’s got like, uh, what, 1300 Watts sprain

[01:13:33] Jonathan Lee: or something? 1400. Yeah. Yeah. 14.

[01:13:35] Nate Pearson: Yeah. Uh, just, just saying like, don’t pigeon your whole self pigeonhole yourself into anything. It’s like the, it’s the worst thing you can do in life, but it’s also bad in cycling.

[01:13:47] Nate Pearson: Everyone’s capable of so much more than they it’s like the, this is the motivation podcast. There’s more capable of what you realize. I guarantee you every single person here is selling themselves short. There’s probably one negative negative megalomania. Who has not everybody else is you can do more than what you believe in.

[01:14:06] Nate Pearson: And if you push out what your belief is, you’re going to fill that space with how you perform. That’s the way it is.

[01:14:12] Jonathan Lee: Yeah.

How to manage expectations for yourself in cycling

[01:14:13] Amber Pierce: Well, I will say I always struggled with confidence. I still do to an extent. Um, but one of the things that really helped me was cause I would always say like, oh, it’s really hard for me to go from not believing myself to believing in myself that just felt like such a huge step.

[01:14:27] Amber Pierce: Like how do I convince myself that I’m capable of doing this? Because my brain works in a very evidence-based way. So if I haven’t done it yet, I’m not sure I can, until I do. And that’s a really frustrating way of it makes it very harder to build confidence. Uh, what helped me a lot was getting curious.

[01:14:42] Amber Pierce: Cause then you, you’re not ruling anything out. You stop telling yourself stories about what you can and can’t do and you just open your mind and say, let’s find out, let’s go see. And that relieved a lot of pressure. Cause it was like, okay. Um, if you, if you can get to a place where you can believe in yourself, do it because I a hundred percent agree with Nate.

[01:15:01] Amber Pierce: Most people are selling themselves short. If you are a megalomaniac in cycling, you will be humbled very fast. This port is not good for most people’s egos because it’s really hard to win. And cycling is really hard. The training is tough. Um, the learning curve is steep. It’s a lot of fun and it’s really rewarding.

[01:15:20] Amber Pierce: But for most of us are you guys can take a bit. It’s okay. Just get, get curious and adopt a growth mindset where you’re here to learn and just learn to get better every day. And if you learn one thing every day that you can apply, you’re on a great track.

[01:15:37] Nate Pearson: Hmm. I have this idea, Amber, that like, I’ve thought about this before, where there’s this like narcissist that races that never thinks that they can’t do it.

[01:15:45] Nate Pearson: And they’re just an awesome race or they lose all the time, but they’re just like, that’s just because the payment was wrong and like come right back in the next time. And they just, there’s just confident again and they keep going for it and they end up racing pretty well because they never go. I’m not good enough because they think of themselves so highly.

[01:16:02] Nate Pearson: Right. Um, and that can happen with regular people too. Yeah. Uh, the other part is that the, the writer types I’ve said this before, that it really, it really does matter at the really high world tour level, but Amber just gave us one of the biggest woman in the, in the Peloton out climbing people at the world tour level, which that’s an example right there.

[01:16:24] Nate Pearson: And then, uh, you see other things like on are beating people in a sprint who are pure sprint

[01:16:31] Jonathan Lee: finish. Exactly.

[01:16:34] Nate Pearson: That’s that is insane. And I wonder how many people are in the Peloton who don’t consider themselves their spinners. So they never work on their sprint and they don’t realize that that was the, that was the conventional wisdom.

[01:16:47] Nate Pearson: No way you can win a mountain type top finish. Eddy Merckx maybe other than that, it’s not going to happen. And while it’s like, I sprinted a bunch and in a cyclocross, like why I’ve been doing this forever? Like, why can’t I do it here too? And so he shows up and he tries, and then he wins

[01:17:07] Jonathan Lee: and they never

[01:17:08] Ivy Audrain: put themselves in the position to try to sprint and guarantee.

[01:17:11] Ivy Audrain: I’m curious and I’m trying that stuff. And don’t, I don’t, I feel there’s so much attachment around knowing what kind of cyclists you are. I feel like other road cyclists do that to each other,

[01:17:23] Jonathan Lee: see if identity, right. We like seek ways to identify ourselves. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:27] Amber Pierce: Right.

[01:17:27] Ivy Audrain: And the things that NIGO can focus on is like, I don’t know if I’m a sprinter, but I’m going to get really good at being in the right spot in the last corner and focus on that.

[01:17:42] Ivy Audrain: And I’m gonna do it every time, or like, learn how to do it, or I’m gonna learn how, like launching an attack with a K to go and being the best at that and learning that that’s a skill that you can do. Like what kind of writer does that make you, it doesn’t make you a type of writer. It makes you really know yourself.

[01:17:59] Ivy Audrain: And it means you’ve developed some really intricate Tufts skills, but don’t put you in a writer type of being a sprinter or a climber or whatever

[01:18:07] Jonathan Lee: makes it fun. That’s a

[01:18:10] Amber Pierce: really good point because it’s not just about the physicality either. There’s a whole layer of tactics there, right? And a whole psychological game at play here that you can tap into as well.

[01:18:18] Amber Pierce: So I’m a hundred percent not just about rider type, like on a physical level, on a tactical level, on a mental level. Just give it a go. See what you can do,

[01:18:29] Jonathan Lee: Nico. I’d like to encourage you to play chess, not checkers on this. So everyone else will put every other rider into a box. So when you’re in a race, you will look at another rider and you will say, oh, Nate’s tall.

[01:18:44] Jonathan Lee: Nate’s not going to do well on a climb. That rider looks really. Maybe small, it looks like they can get that. Writer’s going to be a good sprinter. Somebody is going to try to put you into a box and I would challenge you once again to play chess, not checkers and experiment with that, do unexpected things and do things when people aren’t expecting, because that’s the coolest part about road racing.

[01:19:06] Jonathan Lee: It’s I mean, it’s, it’s basically just gambling. It’s people putting down bets and those bets are paid in terms of, of, you know, physical strain. Right. But people are putting down bets all the time in a road, race and, and bets are made wrong and it happens. And you could make a good bet and you could totally flip that deck and change it on them.

[01:19:25] Jonathan Lee: Uh, Amber, you have something to say on that. I just have a funny

[01:19:28] Amber Pierce: story to share. So speaking of tactics, this comes back when I was in elementary school, back in the day, I, we like to do like mini ad hoc, little running races on the, on the playground. And I was pretty fast runner at the time. Um, not so anymore, but anyway, there was, it

[01:19:45] Jonathan Lee: comes out.

[01:19:46] Jonathan Lee: It’s actually going to be really good at triathlon. Now, now we know she was a childhood runner, a prodigy. So I might say, yeah, you know? Yeah.

[01:19:54] Amber Pierce: So there was a kid that me and this other kid were really, really like, we were kind of, we were fast. And so we, somebody challenged us to race each other to determine like who was the fastest kid on the playground.

[01:20:04] Amber Pierce: So the challenge was to run across the playground, touch the fence and come back. And the first person to finish was gonna be. I’ll tell you what I did. I went out way too fast on purpose. Like I went at a dead sprint all the way across the playground. We touched the fence and he gave up and there, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sustain that pace, but I just, I psyched him out mentally and won by default.

[01:20:29] Amber Pierce: So it’s not just physical.

[01:20:34] Jonathan Lee: The refiner’s fire, the crucible,

[01:20:40] Amber Pierce: very silly, silly story. But Hey, you know, it’s not just about fitness.

[01:20:45] Nate Pearson: I told games that happens on climbs all the time though. Uh, they go out at such a hard pace that they just want the, this like the cycling thing, you start out so hard and someone goes, I can’t do this. And you hold on for like 30 more seconds.

[01:20:58] Nate Pearson: They drop out a brown, a corner and a decline, right. They lose contact and they just mentally give up thinking that you’re going to be able to hold this the whole time. The other part that, that isn’t here is in my whole, my whole life. Actually I, a lot of times I’m probably given away too much. I positioned myself to be underestimated on purpose and you have to be able to not like people will say things about you and you can not correct them because you know, they’re inaccurate.

[01:21:29] Nate Pearson: But then when you show up over, when it matters, it’s like, you can do your thing. And uh, they go, that’s weird. That’s not like Nate. He got lucky. But it puts you into a position where they’re not as concerned about you or focused on you. This happens in business and in sport and other stuff too. And it’s a, it’s a nice place to be, to be underestimated.

[01:21:51] Nate Pearson: Once we started putting all those videos online and it showed that I could win a bunch of races, it actually was really bad for my racing because John too. Cause then you get like marches and stuff like that because a lot of people saw it. But, uh, before that me saying, I don’t know how to race, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[01:22:07] Nate Pearson: Uh, it helped put the podcast and then you went all the races and then, then it makes it harder. So just that idea of being underestimated. Amazing. Uh, especially if you’re doing things that are not look like your body type does. So people go, oh, we’re going to drop Amber on this climb and I’m goes, oh, I’m so tired.

[01:22:23] Nate Pearson: I can’t do this. Oh my goodness, bam. And then she like, turns it on what is wrong with this world? My whole idea. Uh, I have cognitive dissonance in my head and I can’t handle this and I’m going to drop out.

[01:22:35] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. I, I I’m bad at assessing situations. It makes them doubt every, yeah.

[01:22:40] Nate Pearson: Something’s grown with my body today because an of all people, Amber should not be dropping me because she is taller than me and weighs more than me.

[01:22:47] Nate Pearson: How could this be happening? I must have a bad day. My chain needs to be waxed, obviously.

[01:22:52] Jonathan Lee: And that’s the, that’s the reason it got too personal. That’s you? Yeah. But the more

[01:22:56] Nate Pearson: you can do that

[01:22:59] Jonathan Lee: thing I want to, this is an interesting point that you made that I’ve never heard anybody else talk about a competitor like that.

[01:23:05] Jonathan Lee: You mentioned that narcissist. Gets beat down, but then still comes back the next week, believing there’s, uh, uh, people that like motorcross and remember an athlete named Chad Reed, he’d raced for him for super long career. And that guy was the perennial second place, his whole career. But he showed up every single week believing he could win.

[01:23:24] Jonathan Lee: Like, and it’s funny when you talk to people that were inside his inner circle, like he never once was like disillusioned, right? He was never like, oh gosh, I can’t do it. He just went back the next week. And he knew that week he could win. And honestly, it didn’t happen because of generational like overlap.

[01:23:41] Jonathan Lee: He was with the best of the best that have ever existed in that sport. At that time. Now all of us racing locally, you will be in a position where you may be lining up against people that are so much better than you. And as a result, if they beat you on a climb, you’ll think you’re not a climber. Or if they beat you in a sprint, you’ll think you’re not a sprinter.

[01:24:00] Jonathan Lee: And it’s really important to not listen to that and to instead go back to it and approach it with curiosity. Like Amber said, whatever somebody else does has no bearing on who you are. It’s, it’s what you choose to do. And you can race, however you plan to race. So approach it with curiosity, ambers like trademark saying that we should put on a t-shirt.

[01:24:19] Jonathan Lee: It’s awesome. And it’ll make you it’ll it’ll help you learn new things about yourself to do this metaphor of bikes too. It’s really cool. It’ll put yourself into it. It’ll put you into unique situations that you wouldn’t encounter otherwise,

[01:24:32] Nate Pearson: and you don’t have to be an artist to have.

[01:24:34] Jonathan Lee: Ah, yes. Good point.

[01:24:36] Jonathan Lee: Yes.

[01:24:38] Nate Pearson: Yeah. Just, just so you know, it’s just easier I think for that person, but you totally, you can get there the other way and be perfectly healthy and just, it’s true. Every race you can win and just because you made a bad one before it got dropped before, does not change

[01:24:51] Jonathan Lee: that. Yeah. It’s funny that Chad Reed guy he’s retired now, but even in interviews and he listened to him, he’s like, yeah, I could come back.

How fitness plateaus happen and how to avoid them

[01:24:58] Jonathan Lee: And when he’s like, you know, overweight and everything else. Yeah. I could deal with like, yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah. He has no idea that switches broken. So Matt’s question. He says, Hey guys, big fan of the podcast. We often hear about fitness plateaus. And I was wondering how much time without improvement does it take to consider yourself in a plateau?

[01:25:16] Jonathan Lee: So the actual measurement of one, in other words, after how much time without considerable considerable improvement, should I reassess my training approach and structure? Thanks so much for all, for all that you do, uh, Ivy, do you want to, um, share on this one first, kick us off? The

[01:25:36] Amber Pierce: only thing

[01:25:36] Ivy Audrain: I haven’t to contribute to this is that my plateaus often show up retrospectively.

[01:25:43] Ivy Audrain: Like I always look back I’m

[01:25:45] Amber Pierce: like, well, whoops, that was the time when

[01:25:47] Ivy Audrain: I did.

[01:25:50] Jonathan Lee: How do you recognize that? Like, like what do you look back or what, what, um, why don’t you recognize them in the moment and why do you recognize them later? What signs are you. I

[01:25:59] Ivy Audrain: feel like for the type of writer that I am. I see my plateaus in repeatability of effort.

[01:26:06] Ivy Audrain: Um, it’s hard for me to just look at strictly numbers that doesn’t really speak to like shorter efforts, how I’m feeling, but then when I do race or race group ride, and I feel like I hit higher numbers consistently and look back at the effort and think, oh, well that was, that didn’t feel strenuous. That felt really good.

[01:26:29] Ivy Audrain: And I could have done that for an hour more that’s when I look back and go, well, that was the time that I planned to.

[01:26:37] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. How about, uh, Nate? Have you like going through plateaus? What things do you notice or feel when you’re going through a plateau?

[01:26:45] Nate Pearson: Yeah. It’s going to matter your training history and how much volume you can take and your lifestyle and how consistent you’ve been.

[01:26:55] Nate Pearson: Because some people I I’ve seen it, they’re not consistent. And they’re like, I’m in a plateau. It’s like, no, it’s just like you, you, you, you miss a workout every other week and it’s going to be tough to do that. Other people, you might a five watt gain year over year might be pretty. And you might say that’s a plateau, but you might actually just be close to where your maximum training load is for your lifestyle.

[01:27:18] Nate Pearson: And you’re probably not in our world of like your maximum capabilities because of lifestyle. Like you’re magic, magic, you’re magical, you’re maximum and magical. There’s logical capabilities, but there’s a balance there, right? So when you do plateau, some people think they either need to, uh, one has changed their whole training philosophy.

[01:27:42] Nate Pearson: Like everything needs to change or to it is, uh, more volume and it could be a lot, lots of other stuff. It could be the, the workouts that you’re picking. It could be the recovery between workouts. It could be the sleep that you’re getting. It could be the nutrition that you’re doing both on and off the bike.

[01:27:59] Nate Pearson: Those could be reasons why you’re applied towing. And I would say that if I was doing a whole block of train road workouts, and I could not increase my levels at all. So I can’t, every time I’m at a five threshold and I could just not get a 5.2 or a 5.3 at all, like I just keep going back to five and can’t do it.

[01:28:20] Nate Pearson: And then each one of those I can’t move forward at all and I’m not overly tired and I got everything else done. I would say that’s a plateau. And what I might do is add more volume, do longer workouts, that sort of thing to increase it. But that’s only if I can take it based on, you know, I’m a happy mood and all that.

[01:28:37] Nate Pearson: Most people aren’t going to do that. And it’s consistency. If you’re consistent and you’re increasing your levels, you can be really fast. As John said on the, how many of our successful athlete podcast, people do amazing things on low volume, like three workouts a week.

[01:28:54] Jonathan Lee: We actually just had a blog post that we put out on this.

[01:28:56] Jonathan Lee: You can go to train road.com/blog, and it highlights examples of athletes that are doing extraordinary things on low volume plants. There’s a lot of them, a huge amount. So

[01:29:06] Nate Pearson: yeah, like what, what kind of things are they doing? Oh yeah.

[01:29:09] Jonathan Lee: Uh, winning, uh, Ironman age group, world championships, uh, winning pretty amazing.

[01:29:15] Jonathan Lee: Right. Um, winning state championships and national championships fitting in training while they’re being apparent in everything else and still competing at like the state level and doing well achieving PRS, like, like that’s a big thing to achieving lifetime PRS with low volume training because in our mind that breaks, right?

[01:29:33] Jonathan Lee: Because you’re like, no, I need to do more to get more. But once again, it’s a good example of doing less and getting more out of it. Okay. There is

[01:29:39] Nate Pearson: this, this part too. If you’re a plateaued where instead of adding more volume, you add more rest between and the harder days get harder. Right? So low volumes, easy on that because you don’t have to do the hard days there the rest days.

[01:29:52] Nate Pearson: And as long as you don’t fill them in with something else and then just make sure those levels keep increasing. You’re no longer plateaued. And the nice thing about that with the new adaptive training is that you don’t have to wait four to six weeks to see if you’re getting stronger. That next workout you can see week over week.

[01:30:07] Nate Pearson: Did I increase my levels? Boom, you are actually stronger. It is no longer a plateau.

[01:30:12] Jonathan Lee: Um, Amber, um,

[01:30:15] Amber Pierce: I just want to tie this back to what we were talking about earlier with overreaching, because these two things can be connected and fill in the live chat, just pointed this out, and it’s absolutely true. Um, because when you get into an overreaching state, that can feel like a plateau and that can bite, you know, depending on your situation that could tip over into nonfunctional overreaching.

[01:30:33] Amber Pierce: Um, but I also just kind of want to step in here and to say, uh, there’s different ways of tracking progress, and we know that progress is not linear. So it is possible that you can go for a period of time without seeing substantial, um, increase in fitness. If that’s your benchmark of progress and then suddenly your body adapts to a training load, your body’s not going to adapt in a linear fashion, right?

[01:30:56] Amber Pierce: It’s not going to adapt the same amount every single day. You’re not going to see this perfect linear stepwise improvement. What usually happens is you don’t see much improvement and then bam, all of a sudden your body adapts and you feel like you just leveled up. Um, and so sometimes it feels like when progress isn’t linear, it feels like that because it’s very slow, but then sometimes it can feel really fast.

[01:31:19] Amber Pierce: And that’s the beauty of there’s two sides of progress. Isn’t linear. Um, but if you are going through a prolonged period of time and you have other symptoms aside from not seeing your power numbers go up or other benchmarks of training progress, You’re feeling down. You’re really not motivated. You’re on an emotional roller coaster.

[01:31:37] Amber Pierce: Uh that’s when you want to start looking at things like recovery, nutrition, uh, see if some of those things might help too. Cause it might not just be a plateau. It might be just a couple of little leavers that you need. You need a tweak and

[01:31:51] Jonathan Lee: you might be good. I wanted to share something to normalize plateaus because sometimes the plateau is okay.

[01:31:57] Jonathan Lee: Like, and now I assume in this case, Matt, uh, Matt is reaching up because Matt doesn’t want to be in a plateau, but sometimes it’s okay. Don’t feel the pressure as an endurance athlete to just always be like, I was talking about joking around with Nate before, but always be up right. Always be going up, up, up.

[01:32:13] Jonathan Lee: Sometimes the plateaus is okay. Uh, another thing, this is a great comment from cliff bear and ski in the live chat. He says progression levels got me through my plateau. I was probably doing too many achievable or stretch workouts before progression levels rolled out and now focusing on more productive workouts, which made a huge difference.

[01:32:30] Jonathan Lee: So I want to define that for people that don’t use trainer road yet. So we defined your workouts as achievable is something that you’ve proven you can do or, uh, the way the AI or the way that adaptive training is adapter analyzing you. It knows that you can do that work. So that’s achievable that might look like a sort of workout that you can do, or you don’t feel like you’re really pushed to the limits at all.

[01:32:51] Jonathan Lee: You just feel like, yeah, I nailed it. Easy, not too tough then after that is productive and productive, is that, is that and pardon the term sweet spot, but it’s that, that area where you want to be where you’re getting enough benefit from the work being stretched like Amber was saying, but not too much so that you can recover and still do more work thereafter and following days.

[01:33:13] Jonathan Lee: And then after that we have stretch workouts and stretch workouts are still something that you could do, but they are going to be difficult to complete. And in our training plans, you will rarely get a stretch prescribed. I can’t think of a situation where you’ll get one, but I could be wrong, but they are not intentionally prescribed in almost every case.

[01:33:31] Jonathan Lee: And then after that you have stretch, then you get into not recommended workout or breakthrough workouts, which that’s like a huge one where you have bumped up a bunch of levels and then there’s not recommended. So that’s the context. So what he is saying here is he is saying that he was doing too much, too many workouts that were either too easy or too hard.

[01:33:48] Jonathan Lee: And now he’s doing just the right amount of difficulty workouts. And as a result, he is getting more improvement. And this is one thing that I want to mention with plateauing plateauing. It could be happening for any number of reasons. It could be happening because of bad training prescription. You’re just not getting pushed enough or you’re getting pushed too much.

[01:34:05] Jonathan Lee: Both of those things can cause a plan. They may feel different. Both can cause a plateau. Once again, we’re bad at kind of understanding what we’re actually feeling. Most of the time. Another thing that could be causing this too, is nutrition is rest is sleep. You may actually be doing the right training, but it’s not the right training for the amount you’re able to recover from.

[01:34:27] Jonathan Lee: So your stress, once again, can’t outpace your rest too much. It needs to be in proper proportion. So if you have a new job and it’s really difficult right now, maybe your training is what you could physically handle, but because of the new stress in your life, you need to step it back a little bit. But the one thing I’m breaking out of a plateau is to try something different, try something unique.

[01:34:49] Jonathan Lee: Uh, this is a really an easy way on a small scale that you can do this within train a road is workout alternatives. You can just look for a different type of workout. So for example, if you’re doing VO two max work and you’d be doing long, sustained VO, two max work, try switching it up with short shorts where you’re just doing the 30 thirties and threshold work.

[01:35:06] Jonathan Lee: If you’ve been doing over unders try stuff, that’s the stuff that’s just underneath through hard starts just like changing up. Even those training stimulus on the small side can actually have an impact and make it so that you can start improving again. Or it’s flipping the deck. You can swap out your training plan for a different one, work on short power instead of sustained.

[01:35:24] Jonathan Lee: Do something else that’s totally different or it takes some rest. But the point. Plateaus happen because we usually either aren’t being pushed enough or we’re being pushed too hard. And as a result, our body can improve and the way to improve it. And I know this sounds super logical is change in stimulus.

[01:35:42] Jonathan Lee: Um, but in most cases, if you’re plateauing and if this is why adaptive training is so nice is because you don’t have to question whether it’s too much or not enough, because it’s well calibrated to you. But most of the time, if you’re plateauing, first thing I would look at is your rest. Just to not put yourself deeper in a hole, like, am I training too much for what I can recover from?

[01:36:00] Jonathan Lee: And then look at adding on more thereafter, Nate, did you have something to add? Amber

[01:36:06] Nate Pearson: said about the, uh, progress is not linear in my experience when Pete and I talked about this before and Amarone with your opinion, Amber and Ivy, actually all of us that time where you, excuse me, you might be, you feel like stalled.

[01:36:22] Nate Pearson: It’s usually because of an increase in volume and you, so you do an increase in volume. And I had this where I, like, I jumped to like all to our workouts and I had a month of being like stale where like, I really wasn’t moving up so much. I could do it, but I didn’t, I didn’t feel like I had snapped. And then I recovered a couple more like bad.

[01:36:41] Nate Pearson: And then I bumped up the ADA ramp tested. It was like, boom. Like my body suddenly recovered from that amount of large amounts of work and I move forward and that can happen if you increase. You increase your volume so much that you need recovery and you can’t get that bump until you get the recovery.

[01:36:57] Nate Pearson: It’s it’s like the, uh, functional overreaching where you go down, right? Uh, that is one way to do it. It is kind of hard to do, and it’s an easy, it’s like it’s kind of dangerous. I think pros are probably better at it than non pros, uh, dangerous in the way that you could go too much, but that can also happen.

[01:37:13] Nate Pearson: So instead of being, you know, progressively go up, you upgrade your volume, do the same types of workouts recover, and then you get the boost, uh, start with Amber. Is that your experience too, with that like training camp could be another example of this, right? You do training camp. You’re like stale for awhile and then you’ve suddenly absorb it.

[01:37:32] Amber Pierce: Yep, exactly. And it D it depends on the writer, right? For some people that’s going to be volume for some people that is going to be intensity, I will say, at the professional level, and it doesn’t apply to everybody, but you get to a point where you know exactly what you need for your legs to be super sharp.

[01:37:45] Amber Pierce: And what you’re describing is what I would have referred to as feeling flat. So it’s not that I’m not capable of racing and competing, but I just feel flat. I don’t have that nice sharp snap. Um, so what we would do is, for example, if we were going into. In my early years, we, we often had back-to-back stage races.

[01:38:04] Amber Pierce: So I might have three weeks worth of continuous stage racing with maybe one or two days between in a massive block. And in that case, I might actually want to go into that block a little bit flat because the racing and the recovery, you know, recovering appropriately between stages and races would actually help me move into that state of feeling really sharp and snappy.

[01:38:24] Amber Pierce: Um, so we would learn what things would help us feel sharp versus what things would make us flat. And we would tweak that timing a little bit so that it would coincide with, um, a target race, for example, but absolutely that is definitely the case. And it’s something that everybody, as an individual can pay attention to.

[01:38:41] Amber Pierce: What are the things that make you feel flat? Um, and then what are the things that you can do to help you adapt and compensate and get that nice super compensation? So you start to feel really sharp.

[01:38:53] Jonathan Lee: Uh,

[01:38:54] Ivy Audrain: yeah, some sometimes they do that on accident

[01:39:00] Ivy Audrain: because you get really excited that bike racing is back after, you know, a year and change your team’s breath number. And you just want to ride and do a bunch of volume and intensity with your friends, and then you go do your first.

[01:39:13] Amber Pierce: Block of UCI cross races and suck.

[01:39:16] Ivy Audrain: And it’s like

[01:39:18] Jonathan Lee: so

[01:39:18] Ivy Audrain: flat, it was so bad.

[01:39:19] Ivy Audrain: And I seriously contemplated like quitting it’s

[01:39:22] Jonathan Lee: like this, on that, like, cause I remember that period of time, like, uh, it was really frustrating because before, prior to that you were like, I’m falling, I’m ripping. Like this is awesome. And then you got to the races and you just weren’t. So what did you change?

[01:39:36] Jonathan Lee: Was it resting more or I didn’t rest

[01:39:39] Ivy Audrain: before, after that time, before going to race and any rest enough. And then once I got on the road and started racing, couldn’t chill out and take a rest period. And so after that first block I took a rest and just like cried deeply in thumbnail quitting. And I was like, all right, let’s try it again.

[01:39:59] Ivy Audrain: And sure enough, as soon as I started working back into it, I had felt way better and felt like myself again and snappy and yeah. So whoops, as a mistake,

[01:40:08] Jonathan Lee: I like picture our body just being like, anytime now, just like waiting for that rest. Like you’ve given me plenty of stress anytime now where’s the rest of them.

[01:40:16] Jonathan Lee: Like we keep giving us stress. It’s like, okay, I guess I’ll deal with that again. Oh, okay. I’ll deal with it again. And it’s just like, just give me rest. And it was hard

[01:40:23] Amber Pierce: to

[01:40:23] Ivy Audrain: tell myself that I wanted restaurant. I was feeling so good. I was like, why? No,

[01:40:26] Amber Pierce: don’t slow down now. It’s coming

[01:40:29] Jonathan Lee: back. So relatable. Like all of us, right when we’re fighting.

[01:40:33] Jonathan Lee: Why in the world would we not spend more time on our bike? Because that’s more awesome things we can do. Like. How it works, but in our minds, but it’s not how it works physically. I forget where

[01:40:43] Amber Pierce: I heard the same, but somebody who said don’t wasted legs on training.

[01:40:47] Jonathan Lee: I like that attack so many times it’s personally personally attacked, but Hey, it’s fine.

[01:40:54] Jonathan Lee: We can move past it.

[01:40:56] Nate Pearson: John, that was almost John’s like ammo for awhile was the last interval and a trainer road workout. I’m going to go all out. Like it’s a race winning.

[01:41:04] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. I wouldn’t say it was an emo, but it’s the temptation that I would give into when I would start feeling fast. You know what I mean?

[01:41:10] Jonathan Lee: Yes. Um, oh yeah, yeah. It’s and boy, don’t we all face that. That’s for sure. Uh, so hopefully in this case, we’ve given some good advice, uh, Matt, and some, some context on plateauing and how to break through it. Uh, let’s go to Forrest question. She says, Hey, train road, team, longtime listener, and nutrient road user.

[01:41:30] Jonathan Lee: I’ve already seen a 10% increase in FTP from December to January things to adapt, to training in the structured workouts, way to go 10%. Um, I do unspeakable things for 10% right now. That would be sweet. Uh, my question is where and how to find the ideal women’s tr or women’s time trial saddle. Does it remain trial and error?

Finding the ideal womens and mens saddles

[01:41:50] Jonathan Lee: And if I can, we are going to focus this on women’s saddles, but then Nate and I, can we talk about men’s Chon time trial saddles to afterward because. I don’t know. Well, then I will call him after the live chat. Maybe you can help me out with this. But anyways, uh, Flores says I’ve tried the ism pro 3.1 and the pro stuff.

[01:42:13] Jonathan Lee: And those are two different brands. Ism is the brand. That’s the pro 3.1 and the pro stealth that’s like pro bike components. It’s an arm of Shimano. I believe. So pro stealth is the name of that settle and the Sally SMP and then, uh, flora mentions from chafing to bruising the pubic bone non-work. Well, I heard that pro women gets saddles made for them ideal, but unrealistic for most of us.

[01:42:37] Jonathan Lee: Why does it seem so hard for women to find the right saddle? I’d love to hear your thoughts to keep up the great work. Uh, have any of you had your, a saddle custom made for you? I know specialized does that mirror thing, but I don’t know if they ever got to the point where they’re making custom ones.

[01:42:51] Jonathan Lee: Well,

[01:42:51] Ivy Audrain: my, my saddles are handmade in Missoula. We called caterpillar ergonomics. You’re super great. But they’re not custom made only, this is, sounds like something that some like bro would say to a woman, like on a group ride when she’s in sound trouble, like some dude would be like, oh yeah, well I heard the pro women get their saddles custom made you go out and get it.

[01:43:14] Ivy Audrain: No,

[01:43:16] Amber Pierce: pretty much in the process to also like sitting in some sort of like goopy moles

[01:43:22] Ivy Audrain: style

[01:43:22] Amber Pierce: for you, it doesn’t exist

[01:43:25] Jonathan Lee: also the impossible, the TT position, because I still am confused at how any saddle can be good for a TT position. It’s crazy, like, right. Is his discomfort inherent? Like, is that just part of it?

[01:43:41] Jonathan Lee: And Ivy, I actually have no clue how much time you spent on a TT bike. Um, so I don’t know, uh, what your experiences are with that, but a

[01:43:50] Ivy Audrain: bit when I was raising road, professionally ended all the state races and stuff. Um, but I feel, I feel like with tracks specifically and with doing a lot of crits and being in a really like forward rolled position, really aggressive position.

[01:44:07] Ivy Audrain: I used to ride TT saddles just all the time. In some instances, depending upon the bike, I was on a fit, um, because of how that forward rotated I was in my position that was akin to a time trial position. Um, so yeah, I tried a bunch of TT saddles and some of them worked for me for a while and some of them didn’t and sometimes I had teams where our clothing sponsor had really bad shammies and that was the problem, not the saddle.

[01:44:41] Ivy Audrain: Um, so yeah, it’s unfortunately trial and error.

[01:44:47] Amber Pierce: I kind of my band, I’m just laughing about this idea of women getting custom saddles at the pro level, because the custom saddles that I witnessed were pro women actually modifying their own saddles to make them work for them because often what happens is we don’t get a choice.

[01:45:05] Amber Pierce: So we have a satisfied. And we have to ride that brand. You have a choice of models most of the time, not always. Um, and so you can get in really big trouble for writing the incorrect settle. So I knew women who would actually take a lighter and melt out a cut out in the plastic piece, underneath the saddle.

[01:45:25] Amber Pierce: They would go in and, and so on different fabrics. I mean, the, the, the range of modification was huge. And I will tell you, this was not provided service. This is something that people were hacking together in their kitchens, um, out of, uh, like survival instinct, right. Um, and I’ll share it one season. Uh, there was a particular brand, I won’t say which brand were sponsored.

[01:45:50] Amber Pierce: And I did one training ride on my Titi BA bike with a saddle and was like, this is medically concerning and not possible. Like, I can’t. I can’t actually use the saddle. And so I asked to be able to use a different saddle for tr for TTS, because it was, I literally got a note from my doctor to present this and Nope, it was a no go.

[01:46:15] Amber Pierce: So out of self preservation, I just, I didn’t do pen trials that year. And if I had to do a time trial during a stage race, I basically kind of set up to pur to survive because, you know, there would be multiple days of racing after that. Um, so it is not just rainbows and puffy clouds for the pro women. Um, this is a struggle for all of us and it is trial and error, like I said, um, I think one of the things that’s a little bit frustrating is this is a relatively new thing that brands are looking at, right?

[01:46:48] Amber Pierce: This was not something that was really done research experimented with 20, 30 years ago. Like women’s specific settles is a new idea, relatively speaking. And a lot of the first settles that came out were really marketing, right? It was, it was the optics of having a women’s specific settle. It wasn’t functionally doing anything that was going to be helping.

[01:47:11] Amber Pierce: That is getting a lot better. And I think that the benefit to this is for everyone, regardless of gender, uh, because everybody is different shapes and sizes. Everybody has different needs. Um, and there’s no one size fits all. I will say when it comes to time trialing in particular, it is hard to find a saddle that isn’t gonna get.

[01:47:30] Amber Pierce: Some kind of discomfort. Um, it should not cross over to the point of being medically concerning. It should be, it should absolutely be at a minimum tolerable. Um, comfortable might be a lofty goal, but getting to a point where it’s tolerable and it’s not doing, you know, and you can recover from whatever discomfort on a training ride relatively quickly.

[01:47:54] Amber Pierce: Like that would be probably a good idea.

[01:47:58] Jonathan Lee: I don’t think there’s any like a general, uh, or generalizations are tough with saddles too. You can’t say that like, you’re a woman, therefore you need this width or do you need a cutout or you need a snub nose or whatever else on the saddles there there’s. I think that it varies right from, from athlete to athlete.

[01:48:16] Jonathan Lee: In some cases, a men’s saddle may work best for you. A women’s saddle may work best for a man. I see a lot of men with, uh, specialized power, mid, uh, mimic, I think settle the one that’s a women’s specific saddle, but it’s also just really comfortable because like the front is extremely soft. It’s like almost not there.

[01:48:37] Jonathan Lee: So, I mean, there’s saddles are trial and error for sure. Um, uh, Ivy, you mentioned CATA, hula, uh, or the saddles that you have, right? Um, Amber, do you ride fabric settles? I don’t know, know what you. Which settled for these days,

[01:48:55] Amber Pierce: I have a mix. So, um, I’m trying to think. I like, uh, Prologo dimension is one and I also changed it up with the ism Adamo um, cause now I can pick whatever settles I want.

[01:49:05] Amber Pierce: Um, but yeah, I actually, I do like mixing it up a little bit because then, um, I’m not always getting to pressure points in the same places and that’s

[01:49:14] Jonathan Lee: kind of nice. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Nate, a saddle that you prefer, are you a power guy? Is that

[01:49:21] Nate Pearson: the wide specialized mirror, which is annoying because it’s the super expensive one, but it was such a big improvement that I bought them for all the bikes that I can even get like a TT position on it, but it’s just so expensive and ridiculous, but hopefully I can have that one forever.

[01:49:40] Nate Pearson: Now

[01:49:41] Jonathan Lee: I use the Proloquo dimension. That’s the one I liked, um, at that one in terms of. I’ve actually never had a person that has tried it and said that, oh, I can’t stand it. I’ve had people try it and say, I still prefer one or the other, but it’s, uh, they, they like it. It seems like it’s a pretty agreeable shape.

[01:49:58] Jonathan Lee: Um, but once again, these are just like any equals one, but four of those and who knows if they actually work. I just figure it’s probably worth our time while we’re talking about to share what we, we, uh, use for TT saddles. I have no clue. I have tried the specialized had a time trial settle. It was the most uncomfortable thing I’ve used.

[01:50:18] Jonathan Lee: Uh, I have a Trek Quan that kind of is like an open front, like a, it looks like an ism Damo. Uh, and when I use that one, I feel like I’m, my pelvis is being like wedged apart. Uh, I can’t find, and I don’t even know if any, like if Ironman athletes actually, I don’t know if they’re honest. Um, hopefully we can find some that don’t have like saddle sponsors and then they can be honest because I don’t know how that’s comfortable to ride that long, 112 miles in your Aero position.

[01:50:48] Jonathan Lee: They may go in and out of that position, but the top athletes are in there for like the whole time. And man, to just be sitting there on those really uncomfortable with saddles, especially with triathlons, since they’re really pushed forward, they tend to be in a more rotated forward pelvis position too, then like a UCI governed TT position.

[01:51:06] Jonathan Lee: So. Man it’s I don’t know. Maybe it’s just, everyone’s suffering silently.

[01:51:11] Nate Pearson: Oh. Some people actually are, I’m talking lot your age groupers and they can, some people are totally comfortable in the whole position, like arms, neck that you can just go forever. I envy those people so much. Um, yeah. It’s, it’s crazy.

[01:51:26] Nate Pearson: And I’ve, I’ve always had,

[01:51:28] Jonathan Lee: you know what I mean? Yeah. No, I don’t buy it

[01:51:35] Jonathan Lee: because it’s particularly hard for you because you’re so tall and then like getting a bike to fit. Right. And then extensions, like everything has to be customed to the NC degree. Um, so, but the saddle is still, regardless of like everything else has saddled such a key part. So, uh, flora, I don’t know. We might’ve not have helped you at all in this case.

[01:51:54] Jonathan Lee: I am sorry, but hopefully we gave you some perspective, at least, uh, hopefully that’s helpful.

[01:52:00] Amber Pierce: Okay. A good starting point is bike fit. So make sure that you’ve got a good bike fit and that you’re working from a good position because position is going to matter a lot when you’re talking about the type of saddle.

[01:52:10] Amber Pierce: Um, the other thing is to remember, like Ivy mentioned the big shorts make a huge difference too. So one pair of shorts might play nice with one saddle and not with another. So that’s another. Factoring components. So if you’re going to be testing out saddles, start with a good bike fit, then make sure that you’re testing saddles in the shorts that you plan on racing in so that you know, that those are going to play nice in that particular combination.

[01:52:35] Amber Pierce: Um, and then from there, it, it really is trial and error, uh, which can get expensive, but talk to your local bike shops. A lot of them have demo programs where you can demo a saddle, um, and, and go from there. See if you can test them out and test them for a good while. Like give them a good, give them a good, um, some put some mileage on there and play around with the intensity on the bike, so that you’re really getting a feel for how that feel on the saddle is going to change depending on how hard you’re riding

[01:53:01] Jonathan Lee: and with bike fits.

[01:53:03] Jonathan Lee: Doctors and a diagnosis I would recommend second and third opinions on bike fits. Just seeing a whole lot of professional bike fits that, get people in some wacky positions. So, uh, w regardless, unless you’re using a system like retool or something else that’s using like principles to guide you toward the right bike fit, you’re just trusting an individual.

Tips for flying with your bike

[01:53:24] Jonathan Lee: You’re trusting their perspective on bike fit. So that’s also a layer of trial and error. I’m so sorry, flora. Um, hopefully I hope you can find this out, all that works for you quickly, uh, through all this took me years. Have fun. Yeah. Okay. Calvin’s question. Uh, thanks. Always for the killer advice, I have a race travel logistics question I’ve been known to do multi-day drives to get to races, but I’ve never flown to a race before this year.

[01:53:50] Jonathan Lee: It looks like I’ll have more funding, but tighter travel windows. And it seems like at least a few times it may make a lot more sense to fly. However, it seems like flying to a bike race requires a whole new level of planning and logistical thinking, unless you’re on a team that manages that for you. And I’ve thought about that in the times.

[01:54:07] Jonathan Lee: And like, when I traveled to races and stuff, I’m like, man, I really like not being part of a team, but this is when I would love to be a part of a team to have somebody else have a pump and to have somebody else have like all this stuff, maybe my nutrition. So I don’t have to pack it up off. That’d be great because I find this pretty intimate.

[01:54:24] Jonathan Lee: I know that you talk about lots of races that I assume you have flown to. And certainly there are many athletes who do it all the time. Would you be able to provide an overview of strategies and tips for flying to a bike, race, specific challenges? I worry about involved packing lighter. I usually cram my car full with my bike pump, spare wheels on my apparel, lots of nutrition, items, tools, and more dealing with rental car companies that may not be thrilled with you loading a bike into their vehicles, airline delays, and cancellations affecting your ability to actually make it to the race and all of this.

[01:54:53] Jonathan Lee: Adding up to a general increase in pre-race anxiety. I appreciate the help as always. Um, so two strategies that I want to point out two different ways that you can do this one. You can use bike flights or a similar service. You can just ship your bike, all bike flights does. And I apologize if I’m misunderstanding the business, but all bike fights does, is it, it’s like an easier user interface to send a bike.

[01:55:15] Jonathan Lee: Whereas if you take your bike to like a standard shipping place, they might be like, whoa, I don’t even know what to do with something that is big bike flights. We’ll let you print a label. And it makes it really easy. So you can’t use bikes. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:55:27] Ivy Audrain: I’ll interject because I used to work for by plates.

[01:55:29] Ivy Audrain: And if you place like flights order, you see my face telling you how to like safely ship your bike. It’s pretty

[01:55:34] Amber Pierce: funny, already

[01:55:36] Jonathan Lee: embedded another person of using bike foot bike fight to get happy. Ivy

[01:55:42] Amber Pierce: it’s IB from like

[01:55:43] Ivy Audrain: five lifetimes ago too. And I’m like long brown hair and I’m just super basic and

[01:55:47] Amber Pierce: yeah, it’s funny.

[01:55:50] Amber Pierce: Uh, so biplanes also has a, uh,

[01:55:54] Ivy Audrain: they’re offered a high volume discount from ups because they shipped so many bikes that it’s so much cheaper than if you as an individual were to go into ups. Or, you know, and be like how much to ship this bike. So they pass along big discount to you, but then also you can arrange a ups pickup from your house or hotel.

[01:56:14] Ivy Audrain: Um, so once you’re at the race and you, um, like pre print your labels, basically you just putting your dimensions and your shipping locations and pre print your labels, and you can prearrange a ups pickup from wherever you’re staying for your race or from your house or whatever. So those are all services.

[01:56:32] Ivy Audrain: If I played stuff,

[01:56:34] Jonathan Lee: sorry. Uh, in terms of costs that I’ve seen now, especially since airlines are lowering or dropping their fees by fights would be a bit more expensive than most of the airlines that you fly. Not all some airlines are really expensive. Some are really cheap. Depends. Um, Southwest is $75 per bike each way here in the United States.

[01:56:54] Jonathan Lee: That’s a common airline, uh, that people will take like a domestic airline, whereas the United, I think it’s free now. Uh, I think they dropped their bike fee. I believe that American or Delta, I think American Delta American has yet to. Yep. Alaska airlines, I think is $15. I could be wrong, but last time I flew, I think it was that there are some like common, cheap ones that you can do.

[01:57:18] Jonathan Lee: Uh, other ones that are more expensive. So, I mean, if you think about Southwest, it’s 150 bucks to fly with your bike to and from, and in that case, you’re probably going to get pretty close to evening out with bike flights, or maybe even cheaper with bike flights. So that’s one option you can do. You can also ship.

[01:57:32] Jonathan Lee: Am I right in saying this Ivy, if you have a bike bag, you can put your label on that bike bag and have them ship that you don’t have to have a bike box, right? Yeah. You can use

[01:57:41] Ivy Audrain: ups. Thick sturdy hang tags that you can zip tie on your handles, or you can make a tie tie with an old like tieback race number and is a tie

[01:57:51] Amber Pierce: don’t stick your

[01:57:53] Ivy Audrain: adhesive, or like try to tape your number on a fabric bank bag because it just flies off.

[01:57:58] Ivy Audrain: Like it doesn’t stick well enough on it and the label flies off and then your bike bag gets lost. And that’s what I used to do by plates is find the lost bikes.

[01:58:08] Jonathan Lee: Good project. I didn’t think about that probably because of how cold it gets. Right. When it’s in the cargo department, that could make sense.

[01:58:14] Jonathan Lee: Well, yeah, and just

[01:58:15] Amber Pierce: like tape

[01:58:16] Ivy Audrain: isn’t or adhesive isn’t meant to stick on like Cordura fabric and stuff. If you’re using Microsoft case and it just

[01:58:23] Jonathan Lee: flies off and baggage handlers, basically playing curling with your bike bag, so all over the place. So yeah. Uh, the other way you could do it as a bike bag, Nate, uh, we’ve come through quite a few different bike bags here at the office, like testing different ones that we’ve liked, uh, Evoque.

[01:58:40] Jonathan Lee: I feel like makes the best ones that I’ve used. Do, would you agree? Uh,

[01:58:45] Nate Pearson: it depends on what the purpose is. I like the, um, what’s the, the helium one with the four

[01:58:51] Jonathan Lee: wheels, bike and BIS and

[01:58:55] Nate Pearson: yeah. So for road bikes, I like the bike and one, because I can set two sets of, uh, two sets of wheels in there and it has four wheels on it and it’s so easy to carry, even if it’s heavy, the EBAC pro bag or the no, sorry, the e-book XL.

[01:59:12] Nate Pearson: That one is really good for mountain biking and it’s, it’s just a solid big bag. The thing I don’t like about it as you, the wheel in the front is detachable for like airline stuff. And I think twice now we forgotten to take the wheel off

[01:59:25] Jonathan Lee: and they take the bag from you before you can take it off. And

[01:59:28] Nate Pearson: I mean, you could always stop them and be like, Hey, give me that wheel.

[01:59:31] Nate Pearson: Um, but you have to, you have to take the wheel off before you do it, or else you’ll lose that wheel. And then it can be so heavy to pull it through the e-book pro bag, which is the one where you don’t have to put your handlebars, take them off

[01:59:42] Jonathan Lee: the road or something like that. Yeah.

[01:59:44] Nate Pearson: I was so excited about that thing.

[01:59:46] Nate Pearson: And then one, my bike was still too big for it, but two, it is such a big bag that like you had to get like special cars and even putting into like this, this like huge bus, the guy was like, that’s not going to fit. We can’t do it. Um, which is annoying for all the other travel stuff. Uh, so for me, the two, the two ones that I use and it’s a luxury to have two bike bags, but we share them.

[02:00:08] Nate Pearson: So it’s going to have the EBAC XL for mountain biking and then the helium for road, uh,

[02:00:15] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve used, I like the bike and jet pack as well. That’s like a good one that can work for road or mountain bikes. It’s not going to be like, it’s a pain to carry because it doesn’t have a phone. Um,

[02:00:26] Nate Pearson: the problem with that one is that the, the front handle these in the old ones was like flat and it digs into your hand and it was so painful.

[02:00:34] Nate Pearson: And so what we did is we took a PVC pipe, we cut it and put it around there and then wrapped it with BARR tape. And that had that made it so much better, but still, I mean, there’s a lot of long walks and airports, and sometimes you pack your bike back pretty heavy and we’re not known for huge upper body strength.

[02:00:52] Nate Pearson: It’s like, and to carry that thing for like 20 minutes as you pull through, it’s just annoying. That’s why I like the four wheels where you can just like one finger push.

[02:01:01] Jonathan Lee: The Evoque road, bike bag pro is the one that looks like a hammerhead shark that you don’t have to take your drop bars off. You do have to take mountain bike bars off.

[02:01:08] Jonathan Lee: They definitely don’t fit mountain bike bars and a mountain bike won’t fit in that bag unless you ride like a size, extra small because of wheelbase. The wheelbase is designed around road bikes. Um, but th that one, it fits my road bike wonderfully, and I love it cause I have an integrated front end and Ugh, that is a mess to take apart.

[02:01:26] Jonathan Lee: So it works just fine, but I have to get like a pretty big car, like a midsize SUV or, or a truck or a minivan to be able to fit it in there because it is a portly bag, but it’s my favorite bag in terms of ease. Um, and then for mountain biking, Eva pro XL, I believe is the one that they call for that.

[02:01:45] Jonathan Lee: Amber you’ve probably traveled with a bike bag timer to, uh, how about you?

[02:01:50] Amber Pierce: Yeah. Um, so in addition to luggage logistics, there’s a lot of other logistics involved. And so I’m going to talk about two of my favorite things, cognitive load and snacks. So,

[02:02:05] Amber Pierce: um, one thing to remember is you’re not going to the moon, so there’s going to be grocery stores and resources where you’re going. Uh, it’s hard to remember that when you’re packing, cause you feel like you have to have all of the things, but do some research, figure out where you are, um, where the venue is going to be.

[02:02:20] Amber Pierce: Look for food chains that you like, um, grocery store chains that you like. So you can plan ahead and know what things you might be able to pick up when you get there versus having to take with you on the. And then plan ahead as much as you can so that you reduce cognitive load when you get there. So you can do things ahead of time, like create lists, like what’s your packing list of things that you want to bring to the race each day.

[02:02:41] Amber Pierce: Um, what’s the driving time from your accommodation to the race venue? What time would you need to leave each day? You can actually create all of those alarms on your phone before you ever leave on a trip and just don’t turn them on until you’re there. Um, uh, you can make grocery lists for yourself and make sure that you know exactly how to get to the grocery store from your accommodation.

[02:03:01] Amber Pierce: Uh, you’d have to do lists so that you remember when and where to pick up registration and packet pickup, and you can have all of those addresses plugged in and saved into your phone. If that’s what you use for navigation, you can preview courses using Google earth. There’s so many cool, uh, digital tools that we could use to prepare and make this real easy so that when you get on the ground, everything has already been planned out.

[02:03:23] Amber Pierce: And then that way it reduces cognitive load and it reduces the likelihood that you’re going to have any last minute. When it comes to equipment, you can find out if there’s neutral support at the event. And if there is introduce yourself as soon as possible. And if you think that you might need their help, go to them as soon as possible to give them as much time as possible to help accommodate you, they will definitely want to help you, but they will also have folks who have very, very urgent needs that they’re going to have to triage.

[02:03:51] Amber Pierce: The more time you can give them to address anything that you want them to look at the better, um, bring them gifts, express gratitude. They’re are wonderful people. Uh, they do great work and they’re happy to help. If there is no neutral support at the event, you can reach out to local bike shops where you’re going to be, uh, again, call ahead, let them know that you’re coming.

[02:04:09] Amber Pierce: Let them know if you know that you’re going to need something, let them know what that is. Um, if you’re not sure if you’re going to need something, it can’t hurt to call and introduce yourself and say, Hey, if anything, last minute comes up. Is it okay if I pop in, it just puts you on their radar. And it helps them plan ahead, which is really, really helpful.

[02:04:23] Amber Pierce: Um, and I just plan for the food, like figure out what those grocery stores are. You do not want to be running around the night before the race, trying to figure out where you’re going to get your breakfast in the morning. You do not want to be running around after the race, wondering where you’re gonna get your next meal from, uh, so locate good grocery store.

[02:04:41] Amber Pierce: Uh, figure out if you have special dietary needs, figure out where you can get what you need for that. Uh, make sure that you know, what you’ll have available at your accommodation. If you’re going to have a microwave or a fridge or a full kitchen available to you, you can plan it around that as well, but make sure that you have all of that plan ahead of time so that when you get there, you really don’t have to worry as much about the logistics and you can focus as much as possible on the

[02:05:03] Jonathan Lee: race, great points.

[02:05:05] Jonathan Lee: Uh, some things I carry with me in my bag, other than the bike. Uh, so I try to carry all my person or in my carry on my helmet shoes and some kit, just because then if my bike is lost, maybe I can borrow a bike from somebody, uh, or, you know, borrow one from a shop, something like that. Somebody likes it the hard way.

[02:05:25] Jonathan Lee: Uh, no, I’ve never. So knocking on probably not real wood, but I’ve never had a bike bag bike last. I’ve never had a bike broken. I’ve never had any issues like that. And I’m flying next week to 24 hours in the old Pueblo. So let’s hope that I don’t jinx anything, but if Jenkins are real, we’d make them happen.

[02:05:42] Jonathan Lee: I’m reminding myself. They’re not real. Okay. So, uh, but the things that I carry with me, I do that. So then, but if you’re a person like Nate, you probably, who cares because it’s going to be hard to find an XL or double, you know, double XL or if you’re riding an extra small bike or something like that, it might be hard, but I try to carry kit shoes, helmet, that sort of stuff with me.

[02:06:01] Jonathan Lee: And the bike bag I bring there’s this feedback. Sports makes this little torque wrench that’s super compact, and there’s a lot of different brands that make them, but a compact little torque wrench is a great idea because you’ll probably be putting on handlebars or you’ll be putting on your stem in torque values are super important for those two things.

[02:06:19] Jonathan Lee: So bring that don’t bring CO2. In some cases, they can actually like flag your bag and make it so that your, they won’t load your bag onto the plane. Uh, because CO2 is, are not allowed. So do not fly with CO2. Make sure you take those out. Uh, I do put my nutrition, my ride nutrition in there, uh, in less. I know for example, like, oh, well I can actually go to this store and buy that nutrition somewhere else.

[02:06:42] Jonathan Lee: Then that’s easy. Um, but if you have like custom nutrition or anything else fly with that, um, and then I always bring a towel, like a, like a rag that I can get dirty. Uh, that way I can, if I don’t have time to thoroughly clean my bike or something else beforehand, I can do that. Always fly with your bike, being cleaned.

[02:06:59] Jonathan Lee: That is a really important detail because if you have a bunch of gunk in there, then you show up at the race and your drive trains all dirty and you won’t have time to wash. It. That’ll be a pain and same thing with going back, clean your bike beforehand. Especially if you’ve been riding in an area around the ocean where it’s really salty, because who knows how long you’re going to leave that bike in the bike bag afterward.

[02:07:17] Jonathan Lee: Like I’m looking at you, Kona athletes. You probably don’t want to get on that bike at all for a couple months and you might leave it in the bike bag. And then it’s just corroding full of rust. So wash your button before.

[02:07:27] Amber Pierce: And mechanics will. Thank you. So if you’re going to have anybody work on your bike at the racer, when you get home, they really appreciate having a clean bike.

[02:07:34] Amber Pierce: It goes a long.

[02:07:35] Jonathan Lee: Yep. And, uh, really small things though, but try to find small tools like a, a Y key as they call it, you know, with a different heck spits is great to bring instead of a set of Allens, um, for pedals, uh, make sure that you can take your pedals on and off easily. Uh, there’s some stuff that you can put grease on your pedals and that’s fantastic way to stop them from seizing on.

[02:07:56] Jonathan Lee: Um, but I’ve seen plenty of situations where people fly to a race and they have their pedals in their cranks and they’re impossible to get out. Or they’re, they’re really tricky to get in because they don’t have the right tools. So I have a really small tool kit that I bring it fits in a, in a saddlebag.

[02:08:11] Jonathan Lee: And then I have that little torque wrench, and those are basically the things that are bringing, don’t forget your bottles too. I’ve done that plenty of times where I pack everything, but I forget to bring bottles and then I run some random bike shops, bottles, or something that I’ve found in. They’re usually not very good.

[02:08:25] Jonathan Lee: So, okay.

[02:08:27] Nate Pearson: One last quick tip. Then we can end the podcast. You learned this from DC Rainmaker, but put air tags. If you have iOS in your stuff, when you, I had blood luggage lost and United didn’t know where it was and I’m like, it’s sitting there, I can see it on my, uh, on my app. And I even used it when you don’t know where oversize luggage comes out.

[02:08:48] Nate Pearson: And I did it. I did that for a Cape for Cape epic and Sophia, and I had to walk to a very different spot. I think it was even a different terminal for some reason, it was crazy, but the airtight let us know where it was at and it just went to it.

[02:09:00] Jonathan Lee: That’s a great tip. Cool. I think that covers it. Uh, what a, what a podcast.

[02:09:05] Jonathan Lee: We covered tons of information. Uh, if you want to, uh, go and check out AI FTP detection, and let’s be real who doesn’t want to not test anymore. Uh, if you want to do that, go to trading road.com, give it a shot and check it out. It’s going to be super exciting. All this stuff we promised after adaptive training came out, that we would be adding on more and more.

[02:09:25] Jonathan Lee: And this is it. Like we are adding more all the time and we are so much more that we want to add. It’s super exciting. So go sign up for training road, get faster, accomplish whatever goals you have. And if you’re watching on YouTube, give this a thumbs up. You can subscribe on YouTube, but you totally shouldn’t.

[02:09:40] Jonathan Lee: You should join us for our live streams. Thursday 8:00 AM Pacific, and you can hit a notification bell so that, you know, whenever we go live or post a video, which is basically daily. So with all that said, thanks everybody. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye everyone. Bye.

This transcript is produced by an automated service. It may contain grammatical errors and incorrect transcriptions of the original conversation.