Testing Videos

This is my Wingate test from last week, best effort yet!  1041 W 5 sec max, 780 W 30 sec average.

Aaaand... my second muscle biopsy.  Yum!

Cyclists' Night Out

I'm a bit behind on updating my blog, so I'll try to catch up...

Last Monday, the researchers took us hard working test subjects out to dinner in Les Rousses. It was great to get out of the center and have some real food! The restaurant was a small out of the way place with a wood fired oven and great handmade pizza. For my initial pizza, I had a tasty concoction called La Juriassen or something of that nature... it had a few local cheeses and some ham. Very good! It was gone in a few minutes and it felt like there was a good amount of room left in my stomach. So, Logan and I split a second pizza known as the Quatre Saisons (Four Seasons if you don't speak French). This was possibly even better than the first pizza, with peppers, bacon, and some other veggies which I can't remember. My stomach and taste buds were now very happy. Looking around the room, everyone was having a great time, and some getting a bit animated with the beer and wine flowing freely. Spirits and morale had been getting a little low with the current situation back at the training center. 16 hours in the room, monotonous food, hard training, and no time to unwind had started to raise tensions in a lot of us. So the night out was a great way to relieve some stress and cheer everyone up.

Happy and full

I don't think I've mentioned the mustache competition yet...  The researchers are putting up 120 euros for the best mustache by the end of the study, you can see some of the top contenders:

Jesse incorporates the sideburns nicely

Travis working on a nice horseshoe 'stache

Darren's looking nice and creepy...

Andrew rockin' the scuzzball look

Shaun's classic mustache and goatee...

I'm not sure what style AJ is rocking.

After the fabulous night out, some of the crew decided to continue the fun times.  Starting off with some mountain bike trials in my room, which ended when Shaun nailed his head on the ceiling trying to bunny hop onto my bed.

Then we watched the ever classic Anchorman, one of my favorites.  The laptop speakers weren't loud enough, so I turned on the captioning and read the dialogue (in character of course) so that everyone could hear better.  I think this really improved the movie, especially the fight scene between Burgundy and Corningstone.  If you haven't seen this cinematic masterpiece, you should.  Stay Classy!

Great Sunday ride

I went on a very nice ride Sunday, it was beautiful, sunny and warm 65 degrees out.  Following in Andrew's footsteps, or tire tracks I guess, the loop included 3 huge climbs- La Dôle, Col de la Faucille, and D304 out of St. Claude.  He had done this ride the day before, so to out-do him a little bit I tacked on an extra 10 miles by riding out to the Shell climb aka Marchiaruz.  This is not as big as the big 3, but is still a nice 4 miler which gets pretty steep in some parts.  All in all, a great day of climbing with about 11,500 feet in 103 miles.  Here is my route.  Some views along the way-

View from the top of La Dole

Busy day at La Dole!

Coming up to La Faucille

Look at the size of that bike!!  I guess its a decoration from the Tour...

Somewhere in the beginning of my ride, I think when I stopped at the top of La Dôle, one of my rear brake pads fell out.  I started riding down, just using my front brakes.  This was working fine, but seeing sticks on the side of the road gave me an idea... So I stopped and jammed a nicely sized piece of wood into the shoe holder to use as a brake pad, and it actually worked pretty well!

Back back, back to the lab...

After a nice 2 week break, we are going back to the hospital this week for more rounds of tests.  Yesterday was my least favorite, the arterial VO2.  Getting a blood catheter put in the artery in your arm is not pleasant, then doing 2 VO2 max tests with an hour and a half in between means about 4 hours at the hospital having the thing stuck in the arm...  Anyway its over now, and I'm very happy about that.  I managed to improve a little from last time, maxing out at 475 watts instead of 450, then 425 instead of 400 in the 2nd (hypoxic) round.  Not sure if this is evidence that I am indeed in a hypoxic room, or if its just from training hard.

About to start the hypoxic VO2 test, breathing low oxygen air through this tube...

Today was another Wingate (30 sec max effort) and then a 40 minute time trial for the submax effort test.  Improved significantly on both, which was pretty sweet.  Up to 990 watts from 860 in the Wingate, and 316 from 287 in the TT, 4.1 watts per kg.  Apparently on the indoor trainer the power is less than what you can do outside in real life, I must borrow someones power meter and check this out sometime.

The weather has cleared up in the past few days, it is sunny and 65 degrees today and should be the same tomorrow. Perfect weather, it is very beautiful out.  I'm finished with this week's tests, so plan to head out for a nice long ride tomorrow.  Unfortunately next week is looking like more cold and rain, but maybe the weather forecast will be wrong...

Go away rain...

So its been raining for the past 2 days and looks like it will be raining for most of the next week.  And I don't have a set of serious rain gear!  It was 50 degrees and rainy yesterday, went for a 3+ hour ride with AJ anyway wearing my winter gloves and booties, but after they got completely soaked my hands and feet went numb with about an hour left to ride.  It was a good workout though, we pushed each other through a hard set of intervals.

La Forestiere recap:
The race last Sunday did not go as well as I had hoped, the cage (carbon, why???) of my rear derailleur snapped off about 7 miles in to the race.  I was somewhere around 20th place at the time and was feeling good. Thomas Bonne (one of the other guys here) raced also and was up ahead of me in the top 15, when the guy directly in front of him had a bad wreck on a nasty downhill section (same place my derailleur broke).  Thomas stopped to stay with the injured rider, he had gotten knocked out and ended up with a bad concussion and a broken hand.  It turned out Thomas knew him from mountain bike racing in Denmark, I guess its a pretty small scene.  So, he accompanied the injured rider to the hospital and helped him out a lot, and I took both of our bikes back to Premanon.  Bad day for us, but I hear the guy is doing fine now after some hand surgery.  At least I got a cool t-shirt for my 50 euro entry fee.

My Dad and Stepmom were here Monday and Tuesday, I met them at the Hotel Arbez in La Cure both days and we had some delicious and very rich French lunches and desserts, mmm...  They will be moving to Lyon, France in October and were out here scouting out an apartment, so came to visit before heading back to pack up everything in the US.  Dad has been talking about moving to France for a while, and I guess they decided to finally do it, pretty cool!  They had good luck and some help from friends, and found a nice place in Lyon.  I plan to take the train down there at the end of October, visit for a little while and drop off some extra luggage and one of my bikes, then take the train down to Rome to visit my cousin Antonella in Castel di Sangro, Italy.  Spending about a month down there, then probably back to Lyon for a French Thanksgiving with my Dad, then to Geneva to catch the plane home November 28th.  I'm really looking forward to seeing Lyon and relatives in Italy!

We had some great riding this week before the rain started coming down, Wednesday was a pretty long day with a good amount of climbing - a Cat2 climb from the Tour this year that went under a cliff, the road was closed but we cut through anyway.

Fast and fun descent, then the first part of the Tour climb up from Saint-Claude but extending it a few miles with a turn onto a pretty steep road with more switchbacks.  Great views of the road and valley down below.

Premanon Crew

Jesse Rients took this picture a few days ago when some of us went to get coffee in Les Rousses.  From the bottom left going clockwise around the table, here is this bunch of jokers: Shaun Locker, me, AJ Baucco, Adam Aisen, Russel Stevenson, Thomas Bonne, Laust Kruse, Andrew Lees, Logan Wetzel, and Ian Terry.  Some people were not there- Gaby Manser, Gordon Smith, Darren Young, Jacob Christiansen and Luc Morin.  Maybe we can all get together and go out for pizza sometime...

Stuck in hypoxia...

So, I'm not sure if my room is hypoxic or not, half of the participants are in hypoxia half are control and not.  But, I wore my heart rate monitor to sleep last night and my average heart rate was 70, which is a bit high, so I think we might be one of the hypoxic rooms.  I have a room mate now, AJ, and we have to be in our room for at least 16 hours a day.  Enter at 4 pm, leave for an hour at 7 for dinner, back in from 8 pm til 7 am when we have an hour break for breakfast, then back in for 2 more hours from 8-10 am.  So, its a lot of laying around sleeping and being lazy in general.  Which is fine with me really...  10-4 is riding time, I've gone on some pretty sweet rides in the past couple of days, but taking today off, my legs are pretty sore.

Yesterday we rode a nice loop that Logan picked out.  Laust, Russel, Logan, Andrew and I went, it was a 69 mile ride with about 6000 feet of climbing.


View Larger Map

We started out with an hour of descending in a beautiful valley, through the town of Mijoux and ending in Montanges.  On the way down we went past a lot of cool rock formations and into a tunnel blasted through the mountainside.  After about 25 miles of going downhill, it was time for some climbing, up about 2500 feet on the first one, another ripping descent into Saint-Claude, then basically climbing for the rest of the ride back to Premanon.  Here are some pictures from the ride-

Camera strap got in the way, but you get the idea...

I registered for the La Forestiere 100k mountain bike (VTT) race this Sunday.  Its a point to point race, starting nearby in Les Rousses and finishing way down in Arbent.  I'm pretty excited to race in France, this is a UCI marathon event too so should bring out some pretty big names.  No one will know what my 29er is, they are not very big in europe.  I will let you know how it goes...

First 2 weeks in Premanon- recap

Starting tonight, we will spend 16 hours a day (yikes!) in our rooms, which have a special ventilation system that lowers the percentage of oxygen in the air to simulate high altitude.  The air pressure remains unchanged though.  There is a control group that won't be in hypoxia, but its a double blind study so no one knows who is control and who isn't.  Hopefully I will be at altitude!

Aug 30 - Sep 12


My first 2 weeks in Premanon were spent riding and doing a lot of baseline tests.   The testing consisted of one muscle biopsy and two each of VO2 Max, Submaximal effort, and CO Rebreathing tests, one round of tests each week.  This was to measure our physical abilities before going into the altitude rooms, so the researchers can see exactly how things are affected by our time in hypoxia.  All of the testing was done at a small hospital in Le Brassus, Switzerland, about 15 miles from the altitude facility where we are staying in Premanon.  We drove to the hospital in a van with a big trailer for our bikes.

8/30-8/31: Riding!

Bridges near Morez

Went on some cool road rides with Gordon Smith, Canadian (eh), pro roadie, cool guy.  Gordon runs a business designing websites... He can go anywhere in the world to ride and race and still be able to work.  What a great setup!








The 30th was a pretty short ride, up through Bellefontaine onto some cool forest roads (logging access basically) along a ridge and down into Les Rousses and home.  Nice introduction to the area!

Aug 31 route

On the 31st we went on an amazing ride, beginning with a ripping 10 km descent to Morez, then a rolling 20 km or so on this tiny little one lane road barely wide enough for a car, then onto a larger, smoother road for a super fast fun descent into the picturesque city of Saint-Claude.  Up the Col de Lamoura climb from Stage 7 of this year's Tour.  It was really long - 20 km or so, mostly gradual climbing but rather steep for the first few miles, gaining about 800 meters and overlooking an amazing gorge with beautiful rock formations and mountains all around.

St-Claude

The climb begins...

Rocks on the way up

9/1: Test 1 - Submax


My testing began with the Submax test, the most grueling one. This basically tells you the amount of power you can produce for an hour.  However, the amount of glycogen, blood sugar etc. in your body decreases over this long of a time, so its not just an hour spent riding a trainer and recording your average power.  Instead, we rode a computer simulated 26.1 km time trial course, which took about 40 minutes, and the hour effort is computed from this information. We rode our own bikes, but swapped our rear wheel for a  Powertap rear wheel (which measures power... if you didn't know) on a computer controlled indoor trainer.  The trainer was a Tacx system, which alters the resistance over the time trial course, to simulate climbs, descents etc.  But, before getting down to the real test, we did some pre-test tests...

 Nicolai and Victor were the motivators for the Submax,
there was a lot of encouragement going on...

First, maximal quadriceps contraction was measured, and would be repeated after the time trial.  Two electrodes were placed on my right quad and my ankle was strapped to a force meter.  The voltage was raised until the contraction force reached a plateau.  If you've never been electrically stimulated, its pretty interesting.  Grab an electric fence.  Then, I performed three 5 second maximal contractions of the leg, with an electrical pulse applied during and after the contraction.  The force for all these contractions will be compared to the force after completing the TT.

Next, the Wingate.  This is a 30 second long maximum effort to see how many Watts you can produce for a short time... So, all out pedaling on a stationary bike, kill yourself for 30 seconds.  This was very unpleasant, but luckily very short!  I got up to about 800 Watts max and 650 average on the first try... I felt like I should have been able to do a lot better, but you have to stay seated, and also the test was set up with a rather low resistance so I was pedaling at about 160 RPM.  I have trouble pedaling at a really fast cadence.  I think higher resistance and pedaling slower would have suited me better, but apparently that causes the average power to decrease.  Whatever...

Finally, the real test began.  The simulated course started off with a short flat-rolling section followed by a hard, steep 6 km climb and steep descent.  The middle was a long rolling section, then a 6 km medium grade climb to the finish.  It took me 43:30 to finish the course on the first try, with an average wattage of about 275... Ok, not great, about average compared to the other cyclists in the study.

As soon as the TT was done, I had to immediately do another maximal contraction with electrical stimulation. I think the force was actually higher than the initial try, probably due to all the adrenaline.

After this test, I was pretty exhausted, so got a ride back to Premanon in the van, had lunch and took a nice long nap.




9/2: Test 2 - CO Rebreathing
This test is a very accurate way to measure the total count of red blood cells in the body.  This was by far the least strenuous day of testing, all I had to so was sit in a comfortable chair and breath some poisonous gas...  A blood catheter was put into one of the veins in my arm, then I sat in the chair breathing pure oxygen through a mask for about 5 minutes.  Then 5 small blood samples were taken and tested for initial carbon monoxide concentration.  Next, about 200 ml of carbon monoxide (about the same as smoking 2 cigarettes..) was injected into the closed breathing circuit.  After breathing through the closed circuit for 8 minutes, another blood sample was taken.  Somehow, comparing the final amount of CO in the blood to the initial amount can be used to calculate how many red blood cells are in the body...  Anyway, that was all for today.  Took a nice bike ride back to Premanon.

9/3
Now I had a day without testing, and figured it was time to check out the local mountain biking.  I rode down to the local bike shop in Les Rousses, and picked up a fairly detailed map showing routes through the Jura mountains, which we are right in the middle of.  The map is pretty incomprehensible, but I kinda figured it out; there are some main routes for hiking and biking through the mountains, called the GTJ (Gran Tourisee de Jura), then local routes, then unmarked trails- which must be the hot ticket if I can find them. I went out and rode some of the GTJ, and although some short sections were very cool, apparently they log the forests everywhere around here, so I was constantly winding up on ripped-up, destroyed, mud-pit dirt roads through the woods, very frustrating.  There would be a mile of fun rippin' trail or dirt road then bam, back out onto the destroyed logging road again.  Maybe there is some good mountain biking around, but I haven't found much yet.  I did ride this 5 mile long section of super cool single track, but only after slogging through about 10 miles of mud-pit road.  Another mountain bike experience involved going through lots of cow fields (the trails just go through the cow fields), riding next to cows, around cows, through cow pies, and over cow fences every hundred yards or so.  And getting the crap shocked out of me by the electrified cow fences... Oh and by the way, in France MTB is called VTT- Velo Tous Terrain or something like that.  It was invented in Amurica, gawd darn it, and we call it mountain biking, but I guess the French have to be special and call it something else lol.

I decided to stick to road biking for the time being until I get a good chance to ask someone who speaks l'anglais where the good trails are around here.  The road biking, luckily, is fantastic, not nearly as mind numbingly boring as I'm used to.  Tons of awesome looong insanely fast descents down switchbacky roads with beautiful scenery all around, 3000 foot climbs that are 10 miles long, and some cool flat valley riding when you get tired of going up and down all the time.  There are roads so small a car will barely fit on it that are tons of fun to ride.  Plus, the drivers here are actually pretty courteous and respectful to cyclists, imagine that!  In fact, after riding here for 2 weeks, today was the first day I've been angrily honked at and flipped off by some dude going 90 mph.  That's a daily occurrence in good ol' USA! (Except of course its a redneck in a big beat-up pickup, not a euro dude in a Mercedes...)

9/4: Test 3 - VO2 Max

If you're not a cyclist or don't know what this is, VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen in milliliters that one can use in one minute per kilogram of body weight (ml/kg/min).  To perform this test accurately, you must breathe through a mask that measures how much oxygen you inhale and how much you exhale.and the difference is how much your muscles are using to burn fuel. The test can be for running, XC skiing, whatever, but for us of course it was cycling.

This is a very tough test, but doesn't last long, so its not too bad. I rode a special stationary bike with an adjustable workload that is controlled by the researcher.  First, there is a 10 minute warm-up, 5 minutes at 150 watts and 5 at 200.  Then, the test begins.  Starting at 225 W, the power is increased by 25 W every minute until you can't turn the pedals anymore.  At 400 W, it started to get hard.  425 and it was all I could do to keep turning the pedals for a minute, by this point I was sucking air every pedal stroke, wheezing like an emphysema patient with my head hanging down lolling back and forth.  I got up to 450 W and had to stop pedaling after about 3 seconds.  Its weird, 10 seconds at this effort felt like a minute.  My VO2 max came out to 72, pretty good for my age, especially since compared to most cyclists I have a lot more mass in my upper body (due to my massive bulging arms and pecs... yeah, hope you have a ticket to the gun show) which is just sitting there doing nothing in this test.  If I could drop say, 5 kg of upper body mass keeping my legs the same, my VO2 would be 77.  If I could lose 10 and get down to real emaciated stick man cyclist status, it would be 83, which is huge!  But, 72 is really good and until I go on the starvation diet (yeah right) it'll do.  This concluded the first round of tests, hooray!

Decided to ride back from the hospital on my mountain bike, still looking for the good trails.  I had some luck, with some nice sections of trail and beautiful scenery and weather.

I rode through a field past some very nice looking cows.  I must admit, these are the best looking, happiest cows I've ever seen!  They are white where they should be white, and brown where they are should be brown.  They are also everywhere!  The number amazes me, pretty much every field you see has a bunch of dairy cows in it.  Consequently, there is cheese everywhere.  I knew France was renowned for cheese, but did not realize the sheer quantity before arriving here.  We are served cheese for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert.  I have had to stop eating cheese this past week to let my digestive system recover and begin producing solid waste again...

Found a nice trail that went through the woods along the base of these cliffs.  According to my map there is one along the top, too.  This will definitely require some more exploring ;-)

My route took me through downtown Bois d'Amont, past the start of Stage 8 of the Tour this year.










9/5: Another day off


So... more riding! nice...  My plan was to do a 50km VTT Rando (randonneuring) today, which apparently is a group mountain bike ride.  I figured this would be a great way to find some local trails since I hadn't been too successful on my own.  The ride started at 7:30 AM in Morbier, a small town about 10 miles away, so I got up at 5:45, was dressed and ready to go by 6:30 to have time to ride my bike there in time to register etc.  Got down to the storage room where we keep our bikes, and it was locked!  This was a new development... Prevented from getting my bike, I was pretty pissed and went back to sleep.  Later I found out that Paul and Robbie (2 of the researchers) both had a key and I could have woken them up to get my bike, but didn't know this at the time.

It wasn't a total loss though, I went on an awesome road ride with AJ Baucco, a triathlete from Arizona.  We took a small paved forest road out of Premanon down to Longchamois, south into St-Claude down at 400 meters, and back up a long 10 mile climb to 1000 m, through Lamoura and back to Premanon.  Not a huge ride, but really nice and it was great weather.

9/6-9/12:  2nd Round of Tests

Arterial plumbing...

This week's testing was a lot like the first, with the CO rebreathing and Submax tests exactly the same as the first.  This time, I got 60 W higher on the Wingate, and 287 W on the Submax - a 12 W increase, yay!  The difference was, this week I would have to give a muscle biopsy and also do an arterial VO2 max test, which was a lot more involved.  A blood catheter was put in one of the veins in my arm, no big deal, but another was placed in the artery of my right wrist.  This was more involved, I had to be anesthetized first, and poked at for a while to find the artery.  I made the mistake of looking over at my arm while this was being done and noticed that the doctor was sticking a big needle in my wrist and there was blood dripping everywhere... Luckily, I got the more skilled doctor than some of the other guys and it only took him about 5 minutes to find the artery and get me hooked up.  The arterial catheter was attached to a pressurized bag of saline to keep the blood from coming out, so I had to pull the 

Getting wired

Today I would be doing 2 VO2 tests with about an hour break in between.  The first at regular altitude, just with blood sampling and electrodes all over me recording nerve impulses, even one on my head recording brain waves.  For the second run through, I would breathe low-oxygen air through a mask, simulating an altitude of about 8000 feet.  The first was the same as before, getting up to 450 W, but the second I could only manage 400 with the hypoxic conditions.

A well deserved lunch break

This was, by far, the most strenuous day of testing yet. I left Premanon at 730 and didn't get back until 3 in the afternoon, and had to eat a packed lunch in between tests.  I wasn't allowed to go for a ride in the afternoon because of the chance of the increased blood pressure causing the punctured artery to start bleeding, but that was fine with me because I was exhausted.  I took a 3 hour nap when I got back to my room.

The only thing left now was my muscle biopsy.  I was one of the last people to have it done, and I had been dreading it all week.  This was a needle biopsy, the least painful kind, but it still made my stomach queasy thinking about it.  First my leg would be anesthetized at the site, the lateral edge of my left quad, then a small incision would be made in the skin.  Next, a big needle, 4mm in diameter, really long and scary (I didn't look at it) would be punched repeatedly into my quad to remove a nice chunk of steak errr... muscle.  

This all sounded quite nasty and had me pretty worried, especially seeing everyone else come back from the hospital for several days with bandages wrapped around their legs.  After all that, it was a bit anticlimactic for me.  Things went pretty smoothly.  Carsten is a real pro at doing these, apparently he's done about 1000 of them, and he made it as un-unpleasant as possible.  After the initial prick of the needle for the local anesthetic, I couldn't feel the incision.  He warned me that he would be taking the biopsy, and told me to keep the leg muscle completely relaxed.  I accomplished this by closing my eyes, gritting my teeth and flexing the sh!t out of my opposite leg.  The needle being punched into my muscle didn't hurt exactly, due to being completely numb, but it felt verrrry gross.  The best description I can give is a tiny sharp fist or vacuum nozzle punching me in the leg and sucking out a chunk of my muscle.  It took 3-4 good hard jabs to get a big enough piece, then it was over.  I wasn't sure if the thing was still stuck in my leg or not, so I asked Carsten, who assured me it was not, then he taped the skin back together, put on a bandage and compression wrapping, and I was done.  A few seconds of stomach turning gross-ness, but not that much pain.  Afterwards, it felt like a bad charlie horse.

Post biopsy ride:  they are smiling, it couldn't have
been too bad...

 I was able to walk back up the stairs and get my cycling clothes on, then took an easy ride around Lac de Joux with 2 of the other biopsy victims, Gaby and Shaun, then back to Premanon.  I even stood up and hammered up some small climbs and it felt ok, just a little tight when my leg was bent sharply.  Robbie has had 10 or so biopsies, and told me the harder I could work the leg that day, the faster the muscle would heal. Its been 2 days now, and my leg feels fine.