Something unusual happened to me today after my morning workout at the gym. I noticed a new guy working out. He was wearing jeans and not really sweating much but he was lifting respectable weight and appeared to know what he was doing, but he seemed slightly out of place. He said good morning to me and I reciprocated. No big deal. He later introduced himself and we started talking in between our sets. He was a friendly guy but something just didn’t seem quite right about him. Was he gay? He sure didn’t seem gay by any known characteristic I would associate with someone being gay. After I finished my workout and was about to leave he came over to me and said “So you take care of your physical self here at the gym but what do you do to take care of your spiritual self?”

Oh no.

I just knew what the next few words were going to be out of his mouth. Yes, he was trying to sell me his religion. And here I thought he was just a nice guy with no hidden agenda. Now if there ever was a sure fire way to erode the faith I have in people to just be nice without the need to change them or sell them something, this was it. So we went a few rounds of him trying to convince me with his dogma and bible quotations and I tried to get him to show me who he was and not just keep regurgitating what he had read or what someone had told him. Maybe I got through to him, but I doubt it. Eventually I just had to end the conversation and leave.

I’ve been watching the Tour de France lately and becoming very interested in the athletes and just what kinds of power they generate on the various sections of a stage. As it turns out they are generating, on average about 250-300 watts. Roughly estimated this comes out to about 150-200 watts on flat sections, 200-300 watts on low grade climbs, 400-600 watts on steep climbs and 600-1000+ watts for sprints.

Now I am by no means a serious cyclist. I don’t even ride an upright bike. I ride a recumbent bike recreationally and rarely ever do organized rides. I have done a few centuries and plan to do more, but for me cycling is only 1 component of my fitness landscape. I do the vast majority of my cycling on a stationery recumbent bike at home. Luckily this bike gives me a digital watts reading so I was eager to see what it felt like to generate 200+ watts over a period of time. I normally don’t even look at watts when I ride so I had no real idea what I was typically generating on a daily basis. As it turns out watts is the only real universal method of measuring the power someone is generating for a given body weight and heart rate. This bike has 16 levels and I usually ride at lvl 10-14 at a speed that generates about 80-100 watts with my heart rate in the low range at 110-120bpm. It’s a pretty easy ride and serves as the initial 40 minute phase of my early morning exercise.

After coming to understand what the Tour De France rides are generating I decided to see what I could do on my own bike. I started out and used to first 10 minutes to warm up and work my way up to level 16 and get to 200 watts. At 200 watts I was sweating hard, but my heart rate was only about 140-150bpm. Still a long ways from my maximum of 185bpm. I kept up 200 watts for 30 minutes and it felt great. Certainly not easy, but very doable and I think I could have gone another 40 minutes at 200 watts without too much more effort. Distance covered was about 15 miles and calories burned was about 500-600. So this was it. The limits of this bike have been reached. The only way I can make it any harder is to spin faster.

I also tried out the bikes at the gym (upright and recumbents) to get a comparison of the wattage accuracy. Those bikes are Cybex Cyclone models and are very smooth. It turns out the gym bikes gave me readings about 50 watts higher than my home bike for about the same levels of exertion. So if they are more accurate then I was actually generating closer to 250 watts instead of 200 for those 30 minutes. According to the Pros, I should be able to sustain generating at least 4 watts per kilogram of body weight to compete at low level amateur cyclist levels – since I weigh 97 kilograms this means I need to be generating nearly 400 watts sustained. OUCH! OK, so I have some work to do. Will report more in a few months.

I still need to do some more tests with my heart rate to see if the exertion is the same on both, but doing this experiment has given me a little better understanding of what kinds of power the Tour De France cyclists are generating for long periods of time and over those grueling 21 days.

So I weighed in today at 221 lbs. I took it easy yesterday so that today I could really push myself to do legs. I started out like usual on the recumbent bike and did 40 minutes. Then it was on to a 4 mile run followed by leg strength training in the gym along with some plyometrics. I don’t know if you are familiar with plyometrics but they can be extremely brutal to the body. Basically it is a type of training that involves explosive body weight movements like jumping, lunging or throwing. I was doing a frog jump type of exercise which is crouching down near the ground and springing up as hard and fast as you can up into the air and coming back down into the same crouching position. You do this over and over again as long as you can stand it. For me this is about 6-8 times. After that it becomes difficult to breath or walk. If you do too much you can easily pass out. When I got home I was feeling a bit more tired than usual and very much in need of food. Before the workout I always have a fruit smoothie and a half peanut butter and jelly sandwich. After arriving home and crouching down to greet Tinker a few times I noticed when I stood up I felt more dizzy and light headed than normal. One of these times I actually fell down and almost completely fainted. A bit scary.

Excerpt from Lois Lanes first interview with Superman:

Lois – “How big are you… how TALL are you?”

Superman – “About 6′ 4″”

Lois – “And.. how much do you weigh?”

Superman – “Around 2… 225”

Lois (grinning sheepishly) – “2… 225?”

Yes I did reach 225 today and I am indeed 6’4″ tall. I started out at about 285 two years ago and have been pounding on my body hard 18 hours a week running, cycling, skating, and weight lifting. My longest distance run thus far has been 10 miles but that was very difficult and I don’t think I will be doing that again any time soon. On a normal day I will cycle for 40 minutes which usually covers about 10 miles, then run 4-6 miles, followed by a grueling gym workout rotating between a leg workout, a push day (chest shoulders and triceps), and a pull day (back and biceps). Core training is also worked in about every other day. Diet generally consists of a cyclical type of calorie restriction where I restrict somewhat heavily during the week and then reload glycogen on weekends with considerably more calories. Meals are consumed every 3 hours with the heaviest of calories consumed in the early and late morning. Lighter meals usually are restricted to no more than 3-4 bites of a healthy meal of fiber rich carbs, proteins and lots of water. I do not count calories nor do I count macronutrients. I think I would go insane if I tried to do that. Every other weekend I will have a cheat meal where anything goes.

I made a goal today to run 6 miles. I normally run only 2 miles as my hips start to hurt a bit after 2 miles but I wanted to test myself in a more grueling distance and see how I would faire. It may also have something to do with a documentary film I saw recently called ‘Running the Sahara’. Three guys ran an average of 40 miles per day for 111 days straight to cross the Sahara desert. Truly beyond my understanding of what the human body is capable of. I learned a lot from it and I highly recommend checking it out. Seeing the kind of punishment these guys were putting up with I knew I could increase my own mileage and see what happens. It definitely hurt, but I did it. I have a feeling I will be paying the price in the morning.