How to Pick Trail Running Shoes

By Brian Metzler

Upper: For warm weather and well-maintained trails, choose breathable mesh uppers to keep feet cool. Opt for sturdy, reinforced uppers when stability and durability are priorities.

Toe Cap: Always run rocky trails? Choose a shoe with an armored rubber toe cap, even at the cost of extra weight. It protects shoes and feet.

Outsole: A multi-density mix of rubbers helps shoes achieve a just-right combination of traction, stickiness, and durability. Look for characteristics that meet your needs.

Lugs: Take a spin in the store. Any true trail runner today should have low-profile lugs that feel subtle—not clunky—underfoot.

Midsole: This is the guts of the shoe, what gives you cushioning, support, and energy transfer. Most use a combination of soft EVA and hard TPU.

Protection Plate: This guards against "stingers" caused by rocks and roots. It’s usually a slim plastic plate that protects without adding much weight or making the shoe too stiff.

Paceline, Part 2: Speaking Up

By Maynard Hershon

Last issue, I wrote about speaking up, asking for what you want on training rides. I said that when two people ride in a rotating paceline, they’re a partnership, each person helping the other by taking a turn in front.

If you let yourself become exhausted or dropped, you can’t help. It’s too late. You waited too long to protest the pace. You didn’t speak up, didn’t take care of yourself. Now you can’t take a turn, can’t help anyone.

Please, I asked readers, speak up if you’re about to be dropped. Speak up if you’re drafting someone and you realize you’re going faster than you can comfortably go.

In a rare moment of inspiration, I compared that action to speaking up in a relationship, rather than silently letting things happen, then suffering the results. Speak up, I said. Don’t be embarrassed, Don’t be shy. Speak up.

The day after I wrote that piece, I ran into three cyclists at a café. They’d finished their ride; I was waiting for friends to begin ours. I’d heard one of them, a local coach, give a talk days earlier about cycling technique. Assuming he’d be interested, I mentioned my piece about speaking up.

A 50-year old woman cyclist at the café table said she couldn’t do that, couldn’t ask for what she needed.

"I was raised with four brothers," she said.

I was struck by that comment. I don’t know that I ever use events that happened 40 years ago to explain why I can’t do something today. Do you do that?

If you hear yourself doing that, simply saying, "Oh, I can’t do that because in the ’60s or ’70s this-or-that happened," please ask yourself: Is everything that ever happened to you still happening?

Is it ever over?

If you’ve been suffering in silence on your bike because of events that happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, try this: Imagine you’re someone else when you’re on the bike, someone proactive, someone LOUD. Han Solo maybe. Speak up. It’ll work for ya.

This is a fact: Other people cannot read your mind. They cannot anticipate your acts or know your intentions. So – if your group has been doing the same thing for miles, going the same speed in the same direction, there is the reasonable expectation that it will continue to do so.

If you want to do something different, please announce that you are going to do it, whatever it is. Again: If you do not wish to continue to do what you have been doing, you have to alert those around you. They depend on you to do so. Their safety depends on your doing so. My safety may depend on your doing so.

Last Saturday, I rode with a group of about eight, mostly women. We rode in a double paceline on quiet roads south of Tucson, away from the maniac traffic in town. We’d just turned a corner. As I learned later, the two front riders decided to move to the back of the group. I understand there was some confusion about how to accomplish that. Sadly, the individual who was most forceful was wrong.

That person told the rider on the right front, who’d had the good sense to move right to drop back, to move left instead, across the front wheels of the two riders immediately behind him. Probably a little confused, without a word, without accelerating slightly, that person obediently moved left, across the wheel of the woman behind him. She slowed to keep from hitting him. The woman behind HER could not avoid her rear wheel, hit it and fell down, boom, cutting a finger, whacking her helmet on the road and banging up her bike a bit. She got up, wrapped her finger in a clean handkerchief and knocked her brake lever straight. Back on the bike in moments. Brave woman.

Remarkably, when she got rolling again, she was not concerned with discovering what the hell had happened in front of her, causing her to fall. She was not concerned with making sure it did not happen again. She only wanted to soothe potentially hurt feelings. She was concerned with making sure the woman she’d hit from behind (the instant before she crashed) was not upset. Not your fault, she told her. Don’t fret about it. I’m okay. These things happen.

That attitude is sweet. It may be typically feminine and it may be part of the job description of a social worker or nurse or other care-giver. It is not the attitude that will keep crashes from happening.

Most crashes are preventable. Bikes broken in crashes are useless and expensive to repair or replace. Broken bones are far worse.
We have to educate the people who hold our physical safety in their hands, the people we follow, four inches back, while they think about, well, who knows what they think about.

Everyone says education is key, communication is vital, but no one wants to say anything. Shhhh. No one wants to speak up, to sound like an authority by saying: Hey, that crash shouldn’t have happened. Let’s do that thing differently from now on, whattaya say?

No one learned a damn thing from that crash. There was no communication and no education.

Because no one talked about the right way to do it, no one learned how to get off the front of a side-by-side paceline. No one was reminded that bikes don’t have brake lights, that you have to tell people inches behind you that you’re slowing abruptly – or they will hit your bike and fall down.

No one tried to analyze why the crash happened. Finding a cause might mean learning that someone made a mistake, and that would be unthinkable. Easier to think about an occasional crash than to point a finger at someone and say, Hey, how ’bout doing that differently the next time. It’d be safer that way.

That’d be speaking up, wouldn’t it?

Speaking up seems easy when you’re reading about it on this page. Listen on your rides. Let me know how much education and communication actually happens.

Click here for the Maynard Page on Planet Ultra!

Training With the Zone 3 Syndrome

By Josh Horowitz
PezCycling News

The best way to train is by going as hard as you can for as long as you can on every ride you do, right? As we begin the off-season in the northern hemisphere, let’s examine the idea of base training. First up, we discuss the dreaded "Zone 3 plateau" and how to begin getting out of the cycle of constant hammering.

The Hammer Syndrome

We may be entering the age of power monitoring and periodization of training, yet it remains difficult for many riders to wrap their heads around what smart training really means. The philosophy of "hard riding" is one of the pervading cycling training misconceptions of the 21st century. It is the idea that periodization and scientifically-based training is great for those with time to burn, but for those under severe time restraints, the way to get the best bang for our buck is by going hard all day, every day.

Even those who don’t consciously embrace this antiquated training methodology often fall to its pretty clutches when they get caught up in the group ride hammerfest mentality. Even when they set out for a moderate or easy recovery ride, they can’t resist the temptation to jump on with the first group that comes flying by. The pace skyrockets at the rise in the road and the end result is the same—a never-ending string of high-tempo riding with little to no recovery.

The result of this type of training is an ailment I call the Zone 3 Syndrome. Before we get into the syndrome itself, let’s do a little self-diagnosis. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

• Are you exceedingly proud of the average speeds of your rides, and do you gauge your training progress by the improvement of your average speed from one ride to another?
• Do you find group rides fairly easy, even when the pace picks up, yet you can’t seem to make that final acceleration or stay with the group over the steepest part of the climb?
• Do you have a maximum heart rate of 195, yet you haven’t seen it go above 180 since the season began?
• Does the thought of letting a rider pass you on the bike path make you ill, or do you pride yourself on the fact that no rider has ever passed you on a training ride—even on recovery days?
• Do you often leave the house with one ride in mind but more often than not find yourself in the middle of the weekday morning world championships?
• Do you find it impossible to imagine that riding with a heart rate at 130 beats-per-minute could possibly be anything other than an utter waste of time?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might be suffering from the Zone 3 Syndrome.

The Problems with Plateau

Whether it’s a desire to get the most out of every minute on the bike or just an inability to resist the temptation of searing your lungs on a daily basis, the effect is the same when you’re caught in the rut of the Zone 3 Syndrome. Intensity on every ride with no recovery results in sustained and difficult-to-overcome mediocrity and a seemingly endless plateau of middle-of-the-road fitness.

Because adequate recovery time is not given between workouts, the body reaches a level of sustained exhaustion. Due to this ongoing exhaustion, the upper reaches of intensity required to induce training adaptation are not attainable. Workouts that are intended to be done in zone 4 (threshold) and zone 5 (anaerobic) all wind up hovering within a stones throw of zone 3 (tempo, otherwise known as the dreaded gray zone).

To make matters worse, as a result of frustration with poor maximum efforts and sustained plateaus of fitness, the rider grows desperate to break though. Thus zone 1 recovery rides and zone 2 endurance rides start to creep up in intensity until, across the board, every mile is done in this foggy, dead zone of zone 3 riding.

Although there is a time and a place for zone 3, generally speaking, it is not considered hard enough to cause a desired physical adaptation. At the same time, it is too hard to allow for proper recovery. Therefore, you don’t want to be spending the majority of your time there. Remember the old adage: When you go fast, you should be going really fast. And when you’re going slow, you should be going really slow.

Remember that the body is incredibly good at adapting itself to whatever stress is imposed on it. So when you spend most of your time in Zone 3, the only real adaptation that occurs is the body becomes incredibly adept at riding in Zone 3.

You can go out the door, hit a nice, fast tempo and hold it all the way around your favorite loop and back to your house with an average speed over 20 miles per hour. Because of this zone 3 fitness, moderate zone 2 riding (which is where 90 percent of any cyclists’ training should ideally be), feels ridiculously easy.

Breaking Out of the Rut

The good news is that if you’ve reached this level with your riding, chances are you’ve built up a pretty good base of fitness. To take your riding to the next level, it may just be a question of backing off a bit, letting your body reset and starting again on a slightly more disciplined training plan.

Before you change your workout habits, for one week take your resting heart rate every morning before you get out of bed. Then for two weeks after that, restrict yourself to zone 1 riding. (If you don’t know your zones, this means easy.) Little girls on roller skates should be passing you on the path.

Some of you are thinking right now, "This doesn’t include the hard group ride I do every Saturday morning though, right?" Are you starting to see how you managed to get into this situation?

After a week, you should start to see your resting heart rate come down. Wait until it hits rock bottom and then rest another three to five days. Now, you’re body is reset. It’s time to get going.

The first thing you’ll notice when you’re well rested is your heart rate will increase quickly and go up higher. This does not mean you’ve lost fitness, it just means you’re fresh. In fact, during your week or two of recovery riding, the damage you’ve previously done to your body will heal and you might notice a significant improvement in fitness.

Yes, that’s right. An improvement in your cycling strength from doing nothing. In other words, you’ve done all the hard work and you’ve torn your body down over and over. Now all you have to do is let it build itself back up, stronger and faster than before.

So now you’re ready to go out to see if you can beat your average speed on your daily 18 mile loop. Wrong! You’ve turned over a new leaf and you’re now what they call in the industry a smart trainer. Build intensity into your program but focus on quality rather than quantity. Instead of doing your 60 minute ride at 90 percent of your threshold heart rate, break the ride up into intervals. If you want to work on your threshold power, do three 10-minute intervals right at your threshold (your legs and lungs begin to burn and you find it hard to talk). Rest for five or 10 minutes in between and then go again.

After a month you might notice your threshold power or speed start to plateau. Take an easy week, let your resting heart rate drop back down (presumably it has started to rise over the last three weeks of training) and then start to work on your anaerobic power and endurance.

Do some shorter three-minute intervals at maximum effort. Give yourself plenty of rest in between so that each interval is better than the one before. Experiment to see how much intensity you can handle in a week. Start with two days and build to three. Rarely will you want to do more than three days of intensity in a week.

Finally, the most important thing to remember is when you start to get tired and the quality of your intervals starts to diminish, do not try to push through. Rest up until the quality returns to your workouts. As much as you hate to miss workouts, nothing will hurt your cycling ability more than chronic, mediocre, low-quality training.

Josh Horowitz is a USCF certified coach and an active Category 1 racer. For more information about his coaching services and any coaching questions you may have, check out his website, LiquidFitness.com.

PezCycling News: We tap into what’s cool in elite level pro cycling and make the news fun again–every day. Check out our off-beat rider interviews, top level tech reviews, weekly training & fitness articles, cool stories on top rides, race news and reports the way we like ’em, the lovely Daily Distractions and cool stories you can’t find anywhere else. Get Pez’d today.

Paceline 101

By Maynard Hershon

Lots of riders have a shaky understanding of how pacelines work. It’s not their fault, by the way: Many savvy cyclists "just wanna ride," not hassle with teaching green riders.

So here’s my personal Paceline 101. It won’t be technical and it won’t be about how-to-do-it. I’ve never been able to translate written paceline instructions, even diagrams, into action on the road.

Many new-but-strong riders resist learning paceline skills. Unschooled cyclists associate drafting with impossibly fast-paced riding. I can’t do it, they say, I’ll get dropped.

Trust me: Proper paceline technique will make your cycling easier, not harder. You’ll travel faster with less effort. You’ll make new friends, rise to a new level of cycling expertise and be glad you stretched yourself to gain it.

Drafting behind other cyclists, positioning yourself in their aerodynamic wake, makes pedaling easier, often by as much as 25%. That’s a huge difference. If you ride a lot with a stronger person and you feel weak by comparison, learn to draft. If your riding partner is 20% stronger, the draft makes you equal. Equal is cool.

There is no penalty, by the way, for the front person. Having someone "on your wheel" doesn’t slow you down.

My suggestions about drafting are easier to understand than to implement, much like creating happy relationships. Like those relationships, drafting involves other people; It’s cooperative and interdependent and intimate.

So it’s problematical, but not impossible.

First: Pacelining is a team activity. Your partner helps you; If you can, you help him or her. To help, you have to be able to ride at the front, at least for a while. If you’re fried, you can’t do that.

So don’t get fried. Don’t sacrifice yourself; Don’t be a hero. Do only what you can do without exhausting yourself. You owe it to yourself and to your riding partner or partners. Read the last two paragraphs again.

Let’s say there are just two of you. As you draft, remember to take care of yourself. Find the best shelter behind your friend, either directly behind or at an angle. If you find yourself becoming tired, say so.

Say: I’m barely hanging on here. Slow down a bit.

Please do that, please say something. Don’t just be embarrassed and silent and allow yourself to be dropped. I’m imagining all you readers nodding your heads in agreement: Damn, you’re saying, Maynard’s got that right. But will you change your ways?

I’m afraid you’ll go out and let yourself be dropped again and never say a word. I’m slow, you’ll think. Slow. I’m only holding my friend up, ruining his or her ride. He or she’ll be better off when I’m gone. Sound like your mom, don’t you?

When you poop out and drop five bike-lengths behind, your friend or riding partner has to sit up and wait for you. You can’t accelerate and catch him: You’re toast. You feel defeated. Losing the draft the next time will be easier.

You got dropped because you were reluctant, for one reason or another, to ask your friend to slow down. Now you’re tired. The two of you will have to ride very slowly while you recover. If you recover.

If you had asked your friend to ride slightly slower, and we’re talking about a very small difference here, a mph or two, you would still be sitting comfortably in the draft, riding within your abilities.

If he got tired, you could take the front and let him rest. IF you’d made your needs clear to him and he’d complied. So ask. Get what you need. Does this sound like a series of self-help book titles?

If going to the front is going to cause you to blow up, don’t do it. Or go to the front and take very short pulls, 30 seconds max. If you’re in a multi-person paceline and you’re at your limit, sit at the back, open a hole for each rider as he drifts back. You have no responsibility to work. If you can’t, don’t.

Your primary responsibility, beyond safety, is taking care of yourself. Off the back, you can’t help anyone.

And: Your legs will do an amazing amount of work if the loads placed on them are smooth, gradual. So try to create a paceline situation that’s kind to your legs, one that’s smooth and doesn’t make you jump to catch a disappearing wheel.

Speak up.

When the lead rider comes off the front, he should soft-pedal as soon as he moves over. If he does not, the next leader has to stay there for a long time simply to pass him, hovering there right off her shoulder. Get off the front and slow down; Ask your friends to do the same.

Don’t get off the front and brake, just slow down enough so the new leader can pass you and pull off when he wishes.

When you’re second in line, and it’s time for YOU to take the front, please do not accelerate. Please, please do not accelerate. I know you’re excited to be there at the front. I know you want to keep the group moving at a good pace. Don’t accelerate.

Maintain a constant speed, even if you have to check your cyclometer. If you do jump, the guy who just left the front has to chase you with tired legs. He may be able to do that once or twice, but eventually the repeated effort will break his legs.

When the tail end of the line appears next to you, blend into it smoothly. If the pace of the line moving back is almost the same as the line moving forward, it should be easy to blend into the forward-moving line.

Summing up: Take care of yourself so you can be of use to your partner. Try to keep the paceline working smoothly so no sudden-effort loads hit your legs or your friends’ legs. Know what you need and don’t be bashful about asking for it.

Click here for the Maynard Page on Planet Ultra!

Le Tour de Foothills

My over all time was 4 hours 35 minutes — 37 minute faster than previous year.  Had I been on my comfort bike as I had done in the previous year, my time probably would have been longer:

 

				% Total Minutes in Zone
Year	Miles	Minutes	MPH	1	2	3	4	5
2007	61.47	276	16.1	0	8%	24%	62%	6%
2006	64.91	313	13.8	0	2%	30%	63%	5%

 

2007 Route

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2006 Route

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2007 Route Elevation Profile

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VS

2006 Route Elevation Profile

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 Photos from PhotoCrazy.com.