Sat, May 23rd

Workout of the Day:
As Many Rounds in 15 Minutes of:
10 Wall Ball Shots
10 Double Unders

Post rounds completed to comments.

Carb Dependence & Alcoholism – Tom Naughton

8 thoughts on “Sat, May 23rd”

Kyle’s experience/rant on road biking: and appeal for either answers or a heartfelt apology from Colm and Big Rachel

My brother in law–you may know him as Captain Steve–is training for a triathlon. He’s been on me for a while now to go on a bike ride with him as hopefully some form of exercises that should be easy on my knee. Tonight I went, and have the following observations.

I have no idea what the appeal of this sport is. Everything about riding one of these bikes is uncomfortable. I rode a mountain bike for years but this was my first foray into the road bike scene and I couldn’t believe how horribly hunched over I was.

As I was riding I also got to thinking: my legs never fully extend (except when standing up, of course), my ankle never fully extends nor fully flexes, my lumbar is curved, my thoracic is as well, my shoulders seemed ok, by my neck had to be bent back to see ahead of me (as K-starr points out in his deadlifting demo).

Now lock that position for an hour or more. Three or four times a week. How is that healthy? I kept imagining the guys in the office spending a long day hunched over their computers and thinking ‘man I can’t wait to get home and get out on my bike’. Get out on my bike and get even more hunched over than the last 10 hours at work. In fact, biking must have the lowest range of motion of any exercise out there (including this one http://www.usaweekend.com/07_issues/070401/images/lat_raise.jpg).

Big Rachel, I can’t for the life of me understand how, after years of biking, CF has reduced your flexibility. It seems to me that with long distance biking you lose flexibility, you lose strength (if you’re training for any considerable distance and not just doing hill repeats) you gain cardiovascular endurance, increased mitochondrial density and such (which can be gained through less time with interval training) and in Ireland you face a very real risk of death. Or at least getting wet. And the pinnacle of your sport is this http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_7PYLvbtyS04/SAf_56nn1LI/AAAAAAAACyg/azO_xuAr8j4/s400/matthew_mcconaughey-1.jpg

I enjoyed mountain biking a lot when I did it because, well I biked in the mountains and they were pretty. Roads are not pretty. They are dirty. So are cars and so is exhaust. Now Captain Steve, while a fan of CF, has no interest in gaining high levels of strength. It’s an argument we’ve had more than once as I try to convince him of the benefits of heavy deadlifting, but ultimately I understand there are different stokes for different folks. But I can’t seem to put that same logic to road biking. I can give him solid reasons why he–and nearly everyone for that matter–should be deadlfiting, but he can’t do the same for biking, other than it’s better than doing nothing. Ok, I grant you that.

Look, I’m probably going to get slammed by all the ardent bikers out there so a few caveats: I fully respect Mr. Armstrong and what he has accomplished. No I can’t do it myself, or anything close to it. I understand that everybody has different interests like NASCAR racing and sumo wrestling. So I ask you, and anyone else who is a fan–what do you like about it that you can’t get from anything else? And for those who do it for health reasons, I’m curious of those as well.

Man, alive–that’s a really long post!