Physiology, training and the ageing cyclist

Pez Cycling has a brief article (Toolbox: What Does Every Masters Athlete Have in Common?) which touches upon the physical decline that faces the ageing athlete, and what to do about it.  For one in his second half century, Grumpy Bob finds there's always something a little depressing about such articles, but at least there is advice, most interestingly on the subject of recovery from training:

To me, the key is fitting workouts together like a puzzle. For example, perhaps one day the focus of the workout is strength type efforts, where the cardiovascular system is not overly stressed, but the essential component of strength is benefited. The next day, a focus can be more aerobic. In other words, you are working on different “systems” on different days.
One addition item. In a recent study, 75% of athlete’s polled (not sure of the amount in the study, but it was large) said they applied some type of recovery program to their training, like recovery drinks, massage, etc. I still think the biggest and most important, regardless of all the other things you try is sleep.

Anyway, Grumpy Bob's encouraged by his performances this season - routinely hitting levels he's not seen since 2004.  A testament to more structured and analytical training?  Or just luck?

2010 British Time Trial Championship

One half of Team Grumpy is organising this year's British Time Trialling Championship over in South Wales.  Of course this means the more web-savvy half of Team Grumpy has rashly volunteered with the website stuff.  Grumpy Bob leaves it to the reader to figure out who that is!

In any event, you can find out more about the course and how to enter at the Team Grumpy website.  To keep an eye on news relating to the event, and the web pages, you can follow the BTTC2010 Twitter feed.  An RSS feed will be set up shortly.

There are direct links to entry forms in PDF and MS Word formats.  Please note the entry fee is £15, and riders need to ensure they use the correct forms, and not the standard CTT entry form.

Golden Cheetah power training analysis software

Since revising his training programme and reviewing his work-life balance in late 2009 (and as described in the this blog), Grumpy Bob has coupled his use of the Polar CS600X HRM/Power computer with the very excellent Golden Cheetah software package.  The attraction of Golden Cheetah as far as Grumpy Bob's concerned is that it's (a) open source; (b) has an active group developers (which means relatively frequent updates), and (c) it's available for MacOSX, Windows and most importantly from Grumpy Bob's perspective, Linux.  Screenshots are available here (though perhaps not from the most recent build).

In a recent message through the Golden Cheetah mailing list, Grumpy Bob became aware of two new websites related to Golden Cheetah.

Firstly, one of the (and possibly the lead) developer Mark Liversedge has a GC related blog, 40 Goals.  Posts there very often reveal new and/or upcoming developments and features for Golden Cheetah.

Secondly, Golden Cheetah - Windows/Linux Development Builds provides pre-built executables for Windows and Linux (32 bit).  These are based on recent snapshots - Grumpy Bob's pleased to see some of the newer features there.