After about 5 sessions of 30-45 minutes on the trainer, I finally ventured outside today on my PC’s. Have them set up on an old road bike with clip on aero bars.
Some background on me - been riding for over 15 years (3-5K/year for about 10 of those years). Definitely lacking in the power dept. on the bike - classic ectomorph body, lean and skinny, but can usually hold my own on fast group rides and TT’s. Also a pretty decent runner over the last 3-4 years (just did a 3:03 marathon this past weekend in Buffalo). Mid pack swimmer.
Rode the PC’s today for about 1:50 and 30 miles or so. Actaully I rode for about 25 miles, then survived for the last 5 :). What a humbling experience! Here are some of the thoughts going through my head post ride:
Regardless of opinions people may have about there efficacy, they give one hell of a workout! Those 30 miles felt like about 80 in both perceived effort and leg soreness/tiredness after the ride.
I feel that if I stick with these for the summer, I will definitely be a better cyclist AND runner by the time September rolls around. As stated above, I need to develop power on the bike. The PC’s force me to ride a lower cadence than I normally would and push harder as opposed to faster. Whether the increased power will come from increased efficiency (which I’m sure I’ll develop), or increased force due to the lower cadences (which I’m sure will increase as the HF’s become more aerobic), my power on the bike WILL increase. I have already seen this on the Computrainer in the few sessions I’ve done - I can ride at about 10 watts higher with the same perceived effort as I could on regular cranks. I just can’t do it as long before my HF’s give out. It’s weird to describe. On normal cranks my limiter is that my quads start burning. With PC’s, my quads don’t hurt for the same or greater power output. My HF’s do.
An added benefit of the lower cadences and independant leg action - I am getting one hell of a core body workout. My back and stomach muscles are definitley working overtime to stabilize my body on the bike when riding these. I’m not saying my back or stomach are sore on the bike, just that I can feel them working to stabilize against the downstroke since the recovering leg can’t help out.
One danger I need to be aware of - when tired I started cheating by chopping my stroke. I would push down on the pedal, and leave that leg at bottom for a split second while recovering the opposing leg. Think of it like a catch up drill in swimming. Can see how this could become a bad habit given enough time.
Climbing performance did not suffer at all. Pushing hard on the hills they feel like normal cranks. Downhills suck though - mostly coasting at this point since I can’t keep up with the pedals at higher cadences.
Given my current fitness and goals, I think I will use the PC’s exclusively for all of my riding EXCEPT for 1 weekly long ride. I realistically won’t be able to effectively ride the PC’s over 3 hours for quite some time, and really need at least 1 long ride of at least 4 hours at least every 2 weeks. I figure my efficiency and HF fitness will steadily improve on the shorter stuff (until I can do the long rides on the PC’s), and I can still maintain an aerobic base/recovery with this longer ride on normal cranks. Dr. Day may have something to say about this :).
The day after riding PC’s, running seems much easier. Not sure why, but it does.
I don’t want to start another useless PC thread, but welcome opinions, stories, and training advice from people who actually have PC’s and use them. NOT from people who have opinions on them but have never really used them.
BTW - noticed a slight amount of play in the clutch mechanisms on both pedals - if you grab a crank and push/pull it, you can see the crank move ever so slighly towards/away from the seat tube. Is this normal? Cranks are smooth otherwise.
I ride PC’s (since 11/03 - with some breaks) - did mostly trainer stuff at first and now am riding outdoors more. You’ll get up to more miles quicker than you think. I do find that I spend a little more time coasting/resting on rides - part of this may be because its harder to soft pedal with PC’s (with regular cranks - you can spin with little/no effort much easier) - I find it hard to spin the PC’s without pushing out with some effort. I won’t go into details - I’m still training/trying them out but I’ve been tracking my CT rides and run loops and will post my thoughts after anouth 2-3 months.
As for the clutch - I can slide them in and out a bit - noticed it after I had switched them back and forth for a race - was told that a little bit of play is normal - but check to ensure that the retaining cap (? proper term) is screwed all the way in.
I’ll bet my last dollar you’ll be a faster runner WAY before september. Ride on…keep us up to date with your progress. I use my PC’s at least some on all my running days.
If you are seeing a benefit, for whatever reason(s), that’s really all that matters. I don’t know if the 4 hour ride on regular cranks is “the best” idea or not. If you’re concerned about it, one thing you could do is ride a couple of hours on PC’s, as your HR’s become toasted, change over to your other bike. Or, while on your regular bike, as often as possible, try to emulate your PC-style riding. What you may find is when on a regular crank, you may fatigue your HF’s SOONER than when on PC’s…this is because you’re pulling up harder on regular cranks than on PC’s due to lack of a feedback mechanism…on PC’s you can tell almost exactly how much minimum picking up effort you have to do…when there’s a tiny little hitch at the top of the stroke, you just barely pulled up enough…you can’t feel that hitch with regular cranks. In THAT sense, pulling up when riding regular cranks might stress your HF’s MORE than when on PowerCranks! The difference is, on regular cranks, if you fry your HF’s, you can still pedal!
That pause at the bottom of your stroke is where you NOW lose no effort from your other descending leg…because that other descending leg isn’t wasting any of it’s power to propell your 6:00 leg past that “dead-point”. Just keep practicing…you’ll eliminate that pause pretty soon. This is one of the inefficiencies I think PC’s teach the rider to eliminate…I see no reason elimination of these kinds of inefficiencies would be a bad thing to do in terms of power to the chain…it’s probably mostly of a neuro-muscular timing nature…something that may be able to be improved without ANY additional energy cost to the rider (not that I think increased energy cost is detrimental to a rider performing a sub-VO2 max effort, and especially not detrimental to a rider performing sub-lactate threshold efforts, nor is increased energy cost important to a rider in an all-out sprint).
A little play in the clutch sounds similar to my set…it hasn’t changed at all in 1.5 years, at least not that I can detect by eyesight.
The lateral play is normal. Need a little room to give everything room to rotate freely.
Your one long ride a week is a reasonable choice since you are starting in the middle of the season but I don’t think it “optimal”. If you push yourself I think you will be there faster than you can imagine right now on the PC’s. Another way to do what you want would be to do three hours on regular cranks then the last hour on PC’s (you would need two bikes to do this). It seems to me the most important time from a training perspective for your long term benefit is when you are tired. My guess is on regular cranks you won’t toast your HF’s as much because, if you did, you couldn’t do 4 hours on regular cranks either. The reason I don’t recommend this is it seems that those who do this never get to the long rides on the PC’s, alsways finding it “too hard”. As long as you will work up to them I don’t see a problem with your approach. If you won’t I do.
The pausing on the bottom when your tired is what your body is doing to give your HF’s just a little more rest between efforts. It is what is allowing you to survive the end of the ride. I don’t see it as a bad habit but, rather, a survival mechanism allowing you to do more than you otherwise could, which is a good thing. The need for this will go away eventually.
Most people find riding outside to be “easier” than on the trainer. I think it is because the bike keeps going when you take little coasting breaks. Anyhow, was that your experience also?
I will definitley try to work up to the longer rides ASAP. Hopefully go at least 3 next week with a few 1 hours in there as well.
Interesting to note that on my regular cranks today, my HF’s were still very sore - I was focusing on pulling through ala PC’s, and really felt yesterdays effort. A very interesting observation for me was that the hills seemed HARDER today on regular cranks. I’m sure part of this is a different set of expectations (training bike/PC’s vs. tri bike=fast), but I tend to think my pedal stroke got sloppy today when tired on the hills vs yesterday were I was not allowed to get sloppy.
One question I had for Yaquicarbo - do you do your bricks on the PC’s? I’m a little nervous of frying my legs on the PC’s and then tryinhg to run right afterwords using the same fatigued muscles (HF’s)?
Also - what do most of you do for your breakthrough ride during the week? There is a Wed night training ride I do, but there is NO WAY I could hang with them for a few more weeks/months using the PC’s - I can barely hang on my race bike. Should I just accept that and ride alone, or regress to using regular cranks? If I opted to do this ride on regular cranks, I would give up the long ride and sub in a “long as possible” PC ride instead so that I would only be “cheating” once a week. Opinions?
I presume you are an IM athlete. If so I vote for getting your competitive juices out of the way on that wednesday night ride/race and giving up your regular crank long ride and going for the “long as possible” PC ride as endurance is such a big deal in IM racing I think it is best to get the bare minimum ASAP.
Of course, if I could talk you into letting your competitive juices go for awhile and ride the PC’s on that wednesday ride I would vote for that also. I think you would be surprised how soon you would be able to hang with your group.
One possible reason that you go slower uphill on regular cranks, other than your PC ride is a dog compared to your nice bike, is that you lose that PC neuro-feedback…so you either don’t get your rising foot moving out of the way (up), or you pull up too hard for your current level of HF conditioning and fry them.
Bricks: my favorite running/cycling workout involves a trainer with PC bike…warm up on it for 10 minutes, go run a bit, return, rinse, repeat until finished, cool down on the PC bike. When I venture out on either my PC bike or my non-PC bike, I almost always finish the ride with at least a 1 mile run…I don’t detect any difference in my HF fatigue no matter which bike I rode…but, I’ve been doing this for a year and a half…it takes a little time. I remember when I began, it seemed harder to run off of the PC bike, at least for the first mile or so…then it seemed to make no difference…other than the fact I was running faster than I used to.
You’re doing fine on them. As Dr. Day says, if you venture out with the group, you will be forced to adapt more quickly…your body finds a way to do things it’s forced to do! Just don’t get hurt doing too much too soon.
I second Frank’s opinion about long rides. Last year, in May, when I started riding PC’s (after doing 10x30 min rides on rollers before Boston Marathon), I went from a 50K to 70, to 90 to 120, to 160 to 180K long ride in the course of the month. By using regular cranks for your long rides, you will just take that much longer getting to the point where you can do a 100 miler in the aero position.
Ron, don’t worry about being able to do brick runs after PC riding. For some reason, it seems to be a non issue even though you use the hamstrings and hip flexors a bit more while riding with PC’s. Last weekend a did a hilly 4000 ft vertical 95K ride and then road straight to our local half marathon hear in Ottawa (www.ncm.ca), where I was the 90 min pace bunny. I managed to cruise through pacing around 30 runners in at 1:29 for the half marathon. Arguably, you won’t be doing this off the bat, but I started with short bricks, (like 20K bike - 15K run) and worked up to longer bikes preceding the runs. I I even did our annual epicman workout in lake placid (3K swim - 180K bike 21.1K run) with PC’s, after less than 2 months of PC riding last year. You can read about epicman here:
Sitting here on Monday and re-reading this thread, I’ve made up my mind dammit!
All rides wil be PC’s!!!
I’ll hang with the group as long as possible on Wednesdays, then ride in alone as needed since I know the course well. Should be good for some post ride excuses anyways (“I would have chased down that break, but I’m on my heavy bike and still getting used to these cranks…”).
Will do as long as possible on the PC’s, with a few possible regular cranks exceptions if any long group rides come along.