Cycling in Alignment with Colby Pearce

The essence of what training in alignment looks like began to crystallize in Colby Pearce’s mind after an email exchange with a listener of the podcast. “As you’ve identified in your show, amateurs look at pros for things like training, not realizing that all pros do is ride, sleep, and eat. For those of us who race, how much training is too much? Where is the drop off in terms of results? Personally, I’m not willing to train 20 hours a week even if I had the time. Anyway, I’d be curious to know where the curve starts to drop in terms of fitness and health. When does it move?” This episode is Colby’s musings on the matter, which he hopes will prove useful as you determine your own sport-life balance.

To perfect the time trial position for your given anatomy and physiology, it can take years of trial and error. Sometimes, becoming a contortionist is the most appropriate way to describe the skill you must master to find the fastest, most aero position. That raises issues: Riding in such a time trial position increases the functional load when compared to road riding. For instance, the wider the handlebars, the wider the base of support, and, conversely, the narrower the bars, the narrower the base of support. These different approaches yield different aerodynamics, but simultaneously address some of the load characteristic of such a contorted position. In this episode, Colby discusses the key components to creating an effective time trial position based on his decades of experience, tinkering, and experimentation. Resources Superficial Back Line Crank Length Crank Length Tony Martin sand paper story Rohan Dennis http://www.contortionhomepage.com/photolib.html Paul Chek 90/90

James Wilson is the owner and founder of MTB Strength Systems. He is a mountain bike, strength, and Jujitsu coach based in Grand Junction, CO. He is also the inventor of the Catalyst Pedal. He has pioneered many advanced perspectives on strength training for cyclists, producing content on this topic starting in 2005. Our conversation includes James’ thoughts on how power is most effectively made on the bike, how riders should stand more during training, and a model of tension during riding that is broken into four quadrants. Enjoy this discussion which is not only focused on mountain bikes; the concepts discussed apply to all aspects and disciplines of cycling. www.bikejames.com www.pedalinginnovations.com www.bikejames.com/strength/3-bjj-c…your-mtb-riding/ www.bikejames.com/strength/winning…-bjj-tournament/ The shoes James uses: www.somfootwear.com

Some say Scott Moninger is the greatest American cyclist to have never ridden the Tour de France. Moninger is a crafty all-arounder who has victories in road races, criteriums, time trials, and state races. He’s a versatile rider and a passionate athlete with a deep love for the sport. His characteristically stoic expression on the bike and ruthless competitive nature have earned him the nickname of The Iceman. Hope you enjoy our regaling of old racing stories and that you find our conversation about coaching and training to be useful. Velocious coaching site: https://www.velociouscyclingadventures.com IG @moningerscott

So many of my clients have questions and run into issues related to saddle sores, and man, when you get a bad one, it can be really bad. I have actually had a couple clients that suffered so severely, they had to have surgery.  When you sit on a saddle, that’s a lot of weight on a very small surface area. There’s the weight of the torso, the weight of the helmet, the weight of the upper body, the arms — it’s all focused into this relatively small point. Then we add friction generated by the movement of the legs. With so many moving parts there is so much that can go wrong which can lead to undercarriage issues for the rider. Today, I’ve also got a special guest that we’ll get to in the second part of the podcast. Don Powell is the creator and owner of Panache Cyclewear. He’s been designing and creating his own cycling gear there for 12 years. We’ll hear a bit from Don about the construction of chamois and fabrics and technical details in the second part. RESOURCES:  Panache Cyclewear: 20% discount code: Alignment  Kaerwell store for Liposomal Glutathione: 10% discount code: Pearce10 Detox Pathways blog post Chamois cream Dr. Bronner’s soap Weleda soap Trainer platform Inside Ride Trainer platform for KICKR

Group rides are dead. Unpopular opinion number one. Even in ostensibly safe scenarios, group rides are dangerous. Rides are too big; riders are too brash; vehicles are too numerous, and drivers are too distracted.  Other potentially unpopular opinions of Colby’s are related to indoor riding. He outlines some of the pros and cons of Zwifting, including the benefits of riding with extremely controlled and focused training, as well as increased blood volume versus the compounding effects of poor posture that the monotony of riding inside can foster.

My friend and colleague, Julie Young, sent me an email asking some deep, thoughtful questions about fitting riders properly on their mountain bikes. The central theme was around steeper seat tube angles on many modern mountain bikes and how that it is challenging and sometimes impossible to get a rider’s saddle offset far enough back behind the bottom bracket on a mountain bike to match their road position. This question has a lot of nuance and detail. I asked Julie if she would come back onto the pod to do a sort of Q&A style episode, inspired by her thoughtful question. Then, after laboring over these questions even further, I realized that I needed to bring in mountain bike geek-extraordinaire, Travis Brown, also a previous podcast guest (Travis Brown: Mountain Biking Olympian and Hall of Famer.) It is time to unpack bike geometry and rider weight distribution in great detail.

In the first installment of this two-part series on How to Pedal a Bike, you learned the basics of my philosophy of how to pedal a bike. Humans are meant to push down so we need to understand how to optimize that motion for cycling. We’re going to break down how to pedal in different conditions: We will look at the demands of the event that will help us decipher what disciplines have what requirements for the type of pedaling you must do. Then, I will break cyclists down into pedaling phenotypes. When we talk about cycling phenotypes (sprinter, time trialist, etc.) in terms of pedaling, understand that it is a spectrum. I hope these thoughts lead to insight in your own training and spur you to think more critically about how you ride.  Bradley Wiggins hour record Vittoria Bussi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNctC8NnCI&t=50s Alex Dowsett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkfkMTEqQak

Daniel Holloway is a professional cyclist who races for Texas Roadhouse and is a 20-time U.S. National Champion, a Pan Am Games gold medalist, and a member of the U.S. National long team for the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. I met Daniel when he was a junior racing on the track, sometime around 2004. Years later, when I had the opportunity to race some of the European six days, I needed a partner, and Daniel ended up being the man for the job. He was one of the youngest riders in the field at our first Six Day in Dortmund, and I was one of the older riders in the peloton. I think it is quite accurate to say we really had no idea what the hell we were doing. Together, we stumbled our way through four seasons of racing Sixes, World Cups, and World Championships together. We had wins, crashes, DNFs, lots of laughs, and one moment that was pretty close to a fistfight. I thought having Daniel on the show would be the perfect excuse to tell some entertaining stories, and also to help my audience understand the archaic and iconic world of European Six Day racing. 

Many riders come into the fit studio struggling with their bicycle saddles. In this aspect of bike fitting, the end goal is to have a saddle disappear, where you don’t think about it for one hour, you don’t think about it for three hours, you don’t think about it for five hours, you don’t even think about it when you get home. There’s no chafing, there’s no scarring, there are no saddle sores, there are no little pebble-sized cysts growing in your nether regions, which is unfortunately quite common. We’re going to talk about the anatomy of the human undercarriage, and then we’re going to talk about the shapes of saddles and how those two things go together. How do they fit together? What are the design concepts of different types of saddles? How do they support the weight of the torso? All this and much more this week on Cycling in Alignment.