On the Road Again at Last!

Ottawa's miserable winter has relented enough that today I was able to cycle to work on BlackAdder. The temperature this morning was just below freezing, but the sun was shining and the long-range forecast is pretty similar. Except for two patches of ice where I had to walk, the roads were dry so today the outdoor cycling season really begins!

With a few previous and quite brutal rides to work, my total mileage for 2008 now stands at, uh, 17 kms. But the journey of 10,000 leagues begins with a single step.

The Brewery to Brewery (B2B) Ride: still yet another intersection of beer and cycling

Harpoon's Boston brewhouse

Yet another confirmation of the synergy between beer and cycling (as if one were needed) is Harpoon Brewery's annual ride from its original brewery in Boston to the one it acquired in 2000 in Windsor, Vermont: the Brewery to Brewery Ride (B2B).

June 14th, 2008 will mark the eighth time that this charity event has taken place. It is 143 miles/230 kms in length and is over a single day. Riders must be able to complete the event, including rest stops, in 10 hours or less and participants must be able to average at least 16 mph/25 kmh for the course. It appears that support is fairly minimal enroute.

Start times are dependent on your planned speed, with six groups leaving from 6 am onwards. It must be fun: the numbers were limited to 80 invited riders for the first three years, then increased to 300 riders in 2005, 375 in 2006 and 500 in 2007. The ride in 2008 was limited to 650 participants, and on March 20 it was sold out.

So better get on the e-mail list and mark it down for 2009!

Climate Change and Cycling

In November I wrote about TerraPass, a company that sells carbon offsets to people who want to reduce their transportation carbon footprint. Although this firm specializes in organizing investments in carbon-positive projects, it also provides tips on how you can reduce your environmental impact and has, on its website, written about how cycling can help the world. After all, every trip you make with a bicycle instead of a car reduces carbon output by that much. I linked to a blog article about bicycle commuting, and since then the author has had his car insurance reduced because he is driving less and no longer parking his car in a low-security area when at work. In addition, the TerraPass blog recently featured a link to an article from the Newport News, VA Daily Press reporting on the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC that suggests the high price of oil could make 2008 "the Year of the Bicycle" in the United States. Of course, for many of us it is always the Year of the Bicycle but it is good to see this kind of press.

Besides specialized companies like TerraPass, others see business opportunities in climate change. Clif Bar & Company, makers of the Clif Bar energy bar (surprise!), have a number of projects to promote sustainable development. One of these is the 2-Mile Challenge, which is built on the fact that 40 percent of urban trips in the United States are under two miles. The Challenge encourages participants to map a circle two miles in radius from their homes and ride their bikes in that area.

The company has converted a 1959 GMC bus to run on biodiesel and it is travelling around the Western US to encourage people to sign up for the challenge. In addition to giving out Clif Bars--which, I might like to point out still cost twice as much in Canada as in the United States in spite of the parity of our dollars, harrumph--the bus features interactive exhibits on bicycle commuting, with the chance to try out suitable bikes and win equipment and clothing and listen to some live music as well.

The Great Tour of Brandenburg: Part 1

Coat of Arms of Brandenburg

I lived in Berlin, Germany from August 1998 to September 2002. Soon after my arrival, I purchased a book "The Great Bicycle Tour Around Berlin, in 40 Stages" and determined to ride the whole thing. The route described were all around 40 kms each and took the cyclists in a huge circle around the city. It was organized around train stations, with the idea that you could take the train to the start of the stage, do your ride and then come back from the next train station and then start again the following week from where you left off.

The Great Tour was enormous fun and gave me the opportunity to see Eastern Germany up close and personal.

Saturday, April 3, 1999: The Great Tour of Brandenburg Begins

After a Good Friday of perfect weather spent doing housework, I was resolved to get out and start my first leg of the Great Big Bike Ride around Brandenburg. Of course, on the Saturday, the weather was not quite as good as the house-cleaning day, with overcast skies, but with no rain in the forecast, I thought it would be okay even if not very photogenic.

I got to the train station in plenty of time to get my “Regio”, as they call regional commuter trains here, but in the best tradition of bureaucracy, I could not figure out how to buy a ticket for me and Mr. Bicycle. The vending machines were only for local traffic and the other machines did not cover Regios, but only long-distance traffic, so I decided to just buy the ticket on the train, which is allowed but usually costs somewhat more. There were several other cyclists waiting and they said I could do this. They were probably scandalized by my non-German lack of preparation, but the train was about to come in and we had to get ready to drag things on board.

The Regios are nifty red doubledecker trains, with special sections for bicycles. Unlike Switzerland, where local trains use hooks to let you hang up your bikes, the German system lets you sit next to the bike, but wastes huge amounts of space since the bicycles are just upright. There is an elastic cord you can wrap around several frames, but the whole thing is not very efficient and bikes fall over easily. Unlike hooks, other people’s bikes are near yours, which is a bad, bad thing for owners of brand-new, super-expensive custom-built English Racing Green sport-touring bikes who live in complete terror of having their babies scratched. Luckily, the train was not crowded so the danger was minimal.

Sitting next to me was a young man with a pretty short haircut and wearing camouflage motif clothing. He had a duffel bag and was listening to a really loud Walkman, which I could hear from about 3 meters away, although I could not make out the music but only the thumping bass. At 0 meters, I would have thought early-morning deafness was guaranteed.

Off we huffed and puffed and before I knew it, we were at my stop, Brieselang on the outskirts of the Berlin urban area, about an hour from Bahnhof Zoo. No conductor had appeared to take my money, so my introduction to the Regio was a freebie. My camouflaged friend got off as well and as I rode away, he was standing on the platform for the train heading back to Berlin, singing to the tunes on his Walkman (“Jawohl!”). Of course, Mr. Innocent Canadian suddenly realized this was one of those Neo-Nazi thugs we read about in the papers at home.

Not much to see in Brieselang, so off to the west towards Zeestow, a charming little village where I stopped to take a few photographs of the Real Brandenburg. As I was to discover subsequently, all towns in the Land are somewhat similar in layout, grouped around the village church. The area was historically staunchly Lutheran and it was remarkable to see just how many churches there were. They survived East German times but some of them did not appear to make the transition into the post-1989 Germany and were derelict. It seemed to depend on the size of the town or village involved.

Following the directions in my guidebook, I turned right off the main road and onto a country pathway lined with cherry trees in blossom. Although the cherry trees cheered me up, the road surface did not. It quickly dwindled from a hard-packed pathway to what appeared to be tractor ruts in the sand. And what sand! Brandenburg is famous/infamous for its sand, which is as fine as sugar. Good for white asparagus, perhaps, but this is not the ideal surface for a custom-built English Racing Green sports-touring bicycle with darn narrow, 145 psi-inflated tires. I did learn that you can push a bicycle in the sand even if you have cleated racing shoes since the cleats sink too. This went on for about 2 kms until I crossed some railroad tracks and came once again onto a hard-surfaced road that took me through a little industrial park.

After getting mildly lost, I found the right road towards my next goal, Tremmen. The road was now quite good and I was cruising nicely through a flattish agricultural region at a good clip. The guidebook warned me that the untrained would suffer going up the hill to Tremmen, but I did not even notice it. This meant that I was either well-trained, thanks to Mallorca, or I was going the wrong way. Luckily, I was going the right way, but the guidebook, which was accurate in saying that Tremmen had perhaps seen better days, was coy about the next stretch of road towards Wachow. Here I was to really discover the cobblestones of Brandenburg.

Tremmen is a typical Brandenburg town, with a main street of cobbles leading past the church. The houses are well-constructed and quite substantial although there is a bit of monotony since there were not a lot of colour varieties of brick used. Most are a brownish tone.

The cobblestones deserve some mention, and will get a lot during the entire ride. They come in several different flavours: the Yellow Brick Road, which is yellow bricks in a herringbone pattern, tightly-laid and somewhat smooth; the Small Cobblestones, which are not so tightly-laid and give a jarring ride; the Cyclist Smashers, which are gigantic rocks with arched tops that make you feel as if you are being hit with a great flat object as you ride. The Smashers really cut down your speed, not only because you cannot ride fast, but because after you pass over them you have to stop and tighten up all the bolts and screws on the bicycle or things will fall off. Riding on the shoulders does not work very well, since they are the already-noted sugar sand and bring you to a complete stop immediately.

The main street in Tremmen was composed of Cyclist Smashers, but I was fortunately able to ride on the sidewalks, which are just smooth brick, like the ones in Berlin. After Tremmen, there was an ordeal of Small Cobblestones partway to Wachow, but then things improved to an excellent regional road. This road had a first-rate bicycle path running alongside of it. I am not sure of the need for such a path, since the road is not heavily travelled and paths are expensive to maintain. I noted these unnecessary paths in a number of other sections of my ride.

Wachow was small and charming and, following an alley of chestnut trees, I was soon riding along a smooth road through an extensive marshland. Off to one side was a large field with a gigantic flock of large white birds. I stopped to look at them, thinking they might be the famous Brandenburg storks, but the more than fifty birds I looked at were surely a type of egret, a member of the heron family and quite common in the American South. I have seen lots of them in the Carolinas, in particular. In the USA, they were heavily hunted in the early years of the century nearly to extinction to meet the demands of the women’s hat industry and this ridiculous slaughter resulted in establishment of the Audubon Society on a national basis to successfully combat the hunt. These now-German egrets (from Africa, I guess) looked very happy standing around in the fields.

But better was to come. I stopped in the tiny town of Päwesin, on the east bank of the Beetzsee, to look at an enormous tripod between two houses on the main street. This structure was about 15 meters tall and my suspicion that it was a stork’s nest was happily confirmed when a tall, white bird with black wing patches looked down at me. I observed the stork for a few minutes and was delighted when the stork changed position and I had the chance to see another one beside the first. A nesting pair! This was very exciting to a Canadian who is not used to such large birds calmly sitting in an urban environment, although perhaps Päwesin might not be considered urban. But there they were, right on Main Street.

Heading now in a southerly direction, I passed quickly through the villages of Weseram and Klein Kreutz, arriving in Brandenburg am Havel (Brandenburg on the Havel River, as opposed to the Land of the same name) just before lunchtime.

Brandenburg/H., as they write it, is an old cathedral town, founded in 928 AD, but I did not find it terribly interesting. I spent no time exploring it because the traffic around it was terrible. Everybody was doing their Easter shopping before the stores closed and they would all starve on the weekend. Getting only moderately lost, I went up a very busy street on the west side of the Beetzsee, looking for a bicycle path that my guidebook claimed existed. Since the path was supposed to run alongside the lake, I turned right to go towards the Hotel Seeblick, or Lakeview, which I cunningly calculated must also be on the lake. Luckily, the hotel had a large map of the area outside and I discovered I had ridden right past the bikepath. Retracing my steps, I found a quite good bikepath, marked by a sign slightly larger than my hand. The Germans could certainly take another lesson from the Swiss, who use great, big signs that you cannot overlook and then show you are on the right path with regular confirming signs.

I stopped for my sandwich lunch on the shores of the Beetzsee at Brielow. Brielow had a nice big sign dedicated to its stork population, showing how many young had been hatched and where they lived. The bicycle/walking path was called the “Storchwander-weg” and I hope that they are successful in attracting visitors because of the storks.

The lake is fairly narrow and was very calm. There were plenty of bulrushes and although it was overcast, the whole scene was very peaceful and pretty. Compared to Ontario lakes, though, Brandenburg ones feel more like large ponds.

At this point, I had a slightly annoying equipment failure. My handlebar bag, which is supported by an odd bracket-and-string arrangement, chose this time to start flopping down onto the front wheel. After struggling for some time, I realized that I was using the wrong-sized screwdriver head to tighten up the bracket screws. As someone who always begins a project by reading the instructions and assembling it backwards, this did not come as a big surprise. Since the ride was meant as a test run for the new equipment, I was not overly concerned and everything functioned properly after this brief fuss. I suspect that when the people at Mountain Equipment designed the bag holder, they did not include the loosening effects of cobblestones in their calculations.

Refreshed, I returned to the road, a lovely stretch through Radewege, Butzow, Ketzür, Gortz and Bagow where I easily maintained a 35 km/h pace. There were some nice little hills and some gentle curves to enjoy and even a nice downhill stretch through dense forest. At the crossroads in Bagow, there is a very attractive Jugendstil/Art Nouveau church, highly unusual for the region, which was constructed in 1906. It was a most unlikely coral sort of colour, with brown half-timbering. It still seems to be active as a church.

On to Riewend, on the Riewendsee, which I could not see from the road. Then, without warning, began an astonishing stretch of Yellow Brick Road cobble, running for more than 5 kms. This looked as if it had been designed to last an eternity and it also felt as if it would take that long to ride it. After seeing my average speed plunge, and after losing a lot of the feeling in my hands and wrists, the village of Klein Behnitz was reached.

Consisting of the usual church and cobblestone main street, Klein Behnitz looked as if it was in an amazing state of preservation. If you would take the cars away, it would not have been out of place to see Frederick the Great to ride through, or watch the stage coach to Potsdam bounce over the cobbles. There were no new structures of any kind that I could see. The place would make an excellent location for any film on 19th Century Brandenburg village life. Or 18th Century even.

To make up for the bone-jarring cobblestones, the next stretch of road to Groß Behnitz was beautifully and smoothly paved. It is a mark of pride in Brandenburg to have cobblestones in your town. After reunification, many Eastern towns sold their cobblestones to wealthy Wessies who used them for paving their driveways. As a cyclist, I cannot help but think this was an excellent practice since it led to smooth asphalt, but now some towns are re-cobbling.

The Borsig family, famous locomotive builders in Berlin, had a Renaissance-style chateau in Groß Behnitz, constructed in the 1870s. Ernst von Borsig used the house as a base for the German Resistance and meetings with members of the old Prussian aristocracy, a number of whom were implicated in the July 20, 1944 plot, were held in 1942 and 1943, unnoticed by the Nazis since von Borsig often held hunting parties in his forests. The house burned down in 1947.

A little way further and I found myself in the large town of Nauen. An attractive cathedral, an old Rathaus and an important train station (for the region) later, and I was off on a so-called Landstrasse in the direction of Fehrbellin.

The Landstrasse is an East German thing. An agricutural road, clearly similar to those in France that I have ridden, these streets are look smooth but the asphalt is quite rough. As cars approached from the other direction, I also quickly realized that Landstrassen are very, very narrow, about the width of one car and one bicycle. This is not so good when the cars insist on taking the centre of the road. I had been warned often about the quality of driving in Brandenburg, where people are unaware that drinking and driving together constitute bad policy, but part of the bad accident rate must be due to these surprisingly narrow streets. Luckily, everyone seemed sober and the traffic was light. After all, who wanted to go to Utershorst or Hertefeld or Dreibrück or Hakenberg on a Saturday afternoon anyway? Hakenberg was actually a place people had once wanted to go, but first a description of the area.

Looking at the map, one is impressed by the number of rivers and canals in this region. Also, the towns all seem to be exactly 3 or 4 kilometres apart and constructed to an identical plan (yes, a cobbled main street and a church alongside). Apparently, the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm Frederick the Great’s great-grandfather, encouraged French Huguenots to settle in Brandenburg after their civil rights were reduced after the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It seems that a number of these were clever engineers who were able to drain the marshlands and turn them into productive farmlands. More than 20,000 Huguenot families came to Prussia and more than a few of them settled in the little towns through which I was riding. At one point, one-third of the population of Berlin itself was actually French!

It was tiring riding the rough asphalt and cobbles through Deutschhof and Sandhorst and Königshorst and Dechtow (incidentally, all the names ending in “ow” are actually Slavic in origin rather than German and are pronounced “oh” rather than “off”). But up ahead in Hakenberg I could see something unusual: a monument. Just off the road stands a Siegessäule, a Column of Victory marking the defeat of the Swedes at the hands of the Great Elector’s army on June 28, 1675.

The Great Elector had a tendency to forget with whom he had forged alliances. With Prussia in the centre of Europe, this was a Bad Thing. An alliance with the Netherlands had flopped and ended up with Louis XIV taking pieces of Prussian territory on the Rhine. These were given back but Francophobia reined. Then Prussia joined an alliance against France headed by Austria, with Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark. This did not work out well as the Alliance suffered bad military defeats in France. While the army was camped for the winter in Franconia, far away in the South, the Swedes invaded Prussia in December 1674 and were making a mess of Brandenburg. No alliance troops were coming to the Great Elector’s rescue and his general, the 70 year old Derfflinger, had to move the 7,000 man army right across central Germany, with all the baggage and the soldiers’ 3,000 dependents. Within two weeks, the army was back and Derfflinger chased the Swedes out of the fortress at Rathenow and caught up with them at Hakenberg. The Swedes outnumbered the Prussians but did not realize it. Derfflinger was able to position his 13 artillery pieces to command the field, while the Swedes could only get 7 of their 38 guns to fire. The Swedes lost 2,000 men to 500 Prussian casualties and the Battle of Fehrbellin, although minor in European terms, marked the establishment of the fame of the Prussian army and the Great Elector received that nickname due to this success. General Derfflinger, anxious to boot the Swedes right out of Prussia, took a cavalry force and covered 500 kms in 10 days and inflicted another defeat on the Swedes in Tilsit. Considering that 17th Century cavalry mounts were more like draft horses, this was a remarkable feat.

Fehrbellin, centre of the regional peat industry, is an attractive and active old town. It is linked to Berlin by the A24 autobahn and judging from its prosperity, is probably used as home base for commuters. There is a lot of residential construction going on, but the old part of the town remains intact and is quite charming. Unfortunately, Fehrbellin does not have a railway station, so I was going to have to figure out how to get to Friesack, where there was one.

My guidebook suggested going from Fehrbellin to Brunne and then by a path to Vietznitz and on to Friesack, a trip of about 12 kms. When I reached Brunne, nobody could explain how to reach Vietznitz. In fact, locals suggested that the route, wherever it was, would be quite unsuited to anything but a mountain bike. I took an alternative route that was closer to 25 kms. Unfortunately, 6 kms of it was over really terrible road. This consists of two parallel paths of concrete plaques, each about 1.5 metres in length. It was like riding over endless expansion joints and one had to keep looking for traffic as the whole road was only one lane wide. I would have thought that it would have been easier just to lay down a simple asphalt road through the countryside instead of going to all the trouble of these concrete things, but perhaps they needed them for moving tanks around or something.

Exhausted as I was by this “road,” the last ten kilometres from Warsow to Friesack went very well. The road was superb and interesting, with little hills and no traffic and, as always at the end of a long bike ride, the closer the destination the greater the magnetic pull it exerts. The train station is beyond Friesack itself, in the middle of a field. The station has seen better days as well and although there was a snack bar/pub, the rest of the station was boarded up. Switching from my racing shoes to sandals and finishing up the last of my Gatorade, I rested on the platform and twenty minutes later the hourly train to Berlin pulled in.

This time the conductor collected some money from me. I had had a whole day of adventure in the Prussian heartland, covering 156 kilometres, for a total cost of DM 11, or less than C$ 10. And probably 3500 calories! And I had learned that my bicycle, which I had only ridden 200 kms total in Canada, was superbly comfortable over a long day of riding. I had no stiffness anywhere the next day, to my amazement. I had also learned that the plan of taking the train to a jump-off point and coming back from another worked very well. And I had learned not to trust the guidebook, whose authors have a rather different idea of what constitutes a rideable surface for a bicycle than I do.

The Business Press Notices Cycling, Again

A recent article in Business Week detailed the history of an American success story, bicycle components manufacturer SRAM. Besides learning that the firm name uses the founders' initials, it was entertaining to read that the CEO was unemployed in 1987 when he decided to get into the bike parts business by making shifters, the famous GripShift. It was a miserable flop for road bikes but by 1989 had become a success with mountain bikers. A lawsuit against Shimano, which only would sell complete component sets, was settled and the company has gone from strength to strength, with current revenues at US$ 318 million annually. The firm employs 1800 people in 12 offices in 7 countries. It has purchased a number of well-known parts manufacturers, including RockShox, Avid and Sachs Bicycle Components. In 2006 it introduced the new Force and Rival road groups and they have begun to appear on pro-level racing bikes.

SRAM sounds like a fun place to work:

You won't find many cars at SRAM's headquarters on the Near North Side of Chicago. Nearly all the office's 100 employees pedal to work, including Day, who is 51. Expensive road and mountain bikes clutter the place. Day himself doesn't work from a regular desk or office. Six-foot-three and fit, he uses a drafting table in the open. Walls, he says, would cut him off from co-workers. Or the beer vending machine, where employees can buy cold ones for 75 cents after 5 p.m. Or his view of the bike test track, which runs the circumference of the interior.

The Radler: yet another intersection of beer and cycling

My first Radler, from Bad Schussenried

After posting the article about the health benefits of beer, I gave more thought to the relationship of beer-drinking and cycling. I was always curious about “Radler,” a shandy-type drink served in beer halls and restaurants everywhere in Germany, since the name means “cyclist.” The connection was not apparent to me and as a person who likes his beer pretty much as simply beer I was not all that enthusiastic about the idea of mixing it with a soft drink or juice. While cycling in Germany, I tended to drink Schorle, which is just sparkling water mixed with fruit juice, during a ride and then switching to more serious consideration of beer in the evening.

The jolly Franz Xaver

However, it turns out that there is an historical connection between this drink and cycling. The story goes that an entrepreneurial innkeeper named Franz Xaver Kubler had an establishment a short distance from Munich. He was a former railway worker and had opened his inn late in the 19th Century in Deisenhofen.

He arranged to have a bicycle path built through the woods to his place, the Kubler Alm, and on a summer’s day in June 1922 a considerable number of Bavarians, having taken up cycling after World War I with great enthusiasm, descended on Herr Kubler and required refreshment. Herr Kubler does not look like someone who would stint on beer but on that day he and his staff faced an estimated 13,000 thirsty cyclists and–disaster of disasters in Bavaria–it was clear that there was not going to be enough beer. Herr Kubler did, however, have a large stock of unsalable lemon soda and he improvised, mixing it 50/50 with beer and claiming that he had invented the drink just for the occasion to ensure that the cyclists would be able to get home in fairly sober condition, although I suspect that in 1922 there were not a lot of cars around to hit them anyway. He christened his creation the “Radlermass” from “Radler” for “cyclist” and “Mass” being the standard litre quantity of beer that the Bavarians drink. The drink quickly gained popularity and became available throughout Germany. The name is generally shortened to “Radler,” although in Northern Germany it is called “Alsterwasser,” after the river that flows through Hamburg.

After riding the Bad Schussenried Radmarathon in 2000, a really dreadful 200 km ride most of which was undertaken in pouring, cold rain, I was presented with a certificate, a beer stein (a “Mass”) and a bottle of Radler brewed by the Bad Schussenried brewery, one of the sponsors of the ride. I was not very interested in the Radler but I took it home to Berlin anyway. A few months later, on a very hot day, I discovered that I was out of beer but the bottle of Radler was in the fridge so I opened it. It was delicious! The Germans take a light blond lager and mix it with lemon soda and it was quite refreshing. The main advantage is that the full flavour of the beer is apparent but the alcohol content is reduced. 0.5 litres of Radler is about 265 Kcal, compared to around 205 Kcal for that much regular beer so even though the alcohol is down the sugar from the lemon soda clearly neutralizes the weight-loss effect.

The Kubler Alm is still in business and the outdoor beer garden will seat over 2,000 people. It has a full calendar of events and in July there is a celebration of the invention of the Radler. There are bicycle racks sufficient for over 400 bikes so clearly the owners have not forgotten their tradition.

Eight Healthy Reasons to Drink Beer!

Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, Forbes has published an article about the health benefits of drinking beer. You can read the piece here. We have always suspeced that the Truth is Out There and are delighted that the mainstream press knows about it. Of course, an additional reason to drink beer is to toast the successful bicycle ride you have just completed!

Inadvertent Doping?

News feature, March 7, 2008

Neben, others sue Hammer Nutrition over contamination

Mark Zalewski, North American Editor

Amber Neben
Photo ©: Team Flexpoint

American cyclist Amber Neben, along with professional triathletes Rebekah Keat and Mike Vine, filed a lawsuit in a California district court last December against Hammer Nutrition, maker of Endurolytes. The lawsuit alleges that the product contained unlisted substances that caused all three plaintiffs to produce positive doping tests, and that further resulted in subsequent doping violations and sanctions.

Court documents obtained by Cyclingnews state that each plaintiff took multiple capsules of the product Endurolytes before competing in events in which each subsequently tested positive for 19-norandrosterone, a metabolite of the banned steroid norandrostenedione found in urine. Arguing for the plaintiffs is Howard Jacobs, well known for his work with Floyd Landis' case as well as other professional athletes involved with doping violations.

The lawsuit, which was initiated by Keat and her twin-sister Simone, states that Simone had the capsules in question independently tested by the WADA-accredited Doping Control Centre lab in Malaysia in June of 2006, all before retaining Jacobs. That lab reported to Keats that the capsules contained dehydroepiandrosterone and 4-androstenedione. Upon further examination, after repeated requests by Keat, the lab also found the samples were contaminated with norandrostenedione.

For the rest of the article, read today's Cyclingnews.com here.

There have been a number of cases where cyclists have been punished for doping offences where it appears they may not have been at fault. For those of us using Hammer nutrition products it is disturbing to read that it may be possible for them to be contaminated. It will be interesting to see what the court determines here.

A Scientific Approach To Training, revisited

I wrote this piece in Spring 2005 and as I continue on the Tour de Basement in preparation for yet another summer assault on the Alps it is fun to revisit it. There is a difference between training and working-out and my results in 2005, when I rode 11 Swiss/Italian Alpine pass roads in 6 days, convinced me that I just had to keep on doing this.

"Go, Go, Go!," my friend Ralph the Badger was shouting in the distance, along with my coach. My dim brain could barely comprehend what was happening as the words filtered in. I was totally focused on grinding out yet another turn of the pedals as my familiar bicycle turned into a torture instrument, forcing me to ride up what felt like at 25 per cent incline. Worst of all, I was breathing as hard as I could but getting almost no air into my lungs because an ogre was stamping on my chest and suffocating me. In fact, I was taking a test indoors to determine my VO2 max and my lactate threshold. Not only had I willing agreed to do this, but I was even paying for it.

I would consider myself an average recreational rider. Just out of high school in 1974, I made my first serious bike tour, riding from London to Munich with my best friend and discovering I loved cycling. Of course, back then I was strong and slim, albeit less charming and sophisticated than now, but as the years went by I never forgot that great ride. In 1998 I moved to Germany for a four year assignment and discovered cycling Euro-style, with trips to Mallorca, Belgium, Sicily, Holland, Switzerland, the entire Camino de Santiago and all over Germany. But when I rode with my friends I found that I often could not keep up well on hills and was determined to improve this.

Fast-forward to Washington, DC. After moving to the city in 2002 and joining a bicycle touring club, I found that I was able to do more riding than ever before. I also was climbing more hills than ever before as we often rode in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. In a moment of insanity I signed up for the cheerfully-named Mountains of Misery Tour and discovered that I was still not very good at hills. But a year later, and 15 pounds lighter, it was a lot easier when I did my second MoM. And thus a plan was hatched.

In 2000 I rode several passes in the Swiss Alps and I was so taken with the beauty of the region that I vowed to return. But I also vowed that I would not wheeze and gasp my way over the passes as I had done then. It was always my experience that the best tours I did were the ones where I felt most at one with the bicycle, when my conditioning let me enjoy the scenery without being distracted by the hardships of pedalling.

At the end of October 2004 I decided to Get Really Serious and take advantage of the coaching services that have sprung up all over the United States. I bought a good heart rate monitor, an expensive home trainer, and even a great big fan to keep me cool. I got all kinds of bicycle race DVDs to watch but to set the whole thing in motion I clearly needed Professional Help. This would not be a surprise to those who have known me any length of time, but what I was looking at would mean a much greater commitment to my hobby. But as someone with a desk job I looked at this as an investment in my future health as well. The most obvious benefit would come in August 2005 when my goal is to do a week’s tour in the Swiss Alps, covering 12 passes, including the fearsome Stelvio with its 46 hairpin, turns in seven days.

To prepare myself, I stocked up on books written by training luminaries such as Joe Friel and Chris Carmichael, and searched the Internet for any useful information about training I could find. I now have several binders full of Useful Suggestions, but you don’t get fit by reading. So I then found a coach near me who offered training programs and the opportunity to take tests at a facility a short drive away. My friend Ralph wanted to do the test as well, although he was not planning on signing up for coaching.

I was chosen to be the lucky first contestant. My bicycle was set up on a home trainer. A heart rate monitor (HRM) transmitter was strapped on to my chest and then a neoprene mask with tubes sticking out of was fitted to my face, below my eyes. There was a computer wired up that the coach was operating. The idea was that I would keep pedalling at a comfortable and regular cadence as resistance on the trainer unit was increased each minute. The set-up was able to determine how much oxygen I was consuming and how fast I was exhaling CO2. This is used to calculate what is essentially lung capacity (maximal aerobic capacity, technically), something that is more representative of good genes than of fitness. For example, two of the Tour de France’s great riders–Lance Armstrong and Miguel Indurain–could boast VO2 max levels (expressed in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute) of 88 and 80 respectively, compared to the average person’s level of 50.

Of more importance is establishing baseline level for "Lactate Threshold" (LT). Without being too scientific about it, this is the maximum effort you can sustain for extended periods without, well, blowing up. If insufficient oxygen to going to your muscles using the aerobic metabolism, your body must rely on the anaerobic metabolism. What you get is a build-up of lactic acid, which causes your muscles to hurt a whole lot and you eventually have to slow down or stop. The purpose of the test is to determine at what heart rate LT is reached and then you can use that figure to develop a training plan. While VO2 max can’t be changed a great deal, the LT can be raised through training to represent a higher percentage of VO2 max.

So my curiosity thus led me to be strapped onto my bicycle so I could pretend to be an elite athlete. There was a long warm-up first; then the first few minutes of the test went swimmingly as I kept a steady pace and thought positive thoughts. At the 5 minute mark I was finding it a little more difficult; at 10 minutes it was getting noticeably harder. At 14 minutes, bad things were beginning to happen as I was starting to feel the mask constrict me as I tried to breathe heavily to match my exertion. The last two minutes, which took me to 17:08, were horrible as I was gasping, trying to breathe and my legs felt like concrete blocks. Who is doing all that groaning? Wait–it’s me! Get me off of here–I only cycle for fun! My head was throbbing and I felt as if I would do anything to get off the stupid bike and end the idiotic test. But I survived.
Mind you, Ralph had to take the mask off because I did not have the strength or coordination to do it myself. I was too busy gasping. And he took great pleasure in telling me how awful I looked. It needed a good ten minutes of gentle spinning for me to feel sort of normal again. And when the computer printout was completed, I learned that my VO2 max was 58.4 (hmm, no Indurain there) and my LT was reached at a heart rate of 155 bpm. According to the printout, the latter was 76% of my VO2 max. This meant I was a good candidate for improvement through training as you can be trained up to 90% of VO2 max. Most importantly, I now had a baseline to determine the correct intensity of my workouts. No two individuals are alike in heart rate or LT or recovery time, so these tests are only useful for measuring your progress.

In the four months since then, I have religiously followed my workout program. The first part, at what seems like bizarrely slow speeds, has been primarily to improve my endurance. After this initial stage, I will move into the realm of training closer to the LT. My coach has encouraged me to develop training goals for the year and has suggested doing some racing to improve my cycling skills and focus my training. And of course, proper nutrition is a major element of getting in condition, but that’s another story.

Most cyclists don’t race, but training is valuable for anyone going on a bike tour. There is often the added weight of panniers to consider and if there are no hills, there are always headwinds. After a great day of riding and a well-deserved dinner, getting up the next morning and heading off to new adventures should be something to look forward to rather than being endless torture.
On the subject of torture, Ralph had his chance to be tested too and I did not neglect taking the opportunity to point out when I removed the mask from his face how pale he looked, and how pink his eyes had become.

Riding with Coach Troy in New York State: A Recommendation

At this time of year I am hard at work, riding the Tour de Basement as the snow falls gently down outside. Maybe not so gently: we are promised the joys of 15-30 more centimeters (up to 1 foot, in the Old System) of the white stuff this coming Sunday.

Luckily I am one of the few people on the planet to actually admit to having no problem riding indoors for fairly lengthy periods. My personal record was the Braveheart Ride, when I watched the Mel Gibson film in its 3 hour entirety while turning the cranks.

My secret to indoor trainer success is to usually to watch old Tour de France/Giro/Tour of Flanders DVDs and pretend I am out there riding with the guys. This has worked well as there is nothing to detract from doing your own workout. My Cruel Coach has me doing the High Intensity Training regime of Dr. Arnie Baker and there is so much brutality in this that I can easily match my exertion to things like the 1 hour session of Marco Pantani climbing the Plateau de Beille.

In addition to my race library, I have several other DVDs that are training-specific. I will review these for the blog but I wanted to start with my most recent acquisition as I enjoyed it so much.

Coach Troy Jacobson of Maryland is well-known/notorious for his Spinervals training DVDs, which usually feature a team of cyclists riding indoors and creating serious sweat and tendon bulges while the coach walks around them and saying things like: "Good job!" This must appeal to people as the number of his DVDs seems to be increasing exponentially.

The latest series is one that features rides outdoors. Like, with scenery and movement. I purchased the second in the series. It features the Lake Placid Ironman loop of 56 miles. I would like to go south (Lake Placid is only 2 hours from here) and ride this course in Spring and thought it would be nice to see the route beforehand.

The DVD features Coach Troy himself riding the course. He is being followed by a car filming the whole thing, except for the sequences when the Coach Troy Cam gives you a cyclist's-eye-view of the road ahead. This helmet-mounted camera is a nice idea, but Coach Troy should spend a bit more money on equipment as the view always seemed a little blurry to me.

Coach Troy gives a running (rolling) commentary of the route and suggestions about where to go fast and where to pull back. He varies the gearing, and you can follow along: the DVD indicates the gearing, the time enroute and the level of exertion in percentage terms. Although it seemed to me that he was using the big chainring where I would probably not, it is very easy to follow along. You can listen to Coach Troy with music, or music without Coach Troy if you prefer.

Whiteface Mountain (5th highest in New York State)
Photo by Paul Duncan

You get a nice impression of the scenery as the DVD is divided up into segments and you pass through the village of Keen and through a series of nice rollers to Jay before getting in some good climbing. You can see Whiteface Mountain, famous as the site of the 1980 Winter Olympics alpine ski runs. Incidentally, there is a toll road that goes to the top and averages an 8 percent grade. It is described as being "challenging." The summit of the mountain is 1480 m (4867 feet) and the road gets to within 91 feet of the top. Hmmm.

Anyway, you can get in a lot of excellent training with this DVD. It is almost 3 hours in length and you can imagine that you are riding in the wild forests of the Adirondack State Park. Well, except that you spend most of the time actually looking at Coach Troy's butt but at least he is letting you slipstream him. The real Ironmen don't get that option in July.

Coach Troy offers the DVD at his website for $34, but I got it a bit cheaper on E-Bay.