I Spit Hot Fire

Progress in Training for the Mt Diablo Challenge

This morning, I just finished another week of training for the Mt. Diablo Challenge. There are two more weeks of building fitness and one week of recovery before the race. I finished this week with 442 TSS and 5240 calories burned, a bit over my targets.

What I have been most worried about is keeping power for an hour, the duration of the race, especially via the lower cadences used in climbing, but today I got a huge sign I am on track.

I took on Alpe du Zwift in….Zwift and achieved my second fastest time ever. I finished in 52:18, 5 seconds slower than my time on March 29, 2020, 4.5 years ago. The time is even more impressive considering my Stages SB20 trainer blanked out (it loses all friction) and I had to get it going again mid-way. Zwift reports this as 52:16 moving time, so at least a few seconds were lost in which the trainer reported 0 watts and the Zwift avatar stopped moving. I achieved this time despite coming in a bit tired from the week’s workouts, so I have optimism that this result can serve as a floor for my race performance.

I also did the ride without any taking any liquids, just as I want to do on race day.

Back in 2020, my best time was achieved in the early days of COVID when I was certain I was about a month away from my long-time goal of reaching 4w/kg. However, within the next two months, our family bought a house and moved across state lines and my fitness left as well.

This is the Way -> Mt Diablo Under One Hour

It’s time. Another Mt. Diablo Hill Climb Challenge comes in 4 weeks. A year ago I was optimistic I could finish the hill climb under 1 hour and earn myself a prized shirt. Instead, I made an error by riding 100 miles at my highest all-time intensity for that duration and couldn’t sustain enough power the next morning for the hill climb.

I had a good experience overall but wondered what could have been. In the year since, I’ve trained fairly steadily despite welcoming a new daughter into the world. I didn’t quite make the progress that I wanted, however, and I came into last weekend thinking I would take a FPT test to see where I stood and whether I could really match up with my fitness from last year.

I rode Zwift’s The Grade, and ended up with an estimated FTP of 261 watts per Intervals.icu after doing 280 watts for 13+ minutes. Last year, I did 270 watts for 27+ minutes for an estimated FTP of 263, so it feels like I’m on par with last year’s fitness.

Based on this ride profile from BestBikeSplit, the challenge is whether I can actually sustain my FTP for one hour. This rider plan is asking me for 258w average power to finish in 58 minutes, basically the same as my eFTP.

What I need to train for over the coming weeks:

Do I have the longevity/focus to sustain power for an hour?
Can I generate higher power at a lower cadence (65-80 RPM) for that time period?
Can I lose a few pounds without losing power to improve my odds at reaching my goal?

On the first question, I have been in polarized training, with 8+ hrs of zone 2 indoor riding each week, for the past 6 weeks. I bookend those sessions with two high intensity Zwift racing sessions of 30-45 minutes. This ends up looking like 400 TSS and 5000 calories burned each week. Since school season has started for my kids, I’ll add a 30 minute commuter ride each morning in which I bike them to school with a trailer. I won’t measure this physical impact, it will just be a bonus. What I need now is to practice one extended climb at high intensity each week, Alpe Du Zwift. In the past, this climb would take me between 53-56 minutes depending on my fitness, a perfect simulation for race day.

On the second question, I have noticed that it’s difficult for me to go 260+ watts seated now. I used to do extended climbs from 70-75 cadence easily, but that’s gone. I can’t deliver that power at above 80 cadence either. When I did my FTP test, I had numerous bursts of climbing out of the saddle. Typically, I can’t stay out of the saddle for very long without feeling overly exerted, and yet this time I just wanted to stay out of the saddle. This seems to signal that my fitness is pretty good but that I also need to practice lower cadence riding. Over the last year, I have focused most of my time on aerobic higher cadence (90+) workouts. Over the coming weeks, I want to spend at least a few hours at lower cadence (70-75) each week, not including my climb practices.

On the final question, nutrition has always been tricky for me. Do I take in nutrition during the ride? Or just pre-ride? How much protein do I take? Should I listen to my body and eat when hungry? Over the past years, clear patterns have emerged. If I train, I gain weight. I don’t get leaner, however. My percentage of body fat stays the same or increases. Gaining weight means I eat too much, period. Over the next month, I’m going to execute the following:

Nothing outside of water after dinner (this usually ends by 6PM).
Be a little hungry each night.
Have a good carb loaded breakfast of sugary cereal and a banana each morning when I have a workout planned. Couple that with a 30G protein shake.
Use Gatorade Zero tablets instead of optimized sports drinks with high sugar. This along with my long bouts of Zone 2 will emphasize fat burning.
Stay low-carb (or couple high carbs with high fiber) for my other meals and focus on eating normal portions. Eat 1 pound of broccoli at least 5 times per week. Don’t overly focus on getting “enough” protein.
If I start to feel too hungry at night, make the breakfast sizes larger so they go directly into fueling the workout.
Don’t weigh myself until race day.
On race day morning, and the dinner before race day, I’ll load myself up with good carbs – fruits, high fiber pastas.
Focus on the process – eating leaner, good workouts, more endurance during extended climbing.

Wish me luck!

Watching Constellation and Reflections Upon Mental Illness

Earlier this week I finished watching Apple TV’s Constellation. I consider it quite good, but it’s not for everyone – it’s definitely slow. The plot revolves around the concept of quantum superposition, where a particle can exist in multiple states simultaneously. Another way to think of it, at least relating to the show, is the multiverse – multiple versions of every person across multiple universes.

In the show, an accident happens in space with a series of astronauts. Two astronauts specifically are affected: they switch universes and come home to slightly different worlds. Michael of Universe A now lives in the universe of Michael B and vice versa. Some examples: the main character’s car is blue instead of red, and her daughter doesn’t speak Swedish. The histories of the characters in the show can differ as well.

This leads to fears of mental illness in the affected parties. Everyone around the astronauts thinks they are crazy. The astronauts don’t believe they are the problem. To paraphrase one character talking to the main character, all psychopaths and schizophrenics think they are fine.

This made me think of my mother. Over the last five years, I believe her mental state has been transformed. She no longer recognizes her children – she knows she has children, but it isn’t us. We cannot get her diagnosed by a doctor. She refuses to go anywhere and is not hurting anyone so she can’t be forcibly treated. Ultimately, I have accepted that if she is OK in her own mind and if my dad can accept the responsibility of taking her, this is how things will be. If she can be happy, who am I to force a different reality upon her?

And this is a bit of what Constellation make me think about. As a society, we claim to we know what mental illness is, and how to treat it. We define something as mental illness because if we go too far along with the patient, our concept of reality becomes too unstable. Society forces us to share a commonly agreed reality, and anything that goes beyond that, we refuse to adhere to. Anyone living outside those lines must be ostracized.

Not to become paranoid, but what if my mom doesn’t suffer from mental illness? What if there is some (or all) truth to what she lives, in a way that I can’t understand. As I said, if she can live happily in her state of mind, that’s all that matters to me now. I have no wish to interfere, even if I would value a relationship with her and would value her relationship to my children.

However, in the future I may have the responsibility to take care of her. How does her happiness mix with my need to stay within the lines of “reality”, convenience, and finances? For those with mental illness who don’t have proper love or care in their lives, is there a way to help them have some sort of internal happiness without allowing them to hurt themselves or others?

The advanced development of knowledge around mental illness, its causes and solutions, is still very new. We were using leeches to suck blood just a few hundred years ago and applied massive electrical shock therapy to the brain less than one hundred years ago. We look back just a few generations and think of how barbaric we were then, and I can’t help to think of what I’ll think about my mother’s condition when I am her age. What regrets will I and greater society have with new knowledge then?

What to do about AI Nudes?

I recently listed to this podcast from the Wall Streeet Journal, Teens Are Falling Victim to AI Fake Nudes: “Last fall, nude photos of a 14-year-old student started spreading around her high school. But they weren’t real… they’d been created with AI. WSJ’s Julie Jargon breaks down how fake photos like these are a growing trend among teens and why it’s difficult to deal with.”

This part of the ordeal stood out for me:

Elliston Berry: I did. I had a couple classes with him in eighth grade, but he was a classmate and we were mutuals on social media. I didn’t see him as a threat. It was really shocking knowing that he did this because he was a peer, he was a classmate.

Jessica Mendoza: The school district declined to comment about the enrollment status of the teenager who made the photos. The local district attorney said he couldn’t give specifics because the student was a minor, but that the boy was sanctioned within the juvenile justice system. Meanwhile, Elliston’s mom Anna decided to take some steps on her own. Could you walk me through your decision to come forward publicly and talk about this?

The offending student was ultimately suspended but his identity was not revealed to the victims. A big part of the WSJ story is what do to in these cases? It’s clearly wrong, but what does it fit under? I assume schools are afraid of legal liability coming from both sides.

In 2017, I wrote a blog post here during the Me Too environment. It talked about something that I did in my high school days that wasn’t meant to hurt anyone. It was more about wanting to get attention. I don’t know if this is the case for the offender, but I can imagine it starting off that way.

And so when everything is preoccupied about legal liability or political correctness, I think we lose sight of what could generally be considered “right.” The offender invaded the girls’ privacy in a way by creating AI nudes and yet his own identity is protected by the “system”. There isn’t this ability to have the person meet the girls, learn about the pain he causes and apologize (if he felt it was appropriate) or explain himself. I feel a big part of navigating life is understanding the real impact on people. If you fire someone, don’t source it to HR. If you break up with someone, don’t text and ghost them. Take the responsibility, as painful as it is. In today’s world, it feels quite easy to do whatever you want and ignore that responsibility. I can send a Tweet threatening to kill someone for example, or say all sorts of things online that I would never do in front of that person. I don’t learn to understand the impact of those actions on the person receiving them.

Just because the offender in the case was suspended doesn’t mean they really get it. And isn’t the purpose of punishment to help us improve?

Here’s an excerpt from that blog post I wrote years ago, which is no longer public:

I have my own story of guilt: 20 years ago in high school, I was going online during the starting days of the internet, the time when people started transitioning away from AOL and finding the internet: Yahoo, Google, Excite. E-Mail was a miracle. This was Web 1.0, the early days of Geocities, where anyone could create his own website and show off a cool animated “hits” counter to show off the number of page visits.

As many teenage boys do, I gawked at the attractive girls in my classes. I had an idea of naming the most attractive girls in my year and putting it on a website for everyone to see.

I learned basic HTML, scanned photos from my yearbook and put it up. Scraping emails from group threads among classmates, I executed my first example of spam / mass emailing / grassroots marketing. I didn’t ask permission from any of the girls, being scared of them (never had I talked to most of them) and their possible responses, yet still wanted the site out there, getting attention.

As that was, perhaps it wasn’t so bad and I started to get some hits. I can’t remember all the details at this point, but I’m sure I continued working on the site, seeing how I could adjust things. Some friends of mine gave feedback, and this is where I made the wrong decision.

A friend mentioned (paraphrased) that one girl had a physical feature that would be great for oral sex. I don’t think I really knew what that meant, but I thought, hey, more content, and something to put on the website.

And so I did. I remember showing the website to my dad at this point, and he made a very astute comment (as usual) that I should reconsider putting comments like that on the website.

But I wanted the attention, I wanted people to visit the site and have a reaction (even though I truly feared a negative one), so I kept it. A few days later, some anonymous students had a negative reaction to the site and I was actually harassed (pretty stressful for my teenage self) for it. I do not know if they were doing so in defense of one of the girls, or some other reason. It does not matter.

I clearly put my need for attention over something that was not nice to put in full public view. It could have affected one of the girls negatively, and it was a form of harassment.

As I reflect upon this over 25 years later, I could say putting yearbook photos on a website isn’t that big of a deal compared to creating AI nudes. One is porn! Attached to a 14 year old. But we live in different times. In my day, internet porn wasn’t readily available. Sex and violence in film and TV was extremely tame compared to today’s standards. I’m not saying that AI nudes are ok, I’m saying that the thresholds of acceptability are moving extremely fast. If you can download an app to make a nude, it’s suggesting that these are becoming everyday things. And I think there has to be some context around that.

If I were in high school today, would the equivalent of scanning yearbook photos and making a basic website of them in the past be the equivalent of today’s AI nudes? I hope not, and maybe it’s not the equivalent today, but what if it is in 5 years or 10 years?

I Finally Won – “Cheating” My Way to a Zwift Victory

This morning, I won my first Zwift race! And to be honest, it wasn’t really close.

After more than 5 years of fluctuating between 3.5 w/kg and 4 w/kg, and never getting close to a B class win on Zwift, I’ll take it. Normally, winning a lower class would be called sandbagging. This is slightly different, I think. I’ve been off Zwift for close to 4 months and have been recently recovering from painful cycling injury.

Since my layoff, Zwift released its new Zwift Racing Score and reset its recommendations for riders. Or at least reset them for me. When I got back on Zwift last week, I got recommended E class. So I took it. I didn’t even podium that one. If you compare my performance in the first race to today, I worked harder (higher heart rate) in the first race, but did 13% more power (this is a lot in cycling) this morning – I was still a bit weak and a bit sick then. I didn’t even win the second race I did, in which I got recommended class D. I finished fourth – my indoor trainer went crazy and I had no power data for 15-30 seconds in the last few minutes of the race. I had expected to podium, but not win – I made the wrong call not to follow someone and my group wouldn’t work to catch up to that breakaway rider.

So again, it’s not like I’ve been destroying the competition taking easy wins.

Today though, I was feeling reasonably decent and when a gap opened up even though I wasn’t working at my limits, I decided to keep pushing and try to stay away from everyone else. It worked and the result was a 45 second victory in the field of 18, pushing about 3.6w/kg in Normalized Power (NP) for half an hour.

Zwift isn’t going to let me compete in C again, so at least I got one victory to show I don’t belong in C.