We discuss whether a couple of heat training sessions a week has any reward (or risk), why lower back pain seems to be on the rise in cyclists, and Grant details his crash at a local race.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris Case: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Fast Talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. Today we’re doing a potluck me Julie Grant, and Trevor. But before we get there, today’s episode is brought to you by Stages Cycling. Which is an amazing sponsor to have. We’re friends with the company.
Trevor and I both know people over there and have for a very long time. And you know, some people have thought they went away, but they never did in their back, and they’re stronger than ever and innovating more than ever before. Trevor, you’ve been using power meters. Basically your entire cycling life.
It’s a long time. Power is very important these days.
[00:00:42] Trevor Connor: At this point, almost everybody’s on a power meter, and if you’re not on one, you really should be on one because this is a key training tool. You know my philosophy on this, I think heart rate’s important. I think power is important. I think putting the two together, you are going to do your best training.
[00:00:58] Chris Case: And accuracy, I think is one of the most important aspects of any power meter. Anything that collects data, but in particular power because of so much that goes into training by power these days and stages has. A really reliable, trusted device.
[00:01:17] Trevor Connor: Yeah, I think that’s something for anybody who hasn’t been training with power as long as I have kind of forgets just how critical that accuracy is.
I mean, I was on the early power meters when you had to throw out half a your files, and this is where a ton of the innovations have happened, and stages has really led a lot of these innovations so that you can just get on your bike. Ride and you know you’re gonna get good power numbers. In the old days, I can’t tell you how many times my cadence magnet fell off and there went my power.
Or I would forget to calibrate before I started my ride and get really bad data. Or the temperature would change during the day and all of a sudden you were getting bad data. These were all things you had to think of. And stages was the first. To come up with that. Temperature compensation.
[00:02:08] Chris Case: Yeah.
Continuously adjust for environmental changes. You’re not having to worry about recalibrating or resetting during your ride to quote unquote fixed data. It eliminates that temperature induced drift, which can have a significant impact on your numbers.
[00:02:27] Trevor Connor: So they were saying two to three watts per one degree Celsius.
But if you start your ride in the morning and it heats up. Which is quite possible, 10, 15 degrees, you’re suddenly off by 20, 30 watts. That can be a big difference. Exactly.
[00:02:42] Chris Case: You know, I love the convenience of having it be a crank based system. I can switch it between bikes if needed, or I can just get a crank for each of my bikes, which is really nice, and in some ways is kind of that direct.
Measurement of power that you don’t get with hub based systems. Right. Well, we’re super excited to have stages on board and you’ll be hearing more from us and them in future episodes of Fast Talk. Let’s get to the show. Hey there, grant. Hey there, Trevor. Hey there, Julie Out there in California. Welcome to Fast Talk your source for the science of endurance performance.
[00:03:26] Grant Holicky: Wow. Well done. It was kind of casual. That was not your normal radio voice.
[00:03:30] Trevor Connor: My Phil Hartman. That’s like your late night. Put you to sleep voice.
[00:03:37] Grant Holicky: I got nothing. I’m not gonna,
[00:03:38] Chris Case: I’m not gonna give you my Barry White nothing. We don’t need that. We’re gonna talk about science and bike crashes and back pain and heat training today.
No. Sensual voices. No, we got all kinds of good stuff. Yeah. We got, we gotta dive right into the, to the meat. I’ve got a question. I’m gonna kick it off.
[00:04:00] Trevor Connor: Yes.
[00:04:01] Chris Case: Is that all right? I love it. Go for it. Okay. So we’ve been talking a lot lately about heat training, not. To adapt to racing in the heat, but as a proxy, if you will, for altitude training, some of these adaptations that you might see, and we’re gonna talk about that with an expert on that soon, and we’ll have a full episode on that.
But I had a sort of a scenario, and honestly this comes from me being a reluctant swift user and a lazy, swift user. I was finding myself getting on zw and kind of always forgetting to turn the fan on, and then I was kind of like, maybe I just won’t turn the fan on and I will get something extra by sitting there and sweating more and having it be hot and having it be this sort of heat training.
So the question is, if I’m doing this or someone else out there is doing a Zift ride once or twice a week at most. 30, 40 minute race hard, no fan intentionally, so gets hot. You’re making that puddle beneath you. Am I getting any heat training benefit from that? What’s the best I can hope for? What’s the worst that could happen?
[00:05:19] Trevor Connor: As you said to clarify, we are gonna be covering the science of this with one of the top physiologists around on the subject in a couple episodes. We’re not diving into the science here. Yeah. This is more the, what’s the coach’s answer to this? Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:37] Grant Holicky: Yeah, that’s
[00:05:37] Trevor Connor: fair. And I’m guessing grant’s gonna do something like, don’t be an idiot and turn your fan on.
[00:05:41] Grant Holicky: I don’t own a fan. Ooh, you don’t,
[00:05:44] Trevor Connor: oh, oh, you do it in your garage, right? No,
[00:05:45] Grant Holicky: I do it in my basement now, and I don’t own a fan, and so I just. Anytime I ride swift, you’re like me. You’re kind of the intentionally lazy Oh yeah. I just never, I never bothered. Right. And I, I think I have a lot of swift cotton coming in my future.
That’s right. We’ll get to that. For those who don’t know, did we get you a fan? No, no, no. I mean, I don’t mind it. I will say that purely anecdotally, I know the science and I have some beliefs on the science, but I’ll, I’ll let Trevor and Julie jump into that first. But purely anecdotally, I like it. From a discomfort standpoint.
Mm-hmm. Psychological
[00:06:23] Chris Case: standpoint. Yep.
[00:06:24] Grant Holicky: Psychological push through the discomfort. I have always found that when I travel, I used to travel a lot for swim meets and I would have to run in the middle of the day. I didn’t have a choice. And when I would go on these trips, it’d be in Hong Kong or I’d be in China, or I’d be in Florida and I’d go for runs in the middle of the day and it would be miserably hot and miserably humid.
When I was doing that, I never felt like I had a lot of trouble with the heat. Mm-hmm. Racing in the heat, dealing with the heat, all of those things. Now maybe it’s ’cause I’ve gotten older, but I don’t do that nearly as much anymore. I ride. 9:10 AM in the morning. I run early in the morning. I don’t typically exercise very much in the heat, and I do feel like I have more trouble in the heat now than I did before.
You are talking more about the general gains outside of specific heat training and. Again, like I said, I have opinions on this and thoughts on this, but I’d love to hear what Trevor and Julie say. First,
[00:07:25] Julie Young: I would say I, I appreciate what you say about the psychological component, ’cause I think that’s a huge part of it is when we’re in heat, that we have a sense if we can feel anxious, and I think it’s really getting comfortable with feeling kind of calm in those situations, mentally embracing it.
In terms of the science, my understanding is that heat training for the purposes of performing in hot environments comes pretty quickly, and it doesn’t take a lot of intensive nor extensive heat training. The protocol I really like is, I think Lindsay Gulch came up with this, I think, working with the Olympic athletes.
Yes, and I love it because it doesn’t impact. The training. You know, I think that’s always a concern to me that sometimes I see these really sensational heat training workouts on Instagram and I just think, holy smokes, how does somebody even operate after doing that, let alone get some good training in.
But I like Lindsay’s protocol because basically it’s three weeks and it’s 15 to 30 minutes and it capitalizes on the heat generated from the training and just kind of piggybacks on that. So it’s not negatively impacting. Training quality. So that’s my understanding of like if you’re trying to acclimate for the purpose of performing in heat, whereas trying to build that hemoglobin mass is a much more intensive and extensive protocol, which my understanding, it’s like committed.
You know, at least five sessions over five weeks, anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes. And it’s more, again, more intensive in that you really are training in that heat, whether you’re wearing a bunch of clothes in a room or you have that capacity to, to really heat up a room, which I don’t think many people have that capacity to do.
And sometimes it seems like it can be very, very complicated. And I just wonder for the everyday athlete, how realistic that can be. And I guess the other part of that. Is with the hemoglobin promoting that hemoglobin mass, the protocol, I wonder how realistic it is for that amateur everyday athlete where again, they are also trying to train.
It seems to me that’s a give or a take. You’re either doing your heat training. For an hour and a half, or you’re doing your good training, it’s hard to bring both of those into a week for the busy professional.
[00:09:44] Trevor Connor: So for anybody who hasn’t heard about this, this is relatively new research where they’re seeing that heat training.
Promotes natural EPO, similar to training at altitude. So the idea here is instead of doing a trip to altitude, where you also have to deal with the fact that you can’t train as hard go train in the heat. ’cause you can do that at home and if you’re living at sea level, you can train a little harder. So there’s benefits to this, and as you said, you’re gonna have Dr.
Chung on the show very soon who’s actually done research on this. And he’ll talk about whether there’s really something to this or not. I’m gonna give my personal perspective with my coaching hat on, which is for better or for worse, I’ve never seen you wear a hat. Yeah, that’s fair.
[00:10:32] Grant Holicky: My entire life, not even a tok, not even the tok.
I do have Toks Okays. Okay. Two, sorry. Did you call it to I got
a to I got your took right here.
[00:10:41] Chris Case: I even bought you a, I no longer own the Toke spell to T-O-Q-U-E. Yeah. Looks like it should be pronounced to, to me
[00:10:51] Trevor Connor: it’s to, okay. It’s to, there is no other way to say it. It is to, I’m just saying it doesn’t look like, alright.
Sorry, I interrupted.
[00:10:59] Chris Case: I’m
[00:11:00] Grant Holicky: sorry. There should be an, um, out in this Canadian. This is
[00:11:03] Trevor Connor: a touchy subject. Can tell. I know, I know. Can tell.
[00:11:06] Grant Holicky: I will say I lost my Canada tuk. Uh, what in the fire.
[00:11:10] Trevor Connor: Oh, that’s a travesty. It is. I might have to buy
[00:11:15] Grant Holicky: you. I am. I was devastated. That was, you know, along with the 14 bikes and all those other things just right at the top.
Okay. So I’m
[00:11:22] Trevor Connor: gonna be off this episode for the next five minutes while I hop on the website and buy you a new to, this has to be fixed. So going back to wearing my coach, whatever Coach Tuuk did, coach Tuuk, coach Duke, I should buy one of those.
[00:11:40] Grant Holicky: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:40] Trevor Connor: For some reason I kind of see this like the whole cryotherapy thing.
Where they’ve shown that Gideon cold water can aid recovery, but if you read the research on that, it’s. Kind of cold water and it’s just a couple minutes.
[00:11:56] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:57] Trevor Connor: And an hour of, you see people of
[00:11:58] Chris Case: ice bath. Yeah. Doing that,
[00:11:59] Trevor Connor: right? Hopping in a full immersion ice bath for 30 minutes and toughen it out and going, look at all the recovery benefits I’m getting.
You’ve gone over a curve and you’re now actually just doing damage more. I, it is not
[00:12:12] Chris Case: necessarily better.
[00:12:13] Grant Holicky: Well, I think what’s interesting about this subject is, there’s two pieces of it, right? There’s the heat training, which the goal is to increase plasma blood volume. So that you have a buffer when you start to dehydrate over time, and there’s some evidence that can help you all the time, whether it’s hot or not, but what we’re talking about in terms of an EPO response.
Is a whole nother level, right of heat training, and I think that distinction’s really important because the heat benefit to increase blood volume is not very extensive as kind of what Julie mentioned. It’s a couple days a week in the sauna, three, four days a week in the sauna, or an extra 15 minutes riding when it’s warm, when you’re done with your workout.
I do think that benefit is probably worthwhile to most people who are. Listening on the show, I do think that’s something that you can do at home, whether you have a sauna or not. I mean, even a hot shower, like there’s some evidence that this stuff really works. Steam room. It’s not about the sauna per se, it’s about the heat and the loss of a little bit more fluid from your body so that your body’s forced to bolster and produce some more.
Blood volume. There’s benefit to that as both of you guys have alluded to Julie and Trevor, where you get overboard here is when it starts interrupting training. Right. And I think what people do is, if I were to go out, and there’s another side to this too, when I, okay, you’re adding
[00:13:42] Chris Case: too many sides.
[00:13:42] Grant Holicky: I know.
I’m sorry. Like a couple weeks ago it was, it snowed in Boulder. And one of my athletes, and I joked, we were gonna go old school, we’re gonna do a Sufferer Fest workout. If those of you don’t know what Sufferer Fest is, look it up. It was classic for a long time. We turned off power meters, we turned off ER mode.
We just went in the basement, we did a race simulation and just went hard. Mm-hmm. And I came out of that and the amount that I had to. Focus on hydration, focus on replenishment, focus on food, focus on electrolytes, focus on all this stuff just so I could get up the next day and do a base ride. I don’t think that people rec, I mean, I’ve found myself a million times come upstairs, three hours later.
I’m like, what is wrong with me? Oh yeah, I lost a gallon of sweat and I need to replenish this somehow.
[00:14:36] Trevor Connor: That’s kind of what I was picturing in my head and worrying about is the person who hears about this and goes, oh, great. Cranks up the heat in their house, goes down on their trainer, doesn’t turn the fan on.
Loses a huge amount of body fluid and it’s gonna take you a long time to recover from that. Oh, the benefits are not worth the damage you’re doing.
[00:14:56] Julie Young: You guys both said this, I’ll just reemphasize it. You know, I think about that busy professional that may have 60 to 90 minutes a day to train. They have to decide if the protocol to boost hemoglobin is five days a week.
For five weeks. They would have to forfeit their quality training.
[00:15:14] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:15:14] Julie Young: To do their hemoglobin boosting. So I don’t know. To me what’s more important, good training or boosting the hemoglobin.
[00:15:21] Trevor Connor: Right? It’s the good old, you’re sacrificing the 90% for the 10%.
[00:15:25] Julie Young: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:25] Trevor Connor: How come I feel so fit then? I’m just kidding.
[00:15:30] Julie Young: Because you’re mentally embracing the heat
[00:15:33] Trevor Connor: because of your one ride a month. Unw without a fan. That’s right.
[00:15:39] Chris Case: It’s just a little sprinkle of salt. It’s, it’s, it’s just a little sprinkle.
[00:15:43] Grant Holicky: It’s definitely that one indoor ride that’s making your fitness. Yeah,
[00:15:47] Chris Case: that’s true.
[00:15:48] Grant Holicky: You don’t have a tendency to ride long outside at all?
[00:15:50] Chris Case: I haven’t been. That’s the whole thing is that I’ve ridden gwt more. ’cause we were doing rides with the company and that started it. And then my life is a little different than it used to be. Scheduling is harder. And so if I’d have a 45 minute window of time and I’d fit it in and it stemmed. From laziness.
It had nothing to do with, I’m not gonna turn this fan on because Right. I think it’s gonna be
[00:16:15] Grant Holicky: right.
[00:16:15] Chris Case: Better for me. Absolutely. I, like I said, I don’t own one, so it was just on my mind. So I feel like the answer here is you’re not gaining much, especially at the like twice a week for 30 minutes. The worst that could happen in that scenario is not much bad.
Could happen, not much good could happen either if you go overboard just with many things. You’re going overboard. Yeah. Yeah. And more is not necessarily better when it comes to cryotherapy and ice baths that are too long, long and too
[00:16:44] Grant Holicky: cold. Can we make that, can we just make that the theme of the show more is not necessarily better?
[00:16:48] Chris Case: We can,
[00:16:49] Grant Holicky: we can,
[00:16:49] Chris Case: yes. Chris’s favorite
[00:16:51] Trevor Connor: word or MiSiS. Wow, that is a good word. I use it all the time, but I’m gonna admit to you, the first time I ever heard it was from Chris. He was writing an article about it. He was like, Trevor, what do you think of hormesis? And I’m like, huh, it’s
[00:17:04] Grant Holicky: good or bad. It can be a little bit of both.
[00:17:08] Trevor Connor: And then I looked it up and I’m like, that’s really cool. I’ve gotta use
[00:17:12] Grant Holicky: that. You learn something from Chris case every, every year, every third time you talk to every year.
[00:17:19] Chris Case: Yes,
[00:17:20] Julie Young: but you know Chris, I like your motivation though. The fact that you thought like, okay, it’s kind of hard for me to get on Swift and man, if I get on it’s, maybe I get that little bit extra from the heat.
It was like the nudge that you needed. Yeah.
[00:17:31] Trevor Connor: Yeah.
[00:17:32] Julie Young: And so I appreciate that.
[00:17:33] Trevor Connor: Yeah. This is also Chris who can not ride a bike for a month, go do an hour spin on his trainer and be on peak form. Nice. That is, that is fair. You are a
[00:17:41] Grant Holicky: fast responder. Are you still running?
[00:17:43] Chris Case: I have had to give up running. For a while now because of this long term, hard to diagnose injury one thing at a time, like one variable at a time, and right now the lack of running seems to be helping, but it can’t be.
I always thought that was a little bit
[00:17:59] Grant Holicky: of your secret weapon. Mm.
[00:18:00] Chris Case: Well, we’ll see if I’d ever do a Cyclo cross race again, and I’m not that good. Maybe it’s because I have, if we ever do
[00:18:05] Grant Holicky: a Cyclocross race again and I beat you, you’ll know.
[00:18:10] Chris Case: I’m laughing because that’ll never
[00:18:11] Grant Holicky: happen. Oh boy. I was gonna say I, if I beat you, you’ll know you suck.
Now. That’s true. We all have three people in a cyclocross race. You have a person you’re always battling that you kind of want to beat. You have your pie in the sky guy that if I beat that guy, man, I lit it up. And then you have your, if I get beat by that guy, it’s time to quit. I am Chris cases. If I get beat by that guy, it’s time to quit.
If I beat either of you, that’s what I’m saying. Seek immediate medical something attention. Well, this is not gonna happen. Something happened.
[00:18:42] Chris Case: I mean, yeah, fire me too. ’cause I don’t belong at this company and associated with endurance sports anymore.
[00:18:49] Trevor Connor: Wow. Yeah. All right, Julie, you have a question for us?
[00:18:53] Julie Young: I do.
And little do you guys realize with this question, I’ve invited myself to step up on my soapbox.
[00:19:00] Trevor Connor: Ooh, we got a Julie soapbox,
[00:19:03] Julie Young: so buckle up.
[00:19:05] Trevor Connor: Nice.
[00:19:05] Julie Young: So this comes from my experience working with a number of junior U 23 mountain bike racers, and we’ve had some recent races, one being Arkansas, Fayetteville. US Cup race and so many, like nearly every single athlete was experiencing back issues.
And in my programming, I really try to keep a balanced approach, like almost as much off bike as on bike. That’s probably a little bit of a stretch, but big commitment to, you know, stability, mobility, strength off the bike. And it was just like a mystery, like what the heck? Can be going on. And quite honestly, like for me, I, I feel like obviously there’s a lot of contributors, but I think the main driver is poor posture throughout the day.
And I think for a couple reasons, one that becomes our default on the bike. So obviously mountain biking, I know Road two, there’s a lot going on, but I think mountain biking even more so because these US Cup races are really. Explosive, violent one hour efforts, and these kids are, you know, their attention has to be on getting through the rock garden or down the drop.
They can’t be focusing like, Hey, how’s my posture? They can’t be checking in. And so if they’re sitting eight to 10 hours slumped over the computer or carrying backpacks or whatever, when they’re on the bike and they’re really under distress and their. Having to focus on that main task at hand, they’re gonna probably default to that posture.
And I also think through the day, if they’re sitting in that posture, those paraspinals, the erector spine aid, they’re working harder to stabilize that poor posture through the day. So then you get on the bike and I feel like. Those poor little muscles don’t have a chance. You know, they’re already fatigued and they are like the stabilizers.
So it’s not as if they have a ton of endurance or strength to stabilize. So I think that’s one thing. And I also think about this, and I say this to the kids I coach, like even if they’re committed to their trunk stability, like three to five times a week, 30 to 45 minutes each session, they’re not gonna overcome eight to 10 hours of poor posture.
And so to me, like that. Is the main driver. And then I think there’s then other things, there’s like a cascade. So if they’re in that curved spine, posterior tilted pelvis, they essentially are turning off those big muscle groups in the posterior chain, and then they’re having to leverage the muscles in the back and the hamstrings.
So it’s kind of this double whammy. And then of course, it. Spike fit, and I think with the modern day geometry of Mountain Bikings, going with a steeper seat tube and a shorter cockpit, and then we see the taday effect with everybody kind of sitting on the nose of their saddles. It’s tightening and shortening everything up.
So it’s kind of inviting riders to curl up on the bike, and I think that also contributes to the poor posture on the bike.
[00:21:56] Grant Holicky: I think you covered it all. We, I think we can move on Those a pretty good, so
[00:22:02] Julie Young: I told you, I told you guys buckle up.
[00:22:05] Chris Case: One question though that I have for you is, you’re saying this is, is a recent phenomenon that you’re noticing this more and more now than you were in previous years?
[00:22:14] Julie Young: Not necessarily. I think it just, this one race just really stood out and again, it was like. Obviously a very demanding course. Lots of high torque, high resistance type terrain. And so I don’t know, it just seemed to amplify the issue, but I think I see it with the kids just generally, but I think this particular race really brought it home.
[00:22:35] Grant Holicky: Hmm. Well, I have a couple thoughts, and this is something Chris and I were joking before the show that Cyclocross back pain is omnipresent. I remember Pete Weber telling the kids one time he runs BJC out here. Well, you always have back pain. It’s whether you rode well or you didn’t ride well, whether you talk about your back pain.
And I don’t, I think that’s a little extreme, but that goes back to a period of time where lower back pain in cross and in mountain bike, it was omnipresent, right? Short bursts, often high geared bursts. That course in Fayetteville for sure lends to that. I think what also lends to that in Fayetteville that isn’t necessarily discussed is that almost everybody has high travel going into Fayetteville.
It’s not close to home. So you have lots of time in a car, lots of time on a plane. Both of those things could lead to the bad posture. But what they definitely do in my mind, which is a big piece, they turn off your glutes, your butt just stops firing completely. And then when you go in there, it was explained to me one time really well by a PT that basically said, all right, so the glutes are delivering power on the bike, but they’re also keeping your hips stable.
And when your glutes fail. Depending on how quickly they fail, it could be they’re not turned on. There could be they’re underdeveloped, it could be ’cause you’re pedaling style, you fit all these reasons. But when the glutes stop firing, the hips start to wobble and they start to go back and forth and back and forth.
And when that stability is no longer coming from the glutes, the erectus spine has to do it. And these are muscles, as you said, Julie, very small. Not capable necessarily of that stability. It’s not their job. And suddenly they’re trying to keep your hips from rocking and they’re gonna fall apart and it falls apart really quickly.
And that’s where you start to feel that back pain and that lockup.
[00:24:18] Trevor Connor: So agree a hundred percent. The one thing I’m gonna add to this is, well, yes, cyclists really need to work on their posture. I don’t think it’s enough to just remind yourself through the day to sit up straight. So that effect that you see in cyclists where they kind of just look hunched over is called kyphosis.
And when somebody has been developing that over years, you see things like a tightening up of the chest muscles. Yes. Because they’re not really being used. They’re not being stretched out. You see imbalances in muscles, so you can say. You know, open up your posture, but five minutes later you’re gonna be back in that kyphotic position.
So it is something that you need to work in the gym. And I can tell you I’ve been doing more and more of this ’cause I’m more and more focused on health. Back when I was racing full time, my strength routines were all about working the muscles I was using on the right all legs. Now I’m kind of 50%, that 50% actually working the antithesis of what cycling does to you to keep that balance.
So I do a lot of just holding a doorframe and stretching out my chest muscle, working those back muscles so that they’re stronger, encountering a lot of those effects. And one thing I have noticed, just like you said, I always had that go into my first couple hard races. My lower back is killing me. I don’t get that as much anymore.
[00:25:35] Chris Case: Yeah. The specific nature of that. Course and why you were seeing so much of this back pain after that race. I can’t speak to that course specifically, but I can say that after many years of racing Cyclo Cross and having some back issues, I did a season and a half, call it two seasons on a single speed bike.
And that was probably five years ago and my back has never been the same.
[00:26:01] Trevor Connor: Oh,
[00:26:01] Chris Case: that low? Yeah. Cadence, high torque, repeated acceleration out of corners in cross racing specifically. And this race could very well have been similar to that. Like it’s just permanently changed my body. Yeah, it did.
[00:26:17] Grant Holicky: Yeah. It’s really, really hard because that seeded wind up.
Right? Mm-hmm. Like, I gotta sit back and I gotta crank this thing up and I gotta wind it up. And what tends to happen is when you’re trying to do that, you tend to lean forward a little bit more. You get down a little bit more. You, you’re ripping on the hoods a little bit more. Yeah. And it’s almost the worst thing you could do.
You almost wanna sit up and try to pedal through it. No.
[00:26:40] Chris Case: You just try to get into the most powerful ball that you can get into and you’re wrestling with your bike. Mm-hmm. I love single speed, but it’s a huge compromise. And so you’re always over geared in a single speed cyclecross race. And I don’t want to, we’re not talking about single speed cycl cross racing, but at a mountain bike race where there’s tight corners and there’s, you know, steep climbs, you’re going to be in that same situation where you’re totally over geared and there’s nothing you can do about it, but you still have to make extreme amounts of power, and you have to do that repeatedly.
Yep. And that just, it just goes, it’s like. A magnet right to that spot in your back.
[00:27:17] Grant Holicky: Well, and Julie, to your point, the sliding forward on the nose of the saddle, I think what you see is a lot of people trying to get to the quads. Because that’s the overdeveloped muscle and cyclist that they know they can depend on.
So they’re sliding forward on the saddle to get the weight over the quads. They can push the quad down into the pedal and they’re losing that angle in the hips and they’re just turning completely, turning off glutes. And so the power comes solely from the quads, and then over time, not everybody, but over time you’ll see people push their bike fit to enable them to get into their quads because that’s what’s gonna get ’em up this steep, sharp hill or get’em through the rock garden because they can stay seated in mountain biking.
[00:28:03] Trevor Connor: Chris also brought up a really important point. If you are getting those sorts of pains, the back pain, everything else, particularly in the early season races, when you’re just getting back to racing, focus on shifting shift, shift, shift. You watch a pro. They are constantly shifting so that they’re not over spinning and they’re not grinding it out.
Yeah. If you’re in a race, and you see this with a lot of people, particularly new to racing, where they’ll just kind of sit in one gear, come around a corner and they gotta grind it out or there’s an attack and they gotta grind it out ’cause they’re not sitting in the right gear. That adds up over time.
Mm-hmm. By the end of the race, your back is hurting, your legs are fatigued and you’re not gonna perform as well. And you know, you look at pros when they’re doing a 260 kilometer race, if they’re not careful about that. It doesn’t matter how strong they are, they’re just gonna beat their body up to the point where in the last hour of the race, they’re not gonna have anything.
[00:28:54] Julie Young: Chris, I think that was a really good point about just the demands of a race being so different from training. Even though in training we try to replicate the demands, but like you said, out of every corner you’re, you know, steep and you’re having to grind and do whatever it takes to just get that bike up to speed.
I think that makes a ton of sense. And Trevor, kind of back to what you had mentioned about telling people just to have better posture, isn’t. Necessarily the silver bullet, and I understand that, but I guess where I’m coming from in this question is I feel like with. The athletes that I’m training, we’re ticking all the boxes.
You know, I feel like we’re doing all the good things off the bike. We’re doing the trunk stability, we’re doing the mobil, like the activation before riding, the more static mobility after riding. You know, trying to, like you said, undo those less favorable things about the bike, and yet we’re still encountering these really debilitating.
Back issues. And so just trying to like, gosh, what the heck is going on here? But you know, again, I think all these things make a ton of sense. I think another thing with these young riders is they’re growing and so, mm-hmm. The bones are growing and the muscles are trying to keep up with that growth. And so they’re kind of chronically tight.
So even if we are doing a lot of good mobility, especially like for the hamstring, so they can do that. Good hip hinge forward. We’re up against it a bit with the young riders.
[00:30:13] Trevor Connor: Yeah. And to take it one step further, when they’re growing like that, the neuromuscular patterns just aren’t there anymore.
Mm-hmm.
[00:30:19] Grant Holicky: Well, the last thing I’d say about those youngins too, is they never stand up and it’s not their fault, but they have eight hours in school. They have to sit in a chair and they get on a bike where they sit on a bike and then they get off the bike and they sit on the couch. They never stand up. A fellow coach Chris McGovern used to talk about, why are you smiling about it?
[00:30:36] Trevor Connor: We’re both, I just loved it. Talked about those youngins. I was waiting for a go. Another thing about those youngins that those the people playing on my yard, those young ERs, my yard get off my lawn. You also
[00:30:45] Chris Case: described Trevor. That’s all he does. Get off my lawn kid.
[00:30:50] Grant Holicky: And while you’re at it, stand up, get off that phone.
I do have a friend, Chris McGovern is a coach who talks about. Trying to get athletes to do short runs or do walks just to push the hips forward. Mm-hmm. And get that springiness back in the hips and they can be explosive. And I’ve really leaned on that through the last few years of, I like short runs once a week for athletes or twice a week, or walks for athletes is really beneficial.
Just stand up. Yep. Man, we are not meant to be sitting all the time.
[00:31:21] Trevor Connor: Yep.
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[00:32:32] Trevor Connor: No, we’re good. It’s only been 35 minutes. We’re fine. But that is a good segue to somebody who might be struggling to stand up right
[00:32:38] Grant Holicky: now. I could stand up, watch. Oh that. Yeah.
[00:32:42] Chris Case: Fill everybody in on what happens.
[00:32:44] Trevor Connor: We don’t have a question here, but we have something to talk about, a
[00:32:47] Grant Holicky: scenario. Well, I think some people are fired up to talk about this, but I don’t do a lot of road racing and mainly because the kids’ schedules are so busy in the spring.
I’ve lamented on this show before that it’s when I think some of my fitness is the very best of the year, but I never get to use it, so I got really excited this year. Boulder Bay happens once every two years. They went back to the old Boulder Rube style course, which went around the Boulder Reservoir here, which adds more dirt, adds more gravel, adds more technical aspect to it.
And I really like this race because as a Cyclocross racer, it lends a little bit to what I do and I feel like I do well. So we went out, it was a 60 mile road race, I think we’re about 22, 23 miles into it. Just came off a pretty technical, twisty section, fast downhill. Made a turn, I would guess at that point we were probably going 27, 28 miles an hour.
We were going fast and person in front of me. I definitely will take some blame for this. I think I relaxed, I was mid-pack, uh, I overlapped wheels a little bit with somebody and they went hard, left to avoid something. Collected my wheel in the process, pulled my front wheel hard, left with them, and I went down all force onto my right shoulder.
My hands never left the bars. My, my hands looked like I got in a bar fight. I broke seven ribs, so ribs one through four on the back, five and six in the front, and, uh, one on the left side just for fun and broke my scap. Definitely had a concussion. My helmet was cracked. Shout out to laser. That helped me a lot more than just a concussion.
That would’ve been real bad. I spent the night in the hospital with a Hema, the Pneumo Hemothorax. So. Partially collapsed lung and some bleeding in the lung. You’re still laughing though, like usually? Oh, I, I, yeah, I, I can, the ribs are laughing. One’s pretty high up, you know, those high ribs are a little better for I think the belly laughing piece.
Although I did have to turn a show off the other night ’cause I was laughing so hard and I couldn’t stop and I had to turn it off. So it’s been nine days. I’m doing pretty well moving around. You know, I will say for me it was kind of a disappointment. I was definitely laying there on the ground going, I’m never racing a road race again.
And part of why I was going through my mind is if I go down in a cross race nine times outta 10, it’s my own fault, right? I was pushing a corner too fast and then I go down on dirt, mud. Sand. Very, very rarely do you go down a pavement and at this point in my age, in the master’s races, we don’t see a ton of start crashes anymore.
People kind of know what they’re doing. So yeah, it was the bummer and I walked out of it really beat up and kind of made me rethink how much. Quote, unquote, road racing I wanted to do, but maybe more to the point of how much road racing on gravel or dirt I wanted to do. I don’t think you have this crash very often on pavement.
Just that full force down, no chance. Mm-hmm. All at once and the speed was really high.
[00:35:59] Julie Young: Yep.
[00:36:00] Grant Holicky: Yeah, that’s what I’m going through. So I’ve got a chunk of recovery time. I do think I’m gonna try to erase another road race just to get the monkey off my back before the end of the summer, or I know I’ll never do it again.
[00:36:11] Chris Case: Mm-hmm. Hmm. So as you were laying there, but more importantly over the last nine days, have you come to any conclusions as to. The reasons why this might’ve happened at the spot it did or, or with this field, or because of the mixed nature of the group or anything like that.
[00:36:33] Grant Holicky: There were a lot of crashes at that race.
And then this past weekend there’s a race called Copen Berg in the Boulder area, which is again on a lot of dirt. I, and there
[00:36:42] Chris Case: were more crashes and more broken bones.
[00:36:44] Grant Holicky: I do, I do think there’s a couple things. This was a bit of a fluky crash. Mm-hmm. The boulder. Boulder. Not a toy crash, not a toy crash, a fluke crash.
But ay, crash. The boulder, quote unquote gravel is hard packed dirt road. It’s not slippery slidey from a, like big chunks of gravel standpoint. It’s fast and it’s hard, but it’s washboard, it’s pot. Holy. It’s rough. And that’s probably the biggest thing that landed to the crash was somebody avoiding something in a road that they normally wouldn’t have to avoid on a pavement road.
Like I said, I’m not one to not accept blame. I even had said to my teammates, don’t overlap. Wheels overlap bikes. Make sure if somebody comes over, they hit your body. They don’t sweep your wheel. I just came off a really technical section and I just lost some concentration. I do, however, think and will say that when we were going through some of the technical points, I just went to the front
mm-hmm.
And said, I am going to ride this from the front and. It was sketchy behind me, and this race breeds some crashes, and it’s not the organizer’s fault they put on a great race. It’s just the style of road. And yes, I think the mixed nature of participants,
[00:38:05] Chris Case: so you’ve got a mixed level of fitness. It’s dubbed a road race.
It’s been around for a really long time, but it’s kind of a fast gravel race. And so you’ve got people on gravel bikes and you’ve got people on road bikes and you’ve got people on everything in between. And so people are. Taking corners at different speeds. Some people are riding over stuff that other people wanna avoid.
Yeah. And then it’s spring, so you’ve got people with good fitness coming off as WT that may have rusty skills. Yeah. And all of that combined makes for a fairly chaotic day.
[00:38:35] Grant Holicky: I agree. And I think the other thing you have is various tire sizes and choices. Right. I’m out there on 30 twos. I would’ve run 30 sixes if they fit in my bike.
[00:38:47] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:38:47] Grant Holicky: I weigh 180 to 85 pounds and I’m running them at 52 in the front and 54 in the back. Like I run the pressure low on 30 twos. I don’t think it costs me on the pavement, but it changes what you’re able to do on the gravel. And for years I’ve kind of said that. I thought that was what has influenced so many of these crashes at that race.
People are on narrow tires, the pressure’s way too high, and they’re trying to corner. Like they would corner on pavement. Mm-hmm. Right. One of the things we talk about all the time in Cross is don’t lean the bike. Just don’t lean the bike over. Mm-hmm. Your wheels will go away and you watch people come into these corners and they’re counter steering and leaned over and you’re like, oh man, this is gonna end poorly.
It is an interesting combination of people, and I think when you run this. And there is this middle ground like Barry Rube is like this a little bit another race up in Michigan. There’s some races like this across the country that are like, try to go to the novelty of what Perry Rube is on cobblestones and we go to what we can get in the United States, which is dirt.
And they’ve been around long before Gravel’s been around.
[00:39:57] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:39:57] Grant Holicky: And that combination of people, equipment, skillset. Makes for a really interesting race every time. Good to it. And by interesting, I mean, can be dangerous. I don’t think that was what caused my crash this year. Yeah. But I, I have seen those crashes.
[00:40:14] Chris Case: Yeah. And there were probably. You only did 20 some miles, but I bet there were a hundred close calls that didn’t amount to crashes. Yeah, right. Oh
[00:40:23] Grant Holicky: yeah. Yeah. Like there were a number of times where we were going through some of the technical stuff that I was like, whoa, there buddy. Take it easy. And then went around that person.
That’s right. Yeah.
[00:40:33] Trevor Connor: So this is where I’m gonna get the hate mail.
[00:40:36] Grant Holicky: This is where you’re gonna get on your sub max. Right?
[00:40:38] Trevor Connor: Well, I’m just gonna give my observations of it. ’cause I was in the 55 plus field, a couple behind you.
[00:40:44] Grant Holicky: I just wanna note that Trevor
[00:40:46] Trevor Connor: is too old to ride in my field. I am. As I said, anybody can do it.
I chose not to. I’m kind of glad now I did. But for what it’s worth, I passed by your crash a couple minutes after it happened and there were six or seven of you on the side of the road just lying there. And at that moment I had been so frustrated. I just went, you know what? Enough, and I sat up and just rolled in.
In my field, and I’ll give you my take on this, and then please send the angry emails. I had been run off the road three times in my race, had a whole bunch of close calls, and was just at the point of just going, this is dangerous. This is not fun. And I’m just not interested in being here anymore.
[00:41:27] Chris Case: You know what?
What I was thinking is how many guys race peri rue and say, this is not fun, this is
[00:41:34] Trevor Connor: dangerous. Same sort of thing. But what I’m pointing
out is I was in the 55 plus field and I was the old grouchy guy in the 55 plus field. Mm-hmm. So I’m gonna own that. Yeah. I kind of. Told a few people, watch your line, you know, gave them the riot act.
But what I’m seeing is as somebody who’s been doing this race for close to 20 years,
[00:41:56] Grant Holicky: yeah,
[00:41:56] Trevor Connor: it used to be. Skill was a giant component. And yeah, we would start the race go really hard and what you would see is it would quickly shatter because only the people who could really handle riding on the dirt could hang with it.
Yeah. And we get down to a small group weed out that PAC fodder. What I was seeing, and look, I was, you were joking about this. I was the guy on the 14-year-old rode bike with 25 seat tires pumped up to 90 RRP m and I was even sitting there on the start line going, PSI, P psi. Sorry, what’d I say? R rm. RPM.
Sorry.
Yeah, that was the last question. It’s okay. PS
I that. Uh, either way, not smart. But what I was seeing was a lot of guys who had the gear that allowed them to go that pace. Mm-hmm. And we weren’t dropping. Anybody.
Mm-hmm.
And unfortunately, you saw a lot of people who didn’t have the PAC skills, and in particular, when they wanted to move right or left, they just went, oh, we’re on dirt so it doesn’t matter.
And they move right or left. And I kept seeing guys run into one another.
Mm.
You’re doing these races, they are dangerous. You have to be aware of what’s around you. Just because you’re on dirt doesn’t mean you can move left or right when you want. You gotta look, you gotta keep it safe for everybody at the end of the day.
This is just a 45 plus or a 55 plus race on the weekend. Let’s keep it fun for everybody.
[00:43:22] Chris Case: I don’t know if this is true, but one of the things that I thought about is the fact that this is a bit of a hybrid. It’s kind of a gravel race in that it’s on gravel roads, but it’s the distance of. A road race, and it’s always been touted as a road race and gravel racing is really popular now.
And gravel races, for the most part are actually quite a bit longer. Mass starts with a whole bunch of people, and a lot of them actually go off really fast. But then people find the group that they kind of, yeah. And they kind of should be in. Yep. Right. And they’re of a similar skill level or a fitness level, whereas this thing.
It invites people to go faster than they would otherwise get involved in a group of riders that maybe they’re not really either comfortable with, but they’re still there and they’re trying to, they’re making these bad choices. Mm-hmm. And they’re cornering poorly and they’re saving it, and they’re kind of like right on the edge because.
If they’ve done gravel races before, often it’s like straight roads and it’s longer. Mm-hmm. And the pace is a little bit lower, and so all of a sudden they’re like super excited and they’re in a race with a higher speeds and they’re just kind of out of their elements. So they do dumb things, and that could be part of the reason that it becomes more dangerous.
[00:44:38] Grant Holicky: I think that’s probably a fair assessment. I think what’s interesting about Boulder Rube. Is that it’s listed in bike re as a gravel race. Mm-hmm. There is definitely an attempt to pull some of the gravel racers. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that gravel trend into. This race, we’re gonna see a lot of these types of races kind of die.
And this race, like I’ve said, I mean Boulder Ru Bank does a wonderful job. It’s marking the roads, the roads are closed. It is so safe from that perspective.
Mm-hmm.
Which is like the antithesis of what gravel racing these, these days where it’s like kind of this rolling enclosure maybe. Maybe you get out of it, but as you noted Trevor, like that was a goal of mine in the race, was we.
Pretty early on. There’s not a lot of technical sections, but there’s a section when you go between St. VR and Hygiene Road that’s very twisty.
Mm-hmm.
It’s very hard, and then you typically are on a tailwind coming out of that slightly downhill. So I went pretty hard on the front, strung the race out. We got on the pavement and we went hard again.
To get into Crane Holler, which is the next dirt section, which is also very technically and went up that hard. Yeah. And we blew up some of the race there. Mm-hmm. And that was the goal Yeah. Was to pair the field down. And the same thing happened over what Neil always calls the three bears. Yeah. Uh, the three humps.
Right. And then it was right after that where I had my crash, but so much of it was a relaxation of the group and of me. Going 30 miles an hour down a dirt road. And as you noted Trevor, there’s this piece where you just can’t make the same quick shift on the dirt that you can make on the road. Oh, I’m gonna avoid this pothole.
We’re probably lined out. We’re not. We’re in a group. And I think that’s what happened. And it just, like I said, some of the faults, mine, I should’ve known better. I shouldn’t have overlapped wheels. But I do think it’s an interesting piece. ’cause Chris, you made a really good point. The gravel races don’t tend to have the technicality that a race like Boulder Rube has.
Yeah.
[00:46:45] Chris Case: Generally speaking.
[00:46:46] Grant Holicky: Yeah. And I, I mean, I did this race for the first time in 2001 when it went down the ditch road. Which, which I think he was trying to do again this year to a sign that says Certain death have entered on this flu at the reservoir is amazing. It was such a good course, but we were racing it then on nineteens at a hundred PSI.
Yeah. But everybody was doing it. Everybody was doing it was every was in that same boat. And I think that matters. And to me, what I notice now. Trevor, you were saying, I think you were saying the speed and the 55 plus was the same as what you were doing in the pro. I compared it.
[00:47:22] Trevor Connor: So I have all these files and I looked at what we were doing these dirt stretches 15 years ago in the pros, as you said, on 23 C tires at a hundred RA hundred PSSI.
Apparently I can’t do PSI anymore. And the 55 plus field was going through a lot of those stretches. Same pace, yeah. Yeah. And that’s obviously gear.
[00:47:40] Grant Holicky: Well and without a doubt. And we could say this about any race, without a doubt, the speed is dramatically up. Yep. Aerodynamics of the bikes, the width of the tires, the disc brakes make a huge difference in driving the speed up and stuff like this.
Because you know, we would laugh in the old days like, okay, there’s a corner coming up in a while. I gotta start breaking now. Yeah. Gotta get ready. And it really dropped the speed dramatically. Now you can come into that corner, you can break super late. You can modulate the speed off to get into that corner, but it’s also because you’re going so fast, it’s easy to screw it up, right?
It’s easy to hit the brakes too hard skid. It’s easy to not get enough speed off. Be in the corner and you’re like, oh God, I’m screwed. And I mean, the other thing is the hard piece on my crash is I overlap tires. One of the ways you avoid that is you steer hard the other way. I have four bodies, five bodies, six bodies of people in the other way, couldn’t go the other way.
Mm-hmm.
And obviously people went down over top of me and I feel horrible about that. And one of them was a friend who went down really hard. And I feel really bad about that, but I feel like if I had tried to like shift the bike and go hard the other way, I probably would’ve taken out 10. Mm-hmm. 12 people.
Mm-hmm. Which was fascinating. I can’t remember the name of the book, but it was really, really interesting. One of the things they talked about is that road safety’s increased but not at the speed. Think it should for the safety pieces that have been put into automobiles. Mm-hmm. Mostly because people then rely on those safety pieces and do more dumb stuff.
Right. You know, you have the automatic lane stuff, so they, if they’re on their phone, it’s not as big of a deal. ’cause they get protected from the back and forth. They have the automatic braking systems, they have this, they have that. But for all those improvements, road safety hasn’t improved to the level that it quote unquote should have.
And I think we’re seeing that on the bike.
[00:49:35] Trevor Connor: This is where I’m gonna absolutely embarrass my fiance. ’cause she came home the other day and she’s like, I love these Subarus. And I’m like, why is that? She goes, there’s so many great safety features. Like today I was driving home and I wasn’t paying attention and I was about to slam into the back of this car and then the Subaru stopped me and I just looked at her and went.
How about we not rely on that? Very good.
[00:49:59] Grant Holicky: Another
[00:49:59] Chris Case: potluck.
[00:50:00] Grant Holicky: Another potluck, and I made it. I’m here. Do you need a nap? Yeah.
[00:50:05] Chris Case: Shall we? I think we, we shall. I think we done did it. I’m watching you pulling it up. I did pull it up. I’m gonna read this script now. That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast.
Hey, don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Did you know that Grant? I didn’t. Thank God
[00:50:22] Grant Holicky: I’m not currently on
[00:50:24] Chris Case: YouTube. That’s
[00:50:24] Grant Holicky: right.
[00:50:25] Chris Case: Thank God. Give us a like and subscribe there and help us grow our reach. As always, remember that the thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual, Trevor.
You’re staring at me. How do I look?
[00:50:37] Trevor Connor: I’m just wondering, is that your radio voice or your Barry White voice? Are we somewhere in between? No, that’s his normal voice. Okay. That’s the radio voice. Join
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For Trevor Connor, grant Hokey Julie Young. I’m Chris Case. Thanks for listening.
