ACTS OF CYCLING STUPIDITY
for purposes of employment karma you should show a little willing.
After Zone 3, the gradations get a bit finer. Zone 4 is quite hard – you don’t want to do it without good cause. It’s the correct pace for a 40km time trial that you’re not too bothered about winning, but where you want to avoid embarrassment. Zone 5 is for when you actually do want to win and you don’t mind spoiling your afternoon to manage it.
Zone 6 is for punishing yourself for some shortcoming, or if you’re a coach, for punishing your client for some shortcoming. And, weirdly, Zone 7 is so hard that, since you can’t sustain it for more than a second or two, it is almost as easy to do as Zone 1.
However, don’t forget the theory of physiological relativity. There are a number of other training zones that can’t be so easily defined. There is the zone that follows a proper hunger knock, which is simultaneously the hardest riding you’ve ever done, and the slowest, the most bitterly regretted, and the most memorable.
There is the weird beige zone that is what you get if you’ve ended up with a turbo session that’s going to be too short to really do any good and you can’t decide whether to do the whole ride on the rivet to try to make the most of it, or just to quietly give up.
And there is the zone that can be accessed only when you do a ride or a race with riders who are a lot stronger than you, and whose interest in your welfare is zero. As you hang off the back, it may or may not help to reflect that in reality what you’re dealing with is just normal Zone 6, but for two hours rather than the two minutes that would be as long as you can normally manage.
This may not be much comfort.
Peter F from Harrogate writes: a mate and I were discussing our most embarrassing cycling moments, and mine is long enough ago that I thought I’d share it.
I was spectating at the Tour de France in Yorkshire. Right in front of me, an AG2R rider stopped to change a wheel. As he was about to get going again, I spotted he’d dropped his chain and the mechanic hadn’t noticed. As an 'expert' cyclist, I nipped forward to help.
He set off as I was still putting the chain back, dragging my hand into the chain/chainring interface, where it proved just the thing for improving the friction between the teeth and the chain.
He had to stop to release me, with an audience of several hundred people watching.