Umair Yasin

My Tuesday group rode from a spot near the little town of Paicines in San Benito County, out neighbor to the south. At the Start is the Jon Kaplan memorial, to a member of our club who was killed on nearby state highway 25, by a distracted driver. That road has some narrow shoulders and some insanely fast drivers so we no longer ride on it, we stick to the lightly traveled local roads. We Rode out and back in a big loop past the foothills seen to the right There was a lot of climbing in the foothills, with a rest stop at the beautiful De Rosa winery. Just under 30 miles, with a great lunch afterwards in another neat little town, Tres Pinos. The only problem with these rural roads in this County are that they need some maintenance- lots of potholes and cracked pavement. It’s not the best for a skinny-tired road bike, but I took my Sirrus with fatter tires, close to being a “gravel” bike, and it was plenty comfortable. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/3AZa02V via IFTTT

Ducks, Geese, and Terns at Community Park. There’s a nice dirt path that circumnavigates the park, and there’s a dog exercising area to the left of the picture. I like to see the doggies having fun off-leash. Little Llagas Creek runs through Southwest Morgan Hill. More than 20 years ago a development went in and a drainage area was left natural that the creek flows through. There is a nice paved walking and biking path on either side. Whenever funds are available, the city works on extending this path, so now it’s gotten to be a few miles long, a pleasant alternative to on-street riding. The Older drainage easement left natural, with paths on either side. As you can tell, the creek is currently dry. Another section on the way back from Watsonville road, with El Toro in the background. This was a relaxing 90 minute ride on “easy day” on my recumbent. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/2Y25t1v via IFTTT

As I mentioned in my recent post about “ NatureScore “, I am motivated to spend more time in more natural settings, which for me means more hiking. So yesterday I rode my bike to Harvey Bear County Park and did the Willow Springs trail, one of my favorites. It was foggy and quite cool, the fog didn’t burn off till a couple of hours after I got home. But it was still enjoyable, it was great to be out hiking again. Unexpected Bonus- A Tarantula next to the trail. I was surprised because it was pretty cool out, I thought they were only active in the heat. I was glad a couple of hikers I passed on my way down warned me about the Tarantula next to the side of the trail. I wouldn’t have wanted to accidentally step on it. It was just ambling along, it was crossing the trail when they passed it. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/2XNMMOu via IFTTT

Alex Hutchinson recently wrote an article “ Nature Is Medicine. But What’s the Right Dose? ” for Outside Magazine. He described the app naturequant (for “quantifying nature”) codeveloped by three friends, a data expert, a software guy, and an expert in environmental psychology. I wrote a previous blog “ The Healing Power of Nature ” on this topic. Naturequant is designed to encourage us to get out into nature by helping to quantify the positive effects of our exposure to nature. Imagine an addition to a fitness tracker that lets you know how many “nature points” you just earned on your walk. Obviously you’d earn more in Central Park than doing the same walk down 5th Avenue. They currently have an app NatureDose for smartphones that does this, in beta testing. It should only be a matter of time before they are partnered up with makers of fitness trackers to offer it on watches. I’m normally of the view that tech can tend to subtract more from our appreciation of nature than add to ...

Watching the Olympics and Paralympics has gotten me fired up about upper body training. There are multiple sports like kayaking, canoeing, and rowing in the Olympics that require “upper body cardio”. Rowers will say the power from the stroke is mostly from the legs but it’s still a good upper body workout too. In the summer Paralympics there are sports like wheelchair racing and handcycling that also use a lot of upper body cardio. All the athletes in these sports are lean and have good muscular definition without being “bulky”. It was inspiring to watch them perform at their world-class best. US Paralympic Athlete Oksana Masters Recently I also read the book The Purposeful Primitive by Marty Gallagher, who has both competed and coached in powerlifting for many years. He has a lot of advice about strength training, and fascinating behind the scenes stories about top lifters. But even if strength training is your primary goal, he also believes cardio is an important adjunct activit...

I talked about challenging ourselves to motivate training, but carefully choosing the challenge, in a previous post . I recommended there that shorter challenges are probably best to motivate training that leads to optimal health. I violated my own rule recently when I decided to train for a century, decidedly not a short challenge. I’m glad I did the century as a one time check-off item, and it was nice to see that my old body can still do a brisk 100 mile ride. In retrospect I was looking for an adventure with the century and got that mixed up with a challenge. For me an adventure is doing something new, like a hike, bike ride, or combination of the two, somewhere you haven’t been before, and perhaps farther than you’ve go before. But it’s not necessary to push the pace, just do it at whatever’s comfortable now. That started out to be exactly what I intended with the century. Just do an all-day ride, cover a lot of ground, and see some nice scenery. My training rides started out be...

It is well known in the exercise science literature that older adults have less ability to produce powerful movements, like a standing vertical jump from a bent-knee position. Power is force times speed, so you could lose power from a loss of strength (thus less ability to produce force) or from your muscles getting slower (unable to contract as fast), or a combination of both. It has been controversial which of these is the culprit. An interesting new study did an experiment that seemed to place the blame more on loss of strength. The authors recruited younger subjects (age ranging from 20-30), and older subjects (age ranging from 65-86). They first tested the subjects’ static leg strength in a knee extension machine. It was found that older subjects had lower static strength on average. So when they are trying to do a jump, which requires accelerating their bodyweight, they are having to move a higher percentage of their maximum leg strength. Muscles can contract faster against less...

After doing my century on Friday I was sore the rest of the day, especially going down stairs. This persisted through Saturday. I felt a lot better by Sunday. I just did a really easy recovery spin on Saturday, then on Sunday I walked with hand weights for 20 minutes, then did an easy ride on the recumbent for 40, which felt great, nice and relaxing. On Monday I felt up to doing a upper body hard day plus some more walking with hand weights. Tuesday I did my usual group ride, 2 and a half hours on my upright. But I kept the pace easy by making it a social ride and hanging out more towards the back of the group. After an easy hour ride today, I have my first hard ride scheduled Thursday. But it will be much shorter than my rides leading up to the Century have been. There are two local challenges I’ve decided to focus on, the first is improving my time climbing East Dunne Avenue, currently 13 minutes. The second is beating my time uphill walking the very steep Barnard road, for which my...

I was already toying with the idea of canceling the Sacramento century and just doing one from home. With GPS, it’s not really necessary to do an organized challenge because you have your training log to show what you have done. But what was really driving this is that the air quality out in the central valley, including the Sacramento area, has been poor lately because of the large wildfires that are still not contained. There’s a good chance this will not have resolved itself by early October when the Sacramento century is scheduled. In contrast, where I live, we are fortunate enough to often have a prevailing wind bringing clean ocean air inland, so our air quality has been much better. I used the ridewithgps free app to map out a good mostly flat route for a local century. I was going to do a few more weeks of training then go for the century in early October. Fridays are my long ride days, and I had a six hour ride scheduled today. But I had a great training ride this morning an...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I’ve been disappointed in my cruising speed on my recumbent, and thought my rear thorn-proof tube might have something to do with it. So I replaced it with a regular tube. I also noticed my front tire was a bit low so pumped it up. What a difference! On one of my longest rides to date, my average speed was 14.8 mph, or about 1.6 mph faster than it’s been. That would result in a century in less than 7 hours instead of closer to 8 hours. That’s more like it! I did another out and back to Hellyer park and checked out the velodrome because on Saturday mornings they have beginner training, where they let you rent a track bike then teach you the basics. I’m going to muster up the nerve to try that at some point. It’s not the velodrome that worries me, its banking is not too severe so I haven’t been nervous on it before or regular bikes. It’s the track bike, no brakes and no freewheeling. That would take some getting used to. It looked like they were jus...

There’s been a debate for some time over whether single-sided strength training has and advantage over double-sided (doing a one-armed chest press vs doing a conventional barbell bench-press, for example). There are reasons to expect it to be better, such as getting your obliques involved in a one-armed chest press, and the fact that the total load lifted by the two sides individually is more than the total load in a double-sided lift. That is because one side is usually stronger than the other, and the double-sided exercise can be limited by the weaker side. But as discussed in a recent article in Alex Hutchinson’s Sweat Science column , studies have shown mixed results until now. Single-leg press ( https://ignorelimits.com/how-to-single-leg-press/ ) He goes on to review a recent study that showed a pronounced advantage for single-legged vs. double-legged leg presses and endurance performance, however. The protocol was to alternate legs in a single leg press, vs. lift with both le...

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives is the name of an interesting book I recently read by Chris and Melissa Bruntlett. I’ve previously discussed their book Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality which describes the history and implementation of measures taken to make Dutch cities bike and pedestrian friendly. The result is they have some of the highest percentages of trips taken by active transportation, and lowest percentages by motor vehicle, of any cities in the world. http://www.Amazon.com/books Their new book has a more personal perspective. The authors both found jobs in the city of Delft in the Netherlands, with a population of a bit over 100,000. They relocated there with their family (a younger son and a high-school age daughter), from Vancouver, BC. They were already a “car-lite” family in Vancouver, not owning any motor vehicles, renting one when needed, and walking and biking as much as possible. Vancouver is a bea...

Tuesday I went for a longer ride to try and increase my cruising speed on the recumbent. There’s an odd phenomenon on the recumbent that I appear to be “leg-limited”: my heart rate remains below my aerobic pace which is around 120 beats per minute, but if I try to go faster it’s my legs that complain with a slight burning sensation. I guess this is due to working them out in a way they haven’t been accustomed to in recent years, since a recumbent uses the leg muscles in a subtly different way than a conventional bike. If so, I have just under a month to get them accustomed before my upcoming Century ride Oct. 2nd. I did my Coyote Creek out and back ride to Hellyer park. It felt great on the way out, but it turns out I had a pretty good tailwind which I struggled against on the way back. Average speed was disappointing, 13.2 mph. I’m hoping to get it up closer to 15. In a second session I did some intervals nearer to home. The route map for this one looks funny because I’m just wand...

This is a question relevant to the Western US with all the wildfires we’ve been getting lately. ve always wondered if I’m doing more harm than good if I exercise outdoors on a day when the air quality is worse than moderate. An interesting study done in Taiwan answers this question. There are parts of Taiwan where the air quality is often poor because of pollution, like a particulate matter count (pm 2.5) around 160. The authors followed recruited close to a million participants in the study, with medical records available from 2001-2016. They were followed an additional three years until 2019, so almost 20 years of data were available. The authors were able to correlate all-cause mortality risk with air pollution exposure and levels of exercise. Even when consistently exposed to bad air, those who consistently did a high amount of exercise had significantly less risk of dying than inactive people. Of course, the lowest risk of all is breathing cleaner air and exercising more, but it ...