Higher Order Math & Handling Ice

Tuesday's rain washed away much of the snow. The white line is visible along 95% of the road. Finally back on the bike commute this morning! Mid 30's warrants boots, tights, and gloves, but no need for chemical heat packs.

Students of radiant heat transfer understand that even though the air was above freezing all night, there are still thin layers of ice on the road in the morning after a cloudless night. Why? Because outer space is essentially an empty vacuum and thus it is absolute zero , i.e., -460 Fahrenheit. Cold enough so there is no molecular motion at all. How cold is that?  It's 360 degrees colder than solid CO2 a.k.a. "dry ice".  Stupid cold.

Engineering Stuff:
Any two objects that face each other exchange heat with each other through radiant heat transfer. Heat moves from the warmer thing to the colder thing. This is why you get warmed up when relaxing on the beach. This is how solar hot water heaters work. The sun's surface is about 11,000 Fahrenheit. It sends out its heat uniformly in all directions and a tiny portion hits the surface of your skin or a solar panel. The same heat exchange happens to water on the road. Except the water is the warm thing and the blackness of empty space is the cold thing. Without dragging you through nasty derivations, radiant heat transfer isn't a big deal when two things are similar in temperature. It comes into play when things are really different in temperature (because it relates to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of each object).

Executive Summary:
Water on the road can give up enough heat to freeze during a cloudless night even when the air temperature is above freezing.  EXPECT ICE.

A few comments about riding when there's ice:
* If it looks like a puddle, expect that there's ice under the surface. There's nothing with less friction than ice -- except ice with a thin layer of water on it. Too much experience here.
* If you have to ride across ice go straight. Don't accelerate. Don't decelerate. Don't turn.
* If you have to ride across ice, you may be better off speeding up before you get to it and zipping across. I've had this work a few times. I've crashed doing this, too. You don't want to do that in traffic.
* Your balance is better with a lower center of gravity. Relax your muscles. Lower your body, get your tail off the saddle, and put most of your weight on the pedals while maintaining gentle control of the handlebars. Allow your elbows and knees to flex.
* You don't have to ride across ice. You can ride around. You can walk.
* Stay focused and alert. As soon as you see a patch of ice, look ahead and in your rear view mirror. No cars? Ride around it. A mess of cars coming? Slow down or stop and let them pass. That's okay. It's not a race. You have all the time you need to get there safely. When the road is clear, you can walk across, walk or ride around the ice.
* If you want to bicycle on ice and snow regularly with confidence, there are studded bike tires. They're a bit expensive and I wouldn't get enough use to justify them. They're heavy, they're noisy, they wear down, and require extra effort when pedaling. But they work!

Ride well!

Nutrition For Excellent Health

Princeton has a staff dietician, Victoria Rosenfeld, who helps student athletes feed themselves for top performance and also works with students who have eating disorders. She agreed to come and talk to a group of us at lunch today about "nutrition for excellent health".

The conversation was rich with useful and inspiring material. Here are just a few of her points:

 * We live in an environment that promotes being un-well. Dieting alone tends to be an abysmal failure. Only 1 - 2% of people tend to succeed at sustaining diets through discipline alone. You must change your environment to be successful.

* Next to rats, humans are the least selective animals on the planet regarding what we will eat.  We are hard-wired to eat. Calorie-restriction alone leads to: increased hunger, reduced Resting Metabolic Rate, decreased satiety, increased muscle loss.

* Food of any and all kinds is negotiable. Exercise is not. You must move every day in a variety of ways. Going to a gym or doing a fitness program is great. But that alone cannot overcome a day of sedentary work. You need to find ways to walk, climb, carry, lift, ask your body to work in ways that it is designed to every day. Exercise is an appetite regulator and helps improve mood.

* Non-organic veggies  are fine. Don't bother with organic fruits that have a peel you remove. It is vastly healthier to eat lots of veggies regardless of non-organic source than to forgo veggies because they're not organic.

* Everything you eat must be food first. Treats are fine and appropriate, but they should be made from good quality ingredients, not factory-processed junk. Grandma's chocolate cake: Yes, occasionally. Fruity Choc-O Pebbles: Not food (maybe possible if you recognize it as dessert, not breakfast).

* Join a CSA! Two in our area are: Chickadee Creek Farm and Honeybrook Organic Farm.

* Total calories in a week matter. Caloires in vs. calories burned matters. Don't obsess about calories per day. Only if you are really training hard as an athlete (> 1 hour per day) do you need to be concerned with timing of food for recovery and top performance. Skip all junk like energy bars and Gatorade except for rare and specific purposes such as training extremely hard in high heat -- where extra electrolytes and calories matter. A 250 calorie Cliff Bar may add more calories than your workout burned.

* Your plate should look like this. The entree that includes protein might be 4 oz. (like a deck of playing cards), not a lot more. 2 servings of "better grains and starches" per day. 2-3 fruits per day, not more due to calories and sugar content.

Mix It Up

 Do change-up your breakfast routine sometimes. I love oatmeal with fruit and nuts for breakfast. But for a really high nutrient/reduced calorie breakfast, try a fruit smoothie.

Add nuts or chia seeds so you get a tiny bit of fat and protein to slow your digestion. You'll leave home with a full belly and this will be more than enough to feel sated all morning.



Make a double batch and leave half in the fridge so there's something healthy you can reach for the moment you get in from work.

Other than just grabbing a piece of fruit on the way out the door, this is among the fastest  breakfasts you can make.

Finding Grace In The Mountain Church

After a few nights of poor sleep and a few days of rich food, too many workouts with unnatural lighting and stale air in the basement, and several time-sensitive things that needed to be done back-to-back this morning I was just in a grumpy, lumpy, bumpy mood. This wasn't someone else's problem or someone else's fault. This was internal knottiness that I needed to untangle myself. This is not the kind of thing a glass of wine managed to mellow, or even something that meditation could crack. I had a serious soul ache and needed to fight something. I needed to seek salvation in the mountain church.








The weather broke today and the ice receded from the roads enough to ride. There was no way I was going to be pleasant company for anyone, so after a post-Pennington Presbyterian Church service nap, I pulled on tights and a fleece-lined jersey and headed for the hills on my own. To exorcise internal demons I already knew what was required. I needed a true moment of centering. I needed to sweat them out. I needed to climb a few hills that refused to be ignored. I needed to find a few that were long enough that I'd get to a place where I could only focus on climbing and pedaling and breathing.

And the Sourland Mountains reached out to me and offered their beauty, fresh air, and the patient, tough love of simply being there, allowing me to throw myself into them. What a blessing to have them so nearby. What a blessing that they are always there, always offering access to human-scale challenges and views into wilderness.

And so it was. I rode up one side and down the other and up another and down another. I rode away from home until I was tired, wanting to get far enough away that the return trip would really require some effort.



















I could have ridden forever. I drank the cool air as sacrament, pulling it to the bottom of my lungs and feeling the toxins being washed out through every pore. I glided past creeks surging with melted snow. My arteries stretched and flooded every cell with clean mountain air. My psalms and proverbs were animal's stories left as tracks in the snow. The hills offered me communion with nature. The roads were empty and I sang aloud.


























I got home hours ago. My muscles are warm and relaxed. My head is clear. My breathing is slow, deep, and calm. I feel whole and centered. I expect to sleep peacefully tonight.

Training in the Dining Hall

I was training for a century at lunch today. Didn't change clothes, increase my heart rate, or pedal a stroke. But as I am ever-so-gradually learning, health, wellness, and fitness have at least as much to do with what you put on your fork as what you do on the bike.

If you're willing to drop a little north of $13k on a bike, you can get one that weighs only a few pounds.  I'm sure Bianchi's Oltre XR.2 with top-end Campy components would be a sweet ride. It weighs-in just above the UCI regulation minimum weight of 14.96 pounds. A fairly light all-steel bike today might weigh 20 pounds or so. So buying a $2000, 20-pound bike means you need to schlep an extra five pounds more than the pro's racing machine. But it leaves $11,000 in your pocket. So the incremental cost is ($11,000/5 pounds) = $2,200 per pound between the top-of-the line and what you're riding today.

If I have a salad for lunch and don't over-indulge at dinner, I'll probably drop about 0.2 pounds of personal pudge before stepping on the bathroom scale tomorrow. I won't have to schlep that useless flab up and down hills or stairs or while walking around the house. I won't see it in the mirror, either. So the value of eating a single salad for lunch equates to about 0.2 pounds x $2200/pound = $440!

Conversely, pigging-out on potato chips and "free" sandwiches yesterday cost me a temporary set-back in bike-weight-value of $1,760!







By choosing low calorie high nutrient foods whenever possible, my body will find it's own ideal weight. I leave the dining hall with a full belly having enjoyed a tasty meal.

By choosing a low glycemic index lunch, my mood will be more stable and I'll be wide-awake and fully alert all afternoon instead of experiencing the blood sugar crash that comes following meals based on simple carbohydrates like white rice, potatoes, or pastas. I eat all those things, but balance and timing is as important on the plate as it is on the bike!

When Is Winter?

I mean, c'mon when is it ever going to be spring? This snow and cold is getting to be a bit much! Time to be riding on the road, right?

Well, actually, this weather is basically pretty normal.

There's so much cultural run-up from Thanksgiving to Christmas and New Years that we tend to think of the end of our winter holidays as the mid point of the winter. In fact, Christmas is actually only a couple days after the winter solstice. So from a daylight standpoint, yes, we do have bright holidays to distract us at the darkest time of year. But officially, the solstice is just the first day of winter. In fact, that's how it plays out from a temperature standpoint too.

When designing and operating systems for heating buildings we speak in terms of "heating degree days". They help us quantify: "how cold was it this winter compared to last winter?" and quantify and compare the energy use of a building in a winter that had a few really cold days to the same building in a winter that had a lot of average-cold days.

Heating degree days are defined relative to a base temperature—the outside temperature above which a building needs no heating. Typically, we'll use 65°F outdoors as the temperature above which buildings need no heating, since there are usually things in the building that provide a little heat such as people, lighting, washing, and cooking.

So if the outdoor temperature averaged 25°F yesterday, we accumulated (65-25) = 40 degree days.  A typical winter in this area might have 5000 degree-days.

Based on monthly records for the past thirteen winters, what we find is that January is the coldest month followed by February. December is third coldest on average, then March. Of course there's lots of variation. But the point is: like it or not, this is what February in NJ looks like.

More miles in the basement!

Oops, Over-Did The Recovery

Active recovery can be more effective than just sitting around but it's amazingly easy to over-do it unless you are very intentional, and in my case, I ought to get out the heart-rate monitor again and start measuring instead of going by feel.

I had planned to do 30 minutes of gentle spinning as active recovery today. Ideally that might average 50% - 60% of my maximum heart rate (MHR). Haven't measured this year, but my MHR is somewhere about 185. So for recovery, I should maintain a heart rate of only 92 - 111 beats per minute. It is extremely difficult to pedal this gently while riding on the road.

I was merrily wheeling away in the basement listening to my current favorite podcast. Just on a lark, tapped a free app on my phone, "Instant Heart Rate" and realized that at 142 beats per minute I was well into the "aerobic capacity" zone, i.e., 70% - 80% of MHR. This is a fine place to be as an average for a long workout to build fitness. But it's way over-doing it for active recovery. 

Heart rate training is a solid basis to build up your strength and endurance as a cyclist. It's not necessary. It's fine to just go ride whenever you want at whatever pace gives you joy. That's a far more Zen-like approach. But, if you want to throw a little science at your training efforts, mixing harder hard days and easier easy days in the proper proportion, can really help. Measuring your heart rate while training is the easiest and most direct measure of your training effort. 

You can measure your heart rate for free by placing three fingers on your opposite wrist or carotid artery. You can calculate heart rate zones or there are websites that will do it for you.

You can use your fingers, an app on a smart phone, or you can invest in a heart rate monitor. I use all three techniques at different times while training and during personal time-trial type training.