Riding the Hooker

What??? Riding the Hooker? Has this blog been hijacked by some not so pure thoughts? Nope. After a few years in hiding, my Hooker has made her way back out of the shadows and whipped into action. Before Cervelo, before Trek TTX, before Specialized Transition, and all the other fancy dancy TT bikes on today’s market, a very special bike designed by Gary Hooker of Hooker Headers (for cars) fame was the be all and end all of aerodynamic setups. There’s a great story on the history of Hookers at Slowtwitch - http://www.slowtwitch.com/Tech/The_Hooker_237.html.

My Hooker differs from the one highlighted at Slowtwitch. Mine is a 700c version. I was fortunate enough to but it secondhand (or maybe third- or fourth-hand?), though it didn’t come with the entire assortment of Hooker goodies, such as the aerobars of death, the Hooker brakes, and the one-sided Hooker fork. Before I could make the thing race legal I had to find a rear brake (hidden behind the BB shell). I found some Dura Ace AX brakes on ebay and I was set. The rules say you have to have a fixed gear and a brake or two brakes. The rules say nothing about those brakes being functional, and AX brakes really suck in terms of brake power.

I haven’t ridden my Hooker in over 3 seasons, giving it up because while fast as hell, I just couldn’t put the power down. It was no problem averaging over 25 mph on just 250 watts. The problem was I couldn’t take advantage of the ~10% more power I was generating on the road bike. But I need something new. The Ford GT is out, the Dodge Charger is available again, so why can’t I go retro? When I last rode my Hooker, I lived in a different house (so the photo below will likely not pass muster with the Slowtwitch décor nazis). I didn’t even have a proper TT helmet as the Garneau Prologue was the only “aero” helmet legal in the States.

Today the bike looks the same. Same lousy red fork. Do you know how hard it is to find a threaded 1 inch aero fork? I’ve made the decision to remake this bitch, and a new set of aerobars is on the way – threadless version of a similar set of VisionTechs (great bars IMO). Now I just need a 1 inch threadless fork and new headset and my drag should drop even more. The last 2 years I rode a budget Leader TT/Tri frame with aero fork and integrated Oval Concepts A700 bars. Great, cheap, setup that had me go 56:50 in sea-level conditions in a 40k. But I need something different this year.

Last week I did a head-to-head competition between the Hooker and Leader. After a 70 mile ride on the road bike I loaded up the 2 TT frames in the car and headed to a local park with a 1.45 mile loop completely exposed to wind. Winds were 10-15 mph that day but still not bad enough for some testing. Same wheels were used for the tests – 32 aero busting spokes with lousy tires and tubes. Not a go fast setup.

Below is a plot of speed and power (divided by 5) over the course of 6 laps for each setup. I targeted 3 power levels (2 laps at each power level) for each bike. Note the repeatability in power application and also the peaks and valleys of speed due to the wind. But more importantly look at how the Hooker tests faster, even with that lousy red fork which is as aero as a pig. CdA estimates show the Hooker to be 0.015 to 0.020 m^2 more aero than the Leader. The addition of an aero fork should improve that even more. Expected time savings over 40k is on the order of 90 seconds. Free speed if I can keep the power up to the levels I had on the Leader. Should be a fun year.

Week of April 6

Monday - A new way of making life miserable - setting up the Computrainer indoors with my PC equipped bike and doing some indoor riding. The PCs aren't the problem; the problem lies with the pain of getting up out of the saddle with the PCs while modulating the Computrainer power in erg mode. Needless to say, my 40 minutes of PC riding on the trainer wasn't enjoyable. My rear was none too pleased with the lack of off the saddle rest time.

Tuesday - On the race bike for an intense workout, one that simply can not be done effectively with PCs. It's the kind of workout that is getting me in shape again quickly, and I set several yearly best average powers in the 6-10 minute range.

Wednesday - Wife's 40th birthday, so I stayed home, took her to brunch, museum, movie, nursery, and dinner. No riding. Have to have your priorities straight.

Thursday - Wanted to do another race style workout on the race bike but just didn't have the legs. Still got in about an hour of tempo to bump up the CTL.

Friday - Decided to take Good Friday off from work and rode with a pal. Loads of tempo to keep the CTL growing. Later in the day I headed off to the park for an hour of testing on my TT bikes. It's a new year, and I'm trying to decide which bike to use. I haven't ridden my old Hooker in a few years for fit issues, but it felt great. Have some decisions to make... More on this in another post.

Saturday - Group ride with plenty of spunk despite 4 hours in the saddle on Friday.

Sunday - Felt good once more.

Unfortunately only 40 minutes of PC time. I intended much more but I'm having to fit too many workouts of various types in. One thing I noticed on some of the rides, however, was pulling back and up on my regular cranks more than in the past.

PC time this week - 40 minutes
PC time to date - 196 hours 50 minutes

Week of March 23 and March 30

Monday the 23rd - 70 minutes of PC riding at an easy pace. I was blitzed from the weekend.

Tuesday - off

Wednesday - still tired from the weekend

Thursday - A quick hour of riding through the 'hood on the race bike

Friday - 50 minutes of PC riding at an easy pace.

Saturday - Group ride with the race bike.

Sunday - Relaxing endurance ride enjoying the weather.

PC time this week - 2 hours 0 minutes
PC time to date - 195 hours 0 minutes

Monday the 30th - nada

Tuesday - Some of my "race winning intervals" (similar, but not exactly like those described in "Training and Racing with a Power Meter") on the road bike. Left me dead tired after the workout.

Wednesday - 90 minutes of solid surge tempo work on the regular cranks

Thursday - day off

Friday - 70 minutes of Powercranks

Saturday - group ride where I hit it hard

Sunday - another hard group ride


PC time this week - 1 hour 10 minutes
PC time to date - 196 hours 10 minutes

Only 70 minutes of PCs this week but an interesting conversation with one of my pals. One of the top Texas racers asked him if I was the guy on his team riding PCs. This top racer was stating that he felt PCs helped him and that I was using them too much. Hmm. On the one hand you have a top racer claiming too much use is a bad thing; on the other hand I'm violating the spirit of Frank's Slowtwitch study and also not improving by not using them exclusively. What to think... I do know I've used them for some 60% of my training volume over the last 9 months and it would have been more except for those injury issues over the last 2 months.

Week of March 16

It’s been a poor couple of weeks. After getting back from Italy it has been one thing after another. I was essentially sidelined for much of March due to weather and planning a large charity ride. With the charity ride out of the way and the weather cooperating, this week was spent trying to regain some of my lost form. I had the most volume of any week in awhile, and hopefully I’ll get a bump from that in the coming weeks or at least rebuild my foundation. My CTL has fallen from 107 in January to 78 last Sunday. Thus, my form is in the tank, PC riding or not.

Monday – I took the day off from work to put a long 3+ hour ride in on the regular cranks. Just a warm-up ride trying to get my sea legs back.

Tuesday – Easy ride on regular cranks.

Wednesday – A fun ride, which meant a mix of tempo up to anaerobic. Still no PC riding – this ride was intended to rebuild race fitness by simulating out of the saddle surges and such.

Thursday – Today was a PC ride. 2 hours of PC riding and the PC layoff caused some fatigue for sure. The first 90 minutes was a snap, but then the hip flexors were a little tired. The good news is there was no ankle pain, so I plan to add some more PC time during my training weeks.

Friday – No riding due to travel to Austin. I brought the race bike with the regular cranks as the goal was to attack the hills hard with plenty of out of the saddle efforts. I would have been racing at Fayetteville this weekend but my race fitness is so bad right now it would have been an embarrassment.

Saturday – Felt great (relatively compared to previous weeks). I didn’t set any average power or normalized power records or year bests, but I was within a few percent of those values. The 3+ hour ride hurt like heck.

Sunday – My legs were beat from Saturday so the way out I took it easy. I had a nice tailwind and I let it push me along. The first 90 minutes I only averaged a bit over 160 watts while averaging over 20 mph with some nice hills in there. Coming back I was hitting the full force of those 15-20 mph headwinds with higher gusts. The return trip was 30+ minutes slower but with powers 30 percent plus higher. Got some good tempo time in there and burned some fat off. Goal met for the day.

A good TSS building week. I accumulated 910 points for the week and pushed my CTL up 8 points. I need a few more of these weeks and I’ll be back to my previous form I expect. While only being on the PCs for 2 hours, it was a pain free 2 hours (except for the hip flexors). I hope to log more time on them this week, particularly on my endurance rides.

It has been awhile since I’ve reported my power data. The curves below clearly show how lousy my March has been. January and February were both great months, but March has been at least 5-10% below in performance for average power. My normalized powers have only exceeded August and September, when I was mostly riding PCs and had some lousy fitness.

PC time this week - 2 hours, 0 minutes
PC time to date - 193 hours, 0 minutes

The last 2 weeks

Talk about inconsistent. Things just haven't worked out for me the last 2 weeks. I was responsible for organizing a charity ride for a local cycling club which grabbed a lot of my time. I'm amazed at how little riding I've done in the last 2 weeks. Volume was about half what I usually do, and my fitness has dropped as a result. Not good going into the busiest part of the Texas racing season.

Over the last 2 weeks I actually got back on the PCs. Here's some recent history:

March 2 - a good tempo ride with regular cranks doing some race type efforts such as out-of-the-saddle sprints and such.

March 3 - 65 minutes at endurance pace on the PCs with no pain! Yippee!

March 4 - VO2 workout on the race bike with regular cranks. Was only going to do 3 minute intervals but felt good enough to extend them to 5 minutes.

March 5 - no riding in anticipation of a race Saturday

March 6 - opener workout on the race bike

March 7 - Raced the 3/4 race at Tunis-Roubaix. Race is 4 laps of 13 miles with 5-6 miles of that on gravel. It was a war of attrition and I survived. The majority of the field went out with multiple flats but I prevailed for a 3rd place finish. The funny thing is I've never felt worse in a race. It was my absolute worst power day in a race. 189 W average and 211 W normalized for the race. I had zero energy, and that may have been dehydration as this was the first relatively warm cycling day. Usually for the duration I'm a good 20% higher in power.

March 8 - 1:40 on the PCs and Saturday's sluggishness followed me the whole day. I felt just as bad today as I did the day before. Again, no pain using the PCs, but just no legs. I'm in a real funk.

Monday - On the TT rig for the first time this year in anticipation of the Fayetteville (Texas) Stage Race. Felt good enough to pop out a 8+ minute threshold effort.

Tuesday - race paced tempo ride on the race bike

Wednesday - Didn't have much time so I hightailed it to a local park with a 1.4 mile loop for a combined workout and aero test day. Got some good data on the TT bike but didn't have a whole lot of energy.

Thursday to Sunday - no riding due to final preparations for the charity ride, bad weather (freaking cold and rainy), and company from Japan. Sucks not getting a ride in.

So the good news is I got some more PC riding in and without pain. The bad news is my fitness is in the tank due to a lack of riding. I'm hoping to regain my fitness in short order to tackle the races coming up.

PC time this week - 1 hour, 45 minutes
PC time to date - 191 hours, 0 minutes

Sunday evening update - first PC ride in 2+ weeks

I "braved the cold" (ooh, 60 degrees) and did indeed get out on the PCs for the first time in 2+ weeks. Figured I'd just do an hour at endurace pace as I'm shifting my hard workout up a day to Monday.

The good news - riding the PCs was a snap. It was like I never stopped using them for 2+ weeks. No hip flexor fatigue whatsoever.

The bad news - my left ankle/foot pain flared up about 30 minutes into the ride. I cut the ride short at 45 minutes to avoid the pain.

A bit discouraging. I haven't had ANY pain with my race bike setup of Look pedals/cleats (which just can't be used with these PCs without significantly affecting q-factor) and regular cranks. The PC folks have suggested spacers, but I refuse to do this as it may open myself up to even more injuries. The late Sheldon Brown has an excellent discussion of q-factor and the need to keep it narrow - The hip joint is optimized for walking, and in normal walking the footsteps are pretty much in line, with little or no "tread."

PC time this week - 45 minutes
PC time to date - 189 hours, 15 minutes

The Last Two Weeks

It's been 2 weeks since I checked in. Reason is two-fold. The first is that I was in Turin, Italy for work. It's always great heading to Italy and filling up on the best pizza, pasta, espresso, and gelato the world has to offer. I made sure to get my work done but also to enjoy life. My wife came along, and it was her first time to Italy. She loves Japan and bugs me about my next trip there (she's been 7 times, you'd think she'd tire of it but she loves it that much). Italy just made her list now as well.

Anyway, I got back Friday Feb 20 late in the day. Because of that nagging ankle/foot pain I was having, I decided to wait on getting back to PCs. Saturday most of my team was racing in the Austin area. Since I had come off a trans-Atlantic flight not 16 hours earlier, I skipped the weekend of racing. Instead I went long on the race bike and found I was a lot fresher than expected. Throughout the week I focused on just gaining some race fitness back. My upper end and snap have declined due to the extensive PC use so I did plenty of simulated race pace riding - accelerating hard out of the saddle coming out of turns, sprinting, etc. Things that just can't be done well with PCs. The Saturday ride had a slightly reduced crowd due to a couple of folks being out. But for myself the ride was great. Lots of attacking and hard pulling. I feel I'm getting in solid race shape. Most of all I had a lot of fun in training this week. It wasn't a chore. Hopefully next weekend I'll be racing Tunis-Roubaix and making a difference in the race.

I also hope to get back on the PCs this week. I may still get out today for a short hour on them, but the weather is cool and windy (well, not that cool at 59 F). I'm getting REALLY tired of these 20-25 mph winds the last few months. I'm ready for the usual 10-15 mph breezes.

I've spent well over half a year with PCs. I received some slack from the PC folks about "hanging up" the PCs while I get over my injury, claiming I was giving them up. Nothing is farther from the truth as I hope to bring them back in the fold this week. I truly need to be sure to not prolong an injury. Further, I was catching heat for not using them "exclusively" meaning every waking hour on the bike. As mentioned in my last entry, an additional reason for tabling PC use for a short time was lack of motivation. What could is a "training tool" if they kill your motivation to train?

That said, it's interesting to see how my power has progressed since August, when I really started heavy into PCs (I was using them off and on in July). The graphs below show my monthly best average and normalized powers for various durations since August, when I started heavy use of PCs. Note that August and September had some low power numbers. This is due to 2 things - getting used to PCs and also not focusing on serious training. Once late October rolled around I was full into tempo and threshold work. The training season was in full swing. At that time my powers were improving across the board. In other words, you could say my power improvements were due to a change in training load. Of course, you could also say the 2 months of PC use caused the increases. Either way, I haven't busted my historical best power numbers (except for the longer 2+ hour durations). What is of particular interest to me is that with the exception of the month of January (came off a lot of volume on the bike and was running my highest TSS) and August/September, everything is clumped together. I've got my own opinions on this and how PCs, regular cranks, and training fit into it, but I'll keep those to myself for now and let others mull it over.