Hey everybody and welcome to the podcast is dedicated to making you a faster cyclist the ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road coach Jonathan Lee with our head coach Chad Zimmerman everybody and our CEO Nate Pearson and said our product manager and Clif bar racing's Pete Morris. How do you guys good to have you man. Yeah, thanks for bringing in the 200th episode with me. You know, yeah, a lot of people this is our special guest. That's right. Yeah, Pete more special guest. A lot of people have. There's been quite a lot of a lot made of episode 200 on the

trainer road forum forum. trainer road calm. We just look at it as a number just like your FTP. He just keep your head down. Just keep your head down and keep working. Keep turning out good stuff. Just like you don't care when your number goes up or goes down. You just keep training. Just keep focusing. So this is episode 200 and you can go into forum. trainer road calm and look for that. In order to find this episode, you'll probably also find people with crazy ideas on episode 200. One of them I want to highlight is somebody said we should do it live and I'm not sure if they're joking or not.

We are live every week. We should do that. Let's do it. We're live every week on Facebook and YouTube and usually it's Thursday at 8 a.m. Pacific. Just like we're doing right now. And you can join us on there. You can send in some questions. And then at the end of the episode, we usually take some time to answer those. So pretty cool stuff. One quick thing I wanted to update people on with trainer road with the product itself is something that now you can and this has been something that just kind of like slip by temporarily, but you can share your ride.

That sort of thing you can share a link to your rides to people that are not trainer road members. They can look into it. They can see if that sort of stuff. It's pretty cool. So it just makes it easier when you're sharing and you're doing a ride and you want to share it on social media, something like that. You can just take a screenshot. That sort of thing. But then you have a link to go with it, which is pretty cool. People can check in with that. And then we also release some videos on YouTube race analysis video. Two of them Pete. You were the analysis that the analyzer.

I would say and Nate was the question. Also the subject and the question asker. Yes. The first one is sad climbing and I did it wrong. That's the title. Yes. All of that is yes. Yeah. Yeah. We get to see Nate was racing on a circuit race and trying to sag climb the because it's pretty climbing. He was trying to sag climb the hills a bit did well in some respects with the sad climbing. And then you'll get to see why and how it bit him later on in the morning.

He did a darn good job of closing it in. He made it close. But yeah, anyways, you'll see that one. And the next one is the cost of bad descending. And that's another climbing this time of criterion. Yep. And I kind of had some sketchy turns. Yeah, it was high speed. Not the best pavement. So it requires some some gumption. I guess it's reported to you. Yeah. And really wide high speed turns. Yeah, open. I have some guys weren't breaking. But yeah, it requires.

A lot of a lot of power for half the course and some some steely determination the other half. So. And after the descent, you've plopped out into a short flat section. Then it goes uphill to the finish. So how you descend really does matter. In this case, on that course. And in most cases, it also like Pete, you're a fantastic decender. You're also a heavier rider.

Yeah, I was going to say it's like, way up. And you smarty wisely use that to your advantage. And it's really cool to see frustrating for me to see when I'm behind him. But yeah,

is it frustrating in that murk style time trial we did this. I mean, I'm sure you put out more power, but relative to your weight, I'm not sure you did. And you still beat us pretty, pretty handling. And he posted so much more than us. Yeah, no, he did.

It's like, how did that work? You coasted more. You did less power. You still beat us. It's amazing.

Then one thing I want to share. So I did, I did like a two week racing block down in Southern California, real deal racing to you. Yeah, real deal stuff. Yeah.

Like a national level pro XCT is is what it's what it's called. And that was some really hard racing, really hard racing and a shock to the system. But I was racing just fresh out of relatively fresh out of sweet spot.

Base and something that's interesting with that is the fact that like we talked about this. We talked about this on a couple episodes recently.

Like one thing you have to set expectations. You haven't finished a specialty plan. So you don't expect that sort of fine tuning on your fitness.

But at the same time, you'll surprise yourself with what you can do on those sort of races. And even though this is punchy mountain bike racing, which usually favors more time towards specialty than just something that's, you know, more base focused.

I found that this weekend, especially I had like a really good, I guess there's a flat or more steady sections of the course. And I noticed a relative advantage on other people that were really tough to keep up with on the punchy sections of the course.

But I was able to really like exploit that strength of having that steady power because of the training I've been doing. And I was able to get gaps or I was able to close down gaps in those sections, which is pretty cool.

You had a pretty even mix of muscle endurance and punchy power. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of like I feel like right now I'm kind of getting to the point where I'm smack dab in the middle, which is obviously where I want to be with the build phase and everything else. But pretty interesting stuff. So when you show up to a race, you may find yourself thinking, especially like going to a place like Southern California where they have so many races that people are practically peaking right now. And they did.

Yeah, they peaked right. In fact, some guys, I think on the first week, they peaked because the second week, they just looked dead and they didn't do as well. So.

But anyways, when you go up, it's I find myself intimidated sometimes by that or not intimidated. Perhaps that's not the best word. But I find myself putting myself like at a mental disadvantage where I'm like, these guys are going to be better at X than I will.

But don't forget the fact that you are better than them. It's something as well. So it's pretty pretty cool thing to have there.

So with that, I think that we should get into some questions.

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