If you love Italy, hate cancer, and spend as much time as you can on 2 wheels, you should read on.  The Giretto d’Italia (The Little Tour o Italy) is in it’s second year, and enrollment begins now.  This year Cycling Fusion will recruit a minimum of 10 riders before we begin raising the money, booking the airfare, and in general letting the Giretto take over our lives for the next several months.  The Giretto d’Italia is a Livestrong grassroots fund raising event aimed at the best amateur riders in the cycling community, or those that want to be in the lead group.  If you want to find out just how good you can get if you train properly, this is your chance.  All that being said, we will have 2 separate groups of riders this year; the Hammer Heads (who will ride every day), and the Alternators (who will ride day 1, 3 & 5)  If you are an avid cyclist who isn’t quite sure you can “keep up” even with training, you may be able to handle the Alternators group.

This is Erika Smith.  She understands that if you can measure something, you can improve it.  She  built a device to prove it.  Doesn’t she look wonderfully geeky?

We Americans really like our quick fixes – fast food, miracle diet pills, get rich schemes, drive through funeral parlors, and more recently I’ve even heard about a drive through polititian in my home state of PA (Yikes!  Just when you think government couldn’t get more screwed up).  So, it’s no wonder that the MAX heart rate formula of 220 minus your age has hung around exercise junkies and fitness facilities since the flawed formula was first offered up.

So I thought that my last post was rare; a true “rant” of quasi-psychotic proportions, and would leave that genre behind. But here it is, on my very next post, I feel the need to vent yet again. This time however, it’s to a group of which I am a member – fitness facility owners & managers. The phrase “penny wise and pound foolish” immediately come to mind. Of course, the phrase cheapskate sons-of-a… well, I better be careful here, I do need to keep this a family blog.

The new genre of “virtual cycling” DVDs for indoor cycling training is picking up steam with Global Ride’s release of Speed & Power in Italy. The release is obviously timed well in advance of the upcoming winter indoor training season in the U.S. Starting with some of the early efforts of Endurance Films on behalf of the Spinning® company, Mad Dogg athletics, and then followed by probably the biggest producer of indoor cycling training DVDs, Troy Jocobson of Spinerval fame, this new type of training film is gaining popularity.

To all my Spinning® buddies and fanatics out there, don’t get too excited. I have nothing but kudos and good things to say about Spinning®, and have huge love for what Johnny G did to bring indoor cycling “to the masses”. Frankly, if it wasn’t for his work in the 80s, we would probably still be fighting to build the “perfect trainer” while a stationary bike is simply the perfect solution for both the class environment and introducing folks to cycling for the first time. If we can just stop our “us / them” thinking for a minute, we would see that whatever your style of cycling indoors, or whatever your bike manufacturer, it is all good for both the fitness and cycling industries respectively. Let’s be bigger than ourselves and help a rising tide raise ALL ships.

You can probably figure out what the Training and Taper stands for, but Temptation… that one you will have to wait on till the end of the blog. Actually, I’m not sure either what the “temptation” is for, but it seemed like it would make the title more sexy – what can I say, the competition for readers in the blogger world is fierce, I’ve got to do something ☺!

Training with power is the ultimate way to insure your forward progress in cycling. While I am a huge supporter of heart monitor training, and I believe there is no more important training tool than a cadence monitor for both indoor and outdoor cycling, the power meter brings the best of all worlds together. With power we are measuring the “real work” we are doing, the actual energy produced by our efforts. After all, it isn’t how much our body is suffering (reflected by the heart rate monitor), or how fast we spin the pedals (reflected by our RPMs) that determines how fast we go, or how well we climb the next hill. Power is the energy we can produce to propel us forward. Hence, the power meter also accounts for the resistance on the flywheel when indoors, and the force being applied to the pedals when faced with gravity and gearing when outdoors. This, and only this will measure our performance progress.