Hey everyone, it's been a while since I made my last cycling post (20 days ago) so it's about time!
According to my wife, I can't do anything what I like as most people, just ease in to something - instead I'm all-in, reading and watching as much as I can to learn and soak up information, the past four years this has primarily been me playing my favorite game, Splinterlands but lately cycling has taken over! 😅
Milage Update
Since my last post I made on September 26, I did quite a bit of new rides with a total of 317 kilometers, and I also made a new longest ride, doing 74 kilometers - this wasn't entirely supposed to happen, my planned ride was 65 kilometers but Garmin doesn't know about closed roads and finding a new way home I made a poor decision so my legs hated me that day. 😇
Unlike 
Friendlymoose has a yearly 5000 kilometer goal, which when I first read about this it sounds incredibly high but if I can keep this up, I'm doing about 4000 a year. Tough months are ahead because we both live in the same country, and winter is coming!
Winter in The Netherlands mostly means temperatures between 0 and 5 degrees without a lot of sun and with quite a bit of rain, and because I only started my new hobby this spring, this will be my first winter, I can handle cold weather a lot better than really hot weather, but in the summer I could avoid the really hot days by going out really early and be back home before the sun scorches everything, added benefit to this is I had the roads for myself without dangerous situations with cars not seeing me, or just not caring - a problem many Dutch cyclists will recognize.
In the winter however, I can hopefully plan around rain showers but there definitely will be entire days when it's raining, and cold temperatures AND rain... I just have to experience it I guess! 😏
How do you prepare for longer rides?
Experience comes with the years but I learned a lot from cycling podcasts, things like it's better to eat two to three hours before rides, this timeframe gives your body's insulin a chance to regulate blood glucose levels, preventing a crash in energy that can happen if you eat too close to a workout.
Most days off, I'm awake around 6am so I start the day with three sandwiches with something sweet on them so by 9am I'm ready to go out, just before getting dressed I have a small sweet snack like ginger bread or a currant bun and I'll take two 650 mil bottles with me, one with water and one with lemonade syrup to add some sugars on my second hour.
When I'm home I used to drink water to replenish the sweat I lost but I've learned chocolate milk is a great replenishment drink, I like it and it's cheap! Why buy expensive sport drinks?
So for now, most of my rides are two to a maximum of three hours I can do without eating anything while cycling, but one day I want to do a 100 kilometer ride, probably not before the nice weather conditions return in the new year though.
Let me know how you prepare for your rides!
Zone 2 training?
Something else I learned is going as fast as possible for as long as possible, exactly what I am doing 😅 isn't the best way to get better, how is THAT possible? 😅
Heartrate Zone 2 means you ride at an easy to moderate pace, fast enough to breathe steadily, but not so hard that you’re gasping for air. I know training at heart rates isn't the best way and training at power output is better, but a power meter is pretty expensive and crazy to put on a mountain bike, so a new heart rate monitor is on it's way from China... I really like Chinese cycling products, many of them are good quality for a lot less money - more on that later.
Zone 2 means 60 - 70% of your maximum heart rate - which is around 175 for me so the 70% threshold is 124, exactly where Fitbit has calculated this for me.
Fitbit can't broadcast my heart rate to my Garmin, and looking at my watch isn't that great so for now I'm just enjoying my ride and use what I feel to decide how much effort I put in to it.
Staying below 124 seems very boring 🤣 I like to go fast! We will see how this goes when my heart rate monitor arrives hopefully at the end of next week.
Chinese Cycling Gear
A couple of years ago, Chinese sellers like Temu and AliExpress had a bad name because they were mostly selling low quality items, and it's true you have to be lucky what you get and it's not all great but until now only one cycling related item I bought wasn't that great, it's a saddle bag with a mount on it for my tail light... it ripped in a couple of weeks, the vibrations of uneven terrain was too much, even with my really small tail light attached, luckily I spotted my light in the grass when the bag ripped as I was practicing on a field of grass.
So, this is the heart rate monitor I bought, with some extra discount it was just under €16, about $20.
In comparison, exactly the same monitor is almost triple the cost on Amazon!
Of course I can't review this item because I haven't received it yet. 🙂
Summer Gloves
Because my handlebars are pretty grippy, I like to wear gloves with some kind of padding in them, absorbing some shocks and prevent my hand to become sweaty.
Link to product (this is an affiliate link).
This was one of the first items I bought when I just started, and I'm still using them, not every item on AliExpress looks like what the site likes you to think, but these do and after over 1500 kilometers in 5 months, they're still looking good, for only a couple of Euro's.
Tail Light
It's important to be seen when riding on the roads, and I don't care about 'aero' or extra weight, since my mountain bike is heavy on it's own already 😆
I've seen other cyclists with a small flashing tail light, the flashing mode is kinda illegal in my country, law requires a tail light so just emit light all the time, and this light has multiple modes but my battery lasts longer when it's flashing and I think it's more noticeable as well.
Link to product. (This is an affiliate link).
It works great, I think I have to charge after 10 - 15 hours. I bought the 'smart' version of this light, sensing when I brake so it will shine brighter BUT... the smart mode will only display brake light when it's not dark outside, for some reason I can't put it to smart mode for the brake sensing and make the light flash also during day time, so I'm not using the smart mode and I just turn the light on and off when I go out, charging is with USB-C, like almost anything nowadays so that's nice as well.
Another MTB Track discovered 😃
You might ask yourself why I'm riding a mountain bike when I'm only on the roads, but I'm not 😄 I just like both, and for both MTB tracks in my area I need to cycle about half an hour first.
There's a second, smaller MTB track pretty close to where I live and it's totally free to use, the other larger one you have to buy a €17 yearly permit for. The strange thing is, there isn't much info about this smaller MTB track I just happened to read it was there in a message from a local cyclist club, probably no one here lives close enough but it's located here.
It's three minutes of fun per lap, but when I visited I was the only one there, so it was great to experiment (and crash without anyone watching, lol)
For really experienced riders it's maybe not really cool but for a beginner like me it's pretty difficult to get trough without crashing and with a nice speed, especially the banked corners is something I have to practice a lot more, but after a couple of tries there was some improvement, the problem is you need to go in with some speed but it feels scary, and without the speed you can't be on the banked part without crashing, and so... that happened for the first time. 😂
Well, I have even more things and idea's to write about but let's not make this post too long so you all get bored and save it for the next one, thanks for stopping by and I hopefully catch you on the next post!