January | 2016 | midtoad's messages

Archive | January, 2016

New benchmark!

10000

Just before the end of 2015, on December 28 in fact, I reached a new benchmark and the goal I was aiming to achieve by the end of the year: 10,000 km ridden on my FES bike in 3 1/2 years (4200 km in 2015 alone). that’s a lot of distance covered by a pair of paralyzed legs! If you are able-bodied, how far did you cycle last year?

Here is a copy of the summary page of the online log of all of my rides, as recorded by the bike manufacturer. In addition to the total distance ridden so far (6329 miles as of January 15, 2016 = 10,185 km), you can also see the distance I covered in each session (in red, and by others with my same physical condition in blue), and the average power output during each session. I appear to be working much harder than others in my situation. I have no explanation for this other than that I love cycling!

160115-summary

I also manually log all of my rides on Strava, and you can see my profile and stats there.

Tags: bikes, cycling, exercise, FES, SCI

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Cycling, SCI

Good versus not so good

15 Jan

My workout warm-ups are important, and not just for the role they play in getting the muscles moving. I do pretty much the same routine all the time, only occasionally making slight changes to my workout. By sticking to one standard, I can look at my performance during the warm-up and use it to tell me whether I should go easy or hard during the rest of the workout. If I am weak during the warm-up, perhaps it will be a good day to just take it easy. On the other hand, if my muscles are performing better during the warm-up, this might suggest that I have the energy to try harder workout.

Below, are the results from two of my workouts. You can see how the resistance (and also the RPM) increase over a number of steps during my 20 minute warm-up session. During my good warm-up, in the first graph, you can see that the average power on the hardest step of the warm-up was 26 W. In the not so good warm-up, in the second graph, the average power on the top step is only 19 W.

151208w 151225w