After a few rides on PowerCranks you will soon find out why you will love inclines and hills much more than flats!  It's the ability to control your cadence and develop that extra power from your quads.  As you have read throughout the website, PowerCranks will help you develop more Power from lifting your leg than pushing it.  Pushing or mashing is natural, gravity already helps us most of the way down while pulling up is working against gravity.  Now, when you find the ideal initial grade, you will sense  that both group of muscles that allow you to push and pull are being  worked in harmony!  Fore and aft muscle balance will naturally develop!

So back to today's ride!  Teaching a 9 year old how to shift gears going up a slight grade is not easy ... Chiara prefers to hammer up these short elevation gains instead of risking to mis-shift!  I guess she does nto want to hear me say "I told you so!  Always keep pedaling when shifting gears!"  I guess that for a young rider, riding PowerCranks, keeping an eye on the flow of traffic on the bicycle path and wanting to be the first one to the top of the incline is way too much to handle already without having to think about shifting.  Frank and I were impressed about her progression and we look forward to increasing our training mileage once school starts.  I heard that Frank might want to try to break Steve Larsen's or Magnus Backstedt's records in terms of distance for the second ride ... we are just warming up!

I think that this week-end we might tackle a long 13 mile stretch of road that is falso-piano (Italian for describing a road that has a small grade but still looks flat - how do you say that in English) in order to gauge how our three fitness levels have improved over the past week.  While I stated in an earlier post that my goal for the end of September was to ride 40 miles, I am just not cofident about the 90 rpm goal that I set myself.  Short legs and a lack of fast-twitch muscle fibers are going to be my enemies!  While theres is nothing I can do about my short legs, I will work on cadences!  Once I re-connect my PowerTap I will be able to monitor cadences and make my goals cadence based vs. power based at least for the first year as I have no recent data to compare it with.  I do have the old files from 2001 in which 250+ watts was just cruising, but I am a minimum or 45lbs away from being able to compare data.  The other variable I am going to monitor is torque because pedaling in circles does translate in much more linear torque.  For now heart rate in not relevant due to the current (I wonder for how long) lack of fitness.

For those that have read my profile, I will attempt to complete a marathon next year; what I forgot to mention is that this will entail 0.00 running just a little PowerCranking.  Also, for those of you that might not know, Frank is an original Ironman and next year he plans to compete in the 30th anniversary of the race, in Hawaii, on PowerCranks with minimal run training (yet to define minimal) and from our conversation yesterday even minimal swim training.  Stay tuned for Frank's progress report.

Happy Training