Welcome and podcast updates
Roman, today I want to talk about the top tree climbing mistakes. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Rowman Podcast. Roadman welcome back to another Roadman Cycling Podcasts. How is everybody getting on? If you follow me over on Instagram on Roadman.cycling, you'll have seen on my Instagram stories that new kit has started to arrive. We got ourselves a road caster pro, I want to say, and the Sure SM7B microphone. All that's just tech speak for the podcast is about to go up a level. You guys are responding by starting to recommend the podcast to friends more and more so I'm responding by starting to up my commitment level to you, the listener up my sound quality I'm constantly looking, it's not the Joe Rogan experience but we're constantly moving the Doyle. I'm not competing against Joe Rogan, I'm competing against myself from last week, myself from last month and I promise you I'm going to keep getting better and better. With that being said, I've had a renewed push on Patreon since the start of the new year and I've decided to take one episode per week and make it a Patreon's only episode. This week the episode is where you feel mentally drained all the time. It's a brilliant episode and it has some really tangible tips to avoid that mental drain. If you want to get access to that podcast, the only way you can do that is either A, you're a coaching client of ours or B, you boy me amazingly beer once a month and you'll get access to the secret podcast. You can boy me a beer over on patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch and you've got to get access to the secret podcast each week. Today, Roadman, I want to talk about top tree climbing mistakes. This is one of the questions I am constantly asked in my Instagram DMs, and I don't mind getting asked the question over and over, but it feels like I've covered some of this before, but I just wanted to kind of package it, totally in this Roadman Bites podcast. There's some lads out there, and you just need to, you know, a cursory glance at them, you'll see they were born to climb. Looking back through all the footy trees we all know these riders, they just look effortless on the bike and especially when the road goes uphill. We're taking the pirate Marco Pantani, friend of the show, Tyler Hamilton and modern era Egan Bernal, they just look like they're out one with the bike on those higher slopes and in the altitude. But this isn't the reality for most club riders, most club riders absolutely hate climbing and they get anxious at even the thought of a group ride or a solo ride which has to take in some hilly terrain. So today I wanted to give you three very tangible tips for starting to climb a little bit better on the common mistakes that I see and these are especially going to be impactful for you if you're planning foreign sportifs or if you're living in a super hilly area. Thankfully, for me as an 80 kilo rider in Ireland, the climbs are fairly short. You know, we can climb for 20 to 24 minutes, but we don't have those big alpine or Pyrenean passes.
Starting too fast and fueling
So, first mistake I see is starting too fast on a climb. And the shining example I think of when I think of somebody starting too fast, and it was early in my cycling days, probably 2010, it's over 12 years ago, on the edge of myself there. I went way too late. Those are Alps with a group of friends. We used to have this summer training camp where we'd go away and live like complete booms and we'd ride our bikes all day. But one of my friends who's actually a surgeon now, but he was super keen on up to Wes. And if I still if I think about this mistake, I can still visualize him. He hit the bottom slopes of up to Wes, which is a 13 kilometer climb, almost full gas at a pace he could sustain for, I would say maximum five minutes and he absolutely blew his lite apart. He came apart so badly. But it's a mistake we see over and over. If you don't ride without a power meter, this happens an awful, awful lot, especially if you don't have experience. When the slope starts going uphill, when the road starts going uphill, you somehow add on an extra hundred watts. But this isn't sustainable. If there's a climb, I always suggest to people segment it into your head, break it into four quarters and aim to negative split each quarter. Negative split all the way up and over the top you can ride hard in that last quarter. But don't forget, unless it's a hill climb, you're still going to have to ride down the far side, you're going to have to ride in the valley so you don't want to be going full gas even over the top of these climbs. The second one I see people making such a mistake on all the time is fueling. Yes, we need to be eating roughly 60 to 80 grams of carbohydrates per hour. But if you look at your day as training, if you look at your event, say it's a New York, a tree one too, and even distribution of that fueling across, you know, every 15 minutes doesn't work because you're going to get caught on a long climb at some point. And you're not going to be able to get a bar down your gullet. So you need to eat based on the terrain and actually seeing one of our clients at the weekend. And it was just a reminder to me, because I'd actually forgotten about this But he came out on his first group ride and he's only started with structure training a few months. It made great progress but came out on the group ride at the weekend and it's his first time in that group setting and it just hit home to me the importance of eating when the pace is down because when the pace is on or when you're going uphill you don't always get a chance. Now you can have softer foods like you can have jails or you can have liquid calories when you're going uphill. It's not as much of a problem. even getting the jail, coordinate and getting the jail out of your back pocket in a race, going uphill. It's not that easy. So you want to be eating in the valleys, you want to be eating on the gentler slopes and just making your peace with it's going to be quite difficult to eat anything solid once the road kicks up. So fueling based on your terrain and a bit of advanced planning really helps on that and knowing the windows and how long they're going to be where you're not going to be able to fuel.
Posture and smooth pedaling
So fueling in advance of those. The last one, it's posture. This may sound like a stupid one, but energy conservation is such an important part of climbing. If you look at the pros, they're effortless. The only thing that moves up and down like pistons is their legs pumping up down, up down, up down. But if you look at amateurs, they're all over the bike. They're like someone who are pedaling with their shoulders, they're pedaling with their arms, they're elbows, they're wrists, their knees, everything. It's not the piston up and down. All this movement, arms, shoulders, back, hips, this all needs to be powered. This all needs calorie expenditure to power this and it's not moving us forward. It's making us less aerodynamic but more than that it's an energy expenditure which isn't propelling us forward. It's not going through the pedals. So even as you fatigue, use your gears to go down a gear or two so you're not fighting the bike. So you're not in a mixed martial arts fight with with the boy trying to wrestle it into submission. Up the climb. Focus on staying smooth. Think of those great riders. Think of Aigem Bernal climbing. Think of Polgacha climbing. Think of Roglish climbing. Smooth, smooth, smooth. Perfect circles. Pushing down on the pedals. And then as almost as if you're scraping shit off the sole of your shoe, pulling up round concentric circles all the way around. Folks, there are tree tips that if you're struggling with climbing, they're really gonna help. Don't forget we're back again tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed that episode yesterday with John Lally. I absolutely loved that. It was amazing getting the chat with a fellow DUB, a fellow podcast host, and he just has some brilliant concepts on health, happiness and longevity. And although the episode, I think it ran for almost a narrow, it was one of my favorite chats on the podcast in a long, long time. As I said, a podcast is going up a notch, something which I haven't called for before, I'm gonna increasingly call for it gone forward because I believe and I've been reliably and told that it makes such a difference. If you're listening to the podcast on Apple, even if you're not listening to Apple, if you can go across the Apple and if you can rate the podcast, if you can review the podcast and if you can subscribe to the podcast over there, I would be much indebted to you. Roadman, thank you very much and I will chat to you again tomorrow. Well men, before you rush off, I want to mention something completely new. We recently just formed the new Roadman Cycling Club. So there's two elements to this club. One, it's a virtual club. You can join it anywhere in the world. And two, it's an in-person club based in Ireland. So if you're a racing cyclist in Ireland, then you're looking for a team to race in the colours of next season. If you're looking to hang out with some amazing people and do group rides on the weekend, go and check it out. roomancycling.com forward slash roadmancc the link is in the show notes hope you can join us as part of the new roadman cycling club