So sue me, I didn't watch the Inaug, I caught up on Drudge.

Today was such an awesome day. This morning, I treated myself to a performance test with Robbie Ventura and Dr. Max Testa. Dave, the Head of Operations over at VQ's Chicago location, told me to act surprised when Dr. Testa walked in. So I did. Dr. Testa is a cute little Italian man who can basically talk your ear off about anything sports-medicine related. I'm really into this stuff, so I could listen to him talk for hours. And I pretty much did. Though I phased out some of the talking during the last few minutes of the LT test (the really hard part).



Anyway, we went through some of my background (race PR's, health history, perceived strengths and weaknesses) and talked a fair amount about the injuries I had going into IM CDA last June. I mentioned that my longest training ride was 70 miles and that my run training was virtually non-existent. Robbie winced at this. We looked at my bike fit and both Robbie and Dr. Testa concurred that it looked pretty good in terms of the fore/aft seat position; not too aggressive and not too boring, either. We tilted my seat down a little to allow me to roll my pelvis forward a bit more, and decided we would bring my handlebars down as my cycling skills improve. Apparently, I have a pretty inconsistent pedalstroke and need to work a lot more on the pull part where I engage my hamstrings and hip flexors. The upside to this is that I have beastly quads. I also need to work on my handling skills since: 1) I am not very good at grabbing waterbottles from volunteers at races; this has almost resulted in disaster on a few occasions. 2) I have trouble on tight turnarounds and usually end up unclipping one foot.



We started the LT test after the bike fit. Robbie pricked my finger with a magical pricking gun every 2 minutes or so (that's what she said), and then put the blood into a reader that measured the lactate volume. Lactate is a byproduct of cell degeneration, so it correlates strongly with fatigue. Lactate Threshold (LT) is measured on a scale with different points - the "breaking point" is the first upswing in the graph curve, and LT is the intensity level of exercise where there is an abrupt and significant increase in blood lactate levels. It's kind of confusing, but this graph I found helped me understand (thanks, Google!):


(FYI, the green dot with the arrow pointing down to '45' is the "breaking point.") I have yet to receive the formal results, but I think I did pretty well. I probably went to about 90% of my max and hit about a 172 HR (started at 54 at rest but nervous). They said something about a 13 lactate volume level, but I don't know what that means. Apparently, LT is a more consistent measure of aerobic capacity than VO2 max, so I'm definitely glad I did this, bruised pointer finger and all.


I won't bore you with the rest of the details on the test, but they did some other functional analysis stuff like flexibility, range of motion and muscular/core strength. Robbie and Dr. Testa also told me that they were going to be pushing me to put in a lot of cycling volume to improve my muscle memory, improve Z2-Z3 efficiency on the bike, and reduce risk of injury (vs. pumping out lots of run volume which is high-impact).


After all that, I felt compelled to go back to the gym, so I did a quick yoga class (I did work today, believe it or not - I just woke up early), grabbed some chow with a friend at an awesome restaurant called Duchamps, and then went to a clinic featuring guess who, Dr. Testa. Yeah. Best day ever.