If you just try to go with the flow (which is one of the things I have to constantly work on) events seem to lead you to where you need to be.

If you want to cheer for someone that wins stages at major professional cycling events on sheer guts and determination, Jens is your man. He is not afraid to launch and attack by himself at 10k in a 150K race hence his nickname the German Diesel. The peleton know if he breaks out they will have to chase and chase hard to catch him. The photo at the left is of the Tour de France individual time trial (ITT). You can see that in the preceding days Jens had crashed.

In a recent interview with VS tv Jens was ask about the ITT. This was his response as close as I could get it:

Well it caught up to me. This week my workout have been sporadic at best. I typically am an early riser on the weekends so I can get in a run or a bike ride before everyone is up. Not this weekend, I wasn’t up until seven yesterday and seven thirty today. Next week will be I will try and get back on a regular schedule and post how I do.

Robb Wolf had this to say about sleep:

“Help me with a little thought experiment. In this thought experiment we rank the importance of various things by how quickly we will die without them. Based on this we might make some interesting observations.

Here is how I order things:

1-Air. Death in a few minutes without it.
2-Water. Typically a few days is the outside for overt dehydration. Increased exertion and temperature can cut this to a few hours.
3-Most would put food here, but I think that is misplaced. Even lean people have about a month’s worth of fat and protein on their bod’s. Want to kill someone in about a week-10 days? Keep them awake. In 3rd position, before food, I’d put sleep.
4-Food.

This is a pretty general list, someone like Greg Everett might structure it as such:
1-Pizza
2-Family guy
3-News Radio

You get the idea…what’s going to kill you if you go too long without it.

Back to my first list, the lack of air thing is pretty obvious. Plastic bag over the head and you are done for. This is a severe , acute exposure that our systems have no ability to adapt to. What about chronic lower level hypoxia? We have slick mechanisms for reading CO2 and O2 levels in the blood and a lack of O2 saturation stimulates the upregulation of erythropoeitin (EPO). We make more red blood cells and, up to a point, we can adapt to hypoxic situations. Another interesting mechanism for adapting to an oxygen scarce environment is…anaerobic exercise. That is a whole other blog topic, but it really makes sense when you think about it. Want to work efficiently without oxygen? Train without it.

The next thing on the list was water. Severe water restriction can kill us but we do have mechanisms which allow us to adapt to lower water intakes. This can change our relative water needs dramatically by tweaking aldosterone and antidiuretic hormone (ADH).

Skipping down to food, we have quite a capacity to survive without food. If you have ever read Good Calories, Bad Calories, you are familiar with the adaptations inherent to starvation and how wickedly efficient our bodies can become when facing a starvation situation.

Now sleep. We see NO favorable adaption to sleep deprivation. Some people tolerate it better than others…interestingly, the folks who can “get by” on less sleep die younger…so there is no free lunch here. You do not build a callous, you do not up-regulate this or that enzyme system…you get fracking sick and have a boat load of problems. What I take from this is we are REALLY wired to get a restful nights sleep all the damn time. You can get by, but at very high cost.”

Most posts will be concerning fitness, diet, and life as a wannabe cycling contender with a family and full- time job.