New England Cycling Coalition for Diversity Upcoming Ride
This ride is hosted by the New England cycling Coalition. The ride will be held on June 10, 2023. The Rain date is June 11, 2023. All members are encouraged to attend this free ride.

A Massachusetts Bicycle Club
Updates about the biking community, news items, and events of interest.
New England Cycling Coalition for Diversity Upcoming Ride
This ride is hosted by the New England cycling Coalition. The ride will be held on June 10, 2023. The Rain date is June 11, 2023. All members are encouraged to attend this free ride.
SSB runs different rides with the touring group and more structured rides from casual riding along the road to 8,000-mile-per-year riders that crave paceline riding.
We will start having scheduled rides. The schedule has changed for the summer due to COVID compliance.
Saturdays starting 6/13/2020
Hanover 8 AM – 37/39 mile
Hanover 7 AM – 48 mile faster group
Every Sunday – Marshfield 32
Every other Sunday starting on 6/28/2020
Halifax 7 AM – 50 mile
Liz
The weekly rides will return in 2020. At the membership meeting on 1/4/2020, we planned the following rides. The start date for the Marshfield ride has not been set, yet.
The Blue Hills ride will be focused more on hill workouts. The first ride will be on 4-15-2020. The meeting spot will be the free public parking lot at Houghton’s Pond on Hillside street in Milton. Workouts will include the option of the classic loop, repeats on the access road, and repeats on Chickatabot road in Quincy.
The Hanover ride will start from Route 53 by the BikeWay. The first rides will be on 4-18-2020. The first group will leave at 7AM. The Women’s group and the moderate pace group will roll at 8 AM. The front group will use the 50 mile route starting on 6-2-2020. The standard 37 mile route will on 4-18-2020.
The Halifax ride will start from Route 58 and Route 106 in Halifax. Park at the Cumberland Farms. The first ride will be on 4-19-2020. We will run this ride every other Sunday. The standard route to Marion will be used.
The Thursday Time Trials will start on 5-14-20 from Halifax. A route map is being made by Mr. Chris Corbin. Mr. Corbin will be the time trial manager.
Suggestions for alternative ride starts should be sent to Mrs. Liz Malone-O’Hara or Mrs. Wendy Torkelson. The alternative rides will allow members to showcase different routes or for the club to participate in rides with other clubs.
Many ask about using the polarized method of training. This methodology is recommended by Dr. Seiler. Most of the fitness podcasts and magazines analyze his system. The benefits of this system are as follows.
In these discussions, training volume or experience is not mentioned. With the case of the athletes that benefited from the polarized system, they were on the bike for 30 hours during the week. They also made sure to limit inflammation. They also completed yoga, stretching, and weight work in the gym. Can you afford all of this time?
In order to be a well rounded person, you should focus on improving all functional strengths. You want to be able to walk up the stairs briskly. You don’t want to complete a training workout on the bicycle and be unable to use any stairs for 5 days. You need to assess your goals and your personal time constrains. Don’t compare yourself to others. Do you really know how someone trains when you only see them on the bike for 1.5 hours each week?
Using a Polarized system is likely to reduce the amount of training injuries. The required amounts of high intensity and frequency of such are amounts are less than the requirements of a more traditional plan. You build the engine by riding many hours. Those hours often have less intensity. The muscle fibers don’t like the long hard hours at high intensity. Your heart will not have to run at 165 bpm indefinitely.
In a sweet spot typical plan provided by many of the coaches, you ride near your maximum sustainable heart rate for an hour or two. You come home tired. The next day, you might elect to skip training. Remember, you want to be able to walk up those stairs? So, you decide not to ride on the following day. You need time to recover. In the sweet spot plan, you accumulate TSS rapidly. You are earning those points.
In the polarized plan, you might find yourself holding out through the day’s workout and saying that you can repeat this, again, tomorrow. This is good. In the polarized method, you would repeat the same intensity, often. You might be able to actually ride more days in the week, consecutively. In the sweet spot training plan, you might need to take a lot of days to recover.
The polarized method might help to improve lactate clearance more than a more traditional approach for the typical American amateur athletes. The author of the cycling bible, Mr. Joel Friel, wrote a piece about polarized training. He referenced a study. You have to realize that the study was about elite champion athletes. Those athletes already have improved lactate clearance. Their Vo2Max numbers are in the 50s.
Is your typical new cyclist starting at a Vo2Max of 30? Mr. Friel dismisses the polarized method, which is contrary to his years of publications. His method pushes many complicated interval plans. Does your body really distinguish between all of these intervals?
Some of those intervals are really designed to make you think that the coach is spending a lot of time working on your plan, when they are not. They simply pull the workouts from a library. The library automatically updates the numbers within the workout based on your 20 minute endurance. Can you really rely on this method?
Go polarized. For your high intensity sessions just use the following intervals