Heart Zones Cycling: The Avid Cyclist's Guide to Riding Faster and Farther
Active Cities USA Review Heart Zones Cycling: The Avid Cyclist s Guide to Riding Faster and Farther Cycling has steadily gained popularity both in the United States and around the world. Lance Armstrong is a household name and on a beautiful summer day you will often find as many bikes on back roads as cars. From the casual weekend warrior to highly competitive racers, athletes have made cycling a huge sport, apparently with a reputation for a convoluted training regimen and enough scientific data to require a PhD to unravel it all. Heart Zones Cycling aims to combat this. Sally Edwards and Sally Reed are singularly qualified to write this book. They are the foremost authorities on heart rate monitors and combine decades of experience as athletes and sports industry participants. Edwards is the national spokesperson for the Danskin Women s Triathlon Series and founder and CEO of Heart Zones. She is also an author and professional athlete. Reed is the athletic director at a Bellevue, Washington, health club, the founder and master trainer of Heart Zones as well as a Level 2 cycling coach. These women break down the rather complicated and difficult science of cycling training into a manageable and comprehensive book. Heart Zones Cycling takes the methodology behind the training program and puts it in layman s terms, empowering the reader to understand what he or she is doing and to tweak it to fit his or her individual needs. The book is incredibly detailed while still managing to be practical and understandable, and covers everything from the basics to highly intricate levels of training. The first two-thirds of the book cover in detail the basis of the training regimen, including: how to set your goals by what kind of rider you are; determining your anchor heart rate as the base of all the training you will do; how to set your heart zones and how to ride within those zones; varying your training to build endurance, speed, and power; and how to personalize your program and design your training plan to fit your individual goals and fitness level. The final third of the book includes a variety of appendices that delve deeper into what has been presented. There is a glossary with every term you ll need to know to understand cycling and your training. Appendix A has a list of over 30 different rides that can be customized to individuals based on their needs and what they ve learned. Appendix B is a thorough list of Heart Zones resources with charts and graphs, and Appendix C goes into more detail on heart rates. This book is no-nonsense and at first a little intimidating, but once you dive in you discover that it really is highly readable and you don t need to be a scientist to understand and apply the principles that are presented. Reed and Edwards do a wonderful job of taking a subject that could be incredibly dry and sleep-inducing (not to mention next to impossible to understand) and making it practical, usable, and even inspiring. For anyone who is looking to up their cycling game, this is the book for you! --Active Cities USA Review