Week of November 17

Monday – Since last Saturday’s ride totally floored me, Sunday was a recovery day. Combined with potential long days at work on Tuesday and Thursday, Monday was going to be an all-out hard workout. No usual recovery day today. And what a workout it was. I did a threshold workout on the PCs and had my best performance of the year. I would go so far as to say it was my best ever 2x20 session as I nailed both 20 minute intervals with yearly best powers. The power data is shown below in graphical form. Looks like I had plenty left in the tank at the end of the first interval so could have probably pushed a little harder at the start for a more even distribution. On the second interval I started out a little harder and didn’t have quite as much left at the end. Both intervals achieved identical powers of 285 watts normalized/average. An awesome day of 90 minutes of PC time.

Tuesday – Got out of work earlier than I thought so I rushed home and got in 55 minutes of L2 riding on the PCs.

Wednesday – Goal for today was 90 minutes of over-under time. I was at a local park loop and decided that each lap I’d do 290-300 W followed by a lap in the 230-250 W range. Unfortunately I had nothing in the tank. Legs felt dead and my motivation wasn’t there. Ended up with 1:55 of riding on the PCs. Despite the poor performance, I still had a decent L3 block of 82 minutes at an intensity factor of 0.85. A good “sweet spot tempo” session.

Thursday and Friday – Got out of work late and didn’t ride.

Saturday – Usual Saturday hammerfest. Felt strong in the first half and did a ton of pulling. Was getting fatigued on the way back and drifted off the back to go my own pace near the end. The ride was hard, but the TSS wasn’t as high as last week (though close at 244 for the 3 hour ride).

Sunday – Got in 90 minutes of PC time and 2:30 total. Had a flat tire so I came home and switched bikes rather than really fix the PC equipped bike. A solid tempo session.

PC time this week – 5 hours 50 minutes
PC time to date – 110 hours 50 minutes

Weekly status of power progression – No real change from last week except for the new yearly best in 20 minute power so no summary. I’ve got a run of 3 weeks with 20 minute intervals of 280 W or more. Me likes. Looking back at my logs, the last time I had a 20 minute power of 285 W was June 2007. I remember those 2 weeks well; I was west of Paris for work and I was in the midst of VO2 work. I was taking advantage of the late summer sunsets to put in a couple of hours after work.

Some may say this form is due to a significant increase in training load. While I am certainly
ahead of on the TSS curve, as shown by the graph below, the difference isn’t significant.. After 16 weeks, less than 500 TSS points separate 16 weeks of PC use compared to the same time period last year. The second plot shows my cumulative average weekly TSS. The second plot shows my overall training load isn’t too high. When I took a look at it my first response was that I need to up the training.