Sunday, August 31, 2008

Week of August 25

A surprise trip to Austin kind of messed up the training week, but I salvaged things OK. Monday was an easy day with less than an hour on the PCs just joyriding. Tuesday was a hard day, where my intent was to do about 90 minutes of tempo riding. I was doing pretty good early on, but the warmer temperatures and higher humidity were taking their toll on me. Nonetheless, for the first hour I managed 224 W normalized, 2 hours total on the PCs today. Wednesday was a travel day to Austin and no riding.

Thursday morning in Austin was my first time with the PCs on hills. I did a quick 35 miles up and down Parmer on my 24-25 lb PC equipped bike. I don’t know if it was the heavy bike or the Powercranks (and the inability to stand up to climb a hill), but the ride did wear me out. The good news is that it was my best PC ride yet. For an 87 minute stretch I logged 209 watts average but 235 W normalized for an IF of a tad over 0.853 (estimating my regular crank hour power at 275 W). I was rather pleased with the ride.

Friday was a very easy 40 minute recovery ride in preparation for the Saturday group ride. While most of my team was down south to hit the “hills” (bridges, and since I hit real hills earlier in the week, why drive down for some of the manmade stuff?), I took advantage of slightly slower speeds to ride locally with the PCs. The good news is I exceeded my longest PC ride by a few miles. Next week I hope for at least a metric century on them. The bad news was I wasn’t the freshest. A couple of hours in my body wanted no more. My heart was racing pretty good. I was taking pulls on the front at TT power, yet my heart rate was approaching 170 beats per minute. I never see that on my regular crank bike. The tempo efforts felt like threshold, and threshold like high VO2 efforts. I was pretty tired.

Sunday I decided to ride the road bike with the regular cranks to give my legs a break. With a long Monday ride on the PCs planned, I wanted to be sure to have a quality PC workout. A day on regular cranks, I hope, will give the legs the needed rest. When I first clipped in and started pedaling, as I would stop pedaling my legs just wanted to keep going. The sensation was the same as after a night of racing at the track on the fixed gear. Going to regular cranks just feels weird. I was hoping to bust off a 20 minute interval to see if riding the PCs has helped yet, but my legs were simply too tired. I hope to do that later next week.

One thing I have noticed over the past couple of weeks is that while my PC-specific power is going up, in general I feel my fitness is decreasing some. I think some of this can be traced back to a total decrease in training stress. The transition to PCs hasn’t been immediate, and as such I’ve had to ramp up in volume and intensity. My TSS scores the last 4 weeks have been 582. 675, 335 (weather issues, so I turned it in to a rest week), and 602. Ideally I’d be in the 750-850 range.

PC time this week - 8 hours 35 minutes
PC time to date – 34 hours 55 minutes

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