Week of September 22

Wow, what a good week. Riding with Powercranks gets old after awhile. I think it’s the inability to stand up, sprint, and give the butt a rest. It’s just mash, mash, mash. Ad infinitum. So this week I mixed things up – a lot. Monday I just sat on my butt all day. Actually I did some painting in the house (room renovation). The fun started Tuesday. I was all rested up, so I went out for a longer L3 effort on the Powercranks. The rest was rewarded handsomely. Tuesday’s 1:45 long ride was great. 75 minutes of tempo effort. Normalized power for the whole 1:45 was 215 W, which points to a normalized and average power of 230 W/218 W for the tempo portion. Those represent my best numbers yet on the PCs for that duration. I rewarded myself with another rest day on Wednesday, though I did go out for a 5+ mile run.

Thursday I had hopes of extending my tempo riding another 15 minutes. Unfortunately my body didn’t want to. 2 hours of riding total, but I just didn’t have the gas to ride significant amounts of tempo. I did manage 75 minutes at 217 W normalized and 205 W average. Down from Tuesday, but given the running the day before and warmer temperatures, not wholly unexpected. Friday I had no desire to ride.

Saturday most of the gang was out, so there were only 4 of us to really go hard. This was both good and bad. The bad was the group was smaller so it was less of a race simulation. The good was that the group was smaller, so the conditions were ideal for some testing. I rode the Specialized with the regular cranks and we hit a 4.5 loop with a nice overpass. In the flats, we were getting 2 “hills” per lap. After the second pass of the overpass, one of the guys was off the back. I dropped back to pull him back to the other 2. Didn’t work. We held pace with me on the front 100% of the time, but just couldn’t make a dent in the gap. Nonetheless, if gave me 30+ minutes of threshold riding. The numbers I saw were great. My 15-30 minute normalized power was flatlined at 268-269 W. Given I haven’t spent any dedicated time in L4 (and not much L3 either) since early August, this was fairly good news. Looking back at my historical power for Septembers from 2004 to present, my bests have been 275, 290, 283, and 254 W (Sept 2005 was spent in Japan so there’s no data). The average of those is 275 W. But we need to dig deeper. Typically I carry threshold fitness into late August. In 2008, my August 20 minute best was only 266 W. That’s the lowest since the 2004 season when I started tracking power. So while the numbers are positive, I still haven’t seen any eye-popping improvements because of training with PCs.

Sunday was another small group, and usually we take it easy. I also usually ride the PCs. Not today. We hit it hard again and I was on the race bike. When on the front I pushed into my VO2 zone. That resulted in a peak 20 minute normalized power of 266 W, confirmation of Saturday’s data.

PC time this week – 3 hours 45 minutes
PC time to date – 57 hours 5 minutes