Tuesday – After the trip to Japan, I need to get some TSS points in me and build up the CTL. What better way to accomplish that than with some sweet spot tempo riding. In this case, I upped it a bit with a “surge tempo” workout on the Powercranks. The protocol is simply to ride in L3 with occasional trips into L6, recovering back in L3. Basically I was doing continuous over-unders with 20s in L6 and and 160s at 85-90% of FTP. I did this a couple of weeks ago and managed 51 minutes of it. This time I was able to extend the pain game some – 81 minutes of this, plus another 13-14 minutes of straight L3 riding. See the figure below. At times the recovery in upper L3 wasn’t going as well, but I did try to minimize any rest. Overall the 95 minute block was at 226 W average and 241 W normalized. The 2 hours of Powercrank riding was a cool IF=0.84. A good ride.
Wednesday – Easy day of 45 minutes on the PCs
Thursday – Keep building that CTL. 2:15 long ride on the PCs with a 2 hour block of sweet spot tempo riding. Rather than the surge workout of Tuesday, today was a relatively isopower affair. The 2 hour block yielded an AP of 228 W and NP of 239 W for a 0.87 intensity factor. Overall the ride gave me a solid 161 TSS points, so I’m well on my way to rebuilding my CTL. Felt fine on the PCs the whole time.
Friday – Easy hour on the PCs before Saturday’s group ride with regular cranks.
Saturday – Return to regular cranks on the weekly hammerfest. Plan for today was to take 4 minute pulls in my VO2 range for the first half of the ride and ride upper tempo and threshold for the second half. Worked well as I got over 24 minutes of VO2 time in the first hour+. Didn’t really set any PBs this ride, but I did manage a 5 minute power just 4 W under my yearly best. Not bad considering I’ve only been incorporating VO2 work on the group ride rather than in a structured interval session. I didn’t push quite as hard on this week’s ride as I did 2 weeks ago (just a few TSS points lower this time), but it was still a great workout. 236 TSS points in just over 3 hours 12 minutes of riding.
Sunday – I was debating what to do today. I have to take my better half to the airport Monday afternoon, so a good ride Monday is probably out of the question. I’m also wanting to shift my key workouts to Monday and Wednesday so I can get an extra day of rest before the Sunday slugfest. What to do? Screw it; I’m riding hard. Showed up with the Powercranks and hit it pretty hard. 3 hours at IF=0.79 with a VI of 1.16. A nice mix of tempo, threshold, VO2, and anaerobic. Legs felt great on the PCs despite the hard ride on Saturday. I racked up 185 TSS points on the PC ride.
PC time this week – 9 hours
PC time to date – 87 hours, 35 minutes
I’m trying to see if PCs really are making a difference or not. It’s always hard to isolate how a stimulus elicits a response, and I won’t claim that I indeed can isolate it. Nonetheless, I’ll start tracking my power during this time of PC use and compare it to the same time period as 2007. Each week the graph will change as I’m comparing like periods together. For example, this week I’m looking at how my power looks in September and October of 2007 versus 2008. In both time periods I was doing similar types of riding (lots of tempo). I’d say I’m being a little more aggressive on the group rides this year, but the weekday riding is similar. Right off the bat I’ll state that for the 9 weeks covering September and October, my TSS points for 2007 were 4453, whereas my 2008 numbers are 5273 (3529 of which are with PCs). So I’m inducing more stress this year.
The graph below shows my power (average or normalized, depending on the duration) since using PCs, Sept-Oct 2007, the 1 year prior to PC use, and my all-time bests in the last 5 years. What stands out are 2 things: 1) across the board my power is up for Sept-Oct 2008 compared to 2007 and 2) my power is up in general compared to the entire period from Sept 2007 to August 2008 for 2 hours or more. The first item could certainly be explained by the additional training stress (the aforementioned TSS numbers, which shows a nearly 20% increase). The second item, my improved long-term power, is somewhat notable. The spread is at most 10 W (a bit less than 4% of my FTP), but it does represent some of my personal bests. For durations from 30-90 minutes, I just haven’t pushed myself yet since using the PCs. The group rides unfortunately don’t allow me the chance to push the 60-90 minute range (darn mid-ride stop). Now that I’m entering the threshold phase of my base training, perhaps I’ll see something even with the PCs.
A few things are certain – 1) I haven’t lost any fitness since using PCs and 2) you can ride on PCs (e.g., same workouts) the same way as regular cranks. However, I’m still looking for that jump in FTP.
No comments:
Post a Comment