Monday – If anyone thinks a recovery ride is impossible on Powercranks, they haven’t tried hard enough (or is that easy enough?). 30 minutes of PCing with an average power of 138 watts. 3 minutes were spent from 0-20 watts, so this wasn’t a lot of coasting to bring the average down.
Tuesday – I’ve got vacation to burn so my plan was to go into work late after a morning workout. It was a little overcast and the radar looked good, but luck wasn’t on my side. After a warmup and a short opener, rain came and effectively shorted out my Powertap. Being wet and with no data, I decided to head home with 30 minutes of riding under my belt. Went to work and came home early to complete the workout I intended to do in the morning. The goal was a VO2 workout but my legs and heart just weren’t in it. It turned into a hodge podge of VO2 and anaerobic efforts. It was a real stinker of a workout, though I still got 20+ minutes of VO2 work in. Overall for the day is was 2:25 on the PCs.
Wednesday – Got home late so no ride.
Thursday – Today was one of those great workout days. I got home a little early and hit the road for my own version of “race winning intervals” as found in the Allen/Coggan book. These intervals are taxing and effectively are longer VO2 efforts. 30 seconds at 140%+ of FTP followed by 3-4 minutes at 110-115% (today was 4 minutes), 4-5 minutes at 100% FTP (today was 4.5 minutes), 30 seconds back into VO2, and finally the last 30 seconds as hard as possible (easier said than done). 10 minutes of hell. See the plot below for actual ride data, where the horizontal lines are at 100%, 115%, and 140% of FTP. The first 30 seconds puts you into debt quickly such that the VO2 effort starts early. Then recovery from the VO2 effort at FTP teaches your body to recover at high intensity.
The first interval went great. A little fist pump when I saw I averaged 300 W. After about 9 minutes of recovery it was time for interval #2. Another 300 W effort. I couldn’t believe I was hitting these kinds of numbers while riding the PCs. Perhaps it was the freshly cleaned and lubed chain on the bike giving me a few extra watts. The third interval was progressing in much the same manner. I was pushing hard and felt really fresh. Then a school bus that was up the road stopped to let kids out with about 1 minute to go in my interval. I had to come to a dead stop and lose all momentum. Aargh! Oh well, the good was done. The first 9 minutes were dead on to the previous intervals first 9 minutes. I was well on my way to another 300 W interval. I rode home at tempo to threshold and was pleased as punch about the effort. A fantastic workout of 1:25.
Friday – Easy 60 minutes on the PCs.
Saturday – Usual blitz fest. I was bringing some of workouts I did this week into the group ride. On one section I tried to a variant of the “race winning interval” but my training pals are simply too strong. Hard to outride guys who are all top 10% in the state when it comes to time trailing. So instead I took the “rinse and repeat” method. Hit it hard for a couple of minutes, make them respond, rest for a minute, do it again. Try to break them down through attrition. The crosswind just wasn’t strong enough to make it effective. Nonetheless, I set a new yearly best normalized power for 15 minutes and just 1 watt short of my best ever. A great 301 W effort for the duration.
Sunday – A good tempo workout of 3:50 on the PCs. It was icing on the cake after a good workout and group ride. Normalized power of 210 for the duration.
PC time this week – 9 hours 10 minutes
PC time to date – 137 hours 5 minutes
I continue to run ahead of last year in terms of average TSS for the same training period. For grins, I plotted my training volume of 2 years ago on the same plot. See the plot below which shows I’m overtaking my training of a couple of years ago. If I plot my best weekly 20 minute power, you’ll see I was cranking pretty good 2 years ago but then had a 2 week block of no riding due to work travel and the form went to pot. Fortunately I haven’t had to travel this fall for work, so I’ve been on a consistent upswing.
1 comment:
sounds like a good week! Something is working ...
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