Week of February 2

What can I say? Another boring week. Work got in the way a few days this week which prevented me from doing too much volume.

Monday - rest day

Tuesday - I was having a bit of a mechanical issue with the PC equipped bike so I had to jump switch to the race bike if I was going to get a workout in before sunset. Hopped on for a quick tempo workout. Afterwards at home I fixed up the PC bike to be ready for Wednesday.

Wednesday - 85 minutes on the PCs doing a hybrid VO2/threshold workout. I logged 45+ minutes of time in L4/L5 before calling it a day. NP during that time was 274 W. Still haven't sniffed close to the 282 W effort of a few weeks ago.

Thursday - A quick 65 minutes of tempo work on PCs with tired legs. I wanted to do threshold but my legs protested. On top of that my ankle was in real pain. I'm not sure if it's the PCs or the Time ATAC pedals (or a combination of the two), but my left ankle/foot has been having a pain similar to tendonitis on the top inside of the foot. It starts to get debilitating and limits my power output.

Friday - rest day

Saturday - Group ride day on the race bike with a ton of time spent in L3 and L4. It was windy as heck and I was on the front a ton.

Sunday - Back to the PC today. Despite being tired from yesterday I manged to ride plenty of L3 and L4 time over the 2:35 ride. It was just a consistent effort. Before the ride I flipped my ATAC cleats around after reading how the float could be reduced by putting the left cleat on the right shoe and vice versa. It really helped. Hopefully the amount of pain I've been experiencing will be reduced in the coming weeks.

PC time this week - 5 hours 5 minutes
PC time to date - 186 hours 10 minutes

A little update on the amount of work I've been doing. I continue to be well ahead of pace compared to the last 2 years in terms of TSS points. To date with the PCs I'm at 16842 points. For the 2 previous years I've been at 15373 and 15411 for the same time period. So on average I'm about 50 TSS points higher per week since using PCs compared to the last 2 years. In addition, I've been spending a lot more time in the higher zones compared to the same time period as last year:

Zone 1 (recovery) - 91 hours 15 minutes last year, 69 hours 21 minutes this year
Zone 2 (endurance) - 60:41 versus 77:19
Zone 3 (tempo) - 53:11 versus 60:39
Zone 4 (threshold) - 35:03 versus 39:29
Zone 5 (VO2) - 12:48 versus 16:00
Zone 6 (anaerobic) - 6:33 versus 7:36

The total time last year was 259:31 compared to 270:24 this year. The percentage of time spent in zones 3-6 are pretty similar between the two years, suggesting equivalent training structure, though in reality I have been spending more overall time in levels 5 and 6 this year in an effort to drive up my power. Despite this, however, still no huge jumps in power are evident. Actually the last 3 weeks have seen a slight decline in overall power.