The Last Two Weeks

It's been 2 weeks since I checked in. Reason is two-fold. The first is that I was in Turin, Italy for work. It's always great heading to Italy and filling up on the best pizza, pasta, espresso, and gelato the world has to offer. I made sure to get my work done but also to enjoy life. My wife came along, and it was her first time to Italy. She loves Japan and bugs me about my next trip there (she's been 7 times, you'd think she'd tire of it but she loves it that much). Italy just made her list now as well.

Anyway, I got back Friday Feb 20 late in the day. Because of that nagging ankle/foot pain I was having, I decided to wait on getting back to PCs. Saturday most of my team was racing in the Austin area. Since I had come off a trans-Atlantic flight not 16 hours earlier, I skipped the weekend of racing. Instead I went long on the race bike and found I was a lot fresher than expected. Throughout the week I focused on just gaining some race fitness back. My upper end and snap have declined due to the extensive PC use so I did plenty of simulated race pace riding - accelerating hard out of the saddle coming out of turns, sprinting, etc. Things that just can't be done well with PCs. The Saturday ride had a slightly reduced crowd due to a couple of folks being out. But for myself the ride was great. Lots of attacking and hard pulling. I feel I'm getting in solid race shape. Most of all I had a lot of fun in training this week. It wasn't a chore. Hopefully next weekend I'll be racing Tunis-Roubaix and making a difference in the race.

I also hope to get back on the PCs this week. I may still get out today for a short hour on them, but the weather is cool and windy (well, not that cool at 59 F). I'm getting REALLY tired of these 20-25 mph winds the last few months. I'm ready for the usual 10-15 mph breezes.

I've spent well over half a year with PCs. I received some slack from the PC folks about "hanging up" the PCs while I get over my injury, claiming I was giving them up. Nothing is farther from the truth as I hope to bring them back in the fold this week. I truly need to be sure to not prolong an injury. Further, I was catching heat for not using them "exclusively" meaning every waking hour on the bike. As mentioned in my last entry, an additional reason for tabling PC use for a short time was lack of motivation. What could is a "training tool" if they kill your motivation to train?

That said, it's interesting to see how my power has progressed since August, when I really started heavy into PCs (I was using them off and on in July). The graphs below show my monthly best average and normalized powers for various durations since August, when I started heavy use of PCs. Note that August and September had some low power numbers. This is due to 2 things - getting used to PCs and also not focusing on serious training. Once late October rolled around I was full into tempo and threshold work. The training season was in full swing. At that time my powers were improving across the board. In other words, you could say my power improvements were due to a change in training load. Of course, you could also say the 2 months of PC use caused the increases. Either way, I haven't busted my historical best power numbers (except for the longer 2+ hour durations). What is of particular interest to me is that with the exception of the month of January (came off a lot of volume on the bike and was running my highest TSS) and August/September, everything is clumped together. I've got my own opinions on this and how PCs, regular cranks, and training fit into it, but I'll keep those to myself for now and let others mull it over.