It’s been a poor couple of weeks. After getting back from Italy it has been one thing after another. I was essentially sidelined for much of March due to weather and planning a large charity ride. With the charity ride out of the way and the weather cooperating, this week was spent trying to regain some of my lost form. I had the most volume of any week in awhile, and hopefully I’ll get a bump from that in the coming weeks or at least rebuild my foundation. My CTL has fallen from 107 in January to 78 last Sunday. Thus, my form is in the tank, PC riding or not.
Monday – I took the day off from work to put a long 3+ hour ride in on the regular cranks. Just a warm-up ride trying to get my sea legs back.
Tuesday – Easy ride on regular cranks.
Wednesday – A fun ride, which meant a mix of tempo up to anaerobic. Still no PC riding – this ride was intended to rebuild race fitness by simulating out of the saddle surges and such.
Thursday – Today was a PC ride. 2 hours of PC riding and the PC layoff caused some fatigue for sure. The first 90 minutes was a snap, but then the hip flexors were a little tired. The good news is there was no ankle pain, so I plan to add some more PC time during my training weeks.
Friday – No riding due to travel to Austin. I brought the race bike with the regular cranks as the goal was to attack the hills hard with plenty of out of the saddle efforts. I would have been racing at Fayetteville this weekend but my race fitness is so bad right now it would have been an embarrassment.
Saturday – Felt great (relatively compared to previous weeks). I didn’t set any average power or normalized power records or year bests, but I was within a few percent of those values. The 3+ hour ride hurt like heck.
Sunday – My legs were beat from Saturday so the way out I took it easy. I had a nice tailwind and I let it push me along. The first 90 minutes I only averaged a bit over 160 watts while averaging over 20 mph with some nice hills in there. Coming back I was hitting the full force of those 15-20 mph headwinds with higher gusts. The return trip was 30+ minutes slower but with powers 30 percent plus higher. Got some good tempo time in there and burned some fat off. Goal met for the day.
A good TSS building week. I accumulated 910 points for the week and pushed my CTL up 8 points. I need a few more of these weeks and I’ll be back to my previous form I expect. While only being on the PCs for 2 hours, it was a pain free 2 hours (except for the hip flexors). I hope to log more time on them this week, particularly on my endurance rides.
It has been awhile since I’ve reported my power data. The curves below clearly show how lousy my March has been. January and February were both great months, but March has been at least 5-10% below in performance for average power. My normalized powers have only exceeded August and September, when I was mostly riding PCs and had some lousy fitness.
PC time this week - 2 hours, 0 minutes
PC time to date - 193 hours, 0 minutes
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