Week of April 13

Some new personal bests this week! Yippeee!!!

Monday - 30 minutes of light indoor riding on the PCs

Tuesday - I wanted to do some quality VO2 work on the race bike, but I came into the workout with a highly negative TSB and my legs just weren't there. So instead I carried a mix of levels and rode for 47 miles just to keep the CTL increasing. I had some decent midrange, but the upper end was just flat.

Wednesday - Outdoor ride with the Powercranks just doing some endurance pace work for 75 minutes. Could have gone longer, but the winds were demotivating.

Thursday - Workout of the year. I was debating what kind of workout to do. Should it be 1) threshold, 2) a hybrid VO2 workout that sees some good training benefits, or 3) what I'm calling "300+" where I ride at 300+ W for as long as I can, take a short rest, and hit it again? I decided to go with door #3. I was expecting to have to throttle down after 10-15 minutes, but my legs kept rolling. It wasn't until minute 36 that I needed a break. Unfortunately after that I was a bit toasted, but I set some new personal bests for average power in the 15-30 minute range and normalized power bests in the 20-40 minute range. Mind you I beat my all-time bests by anywhere from 1-7 W, but those bets came a few years ago. After this portion of the workout I wasn't done. I decided to fill in some time with "surge tempo" where I ride at tempo and throw in some half-hearted out-of-the-saddle sprints out of every turn. The workout is shown in the graph below. The horizontal line is 300 W, and my current threshold is ~275 W. All indicators are saying I need to bump that up to 285-290 W (not just this data, but other ride data as well). The dips in the first part of the ride are due to corners on a local 6+ mile loop.


Friday - no riding due to some significant rain in the area. In fact, the rain was so bad that it forced the cancellation of the first day of the MS150 ride from Houston to Austin, the first time that has ever happened.

Saturday - The same weather system from Friday was still in the area Saturday. Pal Alex and I found an open window of no rain early in the morning for some riding. Just rode it hard to get some training load in. It was, however, a rain (lightening actually) shortened 1:45 ride.

Sunday - 4 hour 15 minute endurance ride on the race bike. With the training load I accumulated on the ride, I'm now up to a CTL of 100 and feeling strong again. Good thing as there are some races coming up soon.

I'm extremely happy about the new PBs. The question is why did I set those? I see 4 possibilities (or a combination of these):

1) PCs - nearly 200 hours of use in the last 9 months, using them more and more again after some injury issues in Feb/Mar. PC use has certainly declined compared to the first 6 months but I notice my pedaling style has more variety. I can pull up (hammies and hip flexors?) from 6 to 12 o'clock for significant periods at threshold to give the quads a rest.
2) increased training load and the fitness that comes with that - I'm slowly building my CTL back up over 100. I am running a negative TSB right now, but the higher CTL allows you do dig a little deeper.
3) caffeine - had some of my homemade candy bar of dark chocolate (85% cocoa) and whole coffee beans before the ride - probably about 100-200 mg of caffeine in a little piece. Not so sure about caffeine being the real factor as I've have indicators of improvement for a few weeks now.
4) the type of training I've been doing lately - very long VO2 intervals (sorry, only me and my team know the protocol)

Below you'll see my latest power-duration charts. The red line is the line corresponding to the time since starting with PCs. In both charts (average and normalized powers) note the bump ups in the 15-40 minutes ranges.


Clearly I'm well ahead of last year but still haven't significantly increased my all-time power numbers. I just need to hold the form through the summer so I can have a much better 40k this year than last. It would be nice to hit a low 56 minute 40k or dip into the 55s.

PC time this week - 1 hour 45 minutes
PC time to date - 198 hours 35 minutes