ride joe ride

So the absolute highlight of my training week was the miraculous Saturday we had here in chi-town. Our endless streak of snowy, crappy, cold days was momentarily interrupted with an only marginally crappy day — i.e. no snow, and no cold. In fact, it was pouring rain andt 55F when I set out for an hour tempo ride in the late afternoon. It was late afternoon rather than early morning, which is more my style, as I’d spent the earlier part of the day changing out the drivetrain on my road bike. So at 3 in the afternoon, I found myself on the aft-end of December with a powertap equipped, newly rebuilt, road bike and an outside temp of 55F riding up the lake front in shorts (okay with some embrocation too, but that just made it better). In Chicago. Sheer. Freakin. Heaven.

I confirmed that power comes much much easier outside. I was cruising a good bit around my tested indoor  FT and it certainly felt much less taxing than it does on the trainer.

So, here’s the week’s log. And, here’s my current PMC. I’m trying not to obsess about the PMC functionality that WKO+ offers, but it’s so freakin cool. More on it later.

Next week promises copious New Year’s celebrating, so I’ve tried to shuffle the schedule around to account for that. I could potentially be replacing some training with some liquid carb loading as well — we’ll see.

First off, fellow indoor trainers, do yourself and your workouts a gigantic favor:

Head over here, make yourself an account and download some awesome, full-length euro cross videos. This guy hosting these is seriously a saint. Once you have a way to play those rigged up (I convert them to mp4s and burn groups of them to a DVD to be played in my geeked out trainer entertainment system), find some hardstyle. By far the easiest way to do this is fire up hard.fm in your favorite internet radio application. So, sound off on the cross video, music cranked and you have a SERIOUS source of motivation. This doesn’t work very well for LV2 workouts (it’s pretty much impossible to go slow with the Sensation Black compilation blaring combined with Sven Nys kicking some ass), but that’s what netflix instawatch is good for, right?

This week:

Powertap! I’m now keeping all my workout data and output from the powertap logged in WKO+. So, below is a weekly summary from WKO+ and the graphs of my rides (starting mid-week when the PT arrived). From here out this is how I’ll record my weekly progress. More analysis of how my numbers are going after I get a couple of weeks of data logged.

• Weekly Summary
• Thursday
• Saturday
• Sunday

Next week:

Next week begins the first week of my pre-season plan (which is linked over there in the sidebar). Except cases in which I need to adjust the plan, I’ll not make any comments on the coming week in the Sunday wrapup.

I’ve been reading all this stuff and now it’s seriously time I shared. Before I get to that, please note that my current training program is now up on Google docs (linked over there to the right), so I’ll refer to that rather than posting a schedule here. Week one is next week. The plan covers the base period bringing me up to about 8 hours a week of aerobic base a week. I’ll be posting a build schedule soon as well.

Oh crap, I almost forgot: I got a powertap! Performance had a really good sale, so I ended up getting it for what a used one would have cost. This morning was my first interval session on it, and checking out the numbers is seriously cool. That said, my training from here out will assume power based metrics, though I don’t think that ought to exclude anyone who might want to try a similar plan using perceived exertion etc.

So here’s a few of the links I’ve been using:

• 1. A good general overview of training cycles etc
• 2. I linked to this in my last post, but it’s worth doing again. This document has an excellent flow chart for a season-long training cycle. I haven’t found one done this well anywhere else.
• 3. A basic description of the Coggan power levels and basics of training with power
• 4. A good collection of general training info (not power based)
• 5. For the back burner, a good thumbnail of mid-season cx training
• 6. Why all the fast/light bike stuff in the world won’t buy you finishing places (also includes a nice graph by Coggan which is great for making me feel like a wimp)

That’ll do it for now. I’ll post more as I find them.

First off, a cross season recap is still in the works. Unhappily, I did discover that my DFL at Montrose was robbed (robbed I say) from me. It turns out that there were two guys behind me. Needless to say, the shock of finding this out was considerable.

As far as training goes, I enjoyed a really nice week of laid back base building time on the trainer this week (see below for details). I am finding that LV2 training allows plenty of attention for paying attention to movie plots etc, so I have been making a serious dent in my backlog of b-movies on Netflix (which is most of what is available on instant play). Thursday the legs felt solid, so I decided to do another FTP estimating time trial. My effort was much more consistent this time (probably because I had a rough number to pace myself by) and I think the resulting estimated FTP is pretty accurate. I kept an even effort over the 20 min and I was pretty spent when I was done.

I’m putting together a complete pre-season power based training plan, which I’ll post here soon. After a whole lot of searching I came across a really great power training primer by Howe and Coggan. It has a good summary of the process of using power to train, but it also has something I haven’t located anywhere else: a really nice flowchart showing an abstract overview of a season’s training cycle. Very good stuff, and something I’ll be relying on as I put together the year’s plan.

Alright, so for next week, I’ll continue to take it easy and focus on LV2 aerobic base building broken up with a little LV4 on Thursday:

M: 30min LV1
T: 45min LV2
W: 30min LV2
T: 20min@ 90% FTP (w/u and c/d)
F: rest
S: 90min LV2
S: 75min LV2

Last Week’s Log

Mon: 30 min LV1 100w/av
Recovering from the race. Legs felt totally shot.

Tues: 45 min LV2 120w/av
Slow to warm up, but felt good after 20 min. Pushed the upper end of LV2 without really meaning to.

Wed: 30 min LV2 130w/av
Felt good. Legs mostly recovered.

Thur: 15min w/u 20min at 100% FT 10min c/d
235w/av for interval. This felt much more like an accurate measurement of FT than last week’s TT. Because I had a baseline number to aim for, I didn’t go out as hard and kept a much more constant effort. I didn’t have a lot left at the end (serious burn) so I’d say that is just about right.

Fri: rest

Sat: 60min LV2 131w/av
Felt good — watched first half of Blade Runner.

Sun: 60min Lv2 130w/av
Tired from staying up too late. Waited until afternoon to ride.

Rather than recount in detail my own sad tale of misery and woe from states yesterday, I’ll sum it up very quickly: I got mega dropped, managed to fall about a dozen times, and came the closest I think I ever have to getting off my bike and throwing it during a race. That, gentle readers, was just the first lap. So in the second lap, as I was out there pedaling, falling, and cursing all by my lonesome, I knew that the time had finally come for me to dig deeper than I ever had. I needed to finally tap into the Bike Snob NYC Cross My Heart Hope to Die Primer. Here’s how I did:

1. Know When And Where The Race Is

Okay I knew where the race was: check. Montrose Harbor. Yeah the place with all the snow and the sledding hill. I’d ridden by the hill countless times on summer rides but had never seen it looking like the Matterhorn. I got to the race an hour early even though I’d decided I would probably wouldn’t do a pre-ride. It was 10F, and I’m always reading about people showing up for races late and getting their rhythm on the first lap. I need to work more on this skill, because it wasn’t working out for for me so well yesterday.

2. Don’t Pre-Ride the Course

Fail. I tried to resist, but just couldn’t handle it. But instead of doing it properly, compromised with a single lap at slow speed which gave me all the cold with none of the picking lines and warming-up stuff. I also crashed hard and knocked the crap out of my knee. So the file tread tires that I thought might work out in snow? Yeah, not so much.

3. Do Not Have a Pit Bike

Check. This one I actually accomplished at home. I looked at the pit wheels on the way out and thought: “if I flat, I’ll bet I’ll be happy as hell.” From a post-race perspective, this was a prescient observation.

4. Get a Bad Starting Position

Kinda-check. Given that our field was whittled down to the fast dudes, there wasn’t really a bad position. I did opt out of the front row, and lined up behind the series leader Chris Lombardo and told him not to slow me down (heh heh heh). I made up for my less than bad start by popping out of the back of the group in near-record time.

5. Constantly Re-evaluate Your Goals

Checkamundo. Now we’re getting to where I excelled. Man I did so much goal reevaluation in this race, it was epic. I rolled into the parking lot with “huh, maybe today is the day for the top 50% finish” in my head and by the last lap I was composing this race report and thinking about what I was going to make for dinner. Along the way there was “catch up to the dude who hasn’t beat me in a month,” “try to stop falling” then “try to stop falling and also go faster than the kid pulling the sled over there” and  “compose race report while the race is still underway” and finally “make some freakin awesome Brussels sprouts for dinner.” At one point, a Beverly Bikes rider tried to mess with my goal making by encouraging me jump on behind him after he passed me. Little did he know that I’d already re-evaluated my goals. And yes, none of you suckers who passed and/or lapped me can cook Brussels sprouts anywhere near as well as I can. Because I am indeed the Brussels Sprouts Master.

6. “Chunk” the Race

Oh yes, once again a big ol’ check. I had chunked this sucker up on the first lap. There was the “start/finish” chunk, which quickly led to the “overpass of death” chunk, then the “lose massive time hill” chunk. Sometime later there was the “deep snow, wow how many times can I freakin fall in a row” chunk, to be followed by my favorite of all: “the sandy impossible to find a line lakefront” chunk which contained the Spiral of Crank Strike Death and other fun attractions that traumatized me so much I have blocked them from my memory. I do know that I fell on some pavement here and nearly ran over a fallen Jim on the last lap. Since this was my favorite section, I found myself looking forward to it. This was kinda like looking forward to a root canal. Ah, cyclocross.

7. Ignore Your Surroundings

Surprisingly, check. At some point, I seriously remember thinking that if I closed my eyes on the straighter sections, I would stop fighting the snow and could more sorta go by feel. No, I am not kidding. And honestly, I am not sure that it caused me fall any more or go any slower (I’m pretty sure that wasn’t possible). I also managed to actively ignore the race numbers of the guys passing me from the next age group (which started minutes after we did). This allowed me to think of them as being in my race and to build the illusion that I’d blown everyone away at the start and was now tragically settling through the ranks. So I was staging my own private Alka-Seltzer performance.

8. Have Fun!

Check, of course. This is cyclocross, right?

So, I did pretty damn well if I do say so myself — 6.5 of 8 puts me in better standings than any previous race this year. And what did such careful attention to this masterful work of strategy net me? Well I left before the results were posted, but I’m pretty sure that after trying half-heartedly all season for it, I finally managed to score the lantern rouge! That’s right, a big ol’ DFL! It’s been a long hard season, and I’m glad to have ended it with such a notable performance.

So that’s it for the cross season 2008! I’ll save the season overview for another post (to be written when I can look at the photos from yesterday without a shudder), and our cx video should be up any day now. Just 10 months until Jackson Park!

So that’s it: cross is over. I’ll do a race report (to save you the suspense, I fell over more than even I thought was possible) and overwrought review of the season in the near future. But no rest for the wicked: tomorrow is the beginning of the winter season and I need to get on the training.

So here’s the plan at this point: I’m thinking I am going to divide the oncoming cycling year into three training cycles. Tomorrow is the beginning of a 12-week winter indoor season in which I am going to focus on training up my functional threshold and hopefully pop out into the very early road season stronger than I am going into the winter. Then a long cycle building toward a mid-summer peak for a few of key road races. Then a little July slacking before the real performance focus of the year: the cyclocross training cycle. It feels somewhat funny to plan for cyclocross next year as I am sitting here with sore elbows and knees from all the falling I did on the course a few hours ago. Or maybe it’s a coping mechanism.

Anyway, Sunday night is when I’ll be reviewing my training from the previous week and putting up the schedule for the coming week. Last week was mostly getting accustomed to the new trainer, so here’s next week’s plan:

Mostly a week of getting used to being mostly on the trainer. Any LV2 is fair game for riding outside, but the weather is looking bleak for the next week, so it may all be indoors. Low intensity this week in an attempt to give myself a little break from the cross season.

• M: 30 min LV1
• T: 45 min LV2
• W: 30 min LV2
• T: 20 min 100% FTP w/ 15min before and after at LV2
• F: Rest
• S: 1 hour LV2
• S: 1 hour LV2

So I have been hunting power meters, but then winter started. Yeah, I know that you can still ride outside and honestly I plan to. That said, I am not sure how one does a hard interval set while simultaneously dodging ice, worrying about meter batteries in the cold etc. I learned from running, and this cross season, that having high intensity workouts is at least as important to me as long moderate efforts from both a performance and motivation standpoint, so I have keep these in my winter plans.

I quickly switched gears and hunted up a trainer which facilitates measuring power. Kurt Kinetic fluid trainers have the reputation of having the most consitent power responses, so much so that the company actually sells a power meter which produces power numbers from rear wheel speed. Is it as good as having a Powertap on a regular trainer? From an absolute standpoint, maybe not. But the idea is to follow some basic procedures which will give consistent results from workout to workout. I got a great deal on the trainer and power computer at Lickton’s Bikes

I also modified some things in my A/V setup, so I now have my entire music library, cycling video library, and anything Netflix provides in the “watch instantly” category available to me while on the trainer and controllable with a remote. That’s right: I now have a totally geeked out training setup.

So this morning I had my first indoor ride, accompanied by some cross video for warmup and then a seriously loud playlist for the spicy part. The plan was to warm up and measure the most important baseline performance indicator: watts at lactate threshold. I was hoping to get a number which reflects all the fitness that racing cross has (I thought) brought. There are a few ways of doing this, and I decided on the 20 minute time trial method. Basically, after warming up, you ride the hardest 20 minutes you can while attempting to keep your effort somewhat even across the time.

So riding inside is freakin hot. I don’t have a fan and I can see that I really have to get one. Even with the house at 68F, I was drenched by mid-effort. The heat could have accounted for my horrible wLT result: 224. It also could have be just plain suckage. In any case, I’ll test again next week while I am rolling out my winter training plan.

So coming soon: seasonal goals, a race schedule, and a base training program.