ride joe ride

This week started off pretty rough, as I suspected it might. The new power levels were tough and my 2×20’s on Tuesday were not good at all. I missed making the LV4 lower limit by a few watts for the second one, and I was seriously hurting as a result of trying. My ride the next day was similarly a pain. By the end of the week, though, the dread of the new levels had diminished.

Note that my PMC has taken a hit. Whereas before the number adjustment, I was regularly riding near the top of the levels, I’m now barely eeking over the lower end — this looks like lower effort as far as the damn program goes. Of course, the actual reason for riding lower in the rage is that the ranges have lifted. This week also marked the half way mark of my base period. I’m now pretty close to the maximum volume of training I’ll be doing in the base period — about 7 hours a week. In the next 5 weeks, I’ll be upping the intensity somewhat.

It’s just about time to start putting together a spring race calendar so I can make the remainder of my plan through spring racing. I know I’m going to hit some of the early season Matteson crits and the Hillsboro-roubaix. Other suggestions are welcome.

Week #5 Training log (with extra whining)

Week #5 PMC (now with lower numbers)

All the training stuff is supposed to make us strong and when we get stronger we’re supposed to be happy because then we’re more possessing of mad skillz with which we can propel our bikes to epic speeds. No? So when I busted my previous FTP test by 30 watts on Tuesday I was initially super happy. I’m not going to attribute the 13% jump in FTP solely to the five weeks of training, but it probably had something to do with it. Anyway, I was stoked for the time it took me to finish the ride until I downloaded the data into WKO+ and recalculated my power levels. Ouch. I was just starting to get to the point of being able to appreciate my tempo rides — the pace I was doing them at is now my laid back endurance power level. I am suddenly finding eight hours of sleep a non-negotiable part of life. As in: even if I want to stay up later, I simply fall asleep inadvertently.

I was tempted to repeat last week’s program this week to give myself a chance to adjust to new power levels, but I am going to play it by ear and go ahead with plans. If I am eating, sleeping and recovering well and I still have trouble with the new numbers I’ll reconsider. Tomorrow’s 2×20’s will be the real test — at 92% of FTP  (or about 235 watts) I’ll be doing them somewhat harder than my previous FTP (225 or so). So yeah, gain = pain.

Week #4 training log

Week #4 PMC

The big news on my training front this week was a slew of bike fit changes which were followed by some seriously crummy workouts. The bigger changes involved switching from 170mm cranks to 175s, working on fore/aft saddle placement to relieve some knee pressure I’ve been having, and switching from a quill stem to a threadless one to allow the use of oversized bars. Nutritionally, I’ve also gone back to one of my old favorites for harder workouts: accelerade. I was a big fan of accelerade when I was doing ultras. Whether it’s placebo effect or not, it always seemed to allow quicker recovery times, and I’ve noted the same effect using it while biking.

With all these changes in such a short period of time, it’s not a big surprise something went awry. As noted in the training diary, my last couple of rides last week were pretty bad. This week started much worse, with my interval session on Tuesday being  horrible. I came very close to not finishing the second LV4 session, and I was in a whole world of hurt. After some trial and error, I discovered the problem. It was not, as I initially though, a problem with the new cranks. It was actually the wonderful accelerade milkshake I was inadvertently inflicting on my stomach via my morning coffee. I am not sure, but I think there was some protein incomptibility going on. The magic behind accelerade is it’s carb/protein mix. It’s probably snake oil, but its snake oil that I like. Anyway, I dropped the milk, and all is well in Joe cycling land.

Okay, graphs for this week this time with some notation. First off, my weekly ride report. This shows the important information about all the rides I’ve done over the previous week. There’s the obvious stuff, but also note IF and TSS. Intensity Factor (IF) is basically an indication as to what percetage of my FTP the ride was normalized to. So if I did the whole ride at my FTP, the IF score would be 1.0 (100% of FTP). Training Stress Score (TSS) is a similar scoring of the workout, but it takes into account the duration of the ride along with the intensity. There is some controversy as to TSS maybe being too much weighted in favor of duration over intensity, but it’s still the case that the bigger the TSS number, the more work you did.

The performance management chart is basically a graphical display as to how your rides’s TSSs have been stacking up. It’s a whole lot of fun, and it can be seriously motivational.  The purple line indicates Acute Training Load (ATL) indicates the average of my ride TSSs over the preceeding two weeks. Basically, it shows what sort of work I’ve been putting in recently. The blue line is exactly the opposite. It shows Chronic Traning Load (CTL) which averages rides older than 14 days. The third line indicates Training Stress Balance (TSB). I’m not clear on how this is calculated, but it’s an indication of long-term “freshness.” As training stress goes down, TSB rises and can indicate a successful taper pre-race. That all said, note that my CTL is being slowly pushed up by slowly increasing quantity of base milage. This is according to plans. More on how high I expect it to go later.

Well nobody is going to post a training blog update on time after the week of the new year, right? The upside was I had a whole lot of fun and rode every day. The downside was that riding seemed to hurt somewhat more than normal.

Before getting to that, though, after a whole lot of thought  I’ve decided against buying a new bike for the road season. Instead, I’ve swapped out the Paletti’s august Super Record (circa 1986 or so) for a SRAM/Campy mix and done some other upgrading. Yeah, it’s heavy at 21lbs with the powertap wheel. And yeah, I do keep reaching down to shift on the downtube. This bike, though, has some serious soul, and that’s worth having to skip a few desserts to take those couple of extra pounds out of my butt.

Anyway, not as bad of a week #2 as I expected. My 2×20 on Saturday felt harder than it should have, but that probably had to do with the number of rides performed on the trainer in the preceding week which involved beer for hydration. Fun, but you can’t complain when it hurts afterward. Okay, you can complain but nobody really cares. So I am closing in on 300 miles on the PT odometer, which means I am probably just over 400 base miles. 500 was going to be my goal, but my current plan allows for much more build-up and hopefully some of the base miles ridden outside toward the end.

Oh, and speaking of outside, my powertap is a total outside wuss. It’s dead within 15 minutes at any temp below 40 only to perk back up 10 minutes after hauling it inside. I’ve replaced batteries in the wheel, and I’m going to try replacing the head unit batteries juts for kicks. From what I understand, this is pretty normal behavior for them — if anyone has any input, I’d be grateful. I rode 20 outside on Sunday, and it was heaven. I’d rather not have to chose between power data and riding outside.

So here’s week 3 summary and my current performance management chart. The PMC shows (not surprisingly) a steadily climbing chronic training load (CTL) and a moderately buried TSB which indicates (again, not surprisingly) that I am building intensity and not really in race shape. Keeping an eye on the CTL, a measure of work done over a longer period of training, turns out to be a pretty good training motivator. For an example of CTL followed over several years, check this guy’s post.