ride joe ride

I have bemoaned my fair-weather powertap. At temps below 40F it usually closes up shop within 10 minutes, only to pop back into service as soon as it hits the balmy indoors. Anyway, this post isn’t about my wimpy powertap. It’s actually an announcement that I somewhat officially clicked my 1000th mile of base training over the last two months. I rode outside today and the powertap conked out at 985 miles, and I rode a route I know is longer than 15 miles, so I’m gonna call this the 1000 mark. In fact, I’ve ridden outside with a conked out powertap several times over the past two months, so I probably actually hit 1000 a week or two back.

Since I’m sorta guessing anyway, I’m going to say that a good 900 of those miles were clocked indoors. 900 miles — the distance from Chicago to Boston — all covered in my living room and without actually making any forward progress excepting leaving the rollers at speed. It boggles the mind, and I’m not sure that it does much to lighten the soul.

The old-skool training methodology was “ride 1000 miles easy and then race twice a week.” After the week of new numbers and the looming build perdiod, my version of that is now officially “ride 1000 miles on a torture device, er trainer, and then jump directly to post-season.”

I am still pretty much in shock about this, but week before last a friend of mine gave me his “old” road frame. This turned out to be a really, really nice Bianchi SL3, which I immediately whipped up into this sucker here. I could go on and on, but basically I love it. It’s freakin seriously light and stiff. It’s also not only fits me perfectly, but the Bianchi geometry works very well for my warped torso to leg length ratio. I am bravely waging war on italiocentrism, but I am feeling a switch to a totally campy group coming on (I’m already shimano free and sporting a campy crank).

Also of note: I filled in some details on the race/training schedule. My focus is on the cross season, and this current ramp – up is really a test run for the second periodization cycle in the fall. That said, this schedule works out super well in that July and August are going to be base building. Unlike the torture of doing base building on a trainer in December, this bodes well for long lazy LV2 rides in late summer as opposed to racing in the hot sun. I consider this further proof of cyclocross’s inherent perfection, by the way. This will also allow me to come out of base #2 with a significantly higher CTL than I am from base #1– something which will be  welcome in dealing with the super intensive cross race season.

That unplanned weeklong vacation from blogging was mostly due to the best sort of reason to interrupt a biking blog: I was too busy with cycling to find time to write. First, the weather in Chicago decided to take a very welcome turn toward spring and I ended up riding a number of times outside — a couple of them done in genuine summer form. Second, I got a new road bike and have been dumping extra time into generally playing with it.

I’ll get to the bike later in the week, for now: riding. I had no idea just how much I missed long rides outside until I took the ride down to Munster on the 7th. I left around noon, so I got the warmer afternoon temps (in the 60s) but also the afternoon wind. Even overdressed, though, the first 50 mile ride of the year was seriously a welcome break from all the indoors stuff. This actually constituted my first serious road ride since I began racing cross back in the fall, and I think I can feel how road racing will work, now. I’m looking forward to it. Somewhat intentionally, and assisted by the wicked southwest wind, I kept a pretty hard pace and wound up with a normalized power just outside tempo level. A good hard ride that I was feeling for a few days.

A few days later, our thermometers were again in the 60s. I took the day off of work to get a few put-off things done, and I managed to get in two very good rides — a quick, intervally one in the morning and a totally leisurely spin around the city in the afternoon for another ~50 mile day. I thought I needed to add “had a beer sitting on a patio after having biked 50 in February” to my list of accomplishments, but alas none of the obvious patio-bearing places had their patio set up (I added a few miles riding around checking).

So where does this leave the training? By the end of week 8, I was definitely feeling the “base period is over” sensation. I’m ready to have another day of higher intensity riding and a longer ~3 hour ride on the weekends. Conveniently enough, that’s more or less what’s on the horizon in a couple of weeks. I have been teetering on the edge of succumbing to a cold, so I am probably going to skip testing tomorrow, even though it’s time. I can tell from the feeling of the tempo rides that I’m probably going to post some higher numbers, but I could use another week at this level to avoid adding significant stress while borderline sick.

I was lucky enough to get a number for the very popular Hillsboro-Roubaix. I didn’t expect this to be as motivating as it turns out to be: it’s a short six weeks until the first race of the season, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m working on the training schedule through the first month of races now and will post it soon.

Muster ride (first ride well over 100 TSS in months)

Week 7-8 journal

Week 7-8 PMC (check out the peaks from the bigger rides)

The big news in Joe training la-la land this week was the addition of a snazzy set of rollers. I was just about the point where I stopped looking at craigslist — winter seems to cause people to stop selling their cool bike things. Luckily I noticed these: $40 for a set of Minoura aluminum, big tube rollers with a resistance unit is an amazingly good deal.

So after zipcar-ing up to Wicker Park to grab them, I rushed home to try them out. Okay we actually stopped for an amazingly large dinner at a Costa Rican place as well. Maybe it was the ballast of the large dinner, but my first quick ride on rollers was only moderately crasharific. Yes I fell off (frequently) but in twenty minutes or so I managed a reasonable semblance of riding them. This was heartening enough for me to plan on doing an hour-plus  LV2 ride on them the next morning. With the exception of a few random unplanned dismounts, this went really well.

I also noticed that with the resistance unit, I could pretty easily get into my LV3 range. I confirmed this the next day with an hour at LV3 on them with no problem. I seriously think I could even do my LV4 intervals on them without too much problem with one big exception: I really like to slack for the five minutes of rest between intervals, and it’s hard to stay upright on the rollers turning 30 rpm or so. I may try anyway this week. If you ride a trainer and have never tried rollers, I suggest giving it a shot. I find the extra concentration on not crashing does wonders for making time zip by.

This brings me to my final point: rollers freakin hurt. I don’t know if it’s the additional muscles required to stay balanced or what, but I have been awash with delayed onset muscle soreness this week. Maybe it’s all the falling off? Who knows.

This week’s numbers:

Week 6 journal

Week 6 PMC