Week in Review: March 24-30, 2008

What a week a training that was. I've already described the beginning of the week in the previous post. The weekend block after that active recovery day was very intense and physically draining. I felt great on Friday. The workout plan called for a 5 min blow out interval followed by seated gear mashing of a 53X13 gear for 10 seconds every 5 min. Well, I screwed it up and thought it was every 10 min. So i only got half of them done.

My plan for Saturday called for 60-240 straight minutes of Tempo @ 190-224 watts. I had hoped to do this on the Davidsonville group ride. It was not to be. I went to work instead and decided to trip on out after work to Walkersville to pre-ride the course for the race on April 5. This turned out to be a good decision. I needed to see the course and it was closer to 24 hrs since the last ride. I was able to get a power profile of the course and find where my weak spots will be. They will be on Ramsburger Road. If I'm to get dropped that's where it will happen. Those short sharp rises really put the hurt in my legs. I can crank out the power, but I'm giving up 30-40 lbs on the other guys in the race. I'm hoping that another 1-2lbs off me and using my IF will be the difference to help keep me in the race. I had a very hard time with the 3 bumps in the road on a tempo ride. I'll be dead meat on a hook in the race. During the ride It didn't help that the wind was howling in my face. I will have to remember to stay sheltered as much as possible and just gut it out and hope to get recovery on the flatter tailwind side of the course. I rode 4 laps of the course for a total day of a little less than 2 hrs and 32+ miles. Training wise it's still early days and I shouldn't get discouraged if it don't make it all the way.

This graphic shows some marked improvement in one weeks time based on two Tempo rides that were identical in length and protocol. The graph shows rides one week apart (March 22, red and March 29, green) against my personal bests (yellow).

I had made plans to ride with some of my non-racing buddies on Sunday since it was supposed to be a Zone 1-3 type ride. I woke up feeling pretty rough and expected to have a tortuous 3 hours in the saddle. It didn't help that the temperature was only forcasted to be in the 40's. When I left the house at 9am it was 35 degrees. Brrrrr! One mile into the ride I wanted to turn around, go home and ride the rollers 2hr instead. I kept on going. I got to my buddy Doug's house and him and 2 other guys, Kurt and Bob were there waiting. We decided to ride to Galesville and back. I figured it would be fun to take a long circuitous route to get there and I found one. We explored the new section of the WB&A trail that's not really open yet. It ends at Conway Rd. at the Campbell sand & gravel plant. The last 200 yards weren't even paved yet, so it was a jaunt across double track and loose gravel to get to the road. We all wanted to see where the road went so we added about 3 miles to find out that Conway is a dead end road. Early in the ride it became kind of obvious that my fitness is a bit ahead of these fellas. Every rise in the road I ended up dropping everybody unintentionally. I wasn't going that hard, because i was hurting too, but pain is relative from one person to the next. One person's annoyance is another's torture. Kurt was suffering the most, as he had done a hard Metric the day before. Bob was hurting too, probably for the same reason. Doug was the best of the three was able to match pace with me most of the time. After awhile I started to feel very good. We got to Galesville in about 2 1/2 hrs and took another 1 1/2 to get back. It was nice to have the tailwind home. On the day, the pace was easy for me and i was happy to have to have a prescription of easy zone 1-3 work. So easy that it was a 4 hr 15 ride to go 65 miles. I could have probably gone another hour or two, but I wanted to get home to catch MotoGP on the tube and have a few beers.


Numbers for the week:

Training

Hours: 12

Miles: 183

Physical


Weight at beginning of the week: 220 lbs

Weight at end of the week: 217 lbs

Calories Consumed: 16365 (2337 per day average)

Calories Burned: 25448 (15400 rmr + 10048 riding)

Net gain/loss: -9083 calorie deficit


Power


5 sec: 1127 watts (carryover from 3/2)

1 min: 426 watts (carryover from 3/23)

5 min: 323 watts (carryover from 3/15)

20 min: 253 watts (carryover from 3/15)

No changes to these numbers, but I did have changes to other parameters

30 sec, 30 minute and 60 minute power all went up.

Beer

New beers tried this week (and accounted for in the meal log): No new beers. I finshed off the 6er of Harpoon. I'm all out of beer!

Cheers!

FGR

Doctor, this man is dead!

Hahahaha.

Just a little humor based on last nights graph of my active recovery ride. It was a ride done on rollers in my basement. The green altitude line is meaningless. Whats really interesting is the noticeable cardiac drift. The 3 spikes in the graph are from standing on the pedals to relieve saddle pressure. My workout started off around 118 bmp and drifted to 126 by the end. I drank plenty, but my fan wasn't as close as i would have liked it. My guess is heat buildup.
















This ride came the day after a pretty intense tempo sprints/hill repeats workout at the Gateway loop crit course. The loop is 2.2 miles around and is used for the Carl Dolan Circuit race. You can see on the graph the peaks for the sprints and the smaller peaks for the hill repeat where the start/finish line located. The beginning part is my ride over to the course from the office and the end is my ride back to the office taking a different route. I was hoping for high wattages for the sprints, but the workout prescribed said only do them about one gear down from tempo gearing (I was sprinting a 53x19 or 17), so the cadence was high but the power and speed remained low. Carl Dolan is one of my favorite races. It's in one month and I'm signed up for the 3/4 race. I'll be here every week until then getting in my repeats.

Even after last nights sedate roller ride I still feel like a hammered dog turd. I may be dehydrated. I have another tempo workout for tonight (I might skip it), a fast paced group ride tomorrow (I'll get dropped by McKendree Rd.) and a long day in the saddle on Sunday at a tourist pace with my B group buddies.

I sure hope all this overload is doing something, because I really am feeling overloaded and I've got my first race of the year next Saturday.

On the plus side, the diet is working and i've dropped another couple pounds in the last few days. So im down to 218. With any luck i'll be hovering around 213-215 for Walkersville next weekend.


Cheers

FGR

Week in Review: March 17-23, 2008

This will be a regular feature on my blog. A recap of past weeks training.

March 17-23 was my first week on the Hunter/Coggan 16 week intermediate plan. Truth be told, I started it by picking up the action on Thursday. Tuesday and Wednesday workouts were Friel power based plans from trainingpeaks.com.

My Annual Training Plan (ATP) called for 8:20 hours of workouts. My completed workload was 8:55.

The workout load was unusually hard coming off a relatively easy CTS training plan. 4 of the 6 training days were 'break through' type workouts. Tempo, Form Sprints, Lactate Threshold and more Tempo. 3 days on rollers and 3 days on the road. One of my road days was in a crappy cold drizzle on Saturday. After spending all day at the Crofton Library attending the USA Cycling Moto Ref Clinic (which i passed) I decided to treat myself to a hard workout. I'm glad the day called for a Tempo workout. I was able to generate enough heat to keep warm. The cool down part of the ride was brutal, as I started to freeze up pretty good after about 10 mins. I was glad to get home. At the same time, I was glad I didn't do that workout on the rollers.

Some numbers for the week.

Physical

Weight at beginning of the week: 222 lbs
Weight at end of the week: 220 lbs
Calories Consumed: 16863 (2408 per day average)
Calories Burned: 23020 (15400 rmr + 7620 riding)
Net gain/loss: -6157 calorie deficit

Power

5 sec: 1127 watts (carryover from 3/2)
1 min: 426 watts (3/23)
5 min: 323 watts (carryover from 3/15)
20 min: 253 watts (carryover from 3/15)

So the only improvement has been in my 1 minute power. Probably from all the form sprints and VO2 Max intervals.

Beer

New beers tried this week (and accouted for in the meal log):

Harpoon UFO Hefenweiss (Ok, but not as good as Sam Adams)
Youngs Double Chocolate Stout (Pretty good, but I think it's overated on Ratebeer.com)

Cheers!

FGR

The Story So Far...

In order to kick this blog off let me dive into the 2008 season so far. Like most things in my life, I am late to the party. I didn't start my base training until mid-February. Why? I've got no idea. Lazy I guess. It could be that my target A event is a time trial in August. Because of a late goal, I didn't see the need to get started early. So I've pretty much cut my nose off to spite my face. My goal is to get back to the same form or better that I had in the 2000 season just before I quit racing after 6 seasons. Back then I was 30-35 pounds lighter, I could hammer out a sub hour 40K and I could ride crits and short circuit races well. I still sucked at hilly road races though. Now in 2008 I'm gonna suck at all the early season races.

Moving forward...

This 2008 season sees me trying again to lose 40 pounds. I was hoping to be done with weight loss by now. I didn't ride at all in November, December and not enough in January. So from 200lbs in October 2007, I've gained 20+ instead of losing 20+. So there it is; the 40 lbs. Again.

I have all the tools available to me to keep going in the winter including a great team/club to ride with, ABRT-Latitude. However, until Christmas 2007 I was missing the one tool that I thought might save me from myself. Rollers. And bless my darling bride, she got me a set of Performance technique rollers for Jesus' birthday. Yeah Jesus, and yeah me! I was right. Rollers are the shit! In the last 6 weeks, I've only had 3 days off the bike and only 6 days on the road. The rest of my training has been on rollers. Never less than 30 minutes and mostly 60 to 90 minute sessions. Some people hate them, that's fine, but they have been and will be my savior from winter sloth and crappy weather days.

But I digress...

Looking to kick off the training I went looking for a simple plan I could stick too and not have to think for myself. Enter the Lance Armstrong 7 Week Plan for advanced riders. Right out of the book! I did the first 4 weeks to the letter. And believe it or not it helped. Three weeks ago, a teammate, Ken McDowell, came through for me and sold me his Polar Power Kit. I've been using a Polar S725 hrm since 2005. The power kit was my cheap way into the power club. Now I'm working on the 16 week plan straight out of the Hunter Allen/Andrew Coggan book Training and Racing With A Power Meter. Let me tell you, it's a ass kicker. Thanks to those 4 weeks of CTS workouts I have been handling it well so far. But better yet, I don't have to think. I just do. Lucky for me my FTP is the same as the prescription watt ages in the plan. The only drawback is that I have to type them into my Trainingpeaks.com workout calender.

So here is where I am so far as of today:

Weight - 220 lbs (100 kilos)
Height - 72"
FTP - 250 watts
P/W ratio @ FTP - 2.5 watts per kilo.

Goal by August District TT:

Weight - 175lbs (79.5 kilos)
FTP - 300 watts
P/W ratio @ FTP - 3.8 watts per kilo

A pretty tall order. But one I think that is realistically obtainable. My blog will be my chronical to this goal and beyond.

Cheers!

FGR

Welcome to My Blog

Howdy ho!

Welcome to the first post on my new blog. On this blog I'll be chronicling my efforts to become a competent and competitive Masters racer after a long absence from the MABRA racing scene. I'll also be sharing my thoughts on the local racing scene from my aging racer's point of view and from my point of view as a newly minted class 'C' USA Cycling official/moto ref.

The purpose of my blog is to provide me the motivation to keep at what I'm doing, to document my progress and hope that what I'm doing might help someone else down the road. I will do my best to keep the content relative to the topic at hand except for the occasional post about beer, Ducati motorcycles, MotoGP or F1. I don't have a desire to share my private life outside of cycling anymore than someone else would want to read about it. I will do my best to keep my blog cycling related.

Look for the back story coming soon...

Cheers!

FGR