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