Numbers

I had a little time today to play with some numbers. I don't believe they tell me anything I don't already know, but hey, I've got them so why not play around with it. Today, I was just curious to compare my 2010 Jan to my 2011 Jan. No big ephiphany or anything, just more or less curious.

Last year in Jan, I had ballparked FTP at 325w. In 2011, we're looking at a pretty comfortable 350w (I'll keep weight a secret for now ;-)) I still have some slight discrepancy in power between TT bike and road bike, but I'm spending much more time on the TT bike than last year. I guess anything would be an improvement over zero last year.

After I wrapped up my charts, I noticed a few odd things. First, in 2010 I had a huge spike in Endurance zone. I went back to those files and realized that my meter was sent back to service for a week or two and I had a lot of manual entries the first few weeks. So, that sort of blew me out of the water in order to get a good analysis. Second, in 2011 I missed about 4-5 days of training due to sickness. Also, in 2011 I feel like I've been doing more commuting, especially on the powercranks. It skews the numbers a bit in the lower zones. But it is what it is.

Here's the 2010 vs 2011 training zone buckets.
2011:

2010:

The few things that jumped out to me were- is that it appears I logged a relatively substantial % of training time in the Endurance zone. Tempo/TH would probably have been close had I not been sick. Active Recovery % is lower in 2011 most likely due to a higher frequency of time on the rollers vs 2010.

Here is the power distribution charts from same time period:
2011

2010:

Strange to see the huge spike ~200w in 2010, most likely due to manual entries since I try to estimate TSS by plugging in some average power #'s. Definitely think I upped the time spent at Tempo, Ultratempo & Subthreshold in 2011. LT work started kicking in right at the end of Jan in 2011.

And this post wouldn't be complete without a PMC chart:

So, if you can figure out what all this nonsense means, you'll know how fit or unfit I am right now. I do really enjoy being able to compare "programs" year over year. Ken is methodical and progressive in his training approach. Some things have varied a little bit, but by and large, it has been a very similar program through the winter. I'm starting to get excited for race season, especially Battenkill! Well, that may be an understatement.