Bam

Heard this before?

Yeah, it's what was ringing in my head after this morning's workout. You KNOW racing season is approaching when the "white hot" stuff starts to show up on the plan. You just never know what to expect. In the back of your mind you have some preconceived notion of what "would" be great, but in reality you just have no idea what's going to happen when the real intensity starts to get thrown into the mix.

Woke up early, had a few cups of coffee and tried to mentally prepare myself for some suffering. Hitting the rollers on the TT bike with 4x 3min all out efforts with a few SubSupers thrown in after that. For some reason, I thought the plan read 3x 3min efforts but then I noticed the "4" this morning..whoops. A little unusual for me, but the first one felt pretty solid..then the next..then the next...then the finale. I cracked a bit halfway through the last one, but stuck it out. I definitely was seeing some stars after it. Ended up with a 430w cumulative avg which is good and a bit scary. Good by way of numbers, scary that I now know what I need to build off of. Plan on some endurance riding the next few days and then a few good longish rides over the weekend. Should be fun.

Good weekend

It's no secret I'm a big fan of knocking workouts out inside. When I picked up the e-motion rollers back in 2008, my entire outlook changed. I fell in love with the dynamics of being able to squeeze productive hours training inside regardless of the weather. I'll admit, I rarely ride just to ride. I try to have a purpose and goal every time I get on the back. Some say you miss out on the joy of "just" riding. Don't get me wrong, during my transition time from year to year, I do "just" ride, but once the beginning of the year hits, every ride has a purpose. Plus, I like knocking my workouts out in the morning when all possible so I can enjoy the day and not stress about what I need to do after work.

So, although it was relatively nice out on Saturday (relatively is used lightly since there were like 40mph wind gusts out), with a threshold workout on tap on the TT bike, I decided to stay inside. No cars to worry about..no stop lights to worry about...no hiding.

Coach calls them "LT Subs" 4x 8mins at threshold 100%, then drop immediately to 4+mins at sub threshold 95%. This was a new format and I liked it. Cumulative average for all 4 was 343w's...right where I needed to be on the TT bike. I won't lie, the first one felt like DEATH, I just couldn't get breathing right or mentally find a rhythm. Legs were still a little cooked from Thursday. Then things turned around and got better and better each time.

Surprisingly, I wasn't too wrecked afterward and that left me with some good confidence to hit the tough workout on tap for Sunday. So, on Sunday I ventured over to my secret training spot and fired up the engines for some more pain.

The main villain for Sunday was 4x2min all out seated hill reps, followed by a quick set of seated enhanced accelerations and then a 20min tempo set. The route I use is really lumpy. I found one decent climb that would work for the hill reps. It's just HARD to find a true climb around here (well, close to Alexandria) over 2mins. So, after pile driving myself through the hill reps and the rest of the workout, I was pretty cooked. The numbers were good so I was happy to head home and finish up some home improvement projects to keep the wife pleased. It's weird how I'm always in a better mood after having a good workout.

The Condor of Varsseveld

I had no idea that was Robert Gesink's nickname...bad ass! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gesink)

Gesink won me over as a fan during the 2009 Tour of France. I remember watching the stage (5) where he got caught up in a crash pretty early in the race. He freaking finished the stage with a broken hand at the age of 22. Sure, he ended up having to drop out of the race that year due to the injury, but that demonstrated some serious guts and hardness...I've been a fan ever since.

Although I'm not a huge fan of Rabobank, I always find myself rooting for him. I hope he's coming of age. He has some great years ahead of him at the ripe old age of 24. I was very happy to see him take the GC at Tour of Oman. Damn, not sure if it's a blessing or a curse to have Eddy Mercx tip you as a future Tour winner...I hope he's right. This guy is a class act and one of the bright stars for years to come. I just hope he learns how to TT better!

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.