Thursday Group Ride 5/31

My goal for tonight was to do as little work as possible. I want to be fresh for the mtn ride on saturday. Most of the ride was a fast, steady double paceline with no real attacks. I had an easy cruise to the sprint on Airbase so I did the effort. Same thing on Shop Rd. Mostly I just held back and sat in.

My TSB right now is -4.9 and that should be heading south in a hurry after 100miles in the mtns on Saturday. It looks like a who's who of climbers in Columbia are going so I should be suffering quite a bit...I can't wait.

TNWC 5/29

Tonight started with a nice neutral lap then at the start/finish Chris S. and Perry attacked leaving the group looking at each other...would Karl chase down his wife? I don't think so...I know I wasn't about to do any work at the front. She'd kick my ass!

Once we finally brought them back the usual attacks began. I found myself in a break with Karl and "mystery strong dude" (Robin was also there for a while). We were working well but getting a bit tired so it was nice to turn around and see Jay leading a group of 8 up to us containing the usual suspects.

I then went into major conserve mode doing as little work as possible. On the bell lap Jed put in a massive attack on the backside that I had to really dig deep to latch on just before turn 3. I sort of recovered then it came to a sprint between Brian, Jed, Jay, Mystery dude, and me. I was positioned perfectly and had a perfect leadout from Brian but still my sprinting has sucked lately so I got 3rd with Brian winning.

EZ

Just rode around for an hour with Phillip as a recovery, active rest day.

bread and buttah

Went out today to do some threshold intervals. These are the staple of training…gotta have a high threshold as a good base for just about everything else.

Phillip and I headed to the straightest, longest, flattest road in Columbia…Bluff Rd. Not the greatest traffic wise but when you’re at the limit you’re not as afraid for your life. It actually wasn’t that bad today.

The plan was to do 2×20 min at 285w. Things started great…felt strong and for the first 8′ I did 290w then 12′ at 278w (gives an ave of 283w for the entire interval). I took a 2 minute rest then started up again. This time it was harder to maintain my target and near the end I
was really struggling and ended up bagging it after 10min. I feel like 285w is probably pretty close to my FTP right now. When it was all over I had 2:30 hrs, 130TSS and close to 50miles. I was a little tired from yesterday’s VO2 workout and right now I can barely hold my head up!

The wife and kid are away for the next 8 days so I’m planning a huge block of training…

VO2max Intervals

I spent the morning playing dad so I missed the group ride. The plan today was VO2 intervals so I did about 30min of warmup with a 5min push at threshold to see how the legs felt...which was not great but not bad. Then I headed over to tank hill, my favorite place to do VO2 intervals.

Before I began I was cruising down the hill and hit some large rock...my front tire flatted and since I was going pretty fast I skidded the rear trying to stop. This put a 3" gash through the rubber nearly to the tube in the rear. Since it was holding air I decided to just go ahead and do the workout and if it blew I would call someone for a ride.

The idea behind VO2 intervals is to tax your maximum cardiac capacity...your HR should be near it's max at the end of each interval and your recovery should be a 1:1 ratio (and maintain an intensity between 110 and 120% of FTP)...so for me today it was 5' on/5' off at 320w. I have my PM set to read watts but at minute 3 I usually click over to average watts to make sure I'm on target then I adjust my effort from there. The last 30s is usually all-out but seated.

I do these on tank hill at the Fort...If you go down the hill turn right and at the lowest point in the road turn around and start up from there. 5 minutes takes me to Chestnut Rd. The climb upto 378 on Horrel Hill Rd is also a good place to do these.

I felt pretty good today with these. The first one nearly always sucks, not smooth and the legs kindof seize up from the effort. It got better for #2-4 but the last one was pretty tough to maintain the wattage (so I didn't do the 6th I was kindof hoping to do). Still 25min at VO2max is a pretty good day of training.

Ahhhh the beauty of intervals (hash at 318w):

Thursday group ride

Ever have a day where you feel like complete crap but end up riding really well? Today was my day…

Heading through the fort I felt dead, down ridge rd…dead, harmon…dead, Mt. Elon…hey, how come I’m first over this climb? Did everyone stop for a picnic? From there it just got better.

Coming down Airbase in a paceline I did a “Psssst, Phillip….I’m launching on the little climb” I knew he’d follow then I’d make his ass work in the break. Ha Ha Good job Nutty! For the Airbase UPHILL sprint some No-name ex-Belgium Cat. 1 left me in the wind at 300m and called it a “lead out”. Maybe that’s cool in Europe or Indiana but not here. In those situations you just gotta GO so I put my head down and really felt…Nothing, just speed. Flow. Whatever you want to call it. I could see my legs moving but I couldn’t feel them. Itsa very niiiiice (borat voice)…too bad the other local No-name ex-Belgium Cat. 1 got me at the line (why don’t these guys go back to where ever they came from )

Anyway…it was a good ride and I forgot all about the crappy-ness of the start.

TNWC 5/22

I decided to do a loop in the fort before the race for a little pre-mitchell training with Nutty. Tried to keep it steady tempo. I think for the next 10 days I need to keep the intensity low and just pile the miles on. We’ll see.

The crit was pretty fun tonight, not too hard but lots of attacks. There were enough fast guys there to chase down any breaks and that’s pretty much what happened. It was a small turnout.

A couple of notable moments…Brian C. put the hammer down at one point early in the race and I could see that the 4-5 guys behind him weren’t gonna be able to keep that pace so once he pulled off I gave it a couple seconds then attacked up the left gutter. Insta-gap and thankfully Jay saw it go down and he joined me for a little 2-up TT for a couple of laps. It hurt. Bad. And once we were caught I found the back of the group and tried to get my shit together and was able to eventually recover. Later a dangerous looking group of 8 or so was up the road so I waited till Ken drilled it and then same story…I jumped across to the break dragging Kevin along. Of course it soon fell apart and we all got into bunch sprint mode…meaning we let a couple of guys go up the road and rode tempo till the last half lap.

Tonight was probably my best chance of winning one of these races that I’m gonna get. I had Ken’s wheel and got a great lead out but I just didn’t have the speed to come around him at the end…got beat by a half bike length or so and I never felt like I was on top of the gear.

Screamin' Eagle

CTL: 70.7 ATL: 84.5 TSB: +1.9

Weekly Summary (Mon-Sun): 5656 kJ, 10.6 hours, 598.6 TSS

Today was a really great ride, we went through the fort and down percival rd to screaming eagle and around to congress. About 65 miles…good legs, good small group and amazing weather. It wasn’t destined to be a slugfest due to Robert riding in the mtns yesterday and Karl doing a big ride with Nutty on Sat. I upped my FTP in WKO+ to 285w (from 275w) due to the recent tests I’ve done. I don’t feel that 301w is a realistic FTP for me right now…I did a few 10min pulls at this wattage but it was pretty hard. To hold it for an hour…not likely. 285w is more in line with that. Close to a 200 TSS day so it was a good one.

Today was the first day I’ve ever motorpaced behind a Tank…actually a flatbed truck carrying a tank. There were 2 of them and the 2nd truck was not too happy about us riding in front of him. In retrospect there’s no way in hell that semi could have stopped if one of us had gone down or something had happened. Hey but it was fun, right?

The other revelation was when we turned onto Congress and Karl pulled at an ever increasing pace from the turn all-the-way up to the top…I kept thinking he should be getting tired soon but of course that didn’t happen. I popped about 150m from the top and basically threw out the anchor. Damn you Kaiser…

Thursday group ride

Chris, Nutty and I did an easy loop then met up with the group ride. There were a lot of folksout tonight and the pace was kept relatively high. My TSS was low as a result but I felt pretty good despite the last two days of moderately hard riding.

Nutty and his heterosexual male friend decided to light it up on the descent down Horrel Hill and we were attacking and countering at 40mph. Fun! Felt like the last k of LBL. I tried to make it hard on the roubaix section but the group was too big (and too fast!). I took a long 300w pull up to airbase which was probably not the best idea considering I would be sprinting about 3 minutes after turning left…Nick from Outspokin is really riding strong right now, impressive.

On Shop Road the Nut put in a huge pull that gapped him and I off the main group and I kept looking back and wondering where the hell everyone was cuz I didn’t want to sprint, just make a very hard leadout…way to go Nutty!

testing...

After not doing much in the crit yesterday I decided to try to do some testing today. The idea is to do all-out tests of 1 min, 3 min and 20 min. This can then be put into the “monod” spreadsheet to estimate threshold power. This is something I really need to do more of to chart progress cuz you don’t really do all out efforts very often (not even in races etc) and it’s good info to have for tailoring your training.

Ok…I did a 30min warmup then cranked out the 1min, rested a while then did the 3 min up the last climb on Dixie. The 20 min didn’t go so well and I pulled the plug after 10min due to not being able to hold the watts I know I’m capable of. These tests are supposed to be done “fresh” so I’m not too worried about not completing it. I’ve got some good 20min numbers from some earlier workouts so I’ll use those instead (308w).

Now the monod…after plugging the numbers in I get an estimated FTP of 301 (4.31 W/kg). Very interesting as I’ve never tested over 300w. It may be time for a 60min TT test on the Velodyne…damn that’s gonna hurt!

TNWC 5/15

Maybe eating that huge quesadilla at 5:15 wasn’t the best idea…

Perry started the action on the “neutral” lap…or maybe it was Matt. No matter. Things got started in a big way. A huge 1/2 lap chase caught them and then another larger group went away. This looked a little more promising so i jumped across to it. We stayed away a while then things came back together and a few more attacks and things settled down. On one lull Karl did his patented slow speed attack from the back and had an instant gap…alone. He had a 1/4 lap lead and from the “chase” I knew we wouldn’t be catching him anytime soon. Langston ended up bridging across and they stayed away for quite a while. I just rolled through the pack surfing wheels and not really doing any work to speak of. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally caught the two and things stayed fast enought to thwart any real breaks. When at 45min people were resigned to a bunch sprint the inevitable slow down occured and the inevitable 5 non sprinters off the front.

Here’s where I royally screwed the pooch…In an email discussion with Jay he shared some staggering wattage numbers from newbie Ladd L. They were threshold numbers but I thought he was gonna be my ticket to the line so I basically followed him around for 2 laps. Coming into turn 4 I was sitting perfect…3rd wheel with a turbo-diesel in front of me. I envisioned him being forced to lead it out from a long way and me getting a smooth ride to the line…That shit didn’t work out. In fact Mr LL sat up and later informed me that he can’t sprint for shit. Thanks for the heads up dude! Next week it’s back to fighting for Derek’s wheel…

Saturday group ride

After all the intensity lately I felt like I need some good old threshold work. The group was a good one to do that as not alot of hammer’s showed up to fight for the front! I basically just rode on the front at 275w for as long as I could. I probably got around 40 min of solid threshold. It didn’t come easy but it wasn’t terrible either.

Thursday group ride

The plan was just to ride as hard as possible at all times…simple huh? 198TSS later I was completely thrashed and haven’t felt this depleted in a while. Great ride! Big numbers tonight!

TNWC 5/8

God the wind tonight freakin sucked…it was howling down the final stretch and really there was no where to hide. An early break of 8 or so went on the first lap and I figured I needed to be in it in case noone wanted to chase. Things looked promising then it kindof fell apart. We were caught and another break formed with Jay and Karl. I was kindof caught out and tried to bridge with langston and some strong guy I haven’t seen around, acutally there were a couple more with us but they got shelled. Shelled is where I was headed once it was down to us three chasing. I pulled the plug at about 35min and headed home with my tail between my legs. Not good. Here’s the stats for my hardest TNWC to date:

6x5min

As I usually do when I get shelled in a race…go out and do some intervals as punishment! It was threatening to rain so I went out with the plan of 6×5min at 320w…tank hill in the fort. Started out good and was easily hitting my numbers but on the 4th one decided to head and finish on the big loop. I may be just a creature of habit/structure but when I started #4 I lost it and just turned around and went home. More of a mental defeat than anything.

Thursday group ride

Chris and I headed out for an easy loop then hooked up with the group ride. Lots of people out tonight 25-30? made for an OK ride since I didn’t see the front all that much. Took some hardish pulls and ended up with 184 TSS which is respectable.

TNWC 5/1

Tonight’s race was a good one. An early break went with Karl and a few others and it took the group a while to catch…it was a pretty mellow chase but steady.

Once the catch was made everyone sat up and that’s when I saw Jay and Jamie go at about 20min in. I jumped on their wheel for an insta-gap and we rode off as the group just let us go. I felt pretty strong and was taking some hard pulls…about 350w for 45 sec each. Jamie started to lose it and he got shelled after about 15min. Jay and I settled in and I started to think about survival. I began alternating a hard/easyish pull.

At about 45min in I started to lose it and instead of just riding Jay’s wheel for the last 3 laps I told him I would give everything for a half lap then say “see ya!”…I actually thougtht the group was closer than where they actually were. So I gave a suicidal pull and just after the start/finish I pulled up.

Here’s what it looked like (Pnorm: 267w, ave 243, ave speed 25.6, TSS 71.1, kJ 658)