velodyne

Tonight I did 1 x Reno911/Stewart/Colbert for 90min at about 210w. 81TSS.

3x15' at FTP

Today I didn't feel that great heading out the door...it's a good thing nutty came along or I would have ended up on the couch eating chips. We headed over to the crit course and I had originally planned for 4x15 (2' rests) but pretty much drilled it for 3 intervals and was fried so I called that good (wimp!). Pretty good pacing tonight: 280w, 282w, 279w.

I really need to do some FTP testing one of these days but I'm pretty sure I'm heading back up to around 280w which for me is pretty good. Right now 280w feels hard but I can get "comfortable" here & hold it. Last year I hit 280w as my FTP max during the racing season. I've never had numbers this good this early so I'm encouraged (& added bonus: I weigh less-->must.not.eat.chips).

Rest

Ahhhhhhh...

I'm an Apple fanboy/geek & want an iPhone...but first gotta get out of my Verizon contract: Done.

Then I pick up two FREE family plan phones and sell them on Ebay...make $500 profit, buy $400 iPhone, buy $50 phone for wife then port my verizon phone numbers to ATT.

Easy. ;-)

EZ loop

Did 1.5 hours easy with Jed as a recovery and CTL maintenance ride.  Legs feel dead.  Planning the same tomorrow then some hard FTP intervals on wednesday.  Gonna pull back a bit this week so my CTL doesn't rise too rapidly (avoiding over +10/wk)...steady's the name of the game.

Sunday Group Ride

For an impromptu ride today we had a lot of people show. 11 of us headed out for 3+ hours. It was nice to just chill and socialize a bit. Crusty managed his first ride of '08. The temps turned out to be perfect, high 50's with not much wind.

<--- charts are current

epic...almost

Today's ride should have sucked. Low 40's and some rain. It ended up being a great ride...70 miles went by pretty quick for the 7 of us...the roads out in the N.E. are really nice. The cold actually helped with the pace as riding hard was the only way to stay warm. We were talking that it was about 3° in temp from being epic...miserable. It's a very fine line sometimes.

Phil A. was out with us today and says he wants to race with us some this year...are we happy about that? Hmmmmmm.

4x15 @ 100%

In my current mode of "mix it up" I wanted to do a longer ride today with some threshold work. I was going to wait till thursday to do another interval but since Ladd is planning some death march for saturday I thought I would need an extra day to recover.

So I did 4x15' in the fort (45°) with my ave wattages being 280w, 280w, 271w, 272w. I rested for 2min between each one. I started suffering on the 3rd one (the terrain sucked for this one) and the 4th took a lot of focus to finish with the power up (I really wanted to quit*).
I passed Lang going the other way on the 3rd one...he was looking pretty bad too! I was pretty pleased with how today went--I didn't think I could get 60min at threshold done with a hard workout yesterday but there you have it.

*My secret weapon, guaranteed to give me an extra 10w on cold & nasty days --->

2400s

Did 1x40' at 276w at the crit course. It was much smoother than at the fort (flatish) and a change of pace. 5 minutes after I left the house it started to rain...I was a bit worried with the temps in the high 40's but it all worked out and wasn't that bad. The 10min ride home was nice and short...the ideal interval ends right at your door.

I got shotgun

Last Sept I got to ride with crusty in the HealthNet team car at the US Pro road race in Greenville. This is some video I shot (heavily redacted!) that shows what it's like in the caravan. HN got a guy in the early break so we were able to head up to the leaders. I was in the car for about an hour and a half--the initial 3 small laps and then one big lap over Paris Mtn. I think they did 4 laps total.

The guy sitting to my right was Nick L. who the year before worked as a mechanic for CSC in europe. He's pretty quick at changing Kirk O'Bee's wheel as you'll see...

Brrrr

Nutty and I left at noon and it was about 34° and I had on just about everything I own. It really wasn't that bad...we did 2 full laps in the fort. It was a good ride, just cruising along hard enough to stay warm.

I will say that my legs felt like crap for the first 45min...then they were ok. I think it was the 2 hours at one intensity I did yesterday.

EssEssTee

The weather was pretty bad today so I did another session on the velodyne. A solid 2 hour SST workout. Ave of 223w for 120min (about 83% of my FTP). Not bad...it helps having an electronically braked trainer with a massive 22# flywheel. I get that sucker up to 28mph and it feels just like on the road. A good fan and a 42" plasma helps too.

Tomorrow's gonna be pretty cold...high of 40° (which around here is like 0° K). Gonna try to get out in the PM for a while. Vote in the poll on the right --->

HOP à deux

Did a HOP repeat today on the velodyne. This time I tried to hold a higher intensity while still doing the 10s surges every 2 min. I managed to last 45min and averaged 266w (a lot higher than tuesday's 252w ave). Yes, it hurt.

We had a get together tonight for the Outspokin' Masters team: Me, Ladd, Karl, Brian, Jay, Lang, Crusty. The usual old timers at the races around the S.E. are gonna absolutely shit when we line up at greenville. ;-)

<----the charts on the left are now current.

A month in review

Tonight I did an SST workout on the velodyne...basically steady at 220w for 70min. It wasn't too hard to complete. I should be ready to throw down tomorrow.

I was mucking around in WKO+ and decided to see how my training was going compared to last year. Better??? It's all there in the data (basically big green bars mean hard days, more yellow means less training):


Double the CTL, not bad. As Andy Coggan says the ATL/CTL/TSB answers the question asked on the starting line of every race "been riding much?".

Looking forward this is what I did from Dec to March of last year:


Update...just saw this on the list...a pretty good concept:

FTP == how fast you can go. CTL == how long you can go fast

HOP #1

I've been reading about Bill Blacks "hour of power" for a couple of years on the Wattage list. Some call it the "hour of pain" so I figured today was the day to find out for myself. The concept is that you do a threshold 60min interval (starting at the lower range & increasing) with 10 second standing surges of 130% of FTP every 2min.

The idea behind this is that it simulates racing with the constant surges and will break up the monotony of a long threshold interval. Also he feels that it's a good "bump" to FTP when progress stagnates with just 2x20's. For more info search "hour of power" and "hop" on the Google wattage list.

I wanted to start with these a bit on the easier side, so I shot for 250w and surged to around 360w every 2 min (my FTP right now is around 270w). For the last 2 or 3 minutes I held it at around 290w with a long surge at the end...Just like a race. I self selected the cadence which turned out to be 90rpm. I did these on the velodyne indoors.


This was a pretty challenging workout but it did seem to go by pretty quickly. These are really going to be killers when I increase the time (did 45min today) and the wattage (hello...thursday). They're also going to be a great transition into VO2 intervals for the first part of February.

sunday onion

nsfw...

Bro, You're A God Among Bros

You know you're one of my top bros, bro, because you got my back. And I got yours. You're my bro. But you went above and beyond the other night,...

and

I Got What America Needs Right Here

Sometimes I'm a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if you can help me get something straight....

kill-ah

Awesome day today...We met at 8am & it was 43° but felt a lot warmer due to not much wind.  It warmed up pretty quick and we ended up with 66 miles.  Perfect.

My bike's shifting was spot-on.  The DA cassette/chain really make a difference.  No more bargain basement Wipperman chains for me.  Crusty says change chains every 2000 miles and a cassette will last a couple of years...sounds good to me.

Also if you haven't checked velonews today there's a great article about training with a power meter and the PMC chart.  Read it HERE.

Sat AM

9am Saturday...yeah, I know. If you'd rather do something different (earlier) text me at 315-9400. 60 miles, not easy but not a death march either.

1x40 @ 276w

The legs felt a bit tight/fatigued starting out today but I thought they would come around. Did the usual 1x40 on the fort and was pretty happy with the workout. Passed USC Marc and tried to get him to follow me but he didn't take the bait. Did the first 20min at 280w--from 20min to 35min I sucked--then drilled the last 5 min at 280w. Total ave 276w.


My mental strategy today was to never look at either the elapsed time or the ave wattage until near the end, I just tried to really focus on being smooth and keeping the wattage where I wanted. I also had a better mix on the iPod than on tuesday.

After I got home I went over to crusty's and he gave me a new DA cassette/chain...11x23. I'm rockin an E*L*E*V*E*N bitches. Watch out. We figured out that my healthnet hand-me-down rear shifter is pretty much fried so don't buy it from me on ebay. He was also pretty horrified that my PT cable was held in place with scotch tape. I don't get paid to ride this thing brah...

old timers

Since lang cat'd up this year to a 2 (good luck with those P1,2 races buddy!) it looks like the core Outspokin "team" will be racing mostly masters this year. Right now it's definitely me, Ladd, Lang, Karl and Brian. Jay may be up for a few races and crusty is interested in riding and yelling at us (wow...just like being a Pro). Actually with all of us clicking and crusty calling the shots...it should be a lot of fun. Lang should be a Cat 1 by next year ;-)

1x40

Wanted to get back on track with my threshold training so today I did my usual 1x40min at 272w on the fort. These are the venerated 2x20's everyone's talking about but I don't like to stop for a rest in between intervals cuz I have a hard time getting back into my rhythm so I just motor on.

It went pretty well until about minute 35 then it kindof sucked but I got through it. Today I was drilling in on the flats and downhills but had a hard time keeping the wattage up on the hills, normally that's reversed for me. It could be that I'm a little "unfresh" after this weekend.

Nutty came along and rode my wheel which always gives some extra motivation (and keeps me from quitting!). I wanna get another of these sessions in this week then another big day this weekend.

Another big day

Today we met at Ballentine for the lake loop. I wanted to do a little extra in case the ride was too easy so I took off at nine to meet them at 10. It was 20 miles...so it sort of forced me to ride hard-ish for an hour. It was pretty nice that early with no traffic. I got to the meet-spot a few minutes early so I was able to grab a drink and some more food.

The ride had a huge turnout...probably due to the 65+ degree weather. And it was NOT an easy ride so I got a good day in. While I didn't really ride at the front that much there was always someone up there banging it out. It was good to meet/talk to those people on that distant planet we call Lexington.

Soooo....the TSS was through the roof today. 251 TSS for the entire day with 184 TSS for the lake loop itself. About 87 miles total in 4:30. A solid day.

Wkend plans

Since it's going to be below 30 degrees at 9am I'm gonna wait to ride in the afternoon on Sat. Sunday is the lake loop with the Harrells boyz at 10am. I'm actually toying with the idea of riding out there to get an extra 20miles in before the ride.

new day year happy tired

What better way to ring in the new year than a killer ride...went out with LL and Karl & did the screaming eagle / congress / chaingang / cricketstore / cabin creek ride. Gotta love a 246 TSS day (I may have my FTP set a little low in WKO+) and 72 miles. A great day.

For the first 2 hrs we just rode hard...threshold, long pulls, nice. The next 2 hrs were basically flogging ourselves against a 17mph head/crosswind with gusts to 30. Had to give the newbie a lesson in echelon's as he was putting us in the gutter every chance he got ;-) The deep wheels did better than I thought they would, just a little squirrelly with the gusts. It's also very nice to have 15 hrs of data storage on the new PT.

I did about the same mileage on Xmas day and in looking at the two files it really shows the difference that riding with great training partners can have on the results...see below.