The Big Picture Plan

So, I want to be 168 pounds and 16% body fat by Oct 31, so I can hit winter training at a decent point, then get down to 159 pounds and 12% body fat over the winter.... how?

(Before I go any further.... yes, I keep making my goal weight lower!)

I started out by figuring out what I wanted the weight and fitness targets to be.

Starting at 197 pounds in early May and losing 5 pounds per month, that gave me 6 months to lose 30 pounds. Perfect.

The fitness was another story. I haven't been to the gym seriously since 2003 and haven't ridden my bike consistently since 2007. I knew I would have to go through some level of adaptation getting my body ready, then building as much strength and endurance as I could before October.

When I stated my power goal of 1.5 to 1.6 watts / pound (252 to 268 watts at my target weight for October), I kind of pulled it out of thin air. I hadn't looked up any of my old training numbers yet or anything but I knew it would be hard. As it turns out, it's not such a bad target

I'm a huge fan of periodization. It's hard not to be when every major strength and cycling coach on Earth promotes it. For resistance training, Tudor Bompa is really the master. For cycling, Joe Friel and Chris Carmichael are major influences. I've actually been coached by someone one Carmichael's coaching company before (Josh Seldman, who I respect as an amazing coach more than he'll ever know) and studied Bompa's multiple books for years. I've also worked with Joe Wentzell from Breakaway Bikes, a local amazing coach and great guy. I'm a little too broke right now to pay for full coaching, so I developed my own plans.

A lot of this is built on 4-week cycles. Each cycle builds in volume and/or intensity (for both on-the-bike and in-the0-gym workouts) over the first 3 weeks, with the first two being tolerable (with the second being harder than the first) and the third being a true stretch of your ability to recover, bordering on overreaching. By the end of the third week, performance is often noticeably lower from fatigue and depletion of fuels in your body. The fourth week is a recovery week, with reduced volume of training and nothing over moderate intensity. This is when your body recovers from the torture of the last three weeks and adapts to a new higher level of performance. You learn to love the recovery week after a while, but they come with a price: the recovery week usually ends with some sort of performance test to see how you are progressing.

My resistance training starts off with 6 weeks of Anatomical Adaptation training, getting my body used to weight lifting again. After that, I'll go through four 4-week cycles with the following goals/focus points.

1. Develop strength in the muscle I've already got. I've still got the old speedskater thighs, so I've got some muscle that needs to get to work.
2. Build muscular endurance. Taking a weight of about 30 to 35% of my maximum, I'll be doing leg presses and squats for increasingly long times. The body builder idea of "endurance", about 20 to 30 reps, is not even a starting point. I'll be starting with 50 reps, and building to 5 minutes straight of exercise. That's one set, I'll be doing 3 or 4 sets.
   
3. Return to maximum strength. Squeezing a little more performance from the muscle I've already got.
4. Acceleration power development. Take the strength I've got and convert it into rapid acceleration on the bike.

At the same time as those, I'll be doing similar work on the bike, also in 4-week cycles:

1. Build power at Ventilatory and Lactate thresholds
2. Build power at Lactate threshold
3. Build power above Lactate threshold (approx 105%)
4. Build VO2Max power (major efforts, about 3 minutes in duration)

The fun part is that I get to take my time. I have 6 months to get in shape for foundation training. After all this, I don't have a Competition phase, like most people would. I'm doing all this just to get myself to a decent starting point for winter training.

I allowed myself an easy month of recovery and transition to let my mind and body relax (I'll still be training, just at a lower level) before I hit it hard again.

So where am I trying to go? I don't know exactly. I want to get my WRTT time (the 8.3 mile time trial) back down to under 20 minutes. I want to get my 42K time down under 1:05:00. I want to get my old sprint & recovery back. I love time trialing, but I love dropping people in a breakaway even more. Maybe that means I'll be doing a couple crits or maybe that means that I'll just be having fun dueling random cyclists on the road. As long as I'm back in the saddle and riding strong, I'll be happy.

Oh, and as of this morning, I'm 189 pounds and 26.4% body fat. Saturday is my Blood Lactate Test, so I'll find out exactly where my threshold is (I'm guessing 232 watts right now).