The Rapid Climb

As I've mentioned, I've struggled this year with my motivation. I have not been racing and I just started getting back onto the bike and training for real.

Over the last four weeks, I've increased my weekly training volume from 4 hours a week to 11 hours a week. For the power geeks, that mean increasing my CTL (chronic training load) from 45 to 65. It's been a lot of work and I'm completely exhausted, but I'm starting to see signs of fitness again.

Now that I'm surviving higher volume, I'm going to start increasing the intensity of my workouts so I can build up some speed.

I'm looking to do all this for two reasons:

• to lose weight
• to do well in a time trial

Basically, the two goals I started out with at the beginning of the year. I'm not quite at the performance level that I'd hoped, but I'm still going to pursue them.

I'm looking at a couple of races that I did last year, the Deep Blue Time Trial (11 miles, Sept 2) and the Ernie Simpson Memorial Time Trial (12.4 miles, Sept 9). I figure at least that way I can say that I raced this year.

I'm already starting to think about what I can do for next year. The fact is, no matter how much I train, I'm better as a sprinter than a time trialist. I can't change my genetics. At the same time, I don't like the insanity of crit races. I'm trying to figure out what type of racing might be good for me that is a little less crazy but still puts my sprint tendencies to work.