Next week marks the end of the "off season," when I am focused mostly on building fitness for the coming racing season and when most of my training is planned to be on the trainer. After that, racing season begins and I will see the results of all this work. The first race is just 3 weeks away!
In November, on a test day when I was well-rested, I set all all-time best for myself: 20 minutes at 282 watts. It was an amazing result for me and I was thrilled beyond words.
I use the results from the 20-minute power test to give me targets for the workouts that I do the month after the test, using some percentage of that number to determine how hard I am trying to go each workout. The next month I would test again, get a new number, and then train at some percentage of that new higher number.
For workouts that were focused on spending as much time at threshold as I could, I would use 90% of the test power. First it would be 2 intervals of 12 minutes (24 minutes). Then 2 of 15 (30 minutes). Then 2 of 18 (36 minutes). Then 2 of 20 (40 minutes). Then 3x15 (45 minutes). Between each interval, I would pedal easily for about half the length of the work (10 minutes easy between 20 minute intervals). All of it was aimed at helping me reach 60 minutes at threshold, roughly the effort of doing a 40K time trial.
At the same time, I was doing VO2 max workouts to help increase my body's ability to process oxygen and, hopefully, increase my ability for future threshold gains. Those intervals, which were done around 103% of the test power, were between 3 and 8 minutes each. On weekdays when I only had an hour, I did a set number of intervals that fit into an hour workout. On weekends, when I had more time, I would do them until the average power for an interval dropped by 5% below target.
My normal training cycle is three weeks of gradually increasing difficulty and then one week of very easy training to rest up and let my body fully adapt to the training. For as hard as I was training this winter, I grew to love my recovery weeks.
Yesterday was the last day of the third week of this cycle, so I was pretty tried from three weeks of successively harder training. That did not prevent me from doing a record-setting workout: I did 3 intervals of 20 minutes, with averages of 284, 287, 290 watts.
That's three intervals in a row with each one being better than my "all time best" from November.
Back in the fall, I mentioned that I was trying something new, that went against traditional winter training. I never imagined hitting numbers like this and now I do it almost every day. I think I can consider my off-season training program a success!
I have to take a moment thank Hunter Allen, without whom I don't believe I could have done this. Hunter (along with Andy Coggan) wrote the definitive book on training with power. His work gave me the tools to push beyond every boundary I have ever known. His support on Facebook inspired me to push just that little bit harder,
