The Denominator

Last week I talked about my power target for next summer, which is the "watts" part of "watts per kilogram." This week, it's the weight target (which cyclists love to track in kilograms, but I'll keep it in pounds for this post).

I'd hate to say that the weight target will be easier because that almost invites disaster, but I do feel that the weight I need to lose to meet the goal is less challenging than hitting the power target.

I'm currently at 175.4... but let's talk about how I get that number first.

Everyone worries about how much more they weight after a huge meal at night or about being dehydrating after a massive day of riding. I let it all average out.

I weigh myself first thing in the morning, right after I go to the bathroom. I have a Tanita body fat monitor, so I log weight and body fat every day into a spreadsheet. I have a formula in the spreadsheet that averages all the numbers together every week, giving me a 7-day average of weight and body fat.

I use those averages for everything: that's what I track to see how I'm progressing in weight loss, that's what I put into WKO to get my watt/kilogram numbers, and that's how I keep an eye on my body composition to make sure my body fat is dropping (hopefully I'm not losing lean mass).

It's a little crazy but it takes all the little daily variations out of the discussion and it gets me in the habit of logging every single day and not saying "oh, I don't like today's number so I won't log it."

It also avoids the weirdness around weighing in once a week. If you had a big salty dinner with lots to drink the night before, that one day's number will be high and it's just human nature to feel like a failure and either try to figure out what went wrong or just feel demotivated... when the number isn't correct anyway. Getting an average smooths all that out and lets you see the trend, not just one day's hiccup.

So, with all that said, my current weight is 175.4 for the week. My goal for the race in June is to be 164.0 pounds (or lower). Losing 11.3 pounds in 10 months shouldn't be a problem, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't take it seriously.

With my rather massive requirements to increase my power output, I can't let my body get into a state of major calorie deficit. I have to take the weight loss slowly so I don't sabotage the power gains.

Ideally, I will lose 2 to 3 pounds a month for the next 4 months. If I can lose 8 to 10 pounds in those 4 months, I will call that a success. That would put me around 165 to 168 pounds by the start of 2016, leaving me between 1 and 4 pounds to lose over the following 5 months. More importantly, it gives me 5 months where I can focus solely on power gains and not worry about weight loss.


With only 11 pounds to lose in 10 months, it's easy to blow it off and worry about it later, but worrying about it later is a good way to not meet a goal!

Planning

Now that I've got a few solid goals, the real planning can begin.

Of course, right off the bat there was a bit of a twist: it sound like the PA State TT will be 5 or 6 weeks earlier than I'd expected next year, so I'll lose a fair bit of time to train. That makes it all a little tighter.

While I'm tracking a lot of data for my fitness, there are three that I'll be watching the closest: my best 5 minute, 8 minute, 20 minute power numbers. Those numbers might sound like short durations when I'm aiming for a 60-minute race, but they are efforts that I will be routinely doing and they will give me targets for upcoming months: whatever I can do for 5 minutes now, I'll be trying to hold for 8 minutes later; whatever I can do for 8 minutes now, I'll be trying to hold for 20 minutes later.

While the best 60-minute power is used as the functional threshold, it's pretty rare to actually do 60-minute maximum efforts, so luckily WKO4 does a good job estimating what that would be based on all my other training data.

Based on my latest numbers, my functional threshold (using the road bike) is up to 240 watts. In order to have 300 watts on the TT bike, I'll need to be around 320 on the road bike (which is really, seriously fast).

That means that I need to gain 80 watts in 43 weeks, which comes out to a gain of about 1.8 watts per week or 7.4 watts per month. For comparison, I've gained 20 watts in the 3 months so I'm a tiny bit behind schedule. Now keep in mind that fitness is rarely that linear. It's most likely that I will make smaller gains some months and larger gains in other.

Still, 7 watts a month for 10 months are huge gains, but keep in mind that my previous best was 290, so a large chunk of my progress will be just regaining my fitness from the last two years. Hunter and I expect that I should be able to regain that by the beginning of next year. The next 30 watts after that will be the ones that take a lot more work and will have a lot more time crunch since I'll be trying to still gain when I do my first few races next year.

Now that the state TT is moved up on the calendar, I'll be trying to gain fitness right up until the last possible minute before I start recovering for the race.

Calling my shots

With this season pretty much over and no races in it, I'm looking at the 2016 season and picking a few goals.

In the past, I've gotten the best results by having a single performance goal and then picking events that help test me along the way. In 2013, it was a sub-hour 40K. I wasn't picky about the course or the conditions. I just wanted the time.

Next year, it will be something similar. The goals are very performance-oriented and have a few events to see if I'm reaching them:

1. Achieve a functional threshold power (FTP) of 300 watts on the time trial bike.
2. Achieve a body weight of 164 or less.

Together, these will give me an FTP of 4 w/kg.

To put that in perspective, my best FTP on the time trial bike was 260, so getting to 300 is a hell of a jump.

The events I plan to use for testing:

1. PA State Time Trial (like you didn't know that one was coming) in late July. 24.8 (40K) miles of rolling/hilly terrain.
2. Philly Time Trial in early June. 8.2 miles of mostly flat, smooth roads.
3. Any mix of New Jersey series time trials. I'll probably do ones that have nice weather that weekend so I'm not making myself miserable early in the season. Cape May and Somerset are ones where I've been on the podium before but never won. I could do the NJ State TT as well just to get in some practice at the same 40K distance.

If my calculations are right, the performance numbers above should give me a time at the PA State Time trial of around 58:00, which in 2015 would have been a winning time. 

Time to get to work!