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.
