Slipping

I guess I should start off by saying that this is my 200th blog post. It started in 2009 and has become a great way for me to vent and to help keep me on track.  It's great being able to go back and read the analysis of past races or what I was thinking at certain times in my training and racing history.

Every October we take a trip somewhere for our anniversary and I plan my training around that trip. Most years, I use that week as a divider between one racing season and the next. I stop doing major efforts and start rebuilding my foundation for next year, especially as it gets cooler and windier out.

This year it's a little different in terms of planning because I had started my training for next season back in May because of my long training break in March and April.

The problem now is that I had the double-whammy of being sick when we got back. I spent all of last weekend laying on the couch doing nothing and I worked from home on Monday and barely moved the whole day.

I've been gradually adding training back each day since, starting really easy on Tuesday and doing a double, even if it was a pretty easy one, on Thursday. I still don't feel quite right yet, but at least I'm back on the bike a little.

I'm hoping that in another few days I'll be back to full strength... right in time for the temperatures to get below 50 degrees for my lunch time rides. Have I mentioned that I'm a bit of a wimp in the cold?

It's always hard mentally when there's a break in training. No matter how much I know that my body needs a break and no matter how much I plan for it, the training-addicted part of my brain is always screaming for me not to lose fitness.

I'm sure that almost two weeks off the bike has set my fitness back a little. I'm just hoping that the break pays off in the long run. Just 33 weeks until the state TT next year...

Mental Shift

When I started training again in April after taking a few months off to deal with the new house, renovations, and moving, I just kind of rode around for the first couple of months, trying to get my body used to it all again. When I started training more seriously, my power targets were a lot lower than I was used to, making me feel kind of pathetic over how much fitness I had lost. I could barely hold 225 watts for 20 minutes when I used to be able to do 290 with ease.

In those early weeks, I was struggling a lot. I'd make attacks on rides thinking I still had my old fitness, then I'd get caught and dropped.

Now that I've been training for a while, I've kind of gotten used to the lower numbers but now I'm faced with the opposite problem. I've been aggressively working to rebuild my former fitness, especially in the threshold power and VO2max ranges, and the numbers I'm aiming for on any given workout look huge to me, and it has me questioning my ability to hit them.

Just a couple of months ago, I was aiming for three 10-minute intervals at 220 watts. Now I'm aiming for three 20-minute intervals at 255 watts. It's been a rapid series of increases in those targets and my brain can't keep up.

It's a strange feeling: I'm hitting the numbers so I know that I can do them, but when I see them on paper as a target for that day I find them terrifying and wonder how I will ever finish the day's workout.It definitely gives me more of a sense of pride when I complete the workout, but the level of anxiety leading into it isn't a good thing.

Even stranger is the fact that I've been constantly improving. Almost every week, I'm surpassing the numbers from the previous week. I'm just not used to training this aggressively and trying to keep up with the results.

Each ride acts as a confidence builder, but my fitness is definitely ahead of my confidence right now. I have a long way to go for next season, both in rebuilding my fitness and rebuilding my confidence in that fitness.