Notes from Training

It's that time of year when there's not a lot of exciting things to post. I'm training, I'm working on losing a few pounds, and I'm trying to keep motivated now that it's generally some combination of cold, dark, and wet outside.

 Overall, I'd say that I am well behind schedule for my training for next year.  After vacation, I got sick more than once and it really set me back. I'm back on the bike and making progress, but it's slower going without the nice warm days to get outside.

So, here are a few notes that I've found helpful lately:

1. When starting a new exercise, like say a stair mill, maybe 45 minutes on it is not a great idea. Two days of inactivity due to DOMS is not helpful to reach training goals.
2. Cytomax tends to grow mold very quickly and sometimes I need to use bleach on my bottles to get it out. It's a good idea to make sure all the bleach is out before using that bottle again.
3. Two days on, three days off is not an effective training regimen.
4. Plastic cycling cleats and vinyl floors can be a slippery combination

So yeah, not too much exciting but I'm still working on it!

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.

Well-Rested Performance

After last week's recovery week, my body was ready to show off what it was capable of. And show off it did.

In the last week, I achieved several personal bests for the year:

• Max power: 1181 watts, best since Sept 2012 (best ever was 1330w)
• 5:00 avg: 370 watts, tied for best ever, last set in Aug 2013
• 8:00 avg: 323 watts, best since June 2014 (best ever was 338w)
• 20:00 avg: 267 watts, best since July 2014 (best ever was 309w)
• 1 hr NP: 278 watts, best since Sept 2013 (best ever was 298w)
• 1 hr avg: 245 watts, best since July 2014 (best ever was 261w)

So yeah, I'm definitely seeing signs of progress. I can't sit back and relax because I still have a ton of progress left to make. Not to mention, these are all still on the road bike. I haven't started training on my TT bike yet.

A few particular targets that I am aiming for by next June:

• 5-minute power of 400 watts.
• 20-minute power of 340 watts (about 320 on the TT bike)
• 1-hour power of 320 watts (about 300 on the TT bike).

Seeing this kind of performance gain is encouraging, but I've still got a long way to go!!

The Hardest Week

This week has probably been the most difficult that I've done in a while, but not in the way you might think. My daily workout schedule said more or less the same thing every day:

Go easy. Yes, EASY. That means no sprints, no intervals, and no monster climbs.

One problem: like most cyclists, I really don't know how to do that!

I took Monday off the bike completely and then rode an hour or so at a low to moderate pace every day.

On the trainer, it's pretty boring. You just pedal along without much resistance. It's days like that where I pay more attention to what I'm watching and have faster music on the iPod to keep me going.  On Thursday and Friday, I did a couple of short opener efforts to start getting my plasma volume back up. Decrease in plasma volume is why you feel so terrible after several days off the bike and a little intensity helps maintain it.

I also did a couple lunch-time rides this week and it took everything I had to let the other guys attack on climbs and pull away from me on flat roads when they decided to up the pace.

In terms of training, last Sunday I reached a monstrous CTL of 111.5 and an ATL of 136.3, giving me a TSB of -24.8, and I'd been seeing numbers like that most of the previous week. In less technical terms, my body really needed a break.

Recovery weeks are also hard because of how my body reacts. When training hard, the body releases endorphins to suppress the pain. After a few easy days, the endorphins are gone and you feel every bit of how tired you actually are. Small climbs that I usually rocket over had me getting out of the saddle and wincing at the feeling in my legs.

Psychologically, it was really hard to take the break. Aside from not chasing my friends, it also means that every day I'm worried about losing fitness and gaining weight. I had to watch everything I ate so that I wouldn't balloon in size. Most weeks, I burn between 7500 and 8000 calories on the bike. This week, I burned about 5000.

As of this morning, my Performance Manager values are CTL 103.1, ATL  87.8, and TSB  +5.5. Much better.

My weight went up just a hair, from 174.6 to 174.7. Not bad.

Now that my body is better rested, it's time to get back to training!

The Ragged Edge

I'm just coming to the end of a slightly different training cycle, and I'm beat to hell.

My current cycle is 5 weeks instead of the usual 4, which works out a little better with my upcoming plans for vacation and the winter holidays. The downside of that is that I'm that much more beat up.

Most of my structured workouts are done at 5:30 in the morning on a CompuTrainer, so it's indoors, in the dark, and without much scenery. It takes a lot of motivation just to get up and do it. Add to that the compounding fatigue of several weeks of progressively harder training and it's downright miraculous that I can do it.

Amazingly, even though I feel terrible, I am still able to hit all my power targets.

Any day that has intervals scheduled (such as 2x20:00, 4x15:00, 4x8:00, etc.) has a 5-watt power range that goes with them. For example, the 2x20:00 workout I did on Tuesday was supposed to be between 235 and 240 watt average. I was able to do 236 and 246 for them.

Any time I'm doing intervals, I have a habit of going absolutely as hard as I can on the last one, regardless of the target. With something like a 20-minute interval, I'll usually aim for the original target for the first 15 minutes or so and then light it up the last 5 minutes.

Going into my first recovery week in my training campaign for next year, I'm more or less on-target. My weight is down to 174.6 and my 20-minute power is up to 260. Just 10.6 pounds and 70 watts in 9 more months :-)

I've got a hard day today and a long day tomorrow, and then it's 5 days easy. I can't wait!!

Not as specific as you might think

I've been talking a lot about watts/kilogram lately and thought I'd define it a bit better.

Watts/kilogram is really most important when you're dealing with climbing on the bike It's what makes riders like Nairo Quintana so strong in the mountains: tiny little guys with large power outputs relative to their body weight. Since the State TT has a fair amount of climbing, it's a concern for someone like me who will never be that small. I need to be able to climb pretty quickly.

Wattage is the amount of force that I can put into the pedals for any given period of time (in my case, the goal is 58 minutes). Most of my training is focused on increasing the amount of power that I can sustain for an hour (it's an hour race, so it seemed like the way to go!)

As I mentioned last week, I'm trying to lose just a little weight. There is such a thing as losing too much weight. If I dropped from my current 175 pounds to 140 pounds (which many of my competitors are), I would have to lose significant muscle mass, which would probably cause my power output to drop (assuming that I could do it at all). I was 164 pounds in my highly successful 2013 season and I'm trying to get back to that.

To go fast on flat roads, I need a high wattage. To go fast on climbs, I need both a high wattage and a low body weight.

Both numbers have time limits on them. You can only get so much fitter and only lose so much weight in any given amount of time (especially if you're trying not to lose performance).

So I set this target of 4 watts/kilogram, but there are lots of ways to get there. Below is a chart with various weights, their kilogram conversions, and how many watts I would need to maintain to get 4 watts/kilogram. You'll see right away that "4 w/kg" is not a very specific target on its own:

Pounds	KGs	watts
175	79.5	319
174	79.1	317
173	78.6	315
172	78.2	314
171	77.7	312
170	77.3	310
169	76.8	308
168	76.4	306
167	75.9	304
166	75.5	303
165	75.0	301
164	74.5	299
163	74.1	297
162	73.6	295
161	73.2	293
160	72.7	292
159	72.3	290
158	71.8	288

So I have some choices. I was aiming for 164 pounds and 300 watts. I could also aim to gain more wattage (not very likely) and not lose as much weight or lose more weight so I don't have to put out as much power (which could be a possibility if I'm behind schedule on gaining power).

Like many things in training, there's more than one way to get there.

Of course, watts/kg isn't the only aspect of time trailing, but this far out it's the one that I'm most focused on.

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!