Originally Posted by Grotug

So I took 3 days off; no biking at all. Today's Tuesday group ride was a practice for the race on Sept. 15th and the fast guys sent it. I wasn't sure how the ride was going to go and when the pace suddenly picked up I was attacking hard to bridge the gap to the fast guys (since the people I was riding with at that point didn't respond). I soon got dropped on the first set of hilly rollers. I felt decent, and my power was definitely back. It was disappointing to get shelled by the fast men so early in the ride, but encouraging to see good wattage throughout the ride. My HR was typical as well compared to most of my workouts this summer. I didn't take any caffeine for this ride (which wasn't intentional) and I didn't have beet juice either. I had some PBs in the power department, which isn't too surprising since the ride was full gas the whole time once we hit the first hilly rollers. New high average power for any ride: 174 watts (Strava had the average at 188 watts) compared to previous best on a shorter ride of 161 watts. My hour power for this ride was 196 watts, also a personal best (compared to second best of 178 watts).

The ride had some good carrots throughout. After I got dropped by the fast men, I hung on with a guy who was slightly stronger than me for most of the ride before getting dropped near the end of the course at which point some chasers picked me up and we worked together chasing a group in front of us. We were all quite evenly matched, though one guy proved to be a little stronger than the rest of us during the last stretch before the town sprint. It was good that I was picked up by people as strong as me; as such I was gunning at my limit the whole ride. Great fun.

Now the question is what will I do on Thursday and Friday? Tomorrow (Wed.) I will do a recovery ride. Thursday marks the start of the taper. I think Thurs I'll do a route with rolling hills and max 20 miles and pace myself; do what feels good; maybe only one hard effort? (as opposed to two or three?). I think for Friday I will do zone 2 and see how that feels and if I'm feeling good I'll stay in Zone 2 and discipline myself not to get excited... and also keep the ride a bit shorter (probably two hours). I'm afraid if I reduce intensity my lungs are gonna bother me on race day (they bothered me today; my right lung [the one that collapsed when I was 19] was hurting quite a bit while I was holding onto dear life (ie. the wheel in front of me) at one point in the ride. I guess best practice will be to keep up the intensity but have the amount of time at high intensity much less than normal?

I just hope to Betsy I can reach top form for the 15th of September.