revchuck 

Have they taken the edge off the drought?

furiousferret

Not really, we need a good snow pack in Big Bear / Arrowhead to really make a positive effect. Snow is really what makes a big difference, and the rain (at least here) just goes out to the ocean.

mike868y

recovery day. commute+riding around finding the place where i'm taking the GRE on thursday.

echappist

good luck with the test

mattm

1.5 hours after work, almost-tempo pace.

Trying to keep rpms around 95. I don't really know why but I was.

mike868y

woke up and ate my pre-ride breakfast only to realize there's some rain rolling in. dammit. hopefully i'll get a ride in this evening after work.

edit: ended up driving to work because i didn't feel like riding in the rain. legs are really sore from the weekend still. probably won't ride today at all.

thanks! really just want it to be over at this point. life's basically been a revolving door of ride, work, study, repeat for the past few months.

caloso

ZCI's. Managed to hit the average wattage target on all of them, but on the 5th and 6th one the graph looks like a rollercoaster.

scheibo

Another "VO2sday", this time something a little different with 3x 8x(40s "on", 20s "off") w/ the "on" supposed to be 130-140%. Did it going up a hill so my 20s "off" was really 20s at "minimum power required to stay upright" which in some cases was close ~80% = I was closer to 120-130% range power wise on the "on" portion. I purposely lowballed the volume because I had never done this workout type before and didn't know what to expect - I think I could have probably done another set of 8 (or done 3x10). That would have been more in line with my past VO2 work because I seem like I'm only good for about 20 minutes of work right now (hopefully next season I'll be good for 25-30 minutes).

Ygduf

save yourself 2 years and find a place to do your work on the flats. it'll translate to hills, while work on hills does not always translate well.

TheKillerPenguin

1.5hrs straight chillin

dz_nuzz

Does not compute.

scheibo

Why would I work on things that I'm bad at when I can instead work on things I'm already good at???

There are a couple loops near work which are flat (that Markelz uses - Garcia/Shoreline), but there's not really much variety. I like that I can find 5-8 different 4-6" hills that are within a 35" radius. It seems like in the only flat places around here are full of stoplights and cars. The Alpine/Portola loop is OK, but its really more false up/down than flat, which makes isopower really difficult (but maybe thats also something I should work on - hitting high power on a false downhill?).

I'm not *super* opposed to flat work (my first year cycling was through pancake-flat farmland), its just that I'm not in love with the options for workout locations (nor do I love the fact that my power magically dips 10%+ ). I'll do VO2s on the flat loop near work next week, but I can't see doing them on the flats every week.

globecanvas

Went for a spin with the wife, intending to do 45 minutes of tempo afterwards. 5 minutes in, she got a blowout, something very sharp punctured the tire. Just before the ride she removed the spare tube from her seat bag because she doesn't carry a pump and I told her there's no point having a tube without a pump. I rode home and got a tube. Booted the tire, changed the tube, used a CO2, but the tube didn't hold air, because I had put the old tube right back in. Put in the new tube. Used another CO2, but the tube didn't hold air, because the spare also had a hole in it. Walked a short distance to the rail trail cafe, which is closed for the season, but our friend who runs it happened to be there cleaning things up. She had a tube and a floor pump. Changed the tube again. Resumed the ride. At the precise spot where the first tire blew, she got another blowout, almost certainly running over the same sharp whatever it was. Shuffled around in the leaves for a while trying to find this evil sharp thing, no luck. I gave her my bike and rode her stupid bike home at about 2 mph on the rear rim, feeling like a total ass in full kit, shaved legs, bike shoes on a beat up 40 lb hybrid with toe clips and a flat rear tire. Then it started to rain.

caloso

I'm sorry, I actually laughed out loud when I got to the final sentence. I laugh because I have been there.

hubcyclist

Go tell that to the experts on the training forum lol https://www.bikeforums.net/training-n...ain-flats.html

hubcyclist

90mins on zwift z2, it's on to next season now and hopefully becoming less mediocre!

Ygduf

let them figure it out the hard way, like I did.

but, think about it. if you can make a theoretical 300w threshold for 1 hour on the flats, you sure as **** can do it easily on a long climb. If your threshold is 300w on a long climb, making that power on the flats will be hard. So, improve your flats to 300+X and when you go to climb, 300+X will feel easy.

That, at least, is my direct experience over the last couple seasons. If someone finds it mentally difficult to maintain power in the face of a long climb, they surely find it difficult to hold power in the face of an indefinitely long flat without the hill to push on.

hubcyclist

I definitely find it easier in my limited experience to do 300 on hills vs 300 on flattish terrain or the trainer, so I'm totally with you there

caloso

My experience too.

Ygduf

I still can get nowhere near where I am on the hills on the flats. 20min of 425 or so for hills, 380ish for flats. But, that's about 30w++ on the flats this year, and without climbing an inch of pure climbing, my climbing threshold went up about 20w.

scheibo

Hmm, I was ~310 up a mountain for an hour in August and 301 for 25 min at BTC (so say ~280-285 for an hour on the flat). For you it seems to be around 10% difference as well, which is brings up the question of how you set your FTP for the PMC (for individual workouts it would seem to make sense to just target "flat power" on the flats and climbing power up hills, but for tracking TSS/TSB there is a pretty noticeable difference)?

I'm willing to believe flat power translates to climbing more so than climbing power translates to the flat, but right now I justwant to climb hills fast, so I feel the specificity won't hurt . Come February I'll probably be more willing to deal with a boring flat loop.

furiousferret

Out here we obsess about climbing a bit too much. I was talking to a teammate about it and our team rides are ineffective to an extent because we all slog at 200w on the flats. Its a group ride but once we hit that categorized climb its a race, so no one wants to burn matches on the flats. At the end of the day though, it just doesn't replicate racing.

For me, I miss the slight nuances of putting out watts in the flats. Adjusting for the slight tailwind or decline can be tricky, and sometimes I'll look at the garmin and I'm down -100w without even noticing. Maybe its just me. Maybe its akin to when Ron Burgundy was blind and he couldn't taste or feel things either.

Hermes

The wang is strong with these two.

gsteinb

I reckon that's fairly typical. I recall my rides from twenty years ago going to same way. 5 or 6 hard climbs all out, and the rest kinda social.

shovelhd

Same here, for half the time. I had a two week layoff due to some health issues. I finally got the smart trainer set up and calibrated alongside the power meter. Worked as advertised.