procrit

Were they hooked or hookless? This will be on a set of hookless rims... not sure if that really matters though.

TMonk

they were hooked. I hear hookless helps w that. let us know how it goes.

procrit

After four flats in the last six weeks (one piece of glass and three were small wire bristles) I'm willing to give tubeless a try to see if that doesn't reduce the number of flats. I'm not sure where I'm picking them up, but clearly something was dropped on my normal training roads recently as I used to only get flats 3-4x a year.

Hermes

I have been replacing old 12 year + wheels with new ones from our team sponsor. The wheels are tubeless ready but I have not tried tubeless yet. I use the latex tubes and GP 5000 tires. I do not get a many flats.

Back at Carson track on Tuesday for motor led 4 set effort. We space out 5 to 10 meters apart and the motor led us around for a roll up start lap and leading to 4 laps at race pace. Fun workout and I had great legs. Will be there tonight for another session.

himespau 

I have some rims coming to me from Light Bicycle (a 66 and 88 mm set to be laced to DT 180/240 hubs, and a 44 mm set to be laced to DT 240 hubs). I decided to make them all without the nipple access holes even though it's more of a pain to lace them so I could could tubeless in the future if I want. Have a stock of nice old tires (tubed) to go through first. Don't want to let those veloflex masters and the like get any older before using them and it seems a wasted to get rid of them without using them just because I can go tubeless. Flats aren't really an issue, but most of my riding these days is on the trainer - building these because I got money to replace the wheels that got wrecked when I got hit, so I'm doing it even though they won't see as much ride time as my other wheels have in the past.

TMonk

gonna do the stupid Fiesta Island "World Champs" ride this evening. Lots of egos, yelling, not a whole lot of caliber in the legs. Well, mot of the time at least. Worst part is the cars - it's 10x short laps on Fiesta Island, and I've never done the ride where it's been completely uninterrupted by cars. It makes it hard for a guy like me to split the field or shed guys off the back if we're having to slow down for cars. And then some riders will try to wiggle ahead and squeeze around the cars (instead of waiting....) when it is overtly unsafe for the whole field to do so.... so stupid.

what do I get out of it? well, I get to chat and connect with some of the other racers in the community. and, if the cars permit, stretch it out a bit. there are just so many other better events to do around here on Thursdays with actual practice race series, MTB races, track workouts. hell, even zwift. But I will go tonite.

procrit

I've been on the struggle bus a bit since June, and this past week I hit a new low. TSS has been dropping, some due to inability to train from fatigue, some from vacation, but I've been having a lot of bad days and the few good days I've had I've been well off the mark power wise. I hired a coach in June, and I'm giving as much feedback as I can, explained what I've tried, what seems to work and what doesn't, but some of the things I'm being prescribed make zero sense to me. I've gotten weaker and I'm failing workouts left and right, and I've had multiple days lately where I just don't even want to ride or even get out of bed. Not where I wanted to be headed into the fall with some good races coming up, which is why I hired a coach to start with. =/

TMonk

bummer procrit. Are you able to keep yourself healthy off the bike with diet, sleep, stress etc? Have you ruled out any medical problems?

Hermes

procrit Have you had a CBC blood test lately? Check your hematocrit. Also, coaches are great for training protocols, advice, skills and etc. Typically, they are not trained in nutrition and recovery. You train hard and that puts you body in a catabolic state. The question is what resources do you provide your body to allow it to rebuild when it switches to an anabolic state? If you train hard, you need to think feed forward versus feedback. You need adequate, constant nutrition circulating so that once you stop training, all the resources your body needs is already present to rebuild and recover. Waiting until you're tired or hungry is too late - feedback is too slow and you get behind the curve.

Hermes

What has changed?

procrit

For sure I had some good days / weeks in there but I don’t think I highlighted all of the struggles I had either. I had several “off” weeks where I couldn’t ride due to fatigue, but within 7-10 days of rest I’d come back and do well for a bit, only to work myself into a hole very quickly. The big difference for me was doing these prescribed HIIT intervals, beyond failure. Like if target is 550+ watts, I would keep doing them until I could only hold 250-300. Complete exhaustion. I seemed to not handle those well at all, and it would cook me for days.

TMonk

It sounds like you might need more optimized nutrition and recovery, as Hermes suggested above. Are you paying much attention to that? One thing I started doing on recently was eating more on rides - it smooths out my overall caloric demand and energy a bit better throughout the day.

TMonk

Over here, I'm just in "have fun" mode, which means some combination of group rides and zwift events during the week, and one long ride on the weekend, usually surrounding my club's weekend A ride, about 10-12 hrs on average. It's mentally refreshing to be flexible and not following a strict schedule. I might pepper in a VO2 workout in the next couple of weeks, to see how the legs respond. That seemed to be a recipe for success for me/week this year.

Gonna shoot for 6 hours on Labor Day, last time I might ride that far in a long time, given it is within 2 weeks of our daughter's due date. I'm considering doing it on zwift as some sort of rite of passage to focusing on doing most of my weekday riding inside.... My wife thinks I should go outside, since it will be my last chance to ride that far outdoors for a while. Maybe she's right. IDK.

Hermes

procrit I get prescribed workouts from my coach for max power efforts. For all intents and purposes, I train like a pro and he is a pro/olympic coach. He lets the max part up to me but I know the closer to max I get the more effective the workout.

But I have to live to fight another day and I have to look at the entire week of workouts and think about how to tackle each one with the correct power, bike, course and timing of the workout. That is up to me. When I go to the track and meet with him, he prescribes the workout for the day and brings out the stop watch. If I get the on my own power levels and workouts correct then the track sessions go better.

My max power from MMPC is 40 second power is 630 watts during a 500 meter race with a full power standing start. I recently did 40 second max power hill climb efforts. So what power should I use to meet the requirement for max power? 630 watts? If I did that, I would be pretty cooked and lucky to hit 300 on the final effort. And my muscles would be totally shredded needing lots of repair that would take time and resources. So as a roadie, I hit about 450-470 watts for the workout. I was tired at the end but not crippled.

When I did sprint training. we would have done 10 second flying efforts shooting for 630 watts or more but then resting 20 minutes doing 4 efforts. That would be pretty tiring but with the 20 minute RBI and short duration, doable.

I continue to kill my workouts with my new nutrition program. Nutrition is where the action is for power and recovery.

topflightpro

I focus on sprinting, so I do a lot of short, max power efforts. For any efforts under 60, I have no power targets - I go as hard as I can.

hubcyclist

did alpe du zwift today, attempting to go as hard as i could. it's been humid lately and even though my basement is finished, it does not have climate control, so it's been 81 degrees and high humidity. started off feeling good but didn't take too long for the sweat to by flying all over the place, even with 4 fans. i dialed it back to tempo for a few mins and then back to threshold, ended up with my all time best time of 46:46 and 297w, the first 25mins were at 305w, which is my current threshold. looking forward to giving this another try once the weather cools and humidity reduces, I definitely have a better effort in me

TMonk

Z race today, 4 laps on Innsbrucking course. There were only two riders (lol). I dropped the other rider the first time up Leg Snapper, then proceeded to solo for the rest of the race. 54 minutes total at ~3.8. I did try to surge up Leg Snapper and once or twice more per lap to try and simulate a race level effort.

After, I went to Watopia to try and grab Titan's Reverse as a "night cap" to my ride. It's a VO2 length climb. A hard, but repeatable effort for me is in the 4:20 - 4:30 range. A minute or two in, the leaderboard revealed that the KOM was at 4:19. I think I had that in the legs, but not in my mind, so I "cruised" it at 5.0 for a 4:32 effort. NBD.

TMonk

more Z this morning, just an hour on the TT bike. I like to do 30 min at high z2, in then a 10-15 min at sweet spot. So pretty light, not a hard workout by any means, just trying to keep my muscles used to the position.

I also watched some U23 XCO cup race. Well, "watch" is a generous term, since I can't see too far passed my hands when I'm in position.

It's kind of good practice though, like I'll look up every so often if the announcers say something exciting, then settle back in with my neck first. It's good feedback in that I am looking for a specific neck sensation when I know I'm nicely turtled. That may be a harder nuance to notice when going hard, but still I'm sure it helps somewhat. Good practice for looking up at road obstacles, turns, features etc when actually time trialing.

hubcyclist

I usually don't do a lot of retrospective review of data, I'm typically focused on just doing the next workout, but I've been hitting PR's lately and was curious how it compared to 2021, when TR introduced adaptive training and I followed an entire base-build-specialty cycle with just about 100% compliance. At the time, I appreciated that I didn't feel like anything I was assigned was beyond my capabilities but at the end of it all felt a bit underwhelmed, my FTP hadn't shifted and I didn't have any other major shifts in my power curve. I actually had a pretty disappointing CX season that year too and really didn't sense I was any fitter. In 2022 I started to do my own thing but starting last fall into this year I feel like I've really come into my own with self coaching, and the differences in my power curve prove it to me. Not shown is my 3min power, in 2021 my best was 344 and yesterday I did my all time best of 383. I was all in with TR for a number of years but it became clear I was plateaued with their approach, it's fun to be able to squeeze a little more out of myself

hubcyclist

went down a mini rabbit hole with the idea of figuring out AeT/VT1, I didn't know head units could log HRV, so I enabled that on my garmin yesterday, the initial goal was just to share it with a coach I know who is working on this in WKO, but I found someone made a python chart for golden cheetah which estimates this. Based on my one ride yesterday it estimated my AeT is 129bpm/223w, which is actually quite close to where I think it is. I do a lot of my moderate riding in the 220-230 range and under 130bpm, so it's a pretty reasonable ballpark. I'm not really too hung up on staying below AeT, depends on how I'm feeling. But I am curious to see how this develops once I get more data in, I suspect it may be closer to 230, but we'll see!

TMonk

Interesting concept. I had never looked that up (AeT). Although I do put in some 4-6 hour rides from time to time, I suspect that my AeT isn't all that high (relative to my FTP), since I don't do much of that riding (or much riding at all) in z3 or low SST. I spend a lot of time at z2 and focused intervals in z4 and Vo2 zone (z5+), but little to anything in between.

It will be interesting to see how the (imminent) arrival of our daughter may change that. I will probably do less z2 and overall hours and make up some of that with more time in the sweet spot, which seems to be common in "time crunched" plans. This may increase my AeT/LT ratio, even if LT goes down a little bit. I'll still do a VO2 block before big races since they are time efficient and seem to work well on me.

procrit

So I've been focusing hard on nutrition, sleep, and recovery in general, and managed to get 40 hours of training in September. Nothing structured over z4/z5 unless it happened on a group ride, with quite a bit of z1/z2.I also limited myself with the "hard" efforts, never letting myself dig too deep, never going to failure. I had "bad" legs one day out of twenty, so consistency with the workouts was very good. Today I decided to do an FTP test and I managed 318w for 20' with somewhat tired legs, right at the highest I've been over the last few years. I'm finding that less is more for me, and training so hard that it ruins my sleep quality or ability to train the following days is counterproductive. I also just think I have lower work capacity and recoverability than most, and likely just still "out of shape" more than I want to admit, so I likely have some room to grow as long as I can keep from over-doing it. I'm still stuck at 170lb, but I'm also a bit nervous to cut calories back at the moment as I want to keep pushing my power & endurance in general up first.

TMonk

yeah trying to lose weight and gain fitness at the same time is very difficult and not advised. could be good to cut the intensity and decrease volume a bit if you're interested in longer term fitness gains, then start adding some z2 back. do you want to rac in 2024? Now could be a good time for a reset.

TMonk

Over here, I remain confused. Like, I'm for sure low on overall training load and sleep since our child was born (both quantity and quality), but somehow I'm still hitting objectively solid power numbers on the trainer, for me at least. I think it's bc I have this bank of fitness and no fatigue. We'll see how long this lasts.

topflightpro

That's new dad power.

Pretty much all my friends have had fantastic results right after having a kid. (In fact, I once joked with my wife that we should have a kid just so I could get the new dad power.)