Pursuit is a very interesting discipline. It requires a standing start in a gear that you will use for the entire race, CdA is very important metric and the event uses all three human energy systems, ATP - PC, glycolytic and aerobic. It is approximately 55% aerobic and 45% anaerobic with a standing start. One tooth difference in the chainring makes a difference.

I do not think road intervals such as 3' 4' or 5' on a road bike comes close to doing a pursuit. One gets an insane amount of rest on a road bike in a short TT or interval on the road versus a fixed gear on the 250 meter track. For an elite to be competitive in the 4k pursuit, one needs 4:30 to 5 minute power at 120 rpm. There are no micro rests at all on the track. The cadence can be lowered by choosing a bigger gear but then the start is harder and a bigger gear can load up the legs for the last 500 meters. If there is a golf equivalent, it would be having a perfect swing and the ability to make 65 diverse shots in a row without an error. In a 20km TT, you get Mulligans.

The first time I did pursuit, I was not sure that I ever wanted to do another one as I coughed for 24 hours. Pursuit kills ones lungs because one is gasping for air during the end of the race as the O2 is being drained from your blood at the high cadence and your legs are on fire. Many track racers suck on inhalers due to the impact on the lungs.

Over time, racers get good at handling the sensations and optimizing lap times, the start, gearing and training protocol and riding the perfect lap. It is much more complicated than being good at a 4 to 5 minute interval on the road. However, having a great road interval on a TT bike is a tremendous asset in pursuit.

I think you would be superb at pursuit.

Road attacks workout today. Hit it for 1min Z6 then hold upper Z4 lower Z5 (8min power) for 4min. Do this 4x with 5min rest.

Owwwwie.

I'm kind of in a weird spot where last week was endurance week at the end of sweet spot base and next week I'm traveling so didn't want to go whole hog into a phase just to have it interrupted, so I've done some vo2 workouts. Tuesday was 18x1min @ 120%, very doable (followed by 60min z2). Today was going to be 12x1.5min @ 120% Cut myself off at 9 and did another 60mins z2, slightly less doable lol. Not sure how helpful just two workouts will be, but it was "nice" to change the training stimulus a little. I can't imagine doing 120% for 2 or 3 mins lol

Overheard after a prolog:

"It sounds like a TB ward around here!"

I'm at 20.5 for the week with another 5 on the plate today, all trainer. Because I hate myself. Most of it has been quite mellow endurance focusing on aerobic stuff and fat utilization (we'll pretend that's a thing), though I started out the week with some breakaway type efforts. Assuming I do the full 5 today it'll be my largest week ever, and I'm intending to do another couple of 5hr days on monday and tuesday to try and get in 30hrs over a rolling 7 day period. I really don't feel bad physically, it's more mentally taxing than anything. Lots and lots of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

If I can stomach it I'm going to extend the ultra high volume stuff through next weekend, take a short recovery period, and transition into high intensity work, as that should leave me about a month out from the beginning of race season.

bonkers!

Looks like some better weather coming so hopefully can be outside for at least part of next week...

I did some Strava stalking last summer and never made it out to this climb. It looked like it'd be low-hanging fruit due to the low-ish power the leader had put out (296W). He's a friend of mine and a national champion CX racer, so I figured he just hadn't given it the stick (he was also dealing with some health stuff, so now I feel bad). Turns out, it's the stair steppiest of stair-stepping climbs, so my plan of "just hold 360" turned into "400/300/400/300/400/300 etc." Power started dropping near the top because I could swear I was cresting the top at least 4 different times, and I'm sure anyone could guess where those 4 times were from the graph.

Lol @ this data

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...e2df42cb0c.jpg

I am now in a skinny down phase which means eat less, ride more less gym. Last week was a bigger road week for me with most of the time pretty high quality endurance work.

9:29:15 Hours
142.3mi
Load: 433

any special tricks for this kind of trainer volume? This seems like insanity to me to do rides that long on the trainer.

^^^^
Deal with the Devil.

Smart trainer/Zwift combo and a lot of TV. I have also had a bunch of annoying health issues and injuries the past few off seasons and this year I have not, so I'm embracing the motivation.

25.5 last week, 19.8k kj. I took yesterday off because I under ate and it ****ed my sleep up. Probably will get in 20-23hrs this week so will throw in some extra tempo or sweet spot.

We are catching a weather break right now, so I brought everything to the office to ride straight off the desk. It works out well, as there is only so much daylight, but my office is also right at the foothills of the Cascade mountain range. The climbs are longer and more consistent in grade than the coast range hills.

It's bittersweet to have fitness. Being fast is fun, but topography becomes a challenge for the (outdoor) workouts. I've got 2 x 15 threshold today, and that means I need a somewhat-steep climb at least 3 miles long, or a less-steep climb about 5 miles long. The ability to drop down into other valleys is a bonus to keep things fresh, as repeating the same hill over and over can get boring. Everything else in my area is rolling hills, which makes holding consistent power an absolute nightmare. I'm either in my 36 pushing up the stoss or spinning out my 53x11 down the lee side. Too much shifting to keep the power on.

Did the 1:1 at lunch again today at 400w on and 140w off. Did the first set for 5 reps, second set for a new PB of 7 reps. 12min total at 400w within 30min workout and 9min within 20min time.

Toasty. Don't yak on the gym carpet, not on the carpet, ok..........good job.

I think the weeknight crit series with my teammate might be pretty fun this spring. :D

Also, did a 3hr team ride Sunday. We did some fast rotation then ended with the most crap-tastic cat 4/5 leadout trains ever seen for some KOM tries. First one we were leading out another guy for a KOM on a flat and I was going 2nd. I rolled into it easy and was holding my 1min power and looked back and was all alone. Fail. I wound up giving it another dig and got 4th on the segment......into a headwind. Womp womp. I would have assumed the guy behind me should have only had to hold like 350w or so for like 45seconds before his 15second dig.

We'll get it someday. Gotta figure out how much and how long each person can hold on for and still kick. Even at the end of the ride I could hold over 500 for my dig.

It was fun though!

Lots of stuff ahead this season. Might as well mix things up.
https://catwhatever.com/the-bell-lap...ve-never-done/

3 hour endurance ride along the coast. So this is the last year I am going to use the protocol of get strong in the gym and then skinny down. Granted, my power is up but so is my weight and removing the weight is like watching wet paint dry. Why is it so much fun on the way up and so much suffering on the way down. Rhetorical question.

From that, I share with my wife the love of good rest. She doesn't do endurance sport, but we get our proper time in.

I feel like my sleep hours are superior to others I ride with and despite my intensity to hours ratio being a bit beyond the recommended 80/20......I manage fine. It's the intensity I find keeps me able on low hours able to hurt guys who are often on 30, 50, or 100% more hours per week than I am.

That combo of sleep/recovery and intensity really helps.

No training for much of this week, I’m in Puerto Rico. Didn’t help seeing a bunch of cyclists finishing a three day event here yesterday lol a bunch of middle aged dudes with way too nice gear

I think the devil is in the details here too. My goal this season, more than any other, is to be crit fast. 60 or 90 minutes of balls to the wall. This is a little more in line with my physiology, which helps, but in years past I've been wanting to be able to race the early season stage races and if you're talking about racing 250 miles in 3 days, you really need to put in some volume (maybe I'm projecting a bit). In lieu of the ability to train 15-20 hours a week, the training has to be intense. This isn't anything new but I don't think I've ever really ramped it up this early in the season. It might fail miserably but we'll see.

Felt like ass on the bike yesterday. Not totally sure why, but if I had to guess I'd say it was the cold weather. Ride temp hovered around 45 and dipped to 41 at one point with frost still on the side of the road. During my 2x15 the legs kept bouncing back and forth between "YEAH BOY 400W" and "dude 320 is all I've got." Settling in at an even power was a no-go. What's odd (maybe not odd?) is that I still averaged the threshold power on the nose, even with the up and down power.

Woot woot! Email from trainingpeaks ... less than 10 watts below my best (set last summer) and it is only February. I'm happy with that test.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...f8e74fc8bf.png

It is pretty standard for my power to bounce up and down a ton when I'm trying to target a number (especially near threshold). Maybe not an 80W spread, but certainly 50W or 60W. People have told me I'll get better at holding a steady target power, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe its just that my best days are 'felt like ass' days to you (not to mention the substantial difference between your ftp and mine) :). Nice job hitting your power target even when you felt off.

Gaining FTP in February in Oregon is not an easy task! Grats!

Legs pretty torqued today during my easy 1 hr commute to work on the MTB, but felt a lot better and loosened up by the end. I'll spin them out a little more on my commute home soon.

Off yesterday, then the previous 4 days was Valley of the Sun (report to come) and then a 5 hr z2+ ride on President's Day. Not the optimal way to spend my time after a three day stage race, but I'm busy next weekend after Saturday morning and I had the day off, so it worked with my schedule.

Tomorrow I'll likely do my kitchen-sink 2 hr road ride with a 15' at SST, 10' just over threshold, then 3' VO2 up Linda Vista road. Easy MTB again on Friday, then a group ride on Saturday to cap off the week at like ~15 hr or so. Easy next week. Got some more P/1/2 racing coming up in early March that I'll be excited about. Between the 1's and 2's on SDBC we should be able to mix it up in SoCal and hopefully throw a spoke in LA Legion's wheels (not literally).

4x10 SS with jumps last night.

I scoped the climb on Strava and my past results implied it'd be perfect for 10-min intervals at the wattage I'd be doing. It showed that I hit bang-on 10 mins at 340W, so 315W with jumps should stick me right there. What I didn't take into account was my weight loss... What was a ~10-min climb is now a 9:15 climb at lower wattage. The first few intervals had me crest the climb and start flying down the backside, pull the rip cord, do a u-turn, and bang it back up to the top in order to get my 5-minute "rest" period descending in between SS.

This was also my first time running the workout off of my Garmin. I wish it had the ability to pause the workout without pausing the entire ride (I couldn't find a way). I hadn't reached the base of the climb before the SS intervals started, so the first interval was done going DOWN the climb I had picked out to do the reps. Sitting bolt upright at 38mph doing 315W is an odd feeling.

Close to 5,000 kj's over the 3 day weekend, just finally recovered from it today. Easy day today, then on Friday and Saturday it'll be 2 more 1500 kj efforts, then off to Europe for a week.

2 hrs this morning with 2x20's on Fiesta by feel, ended up at 92% and 98%... yeah my legs are a bit fatigued. HR pretty low on the first one, just hurt.

It's the lady's bday weekend and the weather is calling for rain on Saturday. I've already agreed to taking Sunday off, looks like Sat. may be a shorter trainer spin before hitting this rest week, we'll see. MTB tomorrow.

Legs have felt like trash this week. Tried some ftp work on Tuesday but bailed halfway through the 2nd interval. Havent really done much of anything otherwise. Supposed to be close to 50 both days this weekend so I will try to get outside

Random sweet spotting last night on a short ride. Got about 30 minutes of SS wattage in, then went for a 1-minute KOM for giggles at the end of the ride. 1 hour 8 mins, NP of 301W for the ride. KOM at the end was 753W for exactly 1 minute at an unsavory cadence (85rpm).

Off day today, then preride a race course on Saturday.

A single minute can matter a lot in workouts. I cut the rest duration on last week's "attack" pursuit style intervals down from 5min between each to 3min and 4min today with no break into sets. All 4 reps back to back.

That **** hurt. I feel though it's a pretty realistic thing to have to dig and then ease into something that still hurts a good bit.

That first and second rep, it was awesome to see the HR peak after the 400w for a minute and actually go down while holding the 300w. Then taper back up. It held more on the last two sets obviously. Less rest.

Oh, and screw having to cough up or gag up phlegm or whatever during that kind of workout.