Time savings leaving front door to ride. I go around Falls lake on long rides.

I live in N Hills, and ride the 1x 54t TT bike around that part of town. Lol. It’ll make ya a man! Easiest gear 54/25.

I do Reedy/Trenton on a bit more time or the coliseum.

Here is last night:
https://www.strava.com/activities/4041834432

I don't know how people spend hours and hours on the trainer. Zwift has made things bearable, but an hour is about my limit.

So these two posts kind of confuse me. In the first, you say the hills are a problem and hamper training. In the second you say it's making you stronger.

I get the time issue. I'm fortunate that I can ride out my front door and get down to Jordan pretty easily. But if you're looking for a better area to train your TTs, Jordan Lake has much less elevation change.

I only enjoy the hilly TT rides because I get bored on the road bike on the same area. It helps bike handling skills and more complex pacing.

I am heading over to Jordan. I think I can handle a 40k attempt now. I was looking at the Jordan Lake area as an option for flat, smooth, low traffic. During the DPTT Unicorn Dreams thing work decided to hand me a load.

I wanted to do TT regionals, kids and family killed it. Another story. So will do my own thing soon near Jordan.

Mentally there is just a difference between a 2 to 5min KOM try and 10mi or 25mi.

I'm with you. I have a smart trainer and Zwift, but it only makes it sort of bearable. I don't think it feels anything like the road and there's no communication with the other riders. It's weird because I have friends who seem to love it, even riding a fair amount on Zwift in the summer. RPE is a lot higher for me on the trainer and that might be helped by riding it more, but I think I'd rather ride in the rain and the dark in the winter.

Went an hour to see what I'd get at the arena lap. It's a little over a mile per lap, 1.06 or something. There's a sharp corner at the bottom of the hill each lap that ruins the fun a bit, but it is secluded. I did 24mph for 10mi of it and 1:03:56 for a 40k overall. It's basically a false flat down to the corner, then a steeper false flat up the other side. All the "hour" style KOMs faster than me were done by training group rides of some pretty fast folks. I managed 7th I think.

Not terrible. Pacing is tough because for the corner you get at least 10 seconds of braking/coasting each lap and going up the hill each lap you go "over" your target. Given that, you wind up with about 6min of "zero power output" time for an hour. 15 seconds done 25x.

I would assume on a flatter route without the corner every lap, or the hill, I would be faster. You can't say that you'd gain the distance you would cover in that 6min, because you'd only go marginally faster using that power at that speed......but it's something. I'd say you'd probably go 6mph or so faster not braking for the corner. So, 6min at 6mph........0.6 mile extra. Perhaps.

Yep and caloso have you guys tried any races on Zwift? It makes it a lot more fun IMO. Still not the same as real cycling outdoors, but its so much better than the pre smart-trainer era IMO.

Most weeks I do the WTRL TTT series on Thursday nights after work and it's a total blast. I ride it with other members of the road and track here in San Diego. It is much more difficult to execute than a real TTT, but it's fun and a different kind of challenge. Most often, we have a rider who drops out early or doesn't start at all and plays DS for us, talking us through each feature on the course and turn on the front. We have a standing zoom meeting for it.

After I wrote that I did a 90 min workout that wasn’t too bad. Lots of changing cadence and power so it was a challenge to find the right gear on my dumb trainer. That made the time go by much quicker. As for races, I’ve done one or two but they seemed like ridiculous 5 minute time trials from the gun before they settled in to feeling like an actual race.

Fires still keeping me indoors. I've been picking it up but my efforts are a solid 70 ctl. 80 is kinda the 'good' threshold where my performance goes up, but I'm not sure that's important right now.

Netflix and Spin. I also have a very low threshold for entertainment. Some people have to be entertained to their detriment, while others can arrange bottlecaps for hours. I spent 2 hours a day for weeks watching TV on a spin bike where I only understood 20% of the words, so yeah, I don't need much to be entertained.

In my defense I know another language now; well I can read, listen, and write well. Speaking need some work.

Put in a 2800 kJ endurance ride Saturday, legs felt great, no problem recovering from it. I hit the forest Sunday on the dirt bike for 3 hours, mostly single track / technical stuff, and my body is destroyed lol. It's crazy how you can be in shape for one thing, and be totally out of shape for another, even if they are both on two wheels.

I'm more of a put head phones on and black out during the workout. Turning my brain off is one of my favorite things to do, whether it's cycling, meditation, or sleep.

One aspect of training and racing we miss is our first coach and his cycling gym.

We had 3x20’ workouts structured scheduled at his gym and two of them were done by ourselves on rollers with the front fork held and the third with him supervising the 20’ calling out specific levels of effort and cadence. Here is my wife with him cranking out 6x efforts. It was hard not to get fast with someone driving you. Honestly speaking, I do not push myself as hard as I did when I was on the rollers one on one with him. In a race, one can elect to go off the back. There is no off the back option one on one. This is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships so retreat is impossible.:D

Puny week. 5.5 hours 200 TSS.

Not a great week for me either. Weird fever thing during the night after lifting on Tuesday had me hesitant to push myself, felt fine after. AQI discouraged me from riding outdoors, but I also ran out of time doing stuff at home and didn't even ride the trainer on Saturday, got just shy of 3 hours z2 on Zwift on Sunday while watching the tour.

Couple Z races tomorrow morning, ~20k Tempus Fugit ITT at 7 AM, then a 30k race in Watopia on the Figure 8 route at 8 AM. Looking forward to it.

Yeah it's definitely different than a real bike race, and usually more difficult, and less fun. But still kinda fun IMO at least. The first few minutes are always hard as the fastest ones will try to splinter it up into smaller groups.

Is the Tempus Fugit Course modeled with any degree of accuracy? I have done that race a lot when we lived in NorCal.

Hmm, not sure, didn't even know that was a real place haha. It's a crecent-shaped < 10 km one way route with a turnaround. Almost no elevation.

https://zwiftdmz-marcom-us-east.s3.a...IFs/tempus.gif

It has some interesting scenery with some Sedona (Az) or Natural Bridges areas, and some Las Vegas style mini strip at the end. It's my fav place to warmup for workouts or races that I'm doing indoor.

https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/insp...ft-dsrt-06.jpg

All Oregon races for the rest of this year are canceled. I'm betting BWR San Diego will get canceled as well, and even if it somehow happens, I won't be there. Been nursing a week-long forest fire headache and sore throat. My season is officially FINALLY over. Time to get the Zwift fitness back.

TMonk Duh. Tempest Fugit in Latin means time flies.

I've found it kinda helpful to have zwift open on my surface right there and then have Netflix going in the background.

Need to fiddle with my saddle angle a bit. Starts feeling uncomfortable after an hour on the kickr. I think I've hit a max of two hours on the kickr.

I've never minded ramp tests but there's no getting excited for 20+ min efforts for me.

Also the direct drive smart trainers are a game changer.

Just did a workout with 4x2min at 130% 4x1min at 150% and 4x30sec at 180%, it’s rare that my legs feel like jello but they did today when I got off.

took my son on his longest ride ever yesterday, 22 miles on real road. He’s got older style sora shifters which is fine for the rear shifting but tougher for the front (requires a powerful swing to get to the big ring) so it’s tough to take him anywhere that requires him to shift between big and little. He’s good with the 50t on the flats so we just find of stick it there. 1x would prob be good but I may get some cheap microshift r8 which are easier to use.

For my money the inside ride emotion rollers are still the best thing going. Locked into one position I really can only do about an hour.

Cancelled my ride plans on Z, may try to sneak out for 30-45 min of quick MTB at the local open space park (Florida Cyn). Had some work to catch up on.

I was halfway through a ramp test yesterday when the power and cadence reading froze. I've had it happen before in a workout and it usually fixes itself after backpedaling a couple of times, but this time it just stayed stuck. Had to abandon. Later did some googling and found out it's an issue with Quarqs when the signal drops. I may try again tonight and use the power from the trainer. It's within a couple of watts to the Quarq if I make sure to calibrate it properly.

Fiesta TTT and did 2x20K. We knocked 1 minute off our 40K best total and each 20K was within 5 seconds of each and 23 mph. Fiesta had typical crosswind so not really fast conditions.

Riding outside was like smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes due to the air quality. Hopefully, it will improve. Improving 1 minute for 40K is the equivalent of shaving ones legs. So it goes.

My lame team members post up almost every week about a Tues or Weds ride. Several of them recently bought tri/TT bikes. I post up on Sunday for a Wednesday evening TT bike cruise. 10mi TT, intervals, drop and regroup.............crickets.

At lunch just been grabbing about 45min of SS in this glorious weather. Flatter out this way. So fast. Averaging over 23mph per ride on so-so pavement. Fun times.

3x20ish around FTP. Pretty sure I had a 4th in me but cadence was getting stupid low.

I got home early enough to do a second 0.5 hr MTB ride, ha!

Digging these off season vibes. Going with the flow and not "stressing it" are things that take some practice for me :). Gonna play some piano in a bit, maybe do some chores-type stuff at a non-rushed pace. This entirely distasteful (-ly sized) pour of Washingtonian Syrah should help.

This is for you TMonk