caloso

"Fun"? More like "holy crap, I'm not going to be ready!"

Yesterday: 1'on at 120%, 1'off at 90% times 6, five minute break, repeat. Just playing around with this one. I think my ons need to be higher and my offs need to be lower.
Today: 2x30' at 90%

Ygduf

this rain. I've just been riding a lot of tempo and whatever. I seem to have enough to get by at the practice races and I hope to race my way into shape as those weekends start coming along.

TheKillerPenguin

Got my 1sec up to 17.7, 5sec up to 16.5, and was able to repeat it 4x, and did a sprint at 4:30 into the ride and 5sec was just a hair under 15. No idea where this is coming from since I'm mostly doing tons of miles. Pretty groovy though, sprinting has been my weakest spot forever.

hack

Was going to run out and do an hour or so during lunch, but I locked myself out of the house. So, that hour became about 4.5 hours and ended up being a great day for riding.

aaronmcd

3.5 hours on the way to work. Mostly endurance, with 45 minutes of zone 4.

Then almost 11 hours of work.

TMonk

you must be tired ><

aaronmcd

Yeah, then another hour and a half to get home via bike/train. Was gonna do 3.5 hours again tomorrow but it's so late I'll probably just cut an hour and ride straight to work.

When my boss gets in the office after noon he likes to say "gooood morning" as he walks in.

TheKillerPenguin

The weekend's weather report has gone from unmitigated disaster to at worst a disinterested shrug, but not before the boss gave his stamp of approval to the cycling equivalent of waterboarding. Today is 5 hours. Tomorrow is 5 hours with 5x15min tempo.

mike868y

I can't wait to watch you crush this season TKP.

1.5hrs on the rollers for me. on paper the same workout as tuesday (~1 hour z2, 3*3' threshold), but the legs felt so so much better. excited to get back into training on saturday.

Wylde06

This is turning into a rest week, basically.

Off Monday as usual..came home from work early Tuesday and slept most of the day so no riding (felt something coming on over the weekend). Easy ride last night just getting the legs moving. Probably the same tonight. MAYBE will get back at it tomorrow. If not tomorrow one day this weekend.

grolby

I'm on a rest week, too. I'm not sure what everyone is complaining about. Rest weeks are AWESOME. Totally off today.

gsteinb

2:45 indoors. full on suffering

a week and I'll be on the beach. 5 hell work outs until then.

mike868y

not complaining, but I do genuinely enjoy training and riding hard.

TMonk

first structured VO2 max workout of the season: 5x5' at ~112%. The last two were hard!

grolby

It's not the riding hard that gets me. It's the TIME. TIME TIME TIME.

TMonk

The all-star climber (and 2015 CA scratch, points and 4km team pursuit champ) on our team has a good gig, I'm so jelly.

He works 20-30 hours/week as a contracting/consulting Mech E, and rides about 18-22hrs/week.

mike868y

seems like TKP has a pretty rad gig for riding too. my backup plan if i don't get into grad school is to quit my job, get a part time job, and teach myself programming.
@grolby i agree with you on the time front. you also seem to be better about maintaining balance than me.

TMonk

...and on the flip side, you have guys like me who work twice as much, and ride half as much .

I can get pretty good (at my level) if I get months of consistency, but it really does take months and months. If I take a week off due to injury, illness or vacation, it's actually a pretty big setback given my limited volume. On a more short-term level, missing workouts due to outside obligations, short term illness, or even just an off day kinda throws a wrench in my training because I don't have huge CTL in my legs.

Ygduf

I think the first 6 hours per week account for like 90% of performance... Add in race craft and you have guys who probably get 95% of the results on 6 hours that they would on 20.

grolby

Well, maybe, but a big part that balance is, I have a wife and they get tend to get grouchy when you ignore them (obviously, I don't want to ignore her, either). My actual time management skills are basically garbage. I could probably squeeze in a lot more riding with a little more discipline. Working on that.

TMonk

I think there is some truth to this.

On the flip side, I do believe that for a given training volume, your fitness is asymptotic, as defined by your genetics. You can get most of the way there with those ~6hrs, but getting all the way there is actually pretty big. As you raise up in cat level, the fitness disparity becomes smaller, and all of the sudden that last 5-10% is a big deal.

If I, for example, was able to gain 10% in FTP and lose 10% of my body weight, I would become a very competitive cat 3 climber.

caloso

I ride with a guy like that. 8 hours is a big week for him. 10 is huge.

Ygduf

a guy on Matt's team has some of the best results last year on like 5 hours/week, as far as I can tell. He's fearless in sprints and has a lot of snap which helps.

Harlan

I'm super lucky the mrs rides/trains with me. Basically life is: eat, sleep, work (I get to bring the dogs thankfully) and ride. I'm in bed by 8:30 every night. When we get some free time on the weekends we don't even know what to do with ourselves. Sometimes when we're feeling crazy we watch a show on Netflix during dinner to hit the bedtime target.

globecanvas

4x12 hill repeats @ 93%. All 4 repeats were exactly the same average power, to the watt.



I've had much less time available for training this winter, compared to last, but I think I'm slightly ahead of where I was last year, just because every ride is necessarily more focused.