furiousferret

Having to up my FTP 10 points is pretty damn intimidating but I was able to power through a 3 hour trainer workout just fine.

Did a gravel group ride on Saturday; they've all been at it for years and descend almost as fast as road so yeah... I got dropped on a descent (I took a wrong turn and lost them). I did buy 38mm tires cus I was rolling 30mm's and they all had 38-42mm (evidently that makes it easier).

TMonk

Hit a 320w 20 min this morning. 4.87 w/kg @ 145 lbs. 5 watts off a PB. I would have liked a few more watts, but I almost puked as soon as I stopped pedaling so I can't say that I'm unsatisfied with the effort. Or the result either. This may be the highest test value for me this year, although I'll likely try once more in May after a bit of racing and hammering. Who knows.

hubcyclist

We’re spending the week on the cape (cod) and although I brought my trainer I did my workout outside due to having a pretty good 6 mile loop where I could keep a pretty steady power, did 6x10 sweet spot. Tomorrow is a shorter 3x15 session I’ll try to do before the rain comes

TMonk

A bit of a frustrating start to the morning training-wise. Was planning on riding the Tour of Watopia (Zwift) Stage on the Mountain 8 route, but had problems logging into Zwift. Turns out its not a specific problem to me at the moment. After clearing my browser cache and re-installing, or maybe just some elapsed time, it allowed me to log in about 10 minutes after the start. Interestingly it allowed me to late-join since it isn't categoized as a race, and dropped me in the front group right at a short hill pushing big watts. I wasn't warmed up and mentally not in it so I quit the event right away lol.

I was sort of on the fence about doing it, and admittedly a little worried that it may have been a bit too much given my other higher priority riding plans for the week, including a hilly P/1/2 circuit race on Sunday and some low-intensity light volume on Saturday for 3-4 hrs. I think I'll join this shorter Zwift race that starts in 8 minutes instead, 22.5 km "Sand and Sequoias" A race.

--------------------

EDIT: I got third. Very predictable race, but also fun and I felt in control. About 30 minutes of 4.2 w/kg AP.

No staggered start for A-D racers over a flat run-in meant mass chaos until we seeded a group of 30 (of 125) rolling through the desert. I hate those mass starts and prefer staggered by category.

As expected, it cut in half on the ramp leading out of the flats, then again over the TItan's KOM. I had to do a bit of a VO2 max effort to stay up front and even a little z5/6 over the top to latch on. The rollers that followed shed a few more until we were 10 going back to the flats with ~30 seconds and slowing down to 3 w/kg.

I was feeling good and thought I could have took the sprint. Someone took my strategy from me and jumped at like 0.6 miles and some hesitation was all it took for him to get first (or second)? I launched a bit later and thought I would win, I really did, but I didn't quite catch him and got passed by a stronger rider. It was still fun tho

Now it's time to bookend my work with a ~10 mi z1/2 commute each way. Have a good day all and I hope you hit your numbers!

cmh

2 hrs endurance pace yesterday with a 20 second sprint roughly every 10 minutes. The bad news is my sprint power is not what it was several years ago. The good news is my sprint power didn't decline too much over the course of the workout.

hubcyclist

Super annoying day. Started later than I really wanted to because there’s rain expected in the region. It was sunny in the morning but my wife slept until 10 and it’s hard to leave a hotel room without being disruptive. 30mins into my workout it started pouring and bailed. Of course it’s been dry and the sun has been out the rest of the day, albeit quite breezy. Tomorrow is cold and windy so I’m just sticking inside

TheKillerPenguin

I did 4,4.5,4 on sunday, monday, tuesday. Easy spin and second vaccine shot yesterday. I feel very weird but not as bad as after the first shot. Hoping side effects go away and I can do 3 more long rides tomorrow thru Sunday.

Hermes

Fiesta mid day. 4x90” ANO2 (z6) with 5’ RBI cruising on Fiesta and then one easy lap.

furiousferret

I'll be doing the Zwift TOW Ride (A) at 5 pst today. EDIT: Got 8th out of 180, Antenna Hill on a 1x (50x28) was terrible. Also power was around were it should be so the FTP jump is legit, I just need to see what I can do outside....

Worlds didn't go well, I was front 5 and some guy bumped my bars and I let it affect me and dropped 5 spots. I didn't panic, but didn't fight for position either (it was a younger Cat 2 NICA kid so definitely intentional but not in a dangerous way). I've been dropped from every group ride I've done since riding outside and it was acceptable the first few weeks now its frustrating. Its not my power, its just bike handling, and with people doing more off road stuff everyone seems to be better at the technical stuff on road. In the long run this probably helps me, but I feel like I just started racing again and have to work my way back up.

burnthesheep

"Official" all time 60min power at weeknight worlds last night. I've never done an hour test, ever. Also, my 25mi times are sub-hour so you don't get an hour there. 260w AP, 262w NP........on the TT bike.

It wasn't in the cards to make the group road hammer ride with work making me late. I knew this so took the TT bike to solo behind everyone and hope to make daylight back to start. The lead A-group had about a 4min gap ahead when I did start after I had to return to car to pump tires. I wanted a gap anyway so I'd be alone and not bother people. That should have, and was, mostly plenty of gap to allow this.

I slowly in the first half hour I picked off the early dropped riders. Then about 40min in picked off the first dropped group. At about 50min picked off the second dropped group. Neither of those either could or tried to grab a wheel. I gapped them pretty well within seconds. I reached the last group to be dropped at about an hour and couldn't blast past as I caught on an uphill. So they chose to latch for a free-ish ride home. Free-ish because it's not a free ride behind a skinny TT rider.

I caught the leader pair just after the town line sprint finish.

For that kind of terrain and without full TT wheels and kit, a hella fast ride. There was a pocket of 25mph for an hour in there per Trainingpeaks. 24.3mph, 255w AP for 80min, 260w AP for 60min. Without some of the terrain upsets spinning downhill or at intersections, probably had 270w for the hour in the bag. Most time spent was just at or above 270.

I'm chuffed. Great effort.

TMonk

That sounds fun. I've never done a group ride on my TT bike... I plan on taking it out to the Tuesday morning ride at Fiesta in a couple weeks. It's 60 min of paceline that gets shredded periodically by 30+ MPH e-bike attacks. On my road bike I'm always up front and enjoy keeping it fast when people try to recovery after surges. I sort of have the same riding plan for my TT bike... should be fun. Less attacking, but more constant speed after the surges.

Totally different type of ride I know. I do like the idea of starting behind a group and having a carrot to chase. There's too many stoplights and not enough open road for the San Diego metro rides for me to do that. Sounds fun.

For me, just 45 min of z1/2 on the TT bike riding zwift. 2x12.5 high z2 in position.

I'm starting to get psyched for the Fiesta TT series on 5/16. Out TTT captain is out of commission as he just had offspring number two. I'm sort of excited to ride the 20k ITT and test myself since the only ITT I've ever done was VoS Cat 2 and I was late to the start. lol. I'm already starting to plan on TT bike training, early morning Fiesta pilot sessions in full kit and equipment maintenance that I need to do.

burnthesheep

It was fun. I started far enough behind to leave that group alone for 90% of the ride. All it was really is blowing past dropped riders and dropped groups and trying to suffer out with hope of maybe seeing the "leaders" before the town line sprint.

So, I never actually "rode" with any of the roadies. I wanted to be 100% out of their way. 4 roadies in a drop group at the end did choose to latch on and barely hung on headed into town. Nobody rotated on that piece, a team veteran stayed behind me himself so somebody I trust was behind me.

He, myself, and the one other TT nut may do a TTT one night.

Yep

Went out to do a hard effort on a 15-20 minute climb today and instead went for a 7 minute one with some other stuff thrown in. Did 393w (shooting for 400w). I'm 72ish kg, and it was a power PR, so I'm happy.

cmh

Pretty tired yesterday but still got in a few 15 min sweet spot efforts in a 2 hr, mostly endurance paced ride. I was just about ready for rest a week ago, but I put in another hard week to push my rest week back to start today to time it with my 2nd Pfizer hand up. Coincidentally my rest period is also very well timed with the weather. We had a great, dry 10 days and the rain just returned today. Now I'll spend the rest of the weekend lounging around the house.

burnthesheep

Did Ventop in Zwift. 1:17. HR averaged out to tempo pace. 260w or so most of the time. The gear change to try to get to a more sweetspot pace was just too much power and too low a cadence for me to feel like doing that today. I wanted to hurt a bit, but keep it sane.

I'll take it. Rode it with the new feature turning off the display, just watching power and HR on my phone. No % grade or pacing helpers. Just me and the mountain.

So, the 262 for the hour on the climb upped the 60min power from Thursday a hair. Coulda done more, didn't wanna.

I want a shot at Mt. Mitchell again, fresh.

hubcyclist

Aside from one day inside and one day aborted due to rain, I did all my workouts this week outside while staying at a hotel. It helps to have access to a nice loop where I can maintain pretty consistent power with almost no interruptions. Today was 4x15 sweet spot. Last workout of the block is tomorrow

caloso

Successfully hung the whole way on the River Ride this morning. I feel like a Cat 5 again.

furiousferret

My body just wasn't there this weekend after 2 really hard efforts during the week. Just did 2 long z2 rides, though on Saturday I practically fell asleep on the bike and had to get off early.

waterrockets 

Raced the Driveway on Thursday night. First race in about 8 years. Team orders were P/1/2/3, so off I went. This was the "Speed Loop" course, clockwise -- not many successful breaks on this course as it's pretty smooth other than the one hairpin at the top of the Corkscrew (the course is nicknamed the "Dad Bod" course b/c of its tameness). I found it a little too easy to move up in the side-trains, found myself in the top 15 when the attacks were really flying. I ended up closing some gaps until I couldn't close one. Dropped back (120 or so racers total) by snagging the train as it came by and getting back to 70th or so. Was a bit more comfortable there, but the gap closing took it out of me and I ended up dropping on lap 17/27.

Overall a great first race back, was a lot of fun, and enjoyed working the pack a bit. That crowd is too fast for my 50yo self to be any sort of factor for my team, but I think I could finish in the front half if I rode smarter. Fastest 1 mile lap was 36.2mph, with those 17 laps at 27.7mph. The higher speeds probably made it much easier because it's pretty tough to surge from 36.2mph (fast races are smoother).

In other news, Thing 3 did his first road race in the 4/5 with some other juniors (he's 15). His 15yo teammate went off the front for three laps, but was brought back (his 2nd race). Thing 3 got 8th right behind his teammate. Pretty cool watching him get top 10 in his first crit with grown ass men flying off the back every lap.

Here he is staring at the wheel in front of him like a good Cat 5 should

hubcyclist

training status/self promotional nonsense: got my latest vlog up
Finished the 5 weeks of SSB1 HV, this week is just easy endurance stuff for recovery. Too soon to have any objective opinion of TrainerRoad's adaptive training, personally, I think it's putting me on a good trajectory as far as using the progression levels, going from 4.5 to 7.3, and I'm curious to see where SSB2 HV takes me as far as this progression. I think this stuff will get a lot more interesting when I get to the build and specialty phases where vo2 workouts can be adapted to better suit my weaknesses. I get my 2nd pfizer shot this week, so it's not going to mess with any "real" training

burnthesheep

Asking here to avoid the training section riff raff. Can you use aerobic decoupling figures in Trainingpeaks to gauge something like an hour instead of how folks use it for stuff like Z2 for Ironman?

If I had a negative % for an hour, that would tell me IMO that I should have gone harder to decouple the HR. Or at least negative split the effort and cause the HR to decouple in the last 15min or so.

I've got time to learn and play with it. I just hear it can be useful judging efforts for intervals also. Like 3x8, 2x20, 1x60, etc.... To see if "too hard" or "too easy" or "just right but go longer".

Opinions? I never saw this figure in TP until zooming in on a section of riding and looking up the figure.

hubcyclist

I don't know if decoupling is really a useful metric outside of the whole rule of thumb of wanting to see <5% decoupling on a long aerobic ride (generally I see 2hrs as the baseline for that). I personally haven't it seen it used as any type of diagnostic metric for anything else besides assessing base fitness

TheKillerPenguin

I agree. In fact, I really only use it to assess impact of dehydration.

wktmeow

I was planning on doing 1x25, 2x20 yesterday, but ended up doing a Tour de Zwift stage and just gave it the beans up the Epic KOM + Radio tower climb, so more like ~32m @ 98%, took a long break, then did a 20' min effort which felt pretty rough. Started a 3rd effort, was suffering by 5 mins, bargained with myself to get to 10, and then pushed on to 15 but really started to fall apart. Same total time at threshold as the original plan, though.

caloso

3x12' sweet spot intervals on the commute home last night. I've got a route that takes me about 5 miles past my house in a big loop from work that I can do without stopping (more or less).