furiousferret

Zwift race lace night, placed 9th out of 139 people. Had I warmed up properly instead of jumping on the bike 30 seconds before the race I would have been able to have a stronger start and stay with the front group.

My diet has taken a dip the last week. Whenever my father in law is in town its like that. He pretty much has the worst possible food in existence. Whatever food is your weakness, he'll have it...in addition to a massive buffet and of course cake and ice cream for dessert. I know I shouldn't blame others for my failures but I am!

Hermes

Yesterday, Fiesta TTT. 20K three laps. The wind was difficult yesterday as it was in the worst possible direction and steady. The front straight was fast but the back straight was a slug fest. We had stylized power to match the degree of difficulty for the wind but I could feel that we were just spending way too much time in the wind. Even though, we went fast on the downwind sections, it was not fast enough to make up for lost time in the wind.

I love my Garmin 830. Since I am not using a coach, it is nice to have an application running in my Garmin analyzing my metrics real time and spitting out info. 5 minutes into the ride, I get a performance marker of +4. I get this warm and fuzzy feeling inside and power surges through my legs. My wife gets a -1. Oh no, I try to comfort her.

After the ride she gets a summary of her ride - detraining. I get a new FTP indicated and - unproductive.

Priceless.

hubcyclist

So my training has been puzzling. This past week was super inconsistent, had to miss a day and yesterday flat out stunk. So I did a workout today to kind of re-evaluate my training target. It was a trainerroad workout called lamarck (4x10 @ 100% with 2min RBI), did first 2 at 290w (I had done a recent block of sweet spot based on 300w), on the 3rd and 4th intervals I turned it down and was still having to pause to give my legs a break from the accumulating burn. The weird thing for me is a couple of weeks ago I was easily doing 4x20 and 3x30 at 270w, so if my FTP was actually, say, 285, that would be a lot of time at 95%, not sure how typical that is for well trained folks. Either way, gotta check the ego and set myself for sustainable work.

burnthesheep

I need to fit in some tougher work next week. I gave myself a mental prepper today. It was just 2 hrs free ride in Zwift, but at the end of the first hour I got antsy and went up Volcano hard. Mentally, it's one of those "if I can do that for for that long.......I should be able to do a good amount of much shorter sets".

CTL is up well. Need to keep up the trend.

Fat % is down over 20 days, muscle % up. That's good also.

furiousferret

Me when my legs feel bad and I tell myself I'm doing the B ride, but I hit the A button Zwift:



So my legs were good despite doing 100km yesterday and went 65.57mi, for 2107kj @208 TSS. My IF was .87 which is nuts for almost 3 hours. Good for 14th out of 228...not that it matters for a Zwift Fondo but its still feels good to finish so high.

gsteinb

everything matters

Hermes

Size matters.

waterrockets 

It's been weird as mountain biking has forced its way into my schedule through Thing 3's NICA team and my coaching role there. I cannot wait for the road schedule to come back to life in TX, but it just isn't. You know what is on the calendar? Metric sh*t ton of mountain bike races...

I may visit the dark side. I did a hot lap on Sunday's NICA XC course and it really is fun riding in anger like that... even off road. At least my bike is goofy: Trek Stache 9.6 -- so I can't take this too seriously.

TMonk

XC MTB is good stuff man! Do it and post about it here!!!

furiousferret

I've been getting the itch to go out and ride and race again, I've been indoors since April of last year doing nothing but long endurance stuff and somehow it seems like my power is going up, but its all funny math under the assumption that my indoor power and other factors are holding me back (historically, its 8% worse than outdoors). Usually when I believe my FTP is skyrocketing I get hit by a dose of reality.

I also haven't been into cycling the last year; I ride my bike everyday, but I'm not reading PubMed articles and hounding YouTube for training tips. 2 years ago I even did breath holds on my walks because I thought it upped my v02, I think it worked but you can't do it on a bike because its too dangerous.

Those out on the group rides are worried to see how I do because they all think I'll be strong af. I'm worried to see how I do because I'm not sure if I'll remember how to corner!

This reminds me of one of my Drill Instructors in the Marines. He told us everything was a race, and it doesn't matter if the other person doesn't know its a race that makes them even a bigger loser. We were first to everything. Chow, the range, PT, even if we have to outsprint the other platoons.

There's a little bit of truth to his philosophy.

Doge

Junior did 100+ mile training ride with a UAE pro and his girlfriend this weekend. So, I checked Strava.
I guess he has been riding more than he let on and dropped 10 lbs of pull-up and push-up useless muscles. I mean really, what do you do with that?

I'm not optimistic the USAC crit scene will open up this year, but if it does I'll be showing up to a few.

Enthalpic

Hold the controls during high G force turns?

TMonk

Another Tuesday, another nicely executed VO2 max workout. Starting to feel some power after just riding a lot the past few months.

rn I'm thinking 2x20's at 97-100% tomorrow, 50' (cumulative) SST on the TT bike on Thursday, and then maybe some volume over the long weekend. Resting next week.

caloso

3 sets of 5x90s @ 122% FTP on the trainer this morning. That was hard. I had to skip the next to last one in order to finish. Maybe it's just psychological, but I felt like it was better to skip one so I could do the last one properly instead of doing two failure intervals.

gsteinb

90 minutes. Average just tipped into Z4. Ouch.

hubcyclist

I continue to suck, today was going to be 9x2.5min @ 120%, made it through 4 before I felt like I was going to be super unproductive. I then tried a new workout that seemed intriguing, 4x5min @ 100%. I believe I've read/heard that threshold stuff under 10mins isn't really useful, but I quite liked this one, and curious whether I can fit this into a progression of increasing TTE

Enthalpic

6x5min at 100 - 105% with 1min recoveries works very well.

caloso

Agree.

Hermes

I have come to the conclusion that any workout that I am willing to do is useful.

I think context is important. If the only goal is to raise / maintain threshold then running the meter longer at threshold versus shorter seems better. On the other hand, if I were to do a split workout on a road bike and TT bike then I might do a couple of hours on the road bike and then do a TT workout of 4x5’ at threshold but not much RBI. Or flip the TT bike and road bike.

Years ago, our racing club had a TT seminar where a domestic pro, elite TT WR holder and the women’s TT 2008 Olympian talked about position, wind tunnels, training and etc. They were doing longer rides on their road bikes and intensity on the TT bike and combining the workouts. This included shorter threshold work below 10 minutes. Interesting and could be good depending on the race goals and training plan. It is still not easy.

Hermes

TTT Tuesdays at Fiesta 20k. Gloomy, cold with light winds but in the more difficult direction for fast times.

Skiing next week so maybe an easier week this week. Hopefully, we will get some carry over from our last ski trip. I bought new skis on the last trip and but yet another set of skis for this trip. So we will each take two sets of skis. The new skis are the very short skis called Ski Boards. We had these before got bored with them. However, they have been improved and are perfect for the heavier packed snow that gets chopped up or spring conditions. I can ski around moguls and piles of snow by making super fast turns. The Ski Boads are not good in hard pack if one needs to set and hold and edge at high speed.

The other trend is the heavier, wider, longer all mountain skis that plows through snow. So we have both sides of the equation covered. If we get the blue bird day hard pack with light Utah snow then traditional skis.

burnthesheep

Did some custom written 5x5 last night. I got the first 4. Then a bit over 2min on the last one and the body rejected my request soundly. Total "uh uh, nope".

But, good session. It's been time for some structured VO. It's been neglected.

I wasn't in a good mood either. It was nearly 60 and sunny yesterday afternoon. Wife got out the chickens to free roam and was watching them. So I was going to go find a hill and do this outside instead. Then ensures a moan and complain about "why you doing that now.....blah blah blah". It's an absolute SIN to have an afternoon like that this time of year and not optimize. Sin in the Biblical sense.

waterrockets 

Yesterday I did 36 miles of mid-tempo pre-dawn with some friends and Thing 3. Then evening NICA team coaching MTB practice --> one lap Veloway threshold intervals (expected 8' - 10'). Decided to bring the road bike for the first time in one of these on-road practices (kids supposed to be on XC bikes). Then I got stuck with the Jr. Dev team (goal of future collegiate and/or pro) -- one kid had his CX bike, and another had his MTB. That was tough! We did a pretty attacky paceline (me and CX kid). The MTB kid sat on and would attack us whenever he didn't like the pace through a corner or something. I was railing a corner on my Venge, and he passed me drifting the rear wheel dragging a foot on the ground -- INSANE. Anyway, MTB kid is a road 18yo Cat 2, and makes me feel like the 50yo former Cat 2 (3 really) that I am. The CX kid is 17yo, and managed to drop me on a hill in the 4th interval, but I caught him in the next chicane. Really fun and tough workout with these goofballs. Thing 3 was tucked in with the rest of the development team.

End result 4 x 7.5 x 5 and a 57 mile Tuesday for some reason, before and after work. Thing 3 matched this.

Yep

burnthesheep

Another VO2 workout last night. Gosh they're awful. Trying to do 3 this week. 21min of work in the first one doing 5min reps. 26:40 of work this second one doing 3min reps with 2min rest in 3 rep sets. Three sets. Geez.

Last rep of that one on the last minute I had to get out of saddle and snagged the power cord for the trainer. Suddenly zero output, WTF! Oh well. Got most of it in.

So I'm told I have to do this to raise the ceiling on my fitness so it can move up again. Or all that sweetspot and other work may reach a stopping point.

TMonk

Three VO2 max workouts in a week, yeesh. I aim for a similar amount of time in zone and am currently only doing them 1x/week. On the trainer too! I've produced some decent VO2 efforts in Watopia going for Titan's and the like, but man that sounds tough. Are you doing erg mode? TR? Free riding in Zwift? Do you adjust power relative to what you'd do outside?

burnthesheep

Erg. I prefer outdoors for these, but weather here is 40's and 30's and ice and rain for a full week.

I never do the upper or lower % range for VO2. I've read like 105 to 120%. I think I'm at 113%. Zwift you can hit + or - to add or lessen the load by a percent during your workout OR you can do your set and bail the last 10 seconds by swiping right. Heartrate during the workout seems to react just right for what VO2 for me should be.

I managed to hit 4 of 5 of the 5min intervals, managed like 2min the last one. The 3x3x3 workout I got all of them until the foot unplugged the trainer in my last rep of the last set with a minute to go. I started it back up and hit the last minute, but that doesn't count I guess.

I have off days in between, so, the fatigue isn't too too bad. It's just the game face on the trainer. Good feeding before hand.

I wanted to do 3 this week to get into the pattern. I'll probably do 2 in subsequent weeks and try to raise the % a hair or add duration a hair. I couldn't do 3 a week for more than a single week. I'm no stud.