globecanvas

Lose weight now. Ask me how!

Duke of Kent

Did one of the local uphill MTB TTs today.

45s behind the dude that won the Pro/1 Green Mountain Stage Race, despite me putting on a yard sale when I clipped my pedal on a rock that was hidden by fallen leaves. Going uphill, of all things. 18:21 vs. 19:06.

revchuck 

Dang, Fudgy, don't you have another cassette?

rideaz

I'm with you. I'm participating in a Donut ride on Sunday: 60 mile ride to 7 donut shops followed by a donut eating contest which I will not participate in, I'm more of a sprinter when it comes to donuts, I could eat one or two pretty fast but that's my limit. Other than that, I have nothing planned for the off season.

Ygduf

I can sit up and climb fine, but the point of the exercise is to stay locked in and to build endurance in the position.

Ygduf

slow force reps!

TheKillerPenguin

Still feeling Sunday a bit (Gunks 10k) but went out and looked at leaves and committed a couple of acts of strava terrorism and other non structured interval stuff. Like 3hrs of pedaling. Also had a sidewall blow out, but cash money tire boot saved the day.

revchuck 

aaronmcd

Commute by bike instead of caltrain this morning, 2.5 hours. Now I have to take the train home without my book.

Maltex

3x10 @ threshold on the trainer last night. First day of trying to get to the "next level".

For the next 3 months I plan on doing threshold work on Tuesdays and Thursday, some tempo on Friday and 5 to 6 hour group/kitchen sink rides on Sundays.
I feel like muscular endurance is a serious limiter for me and my threshold power is underdeveloped. Hoping this should do a lot to address that, thoughts?

I can whip out my ewang for context if needed.

scheibo

Throw some ebooks on your phone? Suboptimal reading experience, but better then nothing.

scheibo

Seems reasonable, provided you listen to your body and are smart with recovery. The biggest issue I've seen with any long term projections for training is athletes have a tendency to be a slave to a piece of paper instead of taking it easy when necessary. Also, wrt threshold work, longer repeats might be more effective (ie/ 2x20 > 4x10, even though its the same amount of work), but you have 3 months to work up to that.

TheKillerPenguin

When beginning threshold work my coach used to have me start with 3x10s, step it up to 3x12s, then 3x15s, then 3x20s, at a rate that I could handle.

What @maltax wants to do seems like an awful lot of work to be doing on the regular. That's 3 days of structured ftp workouts (tempo counts) and a pound yourself into dust ride each week. Maybe remove an ftp day, do a tempo day the next day after the ftp day that you keep, and add in a recovery day, so that way you can be fresh for the murder ride so you get as much quality from it as possible. Unless you're really careful, FTP work can wear you down quickly without you realizing it.

Wylde06

I do the same thing...except 2 instead of 3 once im at 15 minutes.

I think I need to step it up this winter though, and add that third interval.

canuckbelle

4hrs of endurance riding Tuesday, 3hrs yesterday, 4hrs up for today. Yeesh.

Surfer3287

2H of Endurance on Tuesday, Terrible 20's yesterday; legs are sore today but I will be away from my bike for job interviews until Saturday, so trying to will myself to go get some sort of ride in.

TheKillerPenguin

Probably like 3hrs of light endurance today because it's purdy out.

Sizzle82

When you talk about threshold what % of FTP are you talking about, just curious I'm still kind of new to power and am easily confused. On another note 1 hour of cyclocross training last night, practicing mount/dismount at speed without falling on my face. First cross race this weekend and have a feeling I'm going to get embarrassed.

scheibo

Yeah, if its done very close to 100% FTP it will be hard to recover from. If you instead do the work closer to 'sweet spot' training (high 80%'s to low 90%'s) its pretty doable day in and day out, but once again, you need to listen to your body.


90-105% of FTP is the typical 'threshold' zone (Z4).

Sizzle82

That what I thought thank you.

hubcyclist

another 90mins at z2 (avg 180w) last night. definitely will mix in sweet spot, but nothing purely threshold for a little while, i think.

grolby

A couple of thoughts.

1. Maybe your threshold is underdeveloped, and maybe not. I thought that was my problem, too. Endurance and recovery were bigger issues. Which is tricky because they are less easily measurable than simple W/kg at threshold. Because of the kind of racing I want to do, threshold remains a major target for me, but I learned that it was actually more than high enough to hang in Cat 3 races and wasn't necessarily what was getting me poor results.

2. 2x threshold workouts a week for three months before the season even begins is... let's be kind, and say that this approach is unconventional. For many riders, it might be both more effective and more sustainable to focus on a blend of Endurance and Tempo work during most of the off-season, depending on time available to train - yes, with perhaps some Threshold level work as well. This will develop some threshold but more importantly a training base to handle a high workload, including Threshold work, as the season gets closer.

Obviously I could be totally wrong, I am not a coach and all that stuff. But if you have the training time to contemplate 5-6 hour rides (!!) on the weekend (by the way, how long are the races you are training for??), doing Threshold work twice a week all winter sounds like it will be most effective in making you too fatigued to take advantage of your lighter intensity work during the rest of the week. If you are heavily crunched for time during the week, that is a different story, but that also means that doing such long weekend rides might be ill-advised because they would probably hurt the effectiveness of your Threshold sessions. Basically I think this plan sounds unbalanced, one way or another.

scheibo

I think grolby makes a good point - the plan seemed reasonable to me because I hold 110+ CTL and 15-20 hours a week. I wouldn't attempt a "5 hour kitchen-sink ride" every weekend without something close to that base level of fitness because it will probably ruin the rest of your week (and even with 100+ CTL the kitchen-sink ride might be something I do only every other week).

I think earlier in this thread you said your CTL was closer to 60 - maybe try 1 threshold/SST, 1 tempo and one shorter (~3-4) hard ride on the weekend?

grolby

Yeah, if CTL going into this plan is more like 60, that's a bit of a red flag to me about this plan. I mean, who knows, CTL isn't perfectly precise or anything, but mine is a bit higher than that and the workload described would crack me in a week. This also reinforces for me the suggestion that Maltex look at endurance and recovery before just cranking on threshold.

dz_nuzz

As a suggestion coming from one of the guys who does lots of miles and some pretty hard weeks: Try doing some longer threshold / Z2 rides before you get into the Kitchen Sink stuff. Some of my biggest gains I feel came from me doing really long rides where I just watched my powermeter and forced myself to stay at my Z2/Z3 threshold for 4-5 hours. By the end of sessions like that I was about ready to get off my bike and throw it into oncoming traffic.

At this stage of the game (base season) you wont get alot of benefit from kitchen sink stuff. That stuff is great for prepping you for the shenanigans at the end of a race, less so for building your threshold and/or recovery.

Learning how to deal with fatigue is something that I feel is overlooked. A race is not always a kitchen sink workout, nor is it a straight threshold effort. Being able to keep going when you are about ready to die is a skill that I feel translates well to any really hard race and it will in turn make you better able to hold your FTP when you get to the stage of "F*** THIS!" in your FTP efforts.