What a weekend, what a week, this is what happens when your fitness is going through the roof. In my build up to Joe Martin Memorial Stage Race, May 5-8, this week was a big one in terms of volume and intensity. Wear myself out, wear myelf thin but don’t over-train was the theme for this week.
With the Tour de Husker running Saturday through Sunday, the plan was to train right up to and through this weekend. The reasoning is basically to get some similar intensity and volume, Friday through Sunday, as what I’ll experience at Joe Martin. Friday didn’t quite work out as I had planned. The tax man came knocking, actually messaging me, so priorities where adjusted slightly. Not even the tax man can mess up my cycling, though. I had planned a 2-2.5 hour workout, with VO2 efforts and sweet spot, but got the sweet spot done in 1.5 hours for lack of time.
Not much to say about Thursday other than it was a recovery ride, on the trainer, on the time trial bike. Not that I want to make a recovery ride seem unenlightening, recovery is so crucial, the ride is basically high spin efforts and positioning technique.
Wednesday Night Worlds have been atypical this year. Maybe I should say last year WNW was atypical because of my knee. A wired up kneecap doesn’t help much with riding power. Even comparing to previous years, in general the normalized power is up 15-20 watts. This year the perceived exertion seems a lot less when the going gets going.
Tuesday Night was criterium practice. Beforehand, I went out and did a few sweet spot to threshold intervals, keeping up with the volume and intensity theme for the week. Contesting sprints, with fatigue already built up in the legs, is what this day’s goal was. Again, keeping in theme with the overall picture of stage racing.
Going back to the first day of the week, Monday, was a recovery day. Not so unenlightening, as I took the TT bike outside for the first time this year, getting a feel for the position.
Observing the week by the numbers shows I’m still gaining power. Racing brings this out and just like the previous weekends racing I achieved a top 10 120 min normalized power in the road race Saturday. Unlike last week, I wasn’t in a two up break but a group of 5. This kept the longer power efforts down briefly as a teammate and I let the front group, with teammates, form a gap from our group. Once a 2 minute gapped formed, it was time to help do some work, to catch any stragglers. The power went up but nothing to demanding cruising at tempo. Sunday’s criterium brought out a top 10 one minute effort. This is typical of criteriums to see top efforts in the shorter durations. Reasonable power efforts for a criterium but to be expected from a stage race at around an intensity factor of .9 . After the crit and lunch, I went back out for a 2:45 hour ride at recovery pace. Just from the preceieved effort of this recovery ride, very low, fitness is coming along really well. Also, on Tuesday, I achieved a top 10 five second power. Nothing spectacular but still a sign of improvement. The below picture shows the fitness climbing, the blue line. The yellow line shows fatigue. In the lowest range for me on Sunday. The pink line shows short term accumualtion of fatigue. Still climbing and not staggnating. You can find out more about this performance manager chart here.
The last of the big weeks accomplished. Volume up to 22 hours with lots of intensity. Two weeks to Joe Martin from today. Time to bring the volume down and keep up on the intensity. Stay tuned, now the acknowledgement of my fitness gains the next few weeks.
More evidence that caffeine can improve performance. In this trial, ingesting 5.3 mg caffeine/kg of body weight and a 6.3% glucose solution decreased TT time by 4.6% over just glucose and 9% over water placebo.
Beware, 5.3 mg of caffeine for a 70 kg individual equals 371 mg. That could be anywhere from 2-4 cups of coffee and a lot of trips to the bathroom (diuretic action of caffeine).
This might turn you into a time trial caff”fiend”. It could also make you miss your start by spending to much time in the restroom.
To start off, I don’t like using my coaching blog to blog about myself. This blog is more about providing information to help my athletes and others improve their sporting goals. So, the information on my training is not about me it’s about you. Read between the lines and ask why, how, and what is this process of training.
To start off , let’s begin with some humor. One of my favorite movies is Austin Powers. There’s a scene where Dr. Evil, is in therapy, and they ask him about his childhood. Dr. Evil so begins his story with: The details of life are quite inconsequential. As you see, they are quite consequential. In the training process it is the details that give you the big picture.
In the next 3 weeks I’ll be blogging about my training and racing leading up to Joe Martin. Joe Martin is always on my calender to do well at. It’s a regional stage race that brings out some stiff competition. The courses are tough but suit my style. What is that style? A longer stage race format, with some hills, but not at altitude. I’ve done this race as a masters plenty of times. I’ve done it once when they allowed cat. 2′s in with the pro’s. Once as a cat 1-2 field. ( A side note: racing with the pro’s was pretty cool. They were actually really polite, when they wanted to get by you, coming back from the caravan. Got to do the mother nature call and hold on for dear life as the pro train caught back up to the group. Fun.)
The first week was made up of lots of tempo, sweet spot and longer rides. Sort of boring so I’ll leave out those details. Onto the pain, suffering and defeatist workouts.
Last week was the second week of my build to Joe Martin. This was big time at 21 hours with the start of racing. Ultimately, it pushed my chronic training load up to 110 TSS/day. This week was also the start of 4 minutes @ VO2. The VO2 work is my crutch. I won’t say weakness, because I have a fairly good average, but the longer efforts push my mental capacity. Doing them outside is even harder with all the hills,wind, traffic and debris.
For this week, week 3, there is a 10-15% increase in time from the previous week. I’m fairly maxed out, in the amount of time that I can give, because of life, a.k.a. work. I’ll try to get 1 hour maybe 1.5 hrs of extra time. I’ve been at 22 hours once this year and it’s nothing but riding, eating and sleeping. Oh yeah, and that 8 hour/day job. Plan “B” is to maintain, this past weeks time, and keep the fitness a building with a bit more intensity. This is where the fine line is drawn on over-reaching to over-training. To much volume and intensity and the possibility of over-training looms.
The cycle of workouts have been mostly built around sub threshold power to threshold power work on Mondays, Wednesday night worlds at race pace, and VO2 work on Fridays. Tuesday’s are left as either a longer endurance ride or recovery. Thursday is definitely a recovery day. Saturdays I’ve set up as a longer day, at 80% of threshold, and reaching for 85%+ of threshold the last 15 or so miles. Sundays end up to be moderate distance at the at the lower end of endurance power.
Now that the racing has begun, I can start to see whether for real all this training has paid off this winter. This past Sunday, at the Twin Bing Classic, I hit some of the best power numbers from 1 hour out to 3 hours. Being in the break has a tendency to do this for your personal bests. Also, the 5 and 20 min top 10 power numbers of the 2011 season were laid out during the race.
The next 17 days leave me with some of the most challenging training I’ll put myself through. Right now my chronic training load is holding at 110. I’ll bring this up to 118 in the next 17 days. Then I’ll taper for 7-10 days. There will be 3 more weekends of racing before Joe Martin. These are races I don’t take easy days beforehand to be fresh at. I’ll train right through them. For example, before this past Sundays race I had done an 80 miler on Saturday (TSS 150). Friday was the VO2 workout (TSS 100).
I hope that at the least you find this entertaining. Mostly, I hope you find it educational. For more info on power please visit training peaks or if you have any questions, ask. I don’t have all the answers but I have access to USA Cycling coaches group.
More power to you.
Marc
Posted by Marc Walter as My training at 3:38 AM MST
The Twin Bing Classic is one of the toughest early season races around. The climate and the course, every year, definitely make this a classic tough race. Thanks to Bill Fieges the rest of Sioux City Velo. They put on a very organized event.
This year was no different. The weather was cool, windy and changing throughout the day. The wind was from a westerly direction for the whole day. Switching from south west to west and then north west. Even the temps varied through out the day. At one time, the sun came out and the tailwind section got rather warm. That didn’t last long as the sun disappeared and the west to north west wind began picking up.
As for the race, the pace started off rather tame. Starting into a west wind will do that and 68 miles in front of you. There were a few accelerations in the first section of headwinds. I was hanging in the out in the pack being vigilant to teammates attacks. Knowing that the crosswind section was coming up I wanted to make sure I was around teammates. This is a classic strategy to blow up a field. Get an echelon of a team, stretching across the road and not letting others into your working group, and soon the field is split. What happened next was very unexpected. I followed the wheel of Clark Priebe of Trek the other strong team, to the front, and soon we we’re off the front. This was nota full blown attack but more of a roll off the front. There was another guy up the road, we caught him, and started rotating. Nobody else was rotating through. Right before the crosswind section, I looked back, and was amazed the pack wasn’t there. Clark and I up the pace while the other guy didn’t want to rotate through. Now we had a tailwind through the rolling part of the course. We dropped the guy not rotating through, he was breathing fairly hard, trying to gain some minutes. Clark was taking to strong of pulls for me up some hills. I knew we still had 50-60 miles to go. This was not the tempo I thought I could last. Knowing I had a strong team behind and so did Clark I backed off. The group did make some gains on me and at one point I thought I was going to get caught. This is the point where you just keep going hopefully letting the guys chasing wear themselves thin so a teammate can attack. I was hoping it was Trek since they were the big team.
As I topped the major climb of the course, a one mile ascent, I figured the group would be on my tail. When I turned around on the descent they weren’t there. Soon Jerome Rewerts, of team Zealous, bridged up. I was not sure how many teammates he had. I just rolled through with him. The official did come up and told us we had 2 minutes on the pack and a minute to bridge to Clark. This was the only time he did. Afterwards, I assumed if we were not getting splits, during the race, then we must be well ahead of the group. Soon after we picked up Clark the pace picked up. After we gained some momentum, back in the tailwind section, I knew the teams must be covering and not letting the group pick up the pace. Now it was just a matter of settling in and maintaining the nutrition/hydration to avoid cramps.
The next time up the major hill, we dropped Clark. I had noticed he was faltering a bit on the hills on the tailwind section. Jerome and I waited to the bottum of the decent, it’s good sportsmanship to wait a bit for a guy whose been helping, but no Clark. We decided to proceed.
The headwind section it’s just maintaining a smooth rhythm. Rotating through at tempo to threshold. Once we got that tailwind it was time to just roll it over the tops trying not to push the power. The wind helped. This was the last lap and either we start attacking each other or sprint it out.
The major hill finish was up next. The wind was picking up. With 1k to go Jerome took the lead. It was really slow going with the wind and the grade of the hill. He took the white line and leeward side to pass. I was struggling. With 300 meters I put it in one gear harder, got up out of the saddle, and bogged down. Immediately I let up a little to get into that easier spinning gear. A wheel length gap opened and Jerome saw that, shifted into a bigger gear and beat me by 2 bike lengths.
As we waited for the finish of the group, it was great to see my teammates finish Kevin Limpach, Jared Berger, and Chris Spence finish 4,5, respectively. Team Kaos, a very cohesive bunch of guys to race with. The Specialized bike equipment from JoyRide Bicycles is top notch along with all the sponsorship investment that goes into making this team work.
