2010.05

Well. no more snow, but still lots of cold and wind. lets see how this week goes. it'll be nice to get past the holidays and get into training again.

Monday: Rest day. not much happening.

Tuesday: strength and a short roller interlude. i was aiming for 45 minutes of endurance pace stuff, but ended up doing 15 minutes of jumps. my rollers are making a rattling noise, so anything more than that would have drove me nuts.

wednesday: busted my shin doing box jumps. no riding.

thursday: NYE. nada. oh yeah, and my knee is killing me.

Friday: fixed my rollers, rode the track bike for a half hour. the knee was doing fine up until the end. i tried to do some jumps alternating my leading leg. the first one with bad knee forward...well it didn't go so well.

saturday: snow again.

sunday: strength training. mostly core, didn't want to screw up my knee again. it's feeling pretty good finally.

2010.04 OH SNOW!

Well. It has happened. Snow. I was afraid of this powdery white demon. Now is when I really see if this training plan holds up.

Monday: Rest day. shoveled snow at my grandparents.

Tuesday: Supposed to be a short tempo or fixed gear day. I'd say I did that. Started with some XC skiing, moved to SS MTB. No data. Not really even that sure how much of each I did. I think tomorrow will probably be about the same.

Wednesday: Long endurance today. Ended up doing 1 hour of cross country skiing. I was suprised how hard it was.

Thursday: Holiday cheer

Friday: Warmed up with some mirth and merriment. Moved on to present unwrapping intervals. Ended with some cookies and egg nog.

Saturday: Rain.

Sunday: similar to thursday and friday. EDIT: plus strength training. calf raises, lunges, squat jumps, cruches with a twist, transverse planks.

2010.03 - the UCI approach

Originally, this week was supposed to be my base 1 rest week. However, since the last four days of last week were spent sitting listening to lectures, I figure I'll just jump straight in to Base 2. Since I wasn't able to work out my weekly plan for this week by monday, I've decided this week I'll take the UCI approach to training - that being, it's less about the letter of the training plan, but more of the spirit of the training plan. Hopefully next week I'll adhere more closely. Also, one of these weeks I should start my weight training plan. All in due time.

Monday: Approximately 1hr freeform workout. Started hard, but dropped off a little by the end. I felt like my fitness was waning a bit, perhaps from the four days off.
Distance: 20.45 mi
Time: 1:11.52.67
Speed: 17.1/35.1 mph
HR: 163/186 bpm


Tuesday: Rode with Karl today. Felt strong today. Which is completely at odds with yesterday. I don't know what's going on with that. We did one sprint, which you can see as the spike in the data at around 25 minutes in. The official training plan said to do some tempo today, so I did some riding home from Karl's house. forgot to turn my garmin on again though, so the data you see isn't the whole ride today. Looking back on monday's data, that seems pretty tempo to me, so i'm cool with it. whatever.
Distance: 25.98 mi
Time: 1:30:32.56
Speed: 17.2/38.4 mph
HR: 154/195 (!!!)


Wednesday: off

Thursday: rollers? nope. another day off.

Friday: The worst ride idea I ever had. Met up with Karl near port jeff, rode down to bellport for the friday kreb ride. met up with four other riders along the way, and then rode home. I don't think it got above freezing the whole time. from about halfway through the ride to the end, my legs were shot. I get days like this from time to time, I'm not really sure why. I'm sure skipping dinner the night before and then staying up late thinking about a girl didn't help, but whatever. I'm sure i'll be stronger for it. or set myself further back in my training. i'll add a pretty graph later. EDIT: graph added. I start sucking at 30 miles, pick it back up, and then just about die on the ride home, which you can see as my heartrate going straight down. also, i can't figure out how garmin decides the scales on these graphs at all.
Distance: 71.74 mi
Time: 4:24:33.52
Speed: 16.3 / 32.1 mph
HR: 164 / 188 bpm

Saturday:nada, errands and work all day.

Sunday: strength work, some rollers. oh yes, and shovelling.

2010.02 - week two!

Alright, so I think i mentioned in my last post that from thursday to sunday of this week i'll be in colorado springs. So this means that my training schedule will be all messed up this week. as such, i'm just making up workouts as i go along.

Monday: 3 hours easy pace. I got a late start, so I ended up not eating enough before the ride (or during the ride) and finished with some very painful legs. Also, it was cold. very cold. I'm starting to question my dedication to this whole 'training' thing. oh well, here's the data.

Distance: 51.36 mi

Time: 2:59:44.37
Speed: 17.1/27.7 mph

HR: 157/180 (tisk tisk)

Tuesday: 30 minute easy ride today to try to recover from yesterday.

Distance: 8.53 mi

Time: 32:06.05

Speed: 16.0/30.4

HR: 151/173

2010.01 - Week 1!

Well this is my first week with a 'real' training plan.

...and i'm sick. Two days before the start I started to get aches in my knees and lower back and a killer headache. Feeling better now.

Monday- Scheduled: rest. Actual: rest. cha-ching!

Tuesday- Scheduled: 30 min low intensity. Actual: sick again, but walked at night for 30 min. good enough!

Wednesday- Scheduled: 1:15 low intensity. Actual: doctor and sleep. feeling better though.

Thursday- Scheduled: 45 min low intensity. Actual: 1 hour mostly low intensity. I got a little too excited early on in the ride (hey, it'd been a week since i last rode!). I slowed down eventually once my lung started burning. Apparently i'm not completely recovered from my random illness yet.

Distance: 17.57 mi

Time: 1:01:12.62

Speed: 17.2/33.7 (avg/max) mph

HR: 154/172 bpm

Friday- Scheduled: 30 minutes moderate intensity spinning. I'm trying to raise my max cadence on the rollers as well as my 1 minute average. Actual: Same. I'm hoping to upload some garmin info soon so whomever can see the workout in graph form. I really like this workout, 1 min on 3 min off for 5. I think this is one of my major limiters in my kilo. I always would start out with a great cadence, but then it would drop off about halfway. In these workouts, I could get to 30 seconds, but then it became very difficult to maintain cadence. Coincidence? I think not. I'll have to keep on doing these for a few weeks.

Saturday- Scheduled: 1:15 low intensity endurance. Actual: well it turns out i'm going in to the city all day, so hopefully some rollers at night. edit: not so much.

Sunday- Scheduled: 45 min low intensity. Actual: again, not so much.

Conclusions: I'd call this week about a 50% success. However, being sick, I think that it could have been worse. Next week I'll have to modify my plan a bit as I'll be heading to the OTC from thursday to sunday for my race mechanic's certification.

2010 Season Goals

Also last week I completed my annual training plan. one of the first steps in completing this is to determine goals. For this upcoming season I have decided they are:

-1:15 kilo at either opening weekend or states*
-Top 10 opening weekend
-Top 10 in a cat 4 road race**

*As it turns out, my brother's wedding might fall into the same weekend as states, so I might only have one A race for this season...in april. it'll be a short season for me.
**I'm not really sure how good of a goal this is. I don't actually have any cat 4 races set into my schedule right now, and if i did, they'd all be B or C races since I'm just focusing on opening weekend and states* this year.

LTHR test

Alright, well in the end of november, I completed two separate tests to determine LTHR. The first was as close to a half hour TT as I could complete on LI without having to stop. It ended up closer to 20 minutes, and I think I started out too fast. The end result was an avg HR of 183 bpm. With a little factoring involved, I figured that puts me around 171-175 bpm LTHR. On 25 november, I completed a graded test which revealed an apparent LTHR of 179-180. Thanksgiving day I tested this by riding at around 180 for a long stretch at the end of our thanksgiving ride that we hold around here. my legs were toast by the end, so i figure 180 is a bit high. I figure I'll just set it as 175 for now until I can get more data.

Base Update

Alright, just a quick update for updating's sake. Been doing lots of base. Finally bought Friel's book. Realizing now that my garmin HR zones don't match up with Friel's at all. Looks like I'll have to do a LTHR test one of these days. I've also been riding the rollers on the occasional off day. Still trying to get myself in gear and actually ride more than 2-3x a week. Though this early in the training season, maybe it's for the best. We'll see.

A Look to Next Season

Alright. Well. As you might notice, there were no updates about my progress last season. That's because absolutely nothing noteworthy happened. Well, except for winning my age group in the Tour of Missouri Amateur Sprint Competition. It sounds more impressive than it was, trust me. At least I got a plaque signed by Cav and Thor out of the deal.

Anyhow, my plan now is to put this past season behind me and start training for next season. So far I have come up with the following:
-I have already begun base training. Being unemployed, this will consist of many LSD rides, with a little bit of tempo thrown in for good measure.
-Hopefully at least one day a week will be AR on the rollers. this gives me the benefit of not twiddling along busy roads as well as working on my balance/spin/the whole 9.
-As it stands, I'm thinking a double peak season sounds pretty nice. Hopefully late April and early August (what a coincidence, just in time for opening weekend and state champs for track...)
-Yes. I'm still a cat5 on the road. No. I'm not proud of it. Yes. I am determined to rectify this as soon as possible.
-I'm slowly giving up my euro "train by feel" tendencies and have started using an HRM. Zone 3 is a lot slower than I thought. This is good to know.

Today I rode for 3:13, just about 50 miles, solid zone 3 workout. It's a start!

Saratoga Springs and Training Thus Far...

Last weekend I managed to make it to Saratoga Springs for a tour of the Serotta factory. I have to say, it is a very interesting place. They seem to have very high attention to detail, though some of their manufacturing methods seem unneccessarily complicated and I still question their method of table-ing (tabling?) a frame as opposed to the new accepted method. Regardless, I think I might have to look into saving up for one.

I am almost done building up my rain/cruddy weather bike. Which couldn't be done soon enough, because all of last week was solid rain. Training has been mostly nonexistant, though I did get a decent ride in today. My new goal is to get at least some minimal amount of riding in every day. Hopefully I can start riding to work again as well.

Track Opening Weekend

Well by a strange turn of events, I managed to make it to opening weekend. And as an added bonus, didn't come in DFL. In fact, I was slightly impressed with my results, considering how little I've been able to train. I managed fifth in the kilo, despite completely losing track of my lap count and thinking I was one lap ahead of where I was (I advise against doing a kilo on a 400m track-2.5 laps gets very confusing). That really was the only major result. I ended up sliding to 15th place, being one point short of getting 10th. Looking back, I probably could have gotten that point in the last race (a miss and out), but I dropped out early because the field was racing very sketchy. We even had to reride as one guy broke his collarbone after the second lap. Needless to say, I didn't want to suffer the same fate on my birthday with my family watching.

Track(less) work

Well I'd say it's about time for another update. Yesterday I cleaned up the track bike and had Will at Roadworx (the best shop) take a look at my fit. As it turns out, I fail at math and had the saddle way too high. Today I decided to do some sprints to see how the legs are feeling. Two summers ago, I found a section of road right by me that is low traffic, with a 200m stretch from a speed limit sign to a 3-way stop. I use the stop line at the 3-way as my finish line without having to worry too much about getting hit by a car because this is a T intersection, with my direction of travel being along the top of the T (if that makes any sense). The legs were feeling good, but by the end the hands were feeling...well...they weren't feeling. They were frozen. Next weekend is the start of the race season here, with the first cadence cup race on saturday and the first spring series race the next day. I'll keep an eye to the weather to see if I'll head out there or not. I think the hardest part of these races will be getting there in time. 6:30 am start time with an hour of travel to get there. ouch. I might ride up to kissena after the saturday race to get a few laps in. Hopefully I can start updating this thing more often.

First race of the season

Looking at what little of the NY race schedule I can find, it looks like the first race in the Cadence Cycling Prospect Park series will be my first race for the season. It looks like it should be pretty good. Only 14 miles long (pfft.) and comes with a pink leader's jersey. Between that and the fact that the second race of the series is in May, this means that I could potentially be the cat 5 series winner for a full two months! what a deal. Looks like I'll have to focus on going really hard for only 14 miles. Base...who needs it?

As for actual training...well...yeah. I have gotten a few rides in, but between the snowing, raining, freezing, slow thawing and endless sanding/salting of the roads, I haven't really felt like going out at all. And as fun as they might be, the rollers have still sat in their corner. Today, however, I did crack out the ol' cross country skis. Man, I'm hurting from that. Though that might be because I still have no clue what I'm doing when it comes to skiing. Or possibly having to jump a fence to get to a nice field to ski on.

And so it begins...

Dear Internet,
Well. I finally did it. My very own training blog. Yes indeed. Big things are happening now. Anyhow, I was supposed to ride today with Gregory from the Kreb Cycle. Needless to say, I overslept. So instead it was a solo ride to the old field lighthouse and back. 20ish miles. Sorta hilly. Well as hilly as this area gets, at least. I also replaced my cleats again. They lasted a solid 2kmi (that's kilo-miles). Actually, come to think of it, it's been longer than that, because the last time I replaced them, I was still racing track. Speaking of which, one of these days I'll have to post my season goals. My main focus will be track. And finally doing enough road races to cat up. Well there's that. I'd say this is a pretty solid first post. I'm happy with it. It's supposed to snow tomorrow and then switch to freezing rain, so that either means rollers, cross country skiing, or most likely doing nothing. Now that's commitment. I do plan on helping out at the food pantry in the morning though, so I can still feel good about myself.