Sunday, January 20, 2008

first couple of training weeks 2008



So the first couple of training weeks for 2008 are in the books with relative success. The first week was really solid with about 19 training hours capped off with the Snake Creek Gap MTB TT...which was a blast. The 2nd week saw a few less hours due to work/time commitments and less than perfect weather....for about 16 hours. This week (week 3) has seen even fewer training hours, but a couple of really solid sessions.
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I have posted a couple of files above. Unfortunately the dates on the files are wrong, as I forgot to check my power control ...and it thought it was 2003 for some reason. The second is what I would call a "typical" endurance ride for me. I like the look of the srm software graphs for seeing the ride all at once. It gives an instant visual of the climbs, descents and steady portions of the ride....as opposed to the analysis that is possible in the WKO+ software. Notice that while the average power looks low (just over 200 watts), this was actually a pretty solid ride with lots of time around AeT. Living in the mountains the average power is skewed because of all the low power soft-pedaling on descents.
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The file posted at the top is a 30-30 workout I did the other night inside on the computrainer. I thought the contrast between the outside endurance ride and the controlled short interval workout inside would be interesting to put side by side. This file is only the "work" part of the training session. I did a 1 min effort at about FTP, then did 16x 30 seconds @ 125% of FTP, with 30 seconds recovery. This is a hard workout. My goal was between 15 and 20 efforts. I stopped after 16 mostly to be sure I could get enough recovery for a long endurance ride the following day. Another thing to note is the heart rate curve. Check out how HR does not reach max after each effort until 15 + seconds into the recovery. Also note that the "depth" of recovery is less and less as the session goes on. Each effort was about 420 watts average....my estimated off-season FTP now is probably about 330 watts or so.....in the future I would hope to see several things occur with this type of workout: increased avg wattage for efforts (but probably the same % of FTP as FTP improves), increased depth of HR recovery between efforts, and of course the ability to complete more efforts without feeling like dying.
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OK, I promise a more interesting post next time ... :)
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a2

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