Training Actually Works

Friday was a rest day, which meant Saturday needed to be somewhat hard. This last week was my lower volume (fewer miles/time) week in a four week cycle - three weeks of progressively increasing volume and perhaps an increase in intensity, followed by a week of lower volume, but similar intensity. So, yesterday I skipped the team ride to catch my niece's birthday party (she's one), and then headed out around 2 PM. The plan was to execute a "test" I've been considering. The ride from our place, around Lake Sammamish, and back works out to almost exactly 40 km of rolling terrain with no big hills. So, I wanted to see if I could average over 20 mph door to door. A secondary goal was to keep my average HR around 150, assuming this jived with goal #1. I used the first 10 minutes or so as a warm up, ignoring goal #1, but at the 10 min mark, I stomped it up to whatever speed worked out to 150 bpm on the heart rate monitor. Surprisingly, after a short time I reached 154 bpm, and was covering a flat section at 23+ mph. This seemed like a good sign. I rocked the whole loop, keeping my exuberance in check on the hills (didn't let the HR get over 160), and by the 20 mile mark I was still under an hour of riding! The last 5 miles are flat, so it was no trouble at all meeting both goals. I passed the house turnoff at a time of 1:13:00, which actually makes for a reasonably good 40 km time trial over rolling terrain with no aero equipment. I spun easily on the Sammamish Trail for an additional 5 mile cool down, and even with it, when I got to the garage I still had an overall average of 20.04 mph. Needless to say, I was very pleased. This is certainly the fastest I ever ridden this route, and amazingly I finished with plenty in the tank. I think the early season training is working out famously.

Sunday (today) I wanted to invent a ride that I would offer up as an A-team ride that I could lead. It's a standard loop through Redmond and Woodinville I've done many times in just under 3 hours by myself. I didn't go too hard, either, to recover a bit from Saturday's ride, but unfortunately, again due to the effect of training, the ride is too short. Distance-wise it is about 43 miles, and time-wise it took me 2.5 hours at a recovery pace (or, at least, I kept the HR in the 130's). I'll have to figure out how to amp up the distance by another 10 miles or so.

Still, I am very pleased with how well I am riding. First race of the season is in 3 weeks! The Frostbite TT. I used to be a solid time trialist back when we raced regularly in the late 90's - I'm hoping that Ted is still lurking within. The first race I did as a cat 5 was the pancake-flat 40 km Minnesota State TT, which I won in a time of 1:04:00 (I still have the t-shirt), and even beat the cat 4's who had aero equipment (I had none - just me and my bike). Back then, we were in Minnesota, and the following season we did the bi-weekly Blackdog TT series, although I always did them in the "stock bike" category, which essentially meant a standard road bike with at least 16 spokes per wheel and no aero equipment. The one time I did this course with an aero front wheel and clip-on bars, I improved my time over the 10 km course by over 1.5 minutes! I'm kinda scrambling now to get some aero stuff for the Frostbite TT - at least some aerobars. Maybe I can borrow a fast front wheel from a teammate...

I'm moving my rest day to Monday, now that the season is approaching, which means Tuesday will be the running day. Doesn't really matter since the wunderground.com forecast for this week looks like this:

any kind of training is going to suck. But, it beats snow and ice. If we were still in MN, I'd be lucky to be out on the mountain bike at this time of year...

Tomorrow night we get our new team kits. I'll be sure to post up a modeling shot of me in full Team Cucina Fresca regalia!