SST On a Cold Day

This morning it was 18 degrees and trees were coated with ice, so I didn't really plan to ride outside, but due to lack of motivation I piddled around the house and put off the trainer ride.  Once it got close to noon, it was sunny and about 32, so I decided to ride outside.  After a 9 minute warm-up I settled into a pace in the 280-290 watt range and was feeling comfortable.  I felt better as I went along, ramped up the pace a little, and ended up doing 294 watts for an 85 minute stretch.  It was one of my best efforts this year, and I even finished feeling like I could've kept going.

Except for the long ride on MLK day, I haven't done any long rides.  That's partly due to the cold weather, but mostly because I just feel like trying a different approach.  Who says you have to ride lots of 4 or 5 hour rides to build up endurance to prepare for road racing?...Well most people would say that.  I'm just not going to do it this year.   I don't think missing all those long rides is going to matter at all.  In fact, based on how I'm progressing so far, I think I'll be better off.  But in the end, if I'm wrong, and I suck when it comes time to race, I can deal with that.  The reality is that I'm a 40 year old amateur who does this for fun.  I'm just going to keep experimenting with my less is more training plan and see where it takes me.

MLK Day Ride

TGIM. What better way to start off a week, than doing a 75 mile ride with a bunch of friends on a sunny 60+ degree day in January, and capping it off with large quantities of Mexican food.  LL organized the ride and started us out riding a lap of the 6 mile course that will be used in the upcoming Blythewood RR.  I'm not sure if that course is really what the race will use though.  It includes 1 mile of dirt, plus two short steep climbs. 

After the race loop, we headed out into the country and went through Ridgeway, Winnsboro, Cedar Creek, and back to Blythewood.  The group was 11, including Nathan from Charleston, and Robert from Rock Hill.  The ride was pretty damn fast for so early in the year.  We averaged 21.5 mph on a hilly route.  My NP was 242 watts, despite trying to conserve energy.  Apparently everyone is training a lot even though we've had unusually cold weather since Christmas. 

Back to Training

It's been a long while since my last post.  During the last couple of months I took somewhat of a break from cycling.  I kept riding, but only about 4 days a week, mostly SST, with some weight lifting, and tennis thrown in for some cross-training.  For a mental break, I just let cycling take a back seat for a while.  I rode when it was convenient and didn't think about cycling as much.  I rarely rode more than 1.5 hours at a time, and my longest ride since Thanksgiving was 2.5 hours. 

About 3 1/2 weeks ago I ramped up the training some by adding even more SST, and throwing in some sprints and occasional 30 second intervals in level 6. 

Today I had the opportunity to get out in the awesome weather, and my legs were feeling good.  This was my first ride at over 50 degrees in many weeks.  I was going to do a long 90% FTP interval, but I decided during the warm-up to do a 20 minute test instead.  I've been wanting to do that but haven't been motivated to try it at 35 degrees or indoors.  Really I was looking at this as a pre-test, since I'm in the very early stages of my training, but once I got going I felt good and put out a much better effort than I expected.  I rode the first 10 minutes at 337 watts, and wasn't feeling all that bad, so I ramped up the pace and got the average all the way up to 343 by the 20 minute mark. 

It's really amazing the affect that sub-threshold training seems to have.  Even though I've been training in the 280 to 290 watt range mostly, I was a able to knock out 20 minutes over 50 watts above that today. 

Bike for sale

If anyone is interested, we are selling my wife's Felt F55 on ebay, as well as a set of ultegra pedals.