Training – What is it good for?

Its been an interesting 5 months.

When I found I had a place in the TCR, I knew I had a lot of work to do – I was nowhere near as strong on the bike as I’ve been in the past.

So, how did the training go?

The above graph shows my training load since 1^st Jan. The blue line shows the training load (distance and intensity) – which increased steadily.  I had 2 big rises – from 6 days in Lanzarote, and 4 days on the tour of wessex – big rides with hard efforts.  Apart from that my load has been pretty consistent – some good weeks, some bad, but the overall load just increasing slightly.

This was a success.  In the past, I did too much too soon, and ended up having a very disappointing last 6 weeks.  I currently feel good, and feel I could have done a lot more training.  However, I often felt pretty fatigued too at time, especially on some commutes.

Training Volume – hrs

I’ve averaged 17.5 hours  training a week.  It’s been a balance of workload v enthusiasm, and I decided early on that a realistic, repeatable, sustainable effort was the best approach for me.  I had a couple of off weeks, (Grey bars where the planned duration was more than the actual).  But overall, I did more of my plan than I did not do.

I dropped my gym work pretty early on, (and used my lunches for route planning instead)  However, I hit 75% of my turbos, which is a big improvement for me.

So what did all this training achieve?

The gold standard is frequent ftp tests – that I didn’t do as I hate them.  I always found my peak ftp is in March on my Lanza camp – a combination of hills, wind and competition.

Instead, my Garmin watch has been calculating an estimate of my Vo2 max.  This has seen a steady increase over the last 8 months, even in the last 2 when my training volume stabilized. Nice

Finally I’ve done some power tests at a hr of 130bpm (MAF tests).  I saw my power increase over the months in this test

Date		Test (3*10 mins)	avg power @ hr	bpm for each 10mins	power for each 10 min
04 Nov	Zwift	30 min @ MAF	178@131	130 133 131	191 177 168
10 Feb	Zwift	30 min @ MAF	182@131	131 131 131	190 181 176
08 March	Zwift	30 min @ MAF	180@130	130 130 130	184 179 179
05 April	Zwift	30 min @ MAF	185@132	132 132 133	187 183 187
03 May	Zwift	30 min @ MAF	199@132	131 132 132	201 198 196

I don’t feel ready, but hopefully I am.