Progress

After the Sunapee race my legs were shelled and my moral was down. How you react to these two things really tells a lot about you. Convinced that you need to train more by poor performance in a race, you might think going out and training even harder is the answer, but burnout is the only real result from that course of action. Instead I scheduled two days off in a row to rest the legs and some Giro d'Italia stage watching to get me excited about racing again.

The plan worked beautifully. Tuesday morning came and I felt motivated enough for some 20 minute intervals, the meat and potatoes of increasing FTP. Before I go into the progress, let's look at previous similar workouts. The two numbers signify average power for each 20 minute session.

4/30 - 242, 242
5/6 - 240, 240
5/12 - 243, 249 <-- some improvement showing but nothing eye popping

Then Tuesday's workout; the legs felt the freshest they've been in weeks and the warmup seemed to be going well. The first interval came.. 251. It felt good, I decided to try for a higher wattage and a third 20 minute interval.

254!

Now the third, this would be tough. My legs felt ok after an eight or nine minute rest and I hammered out 255! The last five minutes were brutal but I managed to keep my pace fairly steady.

The whole resting thing really does work after all!

Thursday I did another set, 255 and 252 so it's good to see repeatability. My legs didn't feel as good after field work on Wednesday so I couldn't manage a third set but sat in the middle of my tempo zone for 25 minutes instead.

All and all the progress is very exciting. These may not be big numbers but a 12 watt improvement in 3 weeks is pretty darn good.

I've got one more USAC sanctioned race tomorrow, so I'm taking today off to clean my bikes and shave my legs. I should be totally fresh tomorrow and ready for a solid weekend of TSS, shooting for 300-350. The crit should be 100-120 with warm up and cool down, then 50 miles Sunday for ~200-250.