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.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Another race, another whooping.
Two weeks ago the Jiminey Peak road race gave me some confidence back after the quabbin debacle. I was able to barely hang on to the back of the pack after almost popping on the first major climb. So, in an attempt to keep the good mojo going I registered for the Sunapee Lake road race. Forty five miles with about seventeen hundred feet of climbing didn't look too bad on the computer. In fact, the topo maps all seemed to indicate long slow climbs with no real steep pitches.
That was not the case. There were two major climbs (for me), one about six or seven miles in and the other about eighteen miles in on the twenty two mile laps. The first lap I felt pretty good, no one was attacking but the pace was still high on the climbs, about 4 watts/kg. If it kept up this way I could definitely have another pack finish. On start of the second lap the 35+ guys caught us and some panic insued when a few of our field latched onto the back of them as they passed; totally illegeal. The directors had to stop both fields, start the 35+ with a minute or two lead and let us on our way. Basically a five minute rest in the middle of a road race, pretty odd. It did give me a chance to eat my cliff bar though.
After that, the pace went up significantly. The first lap had a NP of 230, so I was feeling like I had been working but was doing ok, but soon the attacks started and the hills seemed suddenly steeper and longer. I lost contact on the first big climb, anticipating catching up on the descent but left too big of a gap. Instead I wheelsucked a guy who dragged me back to the pack. From there I hung on for dear life as I wasn't able to move up on the descent and filter back on the climbs anymore. The inevitable happened and I was dropped again on the second climb, I could see the field about fifty yards ahead but just couldn't close the gap no matter how hard I tried. There was a nasty headwind and the field was chasing a solo flier as I went off the back. I finally gave up and time trialed it in, an awful feeling.
This race further confirmed my lack of climbing ability. I need to lose 10 pounds (160 right now), and gain 20 watts to my FTP to have any kind of sucess on these kinds of races. With an FTP of 265, and ten fewer pounds this race would have been much more contentious for me. Those ten pounds also mean my other power numbers would go up, independent of gains from training.
The biggest complicating factor is there are mainly crits remaining for the rest of the season, with a hilly stage race in September. I think I'll continue to concentrate my training on FTP, make an actual concious effort to lose ten pounds and race the Tuesday night practice criteriums to keep my anaerobic systems working.
Today and yesterday are rest days, I've had big TSS scores the past few weeks and my legs need a break longer than one day. I should be feeling fresh tomorrow for a 50 mile SST ride, have field work on Wednesday and Thursday will be 20 minute intervals if my legs are up for it.
That was not the case. There were two major climbs (for me), one about six or seven miles in and the other about eighteen miles in on the twenty two mile laps. The first lap I felt pretty good, no one was attacking but the pace was still high on the climbs, about 4 watts/kg. If it kept up this way I could definitely have another pack finish. On start of the second lap the 35+ guys caught us and some panic insued when a few of our field latched onto the back of them as they passed; totally illegeal. The directors had to stop both fields, start the 35+ with a minute or two lead and let us on our way. Basically a five minute rest in the middle of a road race, pretty odd. It did give me a chance to eat my cliff bar though.
After that, the pace went up significantly. The first lap had a NP of 230, so I was feeling like I had been working but was doing ok, but soon the attacks started and the hills seemed suddenly steeper and longer. I lost contact on the first big climb, anticipating catching up on the descent but left too big of a gap. Instead I wheelsucked a guy who dragged me back to the pack. From there I hung on for dear life as I wasn't able to move up on the descent and filter back on the climbs anymore. The inevitable happened and I was dropped again on the second climb, I could see the field about fifty yards ahead but just couldn't close the gap no matter how hard I tried. There was a nasty headwind and the field was chasing a solo flier as I went off the back. I finally gave up and time trialed it in, an awful feeling.
This race further confirmed my lack of climbing ability. I need to lose 10 pounds (160 right now), and gain 20 watts to my FTP to have any kind of sucess on these kinds of races. With an FTP of 265, and ten fewer pounds this race would have been much more contentious for me. Those ten pounds also mean my other power numbers would go up, independent of gains from training.
The biggest complicating factor is there are mainly crits remaining for the rest of the season, with a hilly stage race in September. I think I'll continue to concentrate my training on FTP, make an actual concious effort to lose ten pounds and race the Tuesday night practice criteriums to keep my anaerobic systems working.
Today and yesterday are rest days, I've had big TSS scores the past few weeks and my legs need a break longer than one day. I should be feeling fresh tomorrow for a 50 mile SST ride, have field work on Wednesday and Thursday will be 20 minute intervals if my legs are up for it.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Progress
I first got my powermeter in early March, and finding FTP was not exactly easy for me. Sure, I found my 5", 1' and 5' power easy enough, but something just didn't work with the FTP methods I tried. The first problem is you need fresh legs, but any training plan will tell you that doesn't happen more than once or twice a week for any training plan. That meant I had about one shot a week to test without sacrafising the remainder of the week. The second, bigger problem was the myriad of ways to find it.
At it's basic definition FTP is your maximum 60 minute power, but I'd never ridden the same power level for more than 5 minutes so an hour long time trial was out of the question. Instead, I tried the 1', 5', 20' test recommended by "Training and Racing with a Powermeter". The problem was the 1' shelled me so badly I could barely complete the 5' test and had nothing left for the 20'. Then one day I had a great hour long ride with a normalized power of 255 watts and thought "great! 255 it is!". Not so fast, as the NP alogorythm can easily be tricked into overcalculating wattage. Of course you can't really tell the extent, but this was clearly an overestimation. I "conservatively" estimated my FTP at 240 and went about training from there. Question answered, done deal, right?
Nope.
Fastforward two months and I find the Monod Critical Power excel spreadsheet over at the wattage forms. It uses formulae to describe how your power curve declines with time. Using two samples of maximum power for durations between one and twenty minutes, I can calculate FTP at any time in my training, as long as they're within a week or so of each other. Pretty neat huh?
Using it with current data, I get an FTP of 245 which makes sense based on yet another FTP test by Carmichael (0.88 * 2x8' power average). That means a 5 watt increase after 2 solid months of training? I don't think that sounds right.
So playing with the numbers from the end of March and early April, I find an FTP of 233. That means in one month I've raised my FTP approximately 10 to 12 watts beacuse this is fairly theoretical. That's more than 2 watts increase per week!
This is exactly the kind of thing that motivates me; measurable effort and measurable reward. I think it's from all the years studying engineering, chasing grades on every single effort made in school. It's also exactly what got me addicted to an MMORPG years ago, playing 8-12 hours a day at the peak of my addiction. I would do the same monotonous action over and over, gaining experience, money and levels. The important part was seeing the progression, and when I got to the point in the game where that progression became mind numbingly slower, I quit.
The problem with cycling is you can't play 12 hours a day, your body just won't let you. I know there will be a point where my power numbers will progress much slower, and I wonder what my reaction will be. I think I'll stick with it, because there's so much more to riding than just power; the scenery, the feeling of flying, the friends, the races, etc.
At it's basic definition FTP is your maximum 60 minute power, but I'd never ridden the same power level for more than 5 minutes so an hour long time trial was out of the question. Instead, I tried the 1', 5', 20' test recommended by "Training and Racing with a Powermeter". The problem was the 1' shelled me so badly I could barely complete the 5' test and had nothing left for the 20'. Then one day I had a great hour long ride with a normalized power of 255 watts and thought "great! 255 it is!". Not so fast, as the NP alogorythm can easily be tricked into overcalculating wattage. Of course you can't really tell the extent, but this was clearly an overestimation. I "conservatively" estimated my FTP at 240 and went about training from there. Question answered, done deal, right?
Nope.
Fastforward two months and I find the Monod Critical Power excel spreadsheet over at the wattage forms. It uses formulae to describe how your power curve declines with time. Using two samples of maximum power for durations between one and twenty minutes, I can calculate FTP at any time in my training, as long as they're within a week or so of each other. Pretty neat huh?
Using it with current data, I get an FTP of 245 which makes sense based on yet another FTP test by Carmichael (0.88 * 2x8' power average). That means a 5 watt increase after 2 solid months of training? I don't think that sounds right.
So playing with the numbers from the end of March and early April, I find an FTP of 233. That means in one month I've raised my FTP approximately 10 to 12 watts beacuse this is fairly theoretical. That's more than 2 watts increase per week!
This is exactly the kind of thing that motivates me; measurable effort and measurable reward. I think it's from all the years studying engineering, chasing grades on every single effort made in school. It's also exactly what got me addicted to an MMORPG years ago, playing 8-12 hours a day at the peak of my addiction. I would do the same monotonous action over and over, gaining experience, money and levels. The important part was seeing the progression, and when I got to the point in the game where that progression became mind numbingly slower, I quit.
The problem with cycling is you can't play 12 hours a day, your body just won't let you. I know there will be a point where my power numbers will progress much slower, and I wonder what my reaction will be. I think I'll stick with it, because there's so much more to riding than just power; the scenery, the feeling of flying, the friends, the races, etc.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Season so far
My powermeter came in the mail at the very end of February, so even though I had been riding in December, January and February, my season officially started March 2nd with the first of many rides with my power meter. Initially I saw myself as someone that had a lot of endurance but not enough high end power. I got this idea from all the distance riding I'd been doing, bike touring and the like, and my lack of 5 second or sprint power. So, my first goal was to gain more anaerobic power.
I did hard workouts, 1' to 5' long intervals, and my power in those zones went up. I even gained a bit of sprint. As a result, my first criteriums went well. The short fast races around a small loop with several corners tend to favor anaerobic power. I stayed with the pack on the first two races, just learning the ropes of riding so fast shoulder to shoulder, and how to attack and move up in the field. I learned about how to recover and smooth out the undulations in speed so I wouldn't have to work as hard. My third race I sat in most of the time, waited for the sprint and took 5th. In my mind I was strong, doing well and a capable racer.
Then last weekend, the Quabbin road race. Sixty three miles around a reservoir filled with short, steep climbs. I considered it a real test of the legs. I knew I wasn't a climber, but hoped to stay with the pack or at least get dropped and finish the race.
Neither of these things happened. The pack went just hard enough on the hills that after an hour and a half, my right calf siezed up like a rusty engine. I couldn't even walk it was so bad. Initially I blamed it on the heat, which had shot up to 85 degrees out of nowhere. Most of my riding had been in the 60's and below, so this made some sense but why didn't it happen to others?
When I got the powerdata home I found out why. My normalized power was 239 watts for an hour and a half. With an FTP of 245, this meant I was at my limit, and there was just no way for me to hold the pace any longer. Instead of just falling off the back and not being able to hang on, my calf seized up and the race was over for me. If I had worked on my FTP in March and April instead of my anaerobic power, it's likely I would have at least stayed with the pack. Really only 15 more watts and I would have been ok.
So, this blog is about my quest for a few more watts.
I did hard workouts, 1' to 5' long intervals, and my power in those zones went up. I even gained a bit of sprint. As a result, my first criteriums went well. The short fast races around a small loop with several corners tend to favor anaerobic power. I stayed with the pack on the first two races, just learning the ropes of riding so fast shoulder to shoulder, and how to attack and move up in the field. I learned about how to recover and smooth out the undulations in speed so I wouldn't have to work as hard. My third race I sat in most of the time, waited for the sprint and took 5th. In my mind I was strong, doing well and a capable racer.
Then last weekend, the Quabbin road race. Sixty three miles around a reservoir filled with short, steep climbs. I considered it a real test of the legs. I knew I wasn't a climber, but hoped to stay with the pack or at least get dropped and finish the race.
Neither of these things happened. The pack went just hard enough on the hills that after an hour and a half, my right calf siezed up like a rusty engine. I couldn't even walk it was so bad. Initially I blamed it on the heat, which had shot up to 85 degrees out of nowhere. Most of my riding had been in the 60's and below, so this made some sense but why didn't it happen to others?
When I got the powerdata home I found out why. My normalized power was 239 watts for an hour and a half. With an FTP of 245, this meant I was at my limit, and there was just no way for me to hold the pace any longer. Instead of just falling off the back and not being able to hang on, my calf seized up and the race was over for me. If I had worked on my FTP in March and April instead of my anaerobic power, it's likely I would have at least stayed with the pack. Really only 15 more watts and I would have been ok.
So, this blog is about my quest for a few more watts.
A little background
One day, maybe four or five years ago my bike messenger older brother introduced me to cycling; that's right, he was a bike messenger before it was cool.
It was an odd introduction, a dusty basement full of repair stands, creaking workbenches, greasy bike tools and several mostly bearded cycling addicts. It was a bike co-operative, a place to come and get a cheap bike that needs to be fixed up to work again, or to work on your own stuff, or to volunteer.
I started with the former, buying an old steel flatbar hybrid, then moved through the order until I was riding a more respectable 80's road bike and teaching people how to overhaul bottom brackets and adjust their headsets. Getting more interested in riding the bike outside of crowded, smoggy city streets was an inevitability and I can still remember the first glimpse of the countryside. I came down a steep hill on Stenton road, turned a corner and there were fields, horses, trees and only a few scattered houses as far as I could see. All this only a thirty minute ride away from my house. From then on I was hooked.
I dreamed about cycling when I was studying abroad in Turkey, and when I got back from that four month adventure the first thing I did was order a Surly Cross check, build it as a light tourer and start riding more. Pretty soon my first 200 km destroyed me for a week, but I kept riding. Eventually the co-op started organizing sunday rides, always with food at a friends house afterwards. The miles and the bikes continued to pile up, and last summer I took that surly on a 2,000 mile unsupported bike tour with the very same brother that started it all, along with two friends. When it was done, I moved to Western Massachussetts for graduate school, and the scenery never ceases to amaze me. I even dusted off the high school mountain bike, updated a few parts and started mountain biking. A faceplant and more than a dozen stitches didn't stop me, so the next natural step was to start racing.
So, after the normal endless hours of research, planning, comparison charts and graphs, I picked up a Cannondale CAAD9-5 from my friendly local bike shop owner. Of course, a bike nerd as nerdy as me can't just leave a bike stock, and being a numbers crazy engineer could only mean one thing.
I bought a powermeter.
The problem with cycling is you just can't measure anything real without power. It's not like running where a 6 minute mile is always a 6 minute mile. In cycling, you're moving so fast that a slight headwind or tailwind will drastically change your speed for a given effort. Uphill at 15 mph is very different from jogging at 5 mph; the rate you're increasing your elevation is much faster so you have to work much harder. Even heart rate monitors don't tell you much, they're like the tachometer on your car. You know your RPM's, but what's the horsepower?
That's where the powermeter comes in. Now you have a second by second measurement of the amount of power your legs can produce. You can upload an entire ride into your computer and analyze it, compare it with previous rides, see how much work was done in which training zones, or why you got dropped at the race. Instead of guessing that you're faster based on average speeds (which are suseptible to wind, temperature, stop lights etc.), you can actually measure whether your body was able to produce more watts than it used to.
It's amazing, and this blog will deal mostly with my quest for more power.
It was an odd introduction, a dusty basement full of repair stands, creaking workbenches, greasy bike tools and several mostly bearded cycling addicts. It was a bike co-operative, a place to come and get a cheap bike that needs to be fixed up to work again, or to work on your own stuff, or to volunteer.
I started with the former, buying an old steel flatbar hybrid, then moved through the order until I was riding a more respectable 80's road bike and teaching people how to overhaul bottom brackets and adjust their headsets. Getting more interested in riding the bike outside of crowded, smoggy city streets was an inevitability and I can still remember the first glimpse of the countryside. I came down a steep hill on Stenton road, turned a corner and there were fields, horses, trees and only a few scattered houses as far as I could see. All this only a thirty minute ride away from my house. From then on I was hooked.
I dreamed about cycling when I was studying abroad in Turkey, and when I got back from that four month adventure the first thing I did was order a Surly Cross check, build it as a light tourer and start riding more. Pretty soon my first 200 km destroyed me for a week, but I kept riding. Eventually the co-op started organizing sunday rides, always with food at a friends house afterwards. The miles and the bikes continued to pile up, and last summer I took that surly on a 2,000 mile unsupported bike tour with the very same brother that started it all, along with two friends. When it was done, I moved to Western Massachussetts for graduate school, and the scenery never ceases to amaze me. I even dusted off the high school mountain bike, updated a few parts and started mountain biking. A faceplant and more than a dozen stitches didn't stop me, so the next natural step was to start racing.
So, after the normal endless hours of research, planning, comparison charts and graphs, I picked up a Cannondale CAAD9-5 from my friendly local bike shop owner. Of course, a bike nerd as nerdy as me can't just leave a bike stock, and being a numbers crazy engineer could only mean one thing.
I bought a powermeter.
The problem with cycling is you just can't measure anything real without power. It's not like running where a 6 minute mile is always a 6 minute mile. In cycling, you're moving so fast that a slight headwind or tailwind will drastically change your speed for a given effort. Uphill at 15 mph is very different from jogging at 5 mph; the rate you're increasing your elevation is much faster so you have to work much harder. Even heart rate monitors don't tell you much, they're like the tachometer on your car. You know your RPM's, but what's the horsepower?
That's where the powermeter comes in. Now you have a second by second measurement of the amount of power your legs can produce. You can upload an entire ride into your computer and analyze it, compare it with previous rides, see how much work was done in which training zones, or why you got dropped at the race. Instead of guessing that you're faster based on average speeds (which are suseptible to wind, temperature, stop lights etc.), you can actually measure whether your body was able to produce more watts than it used to.
It's amazing, and this blog will deal mostly with my quest for more power.
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