Big Miles July Home Stretch and The Controversy of Strava

I hit the 1400 mile point today, making this my highest mileage month of all time. It's weird how day to day the fatigue feels differently. Some days are pretty rough, but then after a couple of easy days, you're ready for a big ride again. I'm thinking about taking it up to 1500 miles as there's still 2 days left. I guess I'll figure it out in the morning. This summer has been pretty hot so far. I guess it started out ok, but the last 3 weeks have been pretty brutal. It's not as bad as last summer, so I can't really complain too much.

The key, I think, to getting a lot of miles in July is being creative in the time you have available to ride. One way I've found is to start out really early in the morning. I guess you could ride indoors on the trainer, but I'm not interested in that right now. I'm getting a good amount of time in the hot part of the day. Mostly riding home from work. It seems pretty important to spend a few hours riding in the hot part of the day each week if you're going to be doing any racing in it. It makes such a huge difference when you're acclimated to the heat.

A ride I've been doing lately is the The OKC Early Risers Strava Challenge. We did the ride last Summer, but without the Strava part. Basically, It's a group ride that starts really early in the morning and has 3 Strava segments with prizes for the winners of each segment at the end of the month. Next month will be a different route with different segments. This month has definitely been a different group ride experience. It requires a totally different type of strategy to try and get the fastest time on a segment in a group setting. Especially when the group is pretty big. Some very interesting team tactics can be used I guess.

It's really been a fun and different way to do a more "competitive" type fast group ride. There seems to be 3 opinions regarding the whole Strava thing. Either folks love it, they think it's stupid, or they've heard about it, but don't really know what it is. I'm going to go ahead and say I think it's pretty cool. I've been on a few rides recently where some guys were obviously anti Strava. One guy said the whole thing was nothing more than a "dick flexing contest". We were talking about it at the shop, and in general, most spirited group rides are like this with guys trying to drop as many people as possible, attacking the group, getting to the top of any hill first, ETC.  So, due to the fact that it's really been going on since people have been racing bikes and doing unstructured training rides, we've been calling Strava  "digitally documented dick flexing".

It's basically all in fun. I think the DNA guys are really onto something by organizing this into a regular group ride.

Big miles July progress and the after work crit

 I guess the "Big Miles July" program is going ok. I got quite a few miles the first week. Probably more than what I was prepared for, but with the 4th of July being an epic riding day, I couldn't pass it up. I got 117 miles on the 4th, and another 100 miles + on Saturday, the first of 4 strava early risers challenge rides.
The early risers ride is perfect for getting a lot of miles in during the summer. The whole strava thing adds a pretty interesting mix to the ride as well.

I throttled back a little last week because for 1, I was pretty tired and 2, the Wednesday after work crit was this week. I wasn't sure how the race was going to go because even after taking Monday and Tuesday easy, there was still quite a bit of fatigue in my legs. In the end it worked out good as after doing tons of these mid week practice crits, I've never actually won one. So anyway, I got the win on this one. I got into a break with Aaron Highfil and Matt Jones and we kept it rolling pretty good. With about 10 minutes to go, it quickly became apparent that we were going to lap the field. At first I didn't want to, thinking it wound add another dimension to the finish and screw things up somehow. Rob pretty much set it up perfect, and I got into the last corners first with lots of momentum, and I was able to win the field sprint from there.

WKO+ data   Sorry for the weird effect, it's an actual screen shot

PMC chart - after  the summer break, it only took 2 weeks to get my CTL back over 100

This is the cabin we stayed at in Eureka Springs

It doesn't look that steep, but this is the driveway at the cabin. I would guess it's between 150-200 meters long. According  to my phone. it's a 101 ft climb. The average grade is 16.7 %, with the steepest part being  31%.

Climbing the mountain

I've been on a little vacation from anything structured riding wise since the Tulsa Tough. It's pretty much what seems to work for me for the most part this time of year. I originally wanted to do a little more of "not riding", but it didn't really work out that way. It's definitely less than normal, but it's tough to lay off something you really enjoy doing.

I actually did go on a real family vacation. We went to Eureka Springs Arkansas. I did take my bike, but I didn't ride a ton. Just a few Strava segments plus a few I made up.

 I guess from a training point of view, every year I've been racing bikes has been somewhat of an experiment. I've kept pretty detailed training diaries, or whatever you want to call it, since the mid 90's, in addition to power data for the last 7 years. I tried more of a "more intensity - less duration" type program in 2010 and the first half of last year. The result? Well, the race results were not that bad, but nothing to write home about either. I did however, not set any new personal power records. I've said before that there seems to be something, for me at least, in getting more training volume, IE. bigger miles.

Last summer I had thought about trying to do another big miles July, and around the same time, I came across this article from Hunter Allen. It seemed like it made a lot of sense, so I decided to do an abbreviated version for my late season build. I got a lot of miles in July, mostly pretty moderate intensity wise, then ramped up the intensity, and got a lot in August as well. The result from a fitness perspective, I broke several power records that were 2 or 3 years old. My race results were so-so. I'd say the bad ones were due to mainly bad luck. I had flat tires in a few races where I felt like I was going pretty good. There were a few high points though. I seemed to run out of steam midway through the cyclocross season, but at the same time, I did a few more races than I really wanted to.

Anyway, I wanted to give "The Next Level" plan a go for the start of the road season this year. So, the first half of the season is over. I've been trying to decide if the extra work I put in this past winter was worth it, and deciding how I was going to do a report on it. The whole climbing the mountain is a representation of what my chronic training load (CTL) has been hovering around. Basically from late January to early June, it's been well over 100. Historically, I've touched the 100 CTL point briefly, but never stayed there for this long.

It took a while, but I've established 5 new power records so far this year, and had my best time trial times/speeds ever. The rest of the race results, have been not what I'm looking for, but, nothing horrible or embarrassing. Still trying to get over a bad luck streak I guess. I've had 4 race crashes this year. I think on average I have 1 every 2 or 3 years.

The biggest thing I think I've learned is the more miles- training stress you can repeatedly handle, the more you can tollerate the next time around. When I first got into road riding and racing, I was the typical guy asking the experienced fast guys how to get fast. One thing a lot of them told me was that it took several years of consistent riding to get to your potential. I think the thing about that that I understand now is that it takes years to be able to handle a heavy training load (like a 300 mile week) consistently and not break down, get sick, injured, ETC.

I'm almost 2 weeks into my big miles July 2012. Not sure if I'll break my record from last year, but I'm still going to get a lot of miles in. I've already got over 500 for the month. I'm thinking this August will be pretty similar to what I did last year. Big miles July update in a couple of days.