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.