Thursday, February 18, 2016

Turning the corner..


 Every time I start into a new season, it seems like the progress, for me anyway, is super slow. It's been months of getting up early, riding in the cold and dark sometimes, wondering if it's worth it, not seeing much improvement. It seems like lots of things go that way sometimes. You're in a dark place ready to give up, but you gotta keep plugging away. Just take it day by day, then BAM! You go out one day and notice the change. I think it's happened twice so far this season.

I'm not sure when it happens, but for me, it seems to be a noticeable difference the Tuesday or Wednesday after a recovery week. What I'm talking about is more of less a rise in fitness.

It's not something that occurs after every training block and recovery week, but if its going to happen, that's usually when it comes around. It happened on one of my last rides on my commuter bike, and yesterday.

 It's not necessarily something that's accompanied by high power numbers, although usually so, it's more a feeling of well being or feeling like you can keep punching it indefinitely or you're impervious to fatigue or something like that. 
Maybe it's just because the weather is getting nicer? Well, I'm sure it helps at least.

It's been a while since I've updated any data in my WKO software. I've been working on it, but I have a couple months worth of rides to manually estimate the power numbers and add to the calendar.
Anyhow, I have about an hour each Wednesday while my daughter is at an after school activity to work on this blog thing, but enough rambling for this week. Until next week..

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Gearing up for getting down

So my winter "training plan" so far has been a little half baked. I guess really, you could say it's been pretty unstructured, at least less so than anytime I can remember in the last 10 years. Since I sold most all my bikes, I haven't had a bike with a power meter, just my heavy steel home built rain bike.

It wasn't too bad just riding to work, but doing our weekend group rides was definitely a challenge.
I've tried doing some longer intervals just riding on my way to work, which by the way, the new west river trail is great for. I've mainly been just going off feel and similar volume to what I've done in the past for a rough metric on how hard and long to ride.  Anyhow, I put about 2000 miles on the rain bike and have been riding my new race bike since January, which has been nice.
My new race bike

 In general, I think riding the heavy rain bike has paid off as far as a good base to start the season and be competitive.

We had our team training camp last weekend. I feel like it went really well, and I really like the direction the team is going in. I feel like I fit in well, and I'm pretty excited to go out and compete with these guys.
It was nice having a lead car, a follow van and a moto for a nice rolling enclosure.



The DNA team, the team I'm on, is kind of a junior varsity team to our big brother Arapahoe Resourses elite team


I think I'll try to get a FTP test in soon, just to get a clearer idea where I'm at fitness wise.  I've been slacking pretty bad lately keeping track of all the "fitness stuff", but I got reinterested after hearing guys talking about their numbers and such at camp. So, I guess since the first races are only a couple weeks out, it's time to get my training a little more focused and structured, which I'm pretty excited about as well!