It would seem that I haven’t commented at all on how my training program is going since I did the MAP tests and rented the power meter seven weeks ago. Pretty slack of me, so I’ll try and summarise it a bit here.

The basic structure of a training week is that I ride on Mon, Tue, Wed, Thurs, with a day off on Friday, a long ride on Saturday and then Sunday off as well. The key sessions are a tempo ride on Monday, a hard intervals session on Thursday and then the long ride on Saturday. Each session has a required power band that I must ride in for the duration of the ride, with the power bands determined from my MAP test results as follows:

Long rides are in Zone 1, tempo in Zone 2 and intervals in Zone 4. Since each zone comprises a fairly wide power band, and since power fluctuates pretty easily on-road, I opted to aim for the middle of the relevant power band, so 200W for Z1, 230W for Z2 and 285W for Z4.

The first two weeks of the programme were a bit of struggle. The weather was atrocious for the first week, resulting in me missing scheduled sessions which wasn’t an auspicious start. The second week was much better and I managed to get all the required sessions done. The next two weeks were basically time off as first Mum & Dad were here for a visit and then I was in NZ for Bevin’s wedding, although I did managed to do some MTBing while over there so at least I wasn’t sitting on my arse all the time. On my return from NZ, if I had continued the program where I’d left off, I would have done one week and then had a rest week, so I opted to just restart the program from scratch so I’d have a full three weeks before the next rest week and that’s what I’ve been doing.

So far, so good, though I missed one session the week before last. I’m finding things getting easier as I go along, though I want to string a couple of decent weeks training together to see what the cumulative fatigue over a 3-4 week block will be like. I’ll have done three solid weeks this Sunday, so I’ll see how I feel then.

Totals: