Pros: Lorient to Quimper, 204.5km, Sprint Stage

Me: 68km Z2, Sprint finish

Crap day today. Had a splitting headache all day and just couldn’t shake it, so no ride today.

Pros: La Baule to Sarzeau, 195km, Sprint stage

Me: 65km Z2, sprint finish

Another comfortable day. Supposed to do 65km but ended up with almost 70km, and unlike the pros, I got rained on for the last 45km. Normally wouldn’t have bothered riding in crap weather, so what I’m now calling the Third de France is providing useful motivation.

Pros: Cholet to Cholet, 35.5km, Team Time Trial

Me: 4 x (1m Z5, 2m Low Z4)

When riding a Team Time Trial you end up riding above FTP (aka threshold) for a short time when you’re the guy on the front, and a bit longer under threshold when you’re drafting behind a team mate. The pros took about 38mins, so a third of that is 12-13 minutes for me. I’ll do a minute over threshold, followed by two minutes under and repeat 4 times for a total of 12mins.

Time for a quick detour into training zones. I have a power meter on my bike, which is a device which measures how much work I am doing at any given moment. Using a power meter, your training zones are defined in terms of your Functional Threshold Power. FTP, as it’s known, is just the maximum average power you can sustain for approximately 1 hour, measured in watts (W). In my case, right now my FTP is approx. 285W.

Given that, the zones are defined as follows:

Pros: Mouilleron-Saint-Germain to La Roche-Sur-Yon, 182.5km, Sprint Stage

Me: 61km Z2, 10 sec sprint to finish

Easy enough to start. While this is a comfortable pace, the fact is the training effect will come with the volume over the first week, then more intense work over the following two weeks as the pros get into the mountains. At this stage it’s just a case of do the distance and stick to the comfortable pace.

Well it’s been a really lazy two months as we moved to Brisbane, dropping from a consistent 5 rides per week to one or none. That descending blue line if my fitness decreasing over the last couple of months. It’s Winter, so not a big deal, were it not for the fact that I’m off to Europe in a bit over a month with some solid rides scheduled in the mountains, including a weekend riding with two club mates who are way better cyclists than I am.

So, time for a training cram session and I’ve decided to try to ride a mini Tour de France. The Tour started yesterday, so my basic plan is to ride one third of the distance of each day’s stage while aiming to make my sessions approximate the day’s stage. I’ll figure it out as I go along, but I should end up with a solid three weeks of training and some appreciation for what the pros go through.

I’ve missed the start of the Tour as we were away for the weekend, so I’ll be riding a day late. It’s Sunday evening now and the pros will shortly be riding Stage 2. I’ll start with Stage 2 tomorrow.

So, before all the cycling starts, I figure I should lay the groundwork for what follows. My plan was to ride 1000km per month in the lead up to departure and lose as much weight as possible. The former was reasonably successful, the latter less so.

Above is the record of my training since Jan 1st, expressed in weekly TSS (Training Stress Score - blue bars) and overall fitness level (red line). Simplistically, increasing the weekly TSS will lead to increasing levels of fitness.

January got off to a good start with a very big week down at the Tour Down Under and then decent amounts of work into February. The end of Feb. and beginning of March were a bit of a wash-out in Sydney which hampered things somewhat, but once that was dealt with I managed to get some solid work done through until mid-April, where my CTL peaked around 82. The last two weeks before jumping on the plane say me getting last-minute things organised and as much work stuff out of the way as possible which saw the training take a bit of a hit, but if I’m honest I was quite tired after a series of solid back-to-back weeks.

Summary:
Jan: 1054km
Feb: 895km
Mar: 826km
Apr: 1317km

Net result is that I got on the plane with about 4400km in my legs since Jan 1st which is the most I’ve ever done by this stage in the year. My CTL of 76 is also quite a bit more than I’ve ever gone to Europe with before.

As for weight, well that dropped form 89.5 in Jan to 85kg in May. Not too bad, but I probably doll have lost another few kg if I’d actually been careful about what I ate. Almost all of that weight loss is simply from doing more cycling.

Anyway, I’m here now and we’ll see what happens.

It’s been a little over a week since I returned from the Tour Down Under and my legs are just about recovered. Here’s the training load over the week:

As you can see, training was pretty flat after being away for Christmas and then ramped up hugely for the week of the Tour Down Under.

What happens is that up to 50 of our club travel down to Adelaide with their bikes and spend the week riding through the Adelaide Hills, sampling the small-town bakeries and intersecting with the race to watch the pros do their thing.

In practice it means riding around 100km per day through the hills, so the workload (the pink line) goes through the roof and you dig massive hole of fatigue (see the green line above). During normal training I tend to take a day off if the green line dips under -30, but I hit -98.6 by the end of the TDU! That’s not sustainable, but I knew I could hack it as a once-off, which is why I did almost nothing the following week. The benefit is an almost 50% increase in fitness (blue line) in one week!

It’s also an interesting process, seeing both how far you can push yourself and how your body reacts. For me, all that really happens is that above-threshold efforts become really hard, but I was still climbing at threshold at the end of he week which I was happy with.

After the well-earned rest week, Monday rolled around and it was time to get back into it. Most of my riding for the last few months has been at a reasonably comfortable pace as I built my fitness up, but now that the fitness is there to handle the extra workload, it’s time to start adding some shorter, harder intervals in a bid to get faster.

I stagnated last year, so I’m determined not to let that happen again this year. Time will tell!

Well after the last post, the recommencement of training didn’t last very long. July went reasonably well, but August was a disaster. Three weeks of almost constant rain made it pretty hard to get out on the bike, and for some reason I managed to stack on all the usual winter weight that I had managed to avoid for the previous three months!

September started quietly from a training perspective with an excellent holiday to Uluru, followed soon after by my brother’s first ever visit from Ireland, and by late in the month my CTL (Chronic Training Load, which basically measures fitness) was down at 22 (which is almost untrained) and my weight was back up to 89-90kg. On the plus side, Spring had spring and the weather was getting a lot better, so it was time to get moving again.

Being that unfit meant it was a slow start, as interval type training would take too much out of me, so the first two weeks involved just getting out on the bike and putting in the hours.

My initial plan had been to do four-week blocks - three weeks solid training and one easier recovery week - but two weeks in it became obvious that doing three solid weeks back-to-back was going to be too much, so I’ve switched to three-week blocks - 2.5 solid weeks with half a week recovery.

Here’s the last month’s workload and things are ticking along nicely now. The three-week blocks work well, as just when I’m getting really tired at the end of the second week I can convince myself that it’s only a few days until I can take a few days break. Each of the solid weeks works out to 4 hard rides and two easier rides, and if I’m really tired I have the option of skipping the easy rides. Most of the time you actually recover better if you actually do the really easy ride rather than doing nothing. My CTL is now pushing 60, which would class me as semi-fit (based on my personal scale).

What also became apparent as I got back into exercise is that I tend to eat too many carbs. Despite riding 9-10hrs/week during the first block, my weight barely shifted at all! I was eating pretty healthily 90% of the time, but was still prone to snacking in the evening despite eating a decent sized dinner.

I’ve tried super-low-carb Atkins before and had good results on it, but wasn’t keen to go that extreme again, so instead I opted switch my focus away from carbs onto protein & fat. All it boiled down to was making sure I got about 120-150g of protein per day, then eat plenty of good fats like avocado, olive oil, fish etc. and then add carbs on top depending on how much training I was doing. Instead of carbs being 55% of my intake, they dropped to 25-30% and fats went in the opposite direction. Result: 89kg at mid-October, 84.8kg this morning, less than a month later. Riding 250-300km a week obviously helps shift the weight, but from previous experience, if I’d stayed on a mainly-carb diet I’d probably still be around 86.5-87kg at this stage.

Good to finally be making some progress again!

Now that the ‘man-flu’ has finally abated, I can get back out on the bike again. I have a rule where I completely stop training once a cold gets into my chest and I don’t start again until it has completely cleared. I’ve heard first-hand accounts of people giving themselves long-term heart problems as a result of training hard when under the weather, and whilst there’s always the possibility that I wouldn’t be training that hard anyway and/or they had a more serious infection at the time than a chesty cold, to me it’s just not worth the risk. Given I’m only a hack and not cycling seriously, there’s no point stressing my body with solid training sessions when it’s already stressed trying to fight off an infection.

Here’s the result of my time off…

A week of shite weather and hectic work, followed by two weeks of a cold, leads to a 40% drop in fitness. Total distance for the month of June ended up as 158km, when even a relatively easy month would see me doing 700km+ and a decent week’s training would be pushing 300km.

I got back out on the bike a little at the end of last week to see how things were. My legs feel OK, but the lungs were a little sluggish on Thursday, but OK by Friday. It’s going to be a relatively slow build back to some semblance of fitness I think, especially with the late nights of the Tour de France just around the corner!

It’s been a relatively quiet/lazy/relaxed (delete as appropriate) year on the cycling front so far this year. Here’s the graph of monthly kilometres ridden compared to 2013, and it’s not hard to see that I’m well behind. About 1200km behind at this stage!

The year always starts with good intentions and then various factors get in the way. On a positive note, I’ve managed to survive watching the Giro d’Italia without stacking on any extra weight this year. Laying off the late night snacks is not an easy feat when you’re up until 1.30am watching live cycling for three weeks.

Anyway, lots of catching up to do over the next few months. Once I get rid of this bloody chest cold I’ll be ready to get back into it.

The final countdown to Europe has started as I fly out in three weeks’ time. Training has been going reasonably well as can be seen on the chart above of my training since the start of the year. After the hiccup in mid-February when my knee started acting up and I had to take time off to get it sorted, things have been fairly consistent. Progress has stalled the last two weeks as the bike went in for a service, rain scuppered my long ride last weekend and I’ve also been getting a few knee niggles as the workload increases. This time it’s not serious, but I need to be careful and manage it properly lest I tip it over the edge. Lots of stretching!

I’ve a new pair of bike shoes on the way with much better arch support which I’m hoping will help alleviate the knee issue, and I’ve fitted a 32-tooth sprocket at the rear to give me more options when the roads get steep. I had a 28-tooth cog in 2010 which meant that my cadence got quite low (and hence the effort going through my knee increased a lot) once the gradient got up near 10%. At the slow speed I climb at, the 32 will mean my cadence can increase from 60rpm to 70rpm which feels a lot easier on the knee.

I also have a new set of custom-built wheels on the way; they’re lighter, stiffer and they roll much better than the heavy training wheels I got with the bike 4 years ago. I’d planned to buy a set of DuraAce C24s (1390g, $800), but spoke to a local, well-respected wheel builder, whose name I’d seen mentioned quite a lot, and opted for a set of his wheels, which, at 1520g, are a little heavier and therefore marginally less suited to mountain climbing, will be much more suitable to the racing I want to do when I get back. He also backs his wheels with a full warranty, including crash replacement so it was an easy decision in the end. They should be here early next week, so I’m looking forward to trying them out.

After a slow and interrupted start to the year, the last few weeks have been pretty good and my training has been progressing well. I’ve been aiming for three weeks on, 1 week off - so three weeks of increasing amounts of work, then an easier, recovery week - and it’s been working well so far. I’ve another ‘on’ week this week before my second ‘off’ week since getting my knee sorted out.

I’ll be spending most of my time in France and Italy climbing which is pretty tough to prepare for here given that there are no decent mountains within range of Sydney. The closest are the Blue Mountains, but they’re still a two hour drive from my place and the climbs are still nowhere near as long as those in the Alps. I’ve had a think about it and figured that the best thing to do is to ride long efforts at a certain power but at low cadence. My current FTP, or best average power for one hour, is around 290W, so a good rule of thumb is to climb at around 80% of that, or around 230W. Given my weight and available gearing, I’m likely to be climbing at a cadence between 70 and 75rpm, so I’ve been doing longer rides at the weekend aiming for sections at 230W+ at a cadence around 70rpm. In a 4.5hr ride on Friday I did a solid 2hr continuous section in the middle at an average of 234W and average cadence of 73rpm and felt OK afterwards. I’ll build on that as the weeks progress.

I’ve started back on interval work as well the last two weeks and my knee is holding up well to that which is a big bonus. At the moment I’m only doing 5 x 5min intervals at 280-290W but I’ll increase the duration gradually to give my knee a chance to adjust slowly. They’re still bloody tough!

My weight is fluctuating between 85.5 and 97kg which still leaves 7kg to try to shed before getting to France, so I’m going to have to start being really disciplined with food over the next couple of weeks. I’m going to buy new super-light wheels for my bike which will make a difference as the ones I have are solid, heavy training wheels. A new bike would shave off 2kg or so, but I don’t have a spare $5000 at the moment so that will have to wait :-)

Anyway, it’s nice to be able to report some decent news for a change and to string together a few consistent weeks without complications, so long may it continue. The best news is that I’m already as fit and as light as I was the last time I went to France, but I still have eight weeks to get fitter and lighter.

Not much positive news to report recently. Training hasn’t being going well, with my knee issues recurring out of the blue at the end of January, after only a couple of weeks training. My right kneecap was scraping on cartilage during the ride, which was painful in and of itself and resulted in swelling and some mild pain for a few hours after a long ride. Not good, and most annoyingly, the last time I went to Marmotte, it was the left knee which was acting up.

I booked an appointment with Blair Martin to get an updated bike fit and a physio’s perspective on what was causing the problem, only to find out that I’m not using my arse properly! Cue fart jokes and the like…

It seems that I’m not using my gluteus medius, which is supposed to be used to stabilise my pelvis/upper body while on the bike, leaving my gluteus maximus, quads etc. to actually put power to the pedals. Since I’m not using it, my gluteus maximus, quads, etc. are doing dual duty of supporting my body and putting power to the pedals and, as my body adjusts to this awkwardness, the point of ‘failure’ is my knee. Ergo, I need to do some arse exercises!

After a few minor adjustments to my position on the bike I felt much more balanced on it and left with a few pre-ride exercises to do to activate my gluteus medius (the idea being that it gets used at the start of the ride, and with each successive ride it remains in use a bit longer) and a few post-ride stretches to do as well.

So, after that enforced break from training I was keen to get back into it, but was warned to take it easy; no hills, no intervals and no indoor trainer. A week later, one or two minor tweaks to position and I was feeling good and wasn’t noticing any knee issues on the rides anymore. Just when I thought I could move to the next stage and add a little more distance, I come down with a cold/chesty cough. Since the general rule of training while sick is that it’s not OK to train if the cold is in your chest/lungs, I’ve been off the bike since last Friday as well now!

Comparing my training from my last trip to France in 2010, despite being way better prepared in November, I’m now in about the same state as I was in 2010. The only positive to come out of all of this is that I’ve been fairly diligent with food intake since Christmas, so I’m now 86kg instead of the 89kg I was in 2010. I went to France in 2010 weighing 86kg, so at least I have three months to drop a few more kilos. After all, climbing is all about watts per kilo, and at least I’ve been able to improve the kilo side of the equation, even if I’ve been unable to work on the watts.

Anyway, my cold has almost cleared up, so I hope to be back on the bike tomorrow for an day ride at least.

As well as getting out on the bike, I’ve decided to get back in the pool, albeit purely as some recovery sessions from my bike rides. I’m also aware that all the exercise I’m doing is leg-based, so my upper body isn’t doing anything and going for a swim is infinitely preferable than hitting the gym to lift some weights. I’m not training for any swimming events or following a structured plan, just aiming to get in and swim a few easy laps on a regular basis.

That being said, I want to get to the stage where I can complete 40 x 100 FS off 1:45, averaging 1:30. That’s a reasonable “all year ‘round” level of swim fitness as far as I’m concerned, though a long way short of what I used to be capable of! Still, that’s the initial target and I’ll re-evaluate once it’s reached.

The plan is to do two swims a week and to just get in and start swimming 100s off 1:45. No warm-up, no drills, no messing around. Just in, swim until my arms are wrecked and see how I go.

I did my first session last week and it was a bit of an eye-opener! I took the first 100 nice and easy, concentrating on getting some feel back for the water and ended up with a 1:22. I was pretty happy with that and figured things might not be so bad after all. However, the second 100 was 1:29 and I was starting to feel it in my biceps/lats and after six I needed to stop for a rest :) My arms were wrecked, as if I had been lifting in the gym and just had no energy/pwer left. After a couple of minutes break I managed another four 100s, then another break followed by a final two 100s for a total of 12. If I’d managed 12 straight through I would have been happy enough, but the two breaks put a dampener on things.

Second session was today. I resolved to take things a bit easier on the first few 100s, so swam a 1:29 for the first one followed by a few around 1:31 or so. I got to six and felt OK, then felt a bit better after 10 and suddenly all was well and I knew I could swim many more. I decided to call it a day after 20 having averaged 1:32, though I still felt reasonably good. I just didn’t want to totally drain myself and end up skipping my bike ride in the morning.

Still, a rapid improvement and felt a bit more like a swimmer again. Next session is on Thursday which will hopefully be more like today than last week.

With all the running around getting finance and documentation together to buy the apartment, followed by time spent doing work on the place and being available to let tradies in to do their thing, cycling has taken a back seat since November. That was annoying as I’d built up a decent bit of fitness to handle the 180km+ of the Gone Ride Return and had hoped to build on that leading in to Christmas. Alas, it was not to be, so once again I begin a new year in a relatively unfit state as evidenced by the graph below.

The blue line is a measure of bike fitness, being the amount of work done per day averaged over the previous 3 months. It declined from a peak of just over 60 in November, to just above 20 in the New Year. The pink line is the average work done over the previous week, which fluctuates a bit more.

Anyway, it is what it is. I’m off to Europe this summer to ride my bike in the Alps again, so, the rebuild begins!

Seeing as how I’m going track racing I figured I might as well find out how unfit I am. I’ve been doing little for the past few months and only started cycling infrequently about a month ago. My riding has basically consisted of a 70km cruise with Marc every second Saturday with little else.

I resolved to cycle a bit more regularly last week, so got a ride in on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then figured I should do a MAP test to see exactly where my fitness was. I’d done one previously, about 18 months ago, when I first started training for La Marmotte and the procedure is the same; after a thorough warm-up, start cycling at an effort of 100W and increase by 25W/minute until you collapse in a heap. The best average power achieved for a minute is your Maximum Aerobic Power (MAP) and your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is approximately 75% of your MAP. Your FTP is the power you can sustain for a one-hour, all-out effort and is used as the basis for setting training levels.

Anyway, to the test:

The results…

The above is the graph of the actual test, with the yellow line being power output. I finished up with a MAP of 367W, leading to an FTP of 275W, and a power to weight ratio at FTP of 3.05W. The test 18 months ago resulted in MAP 406W & FTP 305W, so I’m a little over 105 less fit than I was then. There’s work to be done!

Over the last few months I’ve been sitting on my arse doing nothing and increasingly feeling that I should get back out on the bike again. I’ve made a few abortive attempts which usually involved going for a ride on a Monday morning, then again on Tuesday whereupon we’d get one of those Sydney weeks of torrential rain and I’d be back to square one.

With that in mind, I bit the bullet and bought myself an indoor trainer, the Kurt Kinetic Road Machine.

The Kurt Kinetic on the back balcony…

The Kurt Kinetic with bike attached…

Riding on a trainer is usually pretty boring, so I’m not going to be replacing my weekend long ride with a multi-hour session on it, but it will be very good for the short, hard interval work which you can’t really do on the road, or, if you do find somewhere to try them like Centennial Park, it’s invariably windy & gusty which makes it very tough to stick to a particular effort level.

At least now if I wake up and the weather’s atrocious I can set up the trainer on the back balcony and do a shorter, more intense workout. Better than nothing!

One of the concerns I had when I initially received my training program from Alex was that it didn’t include any rides longer than three hours. Given that La Marmotte, even if everything goes perfectly, will most likely take me at least eight hours, this could have been a problem. Alex told me just to go on an extra-long ride every couple of weeks, but otherwise to stick to the plan. With that in mind, on Saturday I resolved to ride for five hours with some small hills thrown in.

I’d ordered a second bottle cage and bidon which had arrived earlier in the week, so I stocked up on water, threw a few muesli bars in my jersey pockets and hit the road, armed with $50 for food refills and emergencies. The first part of the ride was straightforward enough as it’s my usual Saturday long ride, but once I got to Cronulla it was all relatively new territory. I’d ridden the route once before a few years ago as part of the Gong Ride so I knew where I was going.

There were plenty of cyclists heading South as well, though I resisted the temptation to tack onto the back of the pelotons and stuck to my own pace. Once past the Audley entrance to the National Park there was a nice, wide shoulder to the road and less traffic lights which made things more enjoyable, though I was also my first and only encounter with dickheads, as some arsehole hung out the passenger window and roared something at me as he went past, hoping to scare me off my bike. At best he got a mild look of surprise on my face, but no wobbles on the bike!

I entered the park at Waterfall and got to practice some descending, a skill which will be vitally important in France, then got stuck into the gradual climb up to Otford which felt a lot easier than the last time I had done it a few years ago. That must mean I’m a lot fitter, as I’m certainly not lighter! I reached Stanwell Tops after 2h 40m and I was still feeling good. The only problem I had was that my lower back was acting up, presumably due to the different position and different recruitment of muscles while climbing. A bit of stretching sorted things out quickly, but I’ll have to do lots more stretching over the next few months to really loosen up the muscles around the back/hip area. The last thing I need is back troubles when faced with two hours plus of continuous climbing!

Stanwell Tops was my rough turn around point, and I knew it would be a bit easier on the way back as it was gradually downhill for most of it. Unfortunately the first 10km or so was still rolling hills, so I wasn’t quite done with the uphill stuff yet, but once back to Waterfall I was back on the smooth, wide shoulder, with a slight tailwind meaning 40km/h+ was easy enough. Once I made it back to Cronulla I was back on my normal long-ride route and it was just a matter of counting down the kilometres until I was home.

The last half an hour was a bit tough mentally. I was starting to get properly fatigued and was struggling to keep the power up where I wanted it. As I headed back to the coast I was also riding into a headwind which didn’t help matters but I stuck with it and made it home without too much hassle: 4h 57m ride time, not including traffic light stops etc. for a grand total of 132.3km, my longest ride by 32km.

Now I’ll have to plan a six hour route in a couple of weeks!

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: