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:

Yesterday was the big day; my first ever MAP test! I’d done no cycling on Sunday, and nothing on Monday morning either, so my legs should have recovered from Saturday’s ride. The test was scheduled for 14:30, so I was determined to take things easy, get hydrated and to eat accordingly. The last thing you want on any max. effort test is to feel lunch sitting in your gut!

After driving over to Alex’s house he explained the mechanics of the test. It was to be done on his indoor trainer which is fitted with SRM cranks to measure the power being generated. The general idea was that I would be told to cycle at a particular power output which would increase every minute until I could do no more.

I really had no idea what to expect, or what sort of power output I’d be capable of. I’d made a vague effort to work out how much power bad been required for my Calga TT a few months back and had come up with 153W, so I figured anything over 200W would be good. Alex left me to do a 20 minute warm-up and get used to the SRM readout. It’s surprisingly sensitive, so maintaining a steady power output is very hard for an inexperienced user. I was fluctuating all over the place, often 20W over or under the level I was aiming for. I tried a couple of short efforts and managed to top 300W easily enough, so things were looking up.

Once I’d warmed up thoroughly, Alex decided to start me off at 125W and I’d be required to increase by 25W every minute. 125W is super easy, and I was soon past 200W and heading for 250W without feeling too stressed. I was concentrating on trying to minimise the yo-yoing around the target wattage and dealing with the gearing on the test bike. With only 7 gears there’s a large jump between each one, and when I chose to shift into my final gear around 300W it took ages to engage which was a bit off-putting.

By this time I was breathing hard and I knew the end would be coming up soon, though I desperately wanted to reach 400W. Every minute the pressure piled on and on and I could feel the lactate starting to burn in my quads. For some reason, my right quad was burning more than my left, so I obviously favour it to a large degree. By 375W I was consciously trying to work my left leg harder, reasoning that since it wasn’t burning as much it could clearly do more work, then, finally, I was there: 400W. Having reached that goal, the next target became to finish the full minute at 400, though that proved to be too much to ask. After just short of 30 seconds my power started dropping consistently below 400 and I was cooked. That’s it - show’s over, I could spin the legs over and try to get some breath back.

Alex disappeared to download and analyse the power data and returned shortly afterwards to announce that my mean maximal aerobic power (MAP) is 406W. I was pretty happy with that.

Emil, my boss in Canada, who’s a pretty decent track rider, reckons he’s never managed 400W in any of his MAP tests, but he’s 20kg lighter than me and it’s easier for heavier guys to put out bigger numbers. Anyway, that’s the baseline established and Alex is designing my training plan to take me through to La Marmotte in July. I’ve also got a shiny, rented power meter fitted to my bike for the duration of the plan: another gadget to play with!

Update: here’s the graph of my MAP test. The green line is cadence, so you can see I changed gear twice during the test. The yellow line is power, which, although it oscillates wildly, increases steadily until I can’t hack the pace any more, and you can see the line tailing off on the right-hand side.