Another pic from the Arizona campers.

Thanks to Scott for sending me this picture of an Arizona local that they met yesterday on the rest day. Ladies, this guy is apparently looking for a little lovin'. His interests are long romantic walks on the beach, reading his comic books and braiding his mothers hair.

Dreaming away...

Ever wondered what people are dreaming? Here's a look at what Rick has going in his mind at this moment. Sugar plums have nothing on the Double Whopper!

Behind the Scenes at the Arizona Training Camp

Apparently, Dan's fellow campers didn't appreciate him winning the KOM yesterday on Mt. Lemmon and have resorted to some mighty cut-throat tactics to level the playing field....

Having a little fun....

All of my friends out in Arizona right now, decided so send me some pictures from their warm and sunny training camp just to let me know what I was missing. I'm sure they won't mind, but I decided to take some liberty with the pictures they've sent back...... more to come.

brian

Playing with video

2006 Season in Review

The nice thing about having a Power Tap is that it allows you to step back and look at your season from an almost scientific viewpoint rather than trying to remember by feel what I was going through during any given part of the season. One of the benefits about being friends with Scott Thor is he can make some pretty cool images for you if you ask nicely and send him a little data. Thanks to Scott for putting the images together for me. Below is a chart that shows my TSS (Training Stress Score) rolling totals for the 2006 season. I’ve highlighted some key points on these to try and put some reason to why things look the way they do. (You will want to click on the image to make it larger for you to view the fine points).

One thing I want to make mention of is the loss of my power tap for several weeks. That didn’t mean I stopped riding while it was back at the shop, that just meant I wasn’t collecting data which explains why all three values above drop sharply off. Unfortunately, Cycling Peaks doesn’t allow me to manually insert my workouts so I regrettably have to interpolate my data for the remainder of the season. This is a good reason to have a backup PT, now if I could only convince my wife!

To further complicate things, Scott has included for me a chart showing my Peak Normalized Power for the 2006 season. The interesting thing is that my peak FTP for the season (314 Watts) comes after my goal event. After that event, I honestly let up on my structured training program and went more to riding with my buddies in lieu of the interval workouts I had been doing previously. I would theorize that if I had stuck with the program further into the year, that I could have been able to push that FTP up higher, or at least kept it a little more stable as it begins to show a slight downward slope.

This chart showing my ATL, CTL and TSB. Together, I could have used this to predict and tailor my peaks a little more accurately.

So what does all of this really mean? That’s a good question and I’m not sure if I fully know or understand yet how I will fully use this information for my 2007 season. What I can tell you is this, last year I felt like there were times when I had the best form of my life and was unstoppable, and then there were those times where I just felt absolutely lousy. All of that is typical for any rider I guess. The thing for me to do is to now evaluate what I was doing during each of those bad times to determine whether I was feeling off due to my training load, work load here in the office, illnesses or whatever and then determine what I need to do to try and avoid having those severe lows when I'm aiming for those few races where I really want to do something special. I can also take a look at those times when I was really feeling on form, try to match that up to what my CTL was during that time period and try to shoot for that as an optimal goal for my peak events here during the 2007 season.

brian

We need your help!

OK, so I'm not as desperate as what that heading sounds like, but I could use your advice. Jen and I will be celebrating our 10 year wedding anniversary this year and we're trying to finalize where we want to go. I couldn't quite convince Jen to go white water rafting for 6 days up to the Arctic Ocean (Apparently roughing it for six days in the Arctic isn't quite so romantic) so the problem that we have now is that we can't pick the one place, so I'm hoping that you can help us out with that by giving us your thoughts. In the picture to the left (click on to enlarge), you will see what we consider to be our four final choices, of course I do reserve the right to add or subtract from this list as I find other sweet places that we'd like to go :) Our four finalists are: Northern California, Arizona (the Grand Canyon area to be exact), the Canadian Rocky Mountains and lastly New York City. Three out of the four vacations would be similar in that we would want to do some type of Eco vacation which would include some biking, hiking, paddling, etc. New York City is the obvious exception where we would be doing the typical tourist type of thing, sightseeing, Broadway shows, etc. So, please, I'm begging you, please feel free to send us your thoughts.

brian

2007 Season Preperations

With the whole Elves & More thing happening in December, I found myself at the beginning of January almost two months behind schedule from last year. After I settled myself down a little bit and had a chance to really think about my situation, I realized that I was actually more like four months behind. I forgot the fact that once Will was born in mid August my average riding time went down to really only a few hundred miles per month at the very best. Now statistically I was even worse off than I had previously thought. That was before I started riding again and started looking at my power outputs on some of my tests (I can't say enough how great power meters are in the overall scheme of training). As it turns out, yes I indeed am a thousand or so miles behind where I was at last year but I am no longer thinking about my fitness in terms of miles but in terms of power output. My power output today is actually higher than at this exact time from last year. What do I chalk this up to? Well, probably a portion of that has to be contributed to the fact that last year I didn't fully know my limits or training levels, so I was most likely training at a slightly lower level than I was capable of. Outside of that, I also like to think that with several seasons of racing in my legs now, my body is able to come back around quicker to its previous levels. I've been riding consistently now for 6 weeks and am feeling stronger every day. Here's one of my favorite workouts that I try to do 2 to 3 times a week which makes for a great one hour ride on the rollers or fixed trainer:

10 minute warm up
20 minute effort @ approx. 90% of my seasonal FTP
5 minute recovery
5 minute effort @ approx. 100% of my seasonal FTP
5 minute recovery
5 minute effort @ approx. 100% of my seasonal FTP
10 minute cool down

I'm also working on doing an analysis of my 2006 season. In the next several weeks I hope to try to post some data images that Scott Thor has put together for me. Thanks for reading and I hope now that my mindset is back on riding, I'll be able to post a little more consistently.

brian