My Progress Report

The Holiday Parties have all ended; I’ve caught my breath, have fully recovered from the Elves & More 2007 campaign and now I have nothing to do. Oh wait, there is that cycling thing that I used to do, maybe I could get started once again with that? It seems like it had been that long from when I really last rode. Sure, I’d been on the bike a few times during the fall, but that was just for fun with the kids down on the towpath and it has been months, and I literally mean months since I last did any type of serious training. With the lack of exercise I found that I had quickly gained a lot of pounds during my extended offseason. Long gone are the days when I could grab a chair, open up the fridge and sit down and just eat the leftovers with no repercussions at all. Now my slowing metabolism is nothing like the cheetah I used to be, but more along the lines of snail or possibly even a rock. I apparently can put weight on faster than Oprah. I seem to forget that problem every autumn and I quickly put the weight back on again, negating all the hard work I had previously done. This fall will be different!

So like most of America, I decided that January 1st would be the kick-off for my 2008 training program. Knowing that I was already months behind where I typically should be this time of year, I had a lot of ground to make up and quickly. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my goals are somewhat different this year with the inclusion of the Columbus Marathon. Because of this my competitive cycling season will be cut short. It’s unfortunate that I have lousy fitness now because I really need and want to start racing earlier than I would normally consider if I want to do any racing at all which of course cuts my early season preparation even shorter.
I wanted to take a retrospective look back at my 2007 season before I started training this year so I could look at my history and not be doomed to repeat it. The following image shows training info for 2007 along with a brief glimpse at what I've done so far in 08.

You can see that there was a steady increase in all of my values as I went through the spring campaign. My high CTL was 58 at the end of June, and then I hit the big decline in training. That was initially caused by quickly preparing to put our house on the market and followed up by the fatigue of riding my bike. It wasn’t until I finally committed myself to racing the Fall Classic that I got back to business and trained. Unfortunately it was too little too late for me. One good thing that I learned out of that experience however was that for me to feel competitive in races, I need to have a CTL of over 50. This is reinforced by looking back at my 2006 season and seeing that I had a CTL of 60 during my planned peak in late May of that year. Now I just need to get that CTL even higher!

With this knowledge in hand, I went ahead and tried to design my training plan for the first part of the year so I could get those values up to where I was targeting. Last year things went haywire and I didn’t do this and it showed. Although I had decent fitness, I never achieved the really good form I had in 06 when I was on a strict training plan while working with Charles Howe of Velodynamics. Here’s what my training plan looks like so far for 08:

Getting back into it during the first week was my body struggling and resisting the hard work I was making it do. Apparently my laziness and routine of doing almost nothing was beginning to turn me into a real slacker. I resisted the temptation to become a leisure rider on the towpath that my body was telling me I could do with absolutely no training effort and I finally convinced myself to burn through all those cobwebs that had settled in my legs. Starting out with one 20 minute effort at only 250 watts was difficult (note that my typical FTP during the season is about 315 watts, well above this). It didn’t take long though before my average wattage during those 20 minute efforts really began to jump up. My final single 20 minute effort during the first block of training finished up at 278W with my 2x5’s at 300W.

I was beginning to become happy with where my wattage and weight was heading so I decided to recently step it up and transition into 2x20’s, which is where I am now. I’ve only done one workout so far, the second one scheduled to come up tomorrow night, but I was happy that I was able to maintain the 275W for both efforts. What’s important is that although I felt spent at the end of the workout, I felt good and know that with each passing week, I’ll be able to average higher and higher wattages. The chart below is a comparison of my CTL (Chronic Training Load) up to this point in 2007 and this year. This years CTL is shown in Red (Note that the ATL and TSS are from 2007). As you can see, my values are relatively close to where I was at last year. I attribute the fact that I’m higher this year compared to last year because of my starting points. Last year I started out with my CTL values at 0 since it was new software and this year I actually had a few CTL points saved up.

What’s this mean? Well, I would suggest that at this point, without making changes to my training plan, I’ll be exactly as I was last year, which I guess is good news for all the Cat 4’s reading this! I do think however that I am several weeks ahead of where I was at this point last year. That means I should be reaping the benefits of better fitness to help me be more competitive in my racing. My ambitions for this season are to be competitive and a player in each and every race that I enter. I know I won’t have many opportunities so I want to make the most of the time that I have. First up, will be the Arnold Classic down in Columbus on March 2nd, dependent upon the weather of course. I typically don’t care for crits but this one will almost be like a local race with Jen’s family down there. More updates to follow, I hope.

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