Progress

I haven't had much time to blog this month, because I've been spending most of it on my bike, or on Cycle-Smart. I have a blog entry planned explaining what I'm doing in Tucson, why I'm here, why I'm living alone, and what my goals are for these two months. Soon.

This week is my first rest week since getting back on the bike, and with three weeks of training under my belt, things couldn't be going better, at least from a training standpoint. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking:

You can see the progress from when I started my break after 'cross nationals, and got back on the bike in earnest after arriving in Tucson just after New Year. The slope of that progression is pretty.

In this graph you see the weekly hours and TSS totals. I left in the data from all of last season as well, because I prefer to be able to compare year to year at a glance. I wish WKO+ had a rolling graph option, where you could always view the past X months at a glance. I think always being able to view 13 months at a time is helpful. But you can see how well the past 3 weeks have gone, and particularly this last week.

Here's some real proof of how things are going. You can see that I reached the same CTL level in 3 weeks that it took me 5 weeks to do last season. I took an extra week off this year and started a week later, but have been able to do so much more work on my rides that the progression is going more quickly. Coming to Tucson instead of Athens, GA, where I was last year, also meant that I didn't lose a single day of training to weather. When you're doing 6 hour rides 5 days a week, missing a single day can have a big impact. That's a whole week's worth of training for some of my clients at this time of year.

Something else I'm doing different this year is including the legendary Shootout ride on Saturday mornings in my training. While my rides this month have focused entirely on tempo and endurance, where I've built up to being able to do 3 x 60 minutes at around 250 watts over the course of a 5-6 hour ride, I'm allowing myself one day a week to let it rip. By doing the Shootout I get 45 minutes of variable power riding just below threshold, and hopefully will hold on to some of the supra-threshold form I have left over from 'cross. It should mean that when I do finally finish base and turn my attention to intensity, I will be coming from a higher platform and see new peaks. It should also make the early season races much less costly for me, while still not taking away from the amount of base oriented work I need to do in this narrow 2-month period I have before racing starts again.

All this means I'm poised to improve on the form I had last year, which was an improvement on the form I had the year before. I'm turning 37 this year, and amazingly, I'm on track to have the best form of my life.