Good legs

Funny how it only takes a few days of good riding to feel happy again about being on the bike. My saddle sore has recovered and I'm over whatever mysterious illness I had a week ago at Hog Hill (blinding all-day headache stupidly compounded by riding 50km to get to the race through the dustiest smoggiest part of east London) which left me dropped from the lead group on the bell lap and struggling for a 7th place finish.

Sunday saw me at the Team Series race in Melbourne, Derbyshire, one of the more hilly races on the calendar and thus suiting me well. With three of us from the Surrey League team in the front group of 18 (it was a race of attrition more than attacks) and the other two in the second group, we managed three top-12 finishes and fifth place overall team. Considering my form and preparation wasn't the best, I was pretty happy with the result against a strong field with several big teams represented.

Monday's ride saw me in Richmond Park under the guise of recovery, but my legs despite being a bit fatigued were awesome and I actually stopped to recalibrate my powermeter because I thought it was reading too high! Two clockwise laps in under 45 min and 195 watts... so much for recovery.

Tuesday's Palace race was off due to the wet course, but I was commissairing anyway and we ran the kids' races on the top circuit instead. I had opted to drive the car for some stupid reason and learned my lesson there: nearly 30 min longer than it takes to ride my bike! Never again.

Then yesterday was our club 10 TT, this time a 2-up team event though I had asked permission to run a 4-up with Leona, Emily and Lise as training for this weekend's Etape de la Defonce stage race. I headed out early to the hills to get a few more miles in my legs and to my surprise the supposed southwest headwind felt like a tailwind. And my powermeter must have been off again too, as the watts were reading a bit higher than the effort would have said. Nope, all good... so there I was, gliding up the hills and flying along the flats, trying to hold back a bit for the TTT but my legs would have none of it. Until the puncture of course, but that just gave me more reason to haul it along the A25 to get to the club 10 signing-on in time.

The TTT itself went very well, we took the first half steady (again I noted the lack of headwind and wondered how the return leg would go). When we turned around to come back, there was no wind there either and we caned the last few miles in a very smooth through-and-off for a respectable 24:34 time -- all of us on roadbikes with not a stitch of aero gear.

Siting in the car on the way home, I mused that it had been one of those rare days when there's always a tailwind, the hills seem flatter and riding a bike is just plain fast. It was the anti-Shut Up Legs day. We cyclists often moan about the omnipresent headwinds, the steep hills, the crappy road surfaces, etc. but yesterday was just the opposite for me. Seems my legs are coming back nicely. Dare I hope for a good result at the race this weekend?


(Click the pic to order one of these t-shirts from the Cycling Tips blog)

Milestones and Benchmarks

Yesterday was my birthday and I've now hit that (magical?) 35-year mark. Halfway to 40, a "veteran" category runner, and apparently I should be starting now if I want to have kids someday. A lot to think about! Of course I benefit from aging up to the 35-39 category for my Ironman, and I get to use the excuse that the girls who thrash me soundly in my cycle races are young enough to be my kids (not that I was much of a sprinter when I was their age regardless!) In the sense, I should be glad to be aging, as not only am I genetically more inclined to the endurance side, I've got nearly 20 years of base-building behind me to support it. Put them in a 6-hour race against me and I'll win every time, right? So why am I racing those one-hour crits again?

Otherwise I've had a reasonable training week, getting over the cold I had last week and setting some new benchmarks and best times:

Cycling

• Tuesday: a hard clockwise lap of Richmond Park on the road bike, setting a new best time of 19:31. Had I really wanted to set a big PB, I should have ridden the other way to have the wind at my back on the long draggy climb up to Richmond Gate, but mostly I wanted to get a 20-min baseline power level.


• Wednesday: my first ever 10-mile time trial, a low-key event put on by my club every other week. It consists of riding 5 miles as hard as possible down a divided highway, turning at the roundabout, then riding the same 5 miles back (again as hard as possible). I put down a respectable 25:33 time, not bad considering I've never ridden the course and I was on my road bike with no aero bars. I wanted to get a baseline wattage from the Powertap so I could compare and contrast with later TTs on my TT bike (alas I'm still waiting for my Powertap 650c Hed wheel to be built).

Interesting to compare the 2 sets of data (taken from WKO+). The peak 20-min power numbers were also fairly similar (250NP/240AP for Richmond Park and 247NP/242AP for the time trial), though the shorter effort had a higher VI as I was resting in the 30 seconds immediately following the 19:31 effort!

	Club 10-Mile TT				Richmond Park lap
Duration	25:31 (25:37)				19:30 (19:31)
Work	369 kJ				283 kJ
TSS	41.8 (IF 0.992)				32.4 (IF 0.999)
Norm Power	248				250
VI	1.03				1.03
Pw:HR	5.48%				-0.6%
Pa:HR	-1.37%				6.07%
Distance	16.121 km				10.834 km
Elevation Gain	274 m				294 m
Elevation Loss	290 m				289 m
Grade	-0.1 % (-17 m)				0.0 % (5 m)
	Min	Max	Avg		Min	Max	Avg
Power	0	519	241	watts	0	397	241	watts
Heart Rate	118	182	174	bpm	146	180	169	bpm
Cadence	50	114	97	rpm	62	150	96	rpm
Speed	2	52.8	37.9	kph	14.5	54.1	33.3	kph
Pace	1:08	30:00	1:35	min/km	1:07	4:08	1:48	min/km
Altitude	79	119	100	m	3	57	30	m
Crank Torque	0	64.1	23.8	N-m	0	43.6	24.1	N-m

Judging from my data in the power distribution chart in WKO+, my FTP is around 250 watts, though I have yet to formally test it on a good, rested day. Both the efforts above run a little low if my FTP really is 250. However, I felt during both of them that I "could have gone harder but just couldn't" if that makes any sense. On Tuesday I was still feeling the effects of my cold, as evidenced by my low average HR, and on Wednesday my legs felt a bit tired from Tuesday. Still, it's good to set some numbers as a baseline.

My plan for next week is to complete two 20-min efforts in the park with a two minute rest between, to try and get a solid idea of my peak 60-minute power or FTP for training purposes. I'll probably do this on Tuesday after a reasonably easy Monday. The next club 10-mile TT is the week after that, when I'll (hopefully) have my tri bike PT wheel finished, or if not I'll pop some clip-on aero bars on my road bike and reverse the seatpost to approximate my TT bike position (not sure how much effect it will have on my wattage, but it should make me a bit faster!) Then at the beginning of the taper for my Ironman I'll do a 25-mile TT to get my real and current 60-min FTP to set my race wattages for IMLP accordingly.

• Saturday: a long ride with Jim into the Surrey Hills to tackle a couple of our favourite climbs (my first such ride with the Powertap). I managed to get up the nearly 1km 10% Whitedown in a new best time of 4:00 flat, average watts 281, knocking nearly a minute off my previous fastest. Since my peak 5-minute power is 294, I think there's room for improvement there too (and I'm already wincing at my next date with Whitedown, that's gonna hurt!)

Running

Probably part of why I was a bit tired on Wednesday was that I did some hard 1-mile running intervals earlier in the day. I've recently become a paying member of Endurance Nation again, as I felt I needed that extra little push in doing my best at Lake Placid. According to the Vdot calculator, I've got a Vdot of 48 these days (not having done a 10km race for ages, I had to use my most recent 3-mile club handicap for the calculations). According to EN's formula, my running paces are as follows:

Run Zones
Zone	HR	Pace Mile/km
Z1/EP	< 151	8:49/5:28
Z2/MP	152-161	7:32/4:41
Z3/HMP	162-170	7:14/4:30
Z4/TP	171-177	7:05/4:24
Z5/IP	> 178	6:39/4:08

Most of the workouts in the EN plan call for longer intervals at Z3 and Z4 pace, not a whole lot at Z5 (intervals of five minutes or less). Lo and behold, my mile repeats were exactly at Z5 pace which more or less confirms my Vdot zones, so that's useful. Thankfully I can now do the lion's share of my running at the more reasonable Z3 and Z4 from now on!


Swimming

Erm... nothing to report here yet, but I will be tackling some outdoor swims at the Princes Club on Monday evenings from now on. Apparently the water is a balmy 15 degrees Celsius, just cold enough to make me want to swim pretty hard, wetsuit or not! Yikes. Fridays I'll be hitting either the indoor pool in Kingston, or the heated outdoor pool in Hampton.


Racing

As I've been writing this, the Grand Prix criterium at Hillingdon was taking place (i.e., an hour of pain and punishment at the hands of the country's elite female crit riders and sprinters). I'd signed up for it, but once I found out the course was going to be run backwards from what I'm used to -- meaning the normal uphill finish becomes a flat tailwind sprint -- I decided not to bother going, in favour of getting in that 90-minute run I never did this week. I went through a major review of my training schedule the other day, and with only 10 weeks to go before Ironman Lake Placid, I think running today is infinitely wiser than racing a crit, from an IM training point of view. So today's run will include two 15-minute intervals at Z3 in Richmond Park, which is a great ipod pace for my first post-35th-birthday run.

10 weeks to go! Holy @#$%!