The picture's far too big to look at, your eyes won't open wide enough

So find a couple more to help you.

I've been talking to a lot of friends and have come to the conclusion that now is not the time for marathon training. I haven't put my all into getting ready for the race and leaving 2 months to get the appropriate milage in is silly. It's too expensive and draining to throw myself into on a whim. Rather I will continue running and use this as a springboard to keep building a super-solid base. As a reward, instead of signing up for the marathon I think I will do a couple races this fall:

http://www.runnerschoice.on.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10&Itemid=11

http://www.runnerschoice.on.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=86&Itemid=60

I haven't run a race in a while and I'm curious where my fitness is. Besides, I have the base for the half-marathon.

This was a semi-tough decision made much easier by talking to people who care about me. Even if they were just nodding and agreeing. I hear from friends with coaches that just having another set of eyes and opinions is worth it.


Maybe  I'll describe my VO2 max test now.


So I was put on a bike with a nose clip and snorkle in my mouth and told to ride until I couldn't any more. The effort was constantly ramping at a rate of 100W/3min. We started at 30W. I was told for the sake of the data try and stay around 80 rpm. Fine. So how did it go? Pretty well. I made it to 430W before I was toast, with the last 4 mintues being complete hell. From this I got the data presented on the left bar. To put these numbers into perspective:

http://www.thresholdsport.com/vo2max.html

So I'm a bit of a natural or somethin'! Thanks mom and dad!


Some other odds and ends?


So I got that bike! I've yet to race it though... Thursday after my 3.5 hour day was supposed to be a 15km TT but thankfully it rained which was as good an excuse as any to go to bed early. So far I've riden it about 200km and every time I take it out I find something new to like about it. I just can't wait to use it for what it was made for... Next Thursday can't come soon enough.

My 3.5 hour day was one of the most fun training days I've had in a while. I was up at 5 am and out running by 5:15, 4x10 min tempo with 2 min rest around Vic park, in the dark with an onslaught of sprinklers. The soundtrack was Young Machetes by The Blood Brothers. I came home from work and went out for 2.5 hours on the new bike with some friends I met at UWO tri club in first year who have since gone on to bigger and pro-ier things. I made it home and flopped into bed, well spent. The specifics are available on Strava.

So what are my plans for the weekend? Pfft, I don't know. I might go for another run. Maybe not though. I don't really have any obligations to do anything.

Adam "Lazy weekend" Fortais

What do you do the day before a race?

I do an hour run in the morning including 40 minutes of intervals at tempo pace, then I go for a 2.5 hour group ride with some solid efforts after work.

You gotta do what works best for you.

Adam "Just ride, dummy" Fortais

Do you like to hurt? I do I do...

Peak week 1 of 2. I will disclose my training plan leading into my month of races now.

          

                  Week 1                                           Week 2

Mon             Rest                                                Rest

Tues             Crit                                               Quality run

Wed           Easy ride                                         Easy run/bike

Thurs            Rest                                              15km TT

Fri               Easy run                                         Rest

Sat          5x2min @300W, 30min run               Easy ride

Sun           Easy Run                                          Quality run

Hopefully that comes out ok on your screen. If not, we'll see if I re-edit it. So where am I right now? Right on schedule, feeling pretty good, feeling a little fresher. 

I have a couple interesting things to report, I will tell them to you in reverse-chronological order therefore we start with the criterium I participated in on Tuesday.

So the race was around a pretty wide-open 4-corner 1.8km loop, 35min+3 laps. I decided before hand that I would not be in the sprint at the end, I would finish all alone whether that be in the front or the back. To do this I would sit in the pack for the majority of the race unless someone wanted to make a long break with me (fat chance). In the more likely scenario that everyone else wanted to sit and kick, I would use the corners to get a little bit of a lead and pop off the front into the headwind, hopefully solo-ing to victory over the last 3 laps. And that's exactly what I did... or uh, tried to do. 

The first lap went fairly well, I waited until we pulled in a half-hearted attempt at a break just after the 3-laps-to-go mark and made a fairly strong, 600-or-so Watt attack. I kept a gap of about 10 seconds until the start of 2-laps-to-go. At this point 2 others bridged up to me and drafted off me for pretty much a whole lap. Convinced that we could make it, I flicked my elbows wildly for someone to give me a freakin' hand with this as I have been pulling at about 350W for a lap now. Eventually a very angry older man pulled to the front a little quicker than someone hoping to pull for a bit (but only a little bit). I got on his wheel thinking this would be a nice little break, only to see our speed plummet. Was this a cruel tactic from a sprinter's team stuck in the pack? Or an attack out of our break group? Either way I knew he was not helping me at all and I launched another mini attack to shake the dead weight. Unfortunately this little distraction gave the pack enough time to cut my break into a "you're not quite able to draft off me yet" distance by the last lap. So I made another short acceleration to give me a bit of distance, banking on my aggressive cornering to keep me far enough away to avoid being swallowed by the sprint (which was about 75 meters long after the last corner). This worked well, every corner I gained a little bit, every straight the group re-organized and made it back. Coming into the last corner (a little up-hill too) I had maybe 15 meters but it just wasn't enough. Half-way down the finishing stretch I heard the zip of carbon wheels and clunks of under-stress shifts and was swallowed. 

One day I'll hold them off. Feel free to check Strava for my race data. This happened this past Tuesday.

This post is getting a little long so perhaps I'll quickly say that I had my VO2 Max tested a couple weeks back and got some pretty cool data! I have a VO2 max on the bike of about 67mL/kg/min (I think those are the units) and of the subjects tested my aerobic threshold was the highest. I don't know who was tested, but I got that number as well as my anaerobic threshold. Training with this data has been pretty nice. This is good motivation to retest myself during my off-weeks in the future. Not a lab-quality test like I did this time, but at least a short TT or something to get the right numbers for my next block. Next post I will go into a bit more detail about the test as well as some other odds and ends. 

Adam "Name that song!" Fortais