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
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