Most weeks I imagine this blog will simply be an update of my last week of training, but I happened to have a race at the end of a recovery week (great timing!), and for the first time ever - found the top step of the podium! I've been doing this race for a few years now, it's a ~9 mile loop done as many times as possible over 6 hours (last lap can finish after 6 hours, you just need to start it before the clock hits 6:00), and the goal has always been to hit 8 laps. 8 this year was good enough for the top spot in my category (Cat 1, 30-39) and would have been something like top 12 of the 400ish overall racers, so definitely a result I'm proud in. Took a pretty deep effort to get there: This was the first time I ever fully completed a TrainerRoad plan (I usually bail halfway through after getting fixated on some new trendy plan), and also culminated with my first ever win. No way those two things are unrelated!
Back to work it is, I start Sweet Spot Base High Volume 2 this week...really excited to see what fitness comes out of that.
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Week 2 in the books and had another pretty successful week. Given that I'm only retesting FTP every ~6 weeks according to the TrainerRoad schedule, the only summary changes I'll see most weeks are due to weight fluctuations, down a bit (~2 lbs this week) so seeing a jump in w/kg from 3.6 to 3.66, which is really nice progress in just one week. Had a really high quality training week as well, managed to hit my ~10 - 12 hour a week target with 10:45 on the bike, and also overshot the 559 TSS TrainerRoad target (Sweet Spot Base High Volume, Week 2) and hit 665: A bit worried about the TSS jump - in the past one of the struggles I've had with following training plans has been trying to do too much and ramping the volume too fast. Sweet Spot Base High Volume is already a pretty tough plan, and adding too much volume too soon will just lead to burn out. Need to make sure I'm following the plan well. Here's the detailed view of last week's training: I shuffled the training a bit due to a weekend trip, which ended up doing 5 solid workouts in a row. Also had a bit more time two of the days so added 30 minutes of quality work, plan had 8 hours of Sweet Spot workouts and I did 8.5, with an extra endurance ride thrown in. Definitely a heavy week of training, proud of this one.
For most of last year Sweet Spot training really baffled me - I could do one quality session (usually fasted, like all of my training...), but then being able to keep up with a plan was nearly impossible given my attempt to restrict calories & carbs in a short-sighted effort to lose weight while training hard. So far this year I've been fueling more substantially for workouts and definitely post-workout, and seeing real success so far. Both in the quality of the sessions themselves, and then definitely with the motivation to actually do the sessions - haven't had days so far where I really needed to drag myself onto the bike. Still have a lot of low-hanging fruit to collect to keep the gains going (I think I balanced out those Sweet Spot intervals with an equal and offsetting amount of Halloween candy...), which only makes me more motivated to continue this journey and keep getting stronger! One week into the new training & nutrition plan, and it's been a pretty positive week. Here's the high level picture of where I am coming in to the week, the FTP is pretty fresh as I just tested this week, and weight is updated as well: The summary of my training is shown below, as well as the weekly breakdown. I made a few changes to some of the workouts, which is leading to the very small "planned TSS" and "planned hours" figures. Overall this week was a bit ahead of schedule / overly stressful, I was supposed to hit 484 TSS and I ramped it up to 606 TSS, need to keep an eye on myself and make sure I'm sticking to the plan, not overloading it too soon. I generally do like to do all workouts at 102% intensity, sometimes with the Kickr it will lag slightly and this will lead to the final workout tally being slightly lower than the targets, so keeping to 102% ensures I hit the workload desired for the workout.
Nutrition-wise this week was roughly a success, with still some room to improve. I've gotten rid of most of my fasted riding. I used to do every ride fasted, due to both my early schedule (most days I'm on the bike by 5AM to be done by 7) and also I really bought in to the idea of fad adaptation, and while I don't think that's wrong per-se, I think it's only one piece of the puzzle, and if you're underfueling for tough sessions that's a bigger problem to overall fitness than the amount that's gained from being better fat adapted (but certainly not sure on this point yet). Definitely moved off my carb-phobia this week, moving towards a much more balanced diet, but still need to ensure I'm eating more post-workout and during the day to minimize nighttime hunger frenzy. My current plan for next week is to follow the overall workout schedule very closely, but maybe shuffling some rides due to being out of town next weekend. Will see exactly how to make it work, might just do more intensity Friday and Saturday to compensate for losing Sunday - but still working through those options. Until next week! For far too long now my cycling has consisted of a mix of "winging it" and jumping back and forth between the new hot hack, trick, or method that's being promoted. I've basically tried it all at one point in time. Diet-wise has been a mix of Paleo, low-carb, intermittent fasting, etc., with no clear research or understanding as to how this will support my health and fitness and why I should take this approach. Training-wise has been a similar tour through the hot trends, back and forth between polarized, threshold, low volume HIIT, high volume base, etc.
Part of the reason I've struggled so much with finding an approach and sticking to it is the idea that there may be a "better way" out there, and given all the time and energy I put into my cycling - shouldn't I aim to find that better way? Even now as I'm writing this - the idea of locking myself into one training and nutrition method for a year is pretty daunting - but I think at the end of the day that two maxims hold true, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" and "consistency is king". I'm looking to give up accomplishing inconsistent perfection (whatever that looks like...) and want to try my hand at instead picking what is a clear set of "best practices" and sticking with those. My A-Race (Vermont 50) is the last weekend of September every year, and after another year of OK but not "up to my potential" performance, I'm going to pick a method and actually stick to it. What does that look like to me at this point?
Nutrition has definitely been the harder nut for me to crack historically, and it likely will continue to be going forwards. I've definitely gotten trapped in the "lighter is faster" mentality in the past, and struggled with eating enough to support my training (and then of course when you can't fight hunger any longer, destroying a pint or two of Ben & Jerry's...). I like the principles of The Endurance Diet by Matt Fitzgerald and the Winning in the Kitchen philosophy of Frank Overton, which both recommend carbohydrate in significant quantities to support your training (not ALL the time, but as necessary to support significant training). They are more similar than different, with the main difference is Fitzgerald's view that you should "eat everything" (no food group restriction) and Overton's view that you should eliminate gluten & dairy. Really don't have a strong view here, so in the interest of avoiding disordered eating as much as possible (long story there...) going to stick with the Endurance Diet principles, which break down to:
I don't think there's much need to do any planning beyond this level - worrying about the details at this point seems trivial, so it's off to execution mode. My plan is to try to use Monday (my recovery ride day) to update and reflect on how the week went, we'll see how well that pans out. Time to get to work! Had a great trek down to Rocky Point, NY for the 2nd annual Rocky Point 50. While this slotted in as a tune-up for my annual A-priority race (Vermont 50 in a few weeks), the courses could not have been more different. The Long Island trails are pretty familiar to me given the last few years experience at 6 Hours of Cathedral Pines - and Rocky Point definitely fit that bill. Tight, twisty, sandy, and extremely fast trails were on tap today, and the course was an absolute blast.
Getting to the course was a real breeze for me, roughly 2 hour drive door-to-door, getting me there with plenty of time to check in and get ready before the 9AM start time. The race itself is put on by some seriously committed members of Paniagua Cycling - and it's more than just a race, it's a fundraiser for Lustgarten Foundation, with 100% of the proceeds going to pancreatic cancer research. I always love a good race, and even better when it's put on to support a good cause. In general for these longer events I don't warm up much, with the idea that I'll mostly warm up through the race. I still don't know if that's a good call or not, should probably experiment a bit with doing at least some efforts to open up the legs before the start, especially given how important positioning is going into the single track. The event was a mass-start format, which can be risky but generally people seemed to line up in the appropriate spots so that worked fine. One weakness of mine in these events is that I simply start out either too far back or too slow, and then end up getting really bunched up in the singletrack. I need to be more committed to jumping on the gas early and really putting out some energy - both for positioning, and then to ride with stronger riders. I find (this is probably true for most people, but definitely for me, I ride to the level of those around me, so if I end up with a better pack at the start I should be able to push myself harder and not lose so many spots up front. That said - I did get (relative to other people) stronger as the race went on, and was able to consistently pick off a bunch of people each lap, but that just takes so much more energy with those singletrack passes than just one big effort at the start and then rolling with the pack through the woods. Ended up in 7th place in the Cat 1 Under 45 field, something like 12 people overall I think. Still trying to make my way to the podium in these types of events, but I did hit one reasonable metric of beating the Cat 2s (so at least tells me I "belong" in Cat 1). I generally like to finish within 10% of the winners, but my 3:49 time vs the winning 3:21 was just outside that metric. Haven't seen the full lap splits yet, but I think I ran roughly consistent 1:16 laps, not sure what the winners did but given the generally increasing times for the winners it's likely I lost most of my time in that first lap (and then continued to bleed time throughout the race once I lost touch of the fast guys). Overall race was a blast, it's been too long since I toed the start line, but with three races coming up between now and the end of the year (Vermont 50, Erie 80, and 6 Hours of Cathedral Pines for sure) should be able to get a bunch more reps in, and hopefully keep improving. And per tradition, I managed to score a really solid post-race burrito, if you're in the area Miguel's Mexican Grill is a little hole in the wall that shouldn't be missed. Strava: www.strava.com/activities/1827956962 My experiment with primarily using XATA has led to some very interesting observations even just a week in, with the most striking being how much recovery I should take.
In the past my training was highly inconsistent, huge blocks of quality work over a few days and then struggling to maintain / build on it after that, both bad legs and lack of mental motivation. I always thought the driver was poor nutrition, but stuffing myself to try to reset my legs only ended up with weight gain and frustration as my legs failed to retain their snap. Recently I had a race that was hard but not extreme, that took a little under 2 hours. My typical plan would have been a single day off, and then back to the hard intervals two days post race. XATA is given me a very different recommendation - something like 4-5 days of mellow recovery in order to get back to form! It's hard to predict the results from this, but it has encouraged me to really listen to where my body is at post race, and the truth is my legs are still recovering and I need to let that happen to truly build any strength gains on top of that key race. Looks like I'll get back to intensity over the weekend, which will be great to build out of this epic XSS debt I've build up this week... I had originally titled this "putting my season in the hands of Xert"; but that's a bit dramatic regarding how much control I actually have over my results. That is - while I think Xert can help me manage my workouts and load a bit better, it's still up to me to make the work happen to get stronger, there's no magic pill here.
While in my last update I noted that I was going to go back to a more rigid training plan with TrainerRoad's structured plans, I then realized that quite frequently "life happens" (ride cut short due to family duties, happen to have extra time for a longer ride one day) and having a more flexible / adaptive training plan would really benefit me. So I'm going to dive in to the Xert Adaptive Training Advisor (XATA) with the hopes of having a much more fluid plan that responds to my changing requirements and the workouts I can actually do, not just what I had planned to do. Only a few days in so far and hard to tell how the process will play out from here, but excited to see how the recommendations adapt to necessary changes in my schedule. Hopefully I can document my weekly progress and help provide quality feedback for the Xert team to continue to evolve the product, and also very excited to see what kind of gains I can make with this approach! For some reason I've always been overly willing to ditch my current plan and switch over to the latest fad / trend in an effort to fully maximize the results I'm getting. I don't think it's due to a desire to strictly take a shortcut - mostly if I'm going to be spending the time training and eating right, then I want to really make sure I'm getting the most out of it.
What does that look like? Over the past couple of years I've wavered frequently between different eating habits and training modalities, super low carb, super high carb, nothing but long endurance training, nothing but high intensity intervals; you get the picture. I've certainly had some successes with each of these - but have failed to actually implement the one strategy that EVERYONE agrees on - consistency. Training and eating actually aren't likely all that complicated, at least, in order to get 95% of the benefit out of each it's mostly about consistent quality in each space. While nutrition will likely still be a harder nut to crack (am I hungry or just bored...) training should be an easier nut to crack. I'm a monster fan of the TrainerRoad product in general, and while I've stopped and started their plans about 100x I'm going to actually make them stick this time. 20 weeks out from my A race, lines up basically perfectly with 12 weeks of sweet spot base and 8 weeks of general build. While I could drive myself crazy optimizing the choices at this point - given my inability to hit consistency in the past I'm just going to make a pick and go with it, sticking to the plan rather than frequently jumping around. I've always been slightly suspicious of TSS - not that it wasn't a useful heuristic, but that it could be very easily "gamed" such that you could rack up high TSS work while not actually putting yourself under that much stress. One of the failures of TSS as I see it is that it counts time at an intensity level the same whether it's sustained or not, that is one 8-minute effort at 110% FTP counts the same as eight 1-minute efforts at 110% FTP; while the first one would be very hard the second is basically a breeze. Saw this very much in effect with my last three workouts; first the TSS charts: As you can see - the TSS for the "Polarized" workout is the highest of the three, but from a perceived effort sense (as well as a muscle recovery sense) it wasn't all that harder than the "Goodale" workout, and it was MUCH easier than the "Floats" workout (which is a doozy for me). In my quest to find a better way to measure this actual difficulty / impact, along came Xert. If you view the same three workouts in their analysis software, you can see that both the Strain and XSS are about 10% higher for the "Floats" workout than the "Polarized" workout, due to the extended continuous time time spent at that higher intensity vs the smaller sprints. It took me some time to get used to the Xert way of measuring the workouts vs classic TSS, but it's really reassuring to see the metrics now lining up with the perceived exertion, such that I no longer feel like I'm cheating the system.
Moral of the story; if it feels too good to be true (all that TSS for not so much exertion), then it probably is... I've long since accepted that, while I love the concept of being a professional mountain biker, the idea of balancing that with a successful career are downright impossible - so have settled for the idea that I'd like to get my USA Cycling Pro MTB license, race in some national championships, etc. My goal is the level of "serious amateur", treating this sport with a huge level of discipline and focus, but being realistic about what I can look to accomplish given my myriad other constraints.
So - with that in mind, what does 2018 look like? While I'd love to make that upgrade from Cat 1 to Pro, I think that might be a year off, so shooting for 2018 to be the year I:
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