What's Ahead

The purpose of this blog is to share what happens as I prepare for the Tour of the Gila in April.  The majority of racing is preparation and the majority of preparation is training.  So today I'll briefly touch on some of that.

Here we are on a New Year's Eve hike.

I'm new to racing, a couple of years removed from just a few months of experience, and completely new to structured training.  I started following a program a few months ago and learned that the grind is difficult! My days get filled with stuff even if I'm planning on sitting on my duff all day.  But try to throw in training 6 days a week, sometimes twice a day and things get crammed.  Luckily for me I have a supportive wife who allows me the space and time. I often feel bad when I'm spending so much time training and then the rest of the time I'm exhausted, but she is behind me 100%!

My training will largely follow programs set in TrainerRoad (an online company that designs training programs for time-crunched cyclists). TrainerRoad is awesome because provides me with a major component of preparation that I won't fret over. I trust Coach Chad's design and so I just need to monitor my nutrition and recovery.

Netflix on one screen, TR on the other.

TrainerRoad is designed to be done indoors, largely anyway.  When I first heard about it I thought, no I swore, there would be no way I'd conduct regular training on an indoor trainer.  I mean, I can ride outside every day of the year here.  There's very little traffic and amazing routes and scenery.  But once I tried it and experienced the quality of the workouts I could get indoors, I was sold on it.  And, sometimes the simplicity of just hopping on the bike that's already on the trainer is just nice.  Nothing to take out, put away, and the duration is short. Anyhow ... enough of my plug for TrainerRoad.



The over-all structure of my training will go like this:

• Three weeks of increasing workload, followed by a week of active recovery.  Repeat until late April. (It's a little more complicated than that, but generally that's how it works.)
• Each three week block will begin with an FTP test.
• Mondays are rest day.
• I will liberally swap one of my Tuesday/Thursday intense training sessions for a hard ride to Pena Blanca Lake as the combination of punchy and sustained climbs, technical descents and lack of traffic make this an ideal training spot.
• Every Friday will be spent on an easy ride, outdoors if possible, on my time trial bike (getting comfortable as possible on that bike is huge).
• Weekends will be spent outside (not on the indoor trainer if possible).  I have some neuro-muscular issues that respond best to outdoor riding.    
• At least one gym session a week.  One run, long walk or hike a week as well.
• Race often to practice for the big event.  

(The other two components of training, recovery and nutrition, I'll discuss in a future post.)

This coming week I have an FTP test and I'm very curious to see what gains I've made since the last one, which was 2 months ago.  I'll be doing an outdoor, twenty minute test on the Whipple Observatory Climb.  

FTP is an acronym for Functional Threshold Power.  That just means the amount of power that a cyclist could maintain for an hour.  There are many tests but I like the 20 minute test.  The way that works is you warm up thoroughly and then for 20 minutes you ride as hard as you can.  You then take 95% of the average power for that twenty minute period and you'll have a great approximation of your FTP.  

Tomorrow, when I take the test, I'll be shooting to hold 400 watts for the twenty minutes.  That is an insane number, to me, but my last FTP test I held just under 380 watts, so I think I have a good goal. 

Until next time ...