Diary of a Rookie Veteran Racer: 3rd February ’11
February started out nicely: my racing licence arrived from British Cycling which means I am now officially registered as a racing cyclist for Shutt VR. I like the “Age Category: over 23” (yes, by a margin of two decades) and of course, in the grand tradition of ID photos, this one is a stinker.
An interesting element of my training at the moment is a weekly Pilates class which is really helping with core stability and giving me a solid platform for putting down the power. Other than that the main training focus has been a steady diet of threshold and sweet-spot training to build up aerobic power, combined with 4 hour hilly Sunday rides to prepare for the Tour of Wessex. You can see from the Golden Cheetah graph below that this is paying dividends, with the red line (60 minute max power – a.k.a. functional threshold power, or FTP) climbing steadily since October, and the other lines (5, 10 & 30-minute max power) staying reasonably stable.
One high point (or low point, I can’t really decide) of February was my first turbo session with the new Sufferfest video, Local Hero. All the other Sufferfest videos to date have been one hour sessions, but
Local Hero is a full 85 minutes long and finishes with a series of full-gas sprints against a selection of cycling legends past & present. I dug deep and it hurt like hell, but I was rewarded with 20-, 30- and 60-minute max power figures in my all-time top 5.
The plot of the session above doesn’t really give you a sense of the effort until I mention that the red power line being in the green zone corresponds to number 8 on the Suffer Scale, or “I promise never to be bad again, please just make it end right now” as David McQuillen of Sufferfest Studios so delightfully puts it. The combination of Sufferfest videos and the Kurt Kinetic Rock & Roll trainer almost makes me look forward to turbo sessions. Almost.
The month finished with 10 days off the bike for family & business reasons, the result being a little bit of fitness lost. The challenge now is to regain that fitness while starting to introduce a bit of VO2max hill work to sharpen up power levels around the 5-minute range. There’s admin work too: I need to sort out my race calendar for the year ahead…
February summary:
| Training | 697 km in 25.9 hours |
| Weight | 64kg |
| Body fat | 13.0% |
| Threshold power | 245 Watts (3.8 W/kg) |
Tags: RookieVeteranRacer
That ID pic is giving me the fear Darren!
Thats an impressive summary Darren. I’m just wondering how you are calculating your FTP number from that, as it seems like your 60 min power is less than 243w?
Whats scares me the most is your w/kg figure as you are so much lighter than me as well! I hope you’ll pull us along on the ToW when the going gets tough….
My FTP is calculated as 95% of the 20-minute power figure from a maximal effort test on the turbo – in other words it tracks 95% of the dark blue line in the monthly chart. The 60-minute power in the graph is a good general indicator but it comes from training rides where I’m not going full-gas for a whole 60 minutes.
thanks Darren – thats what I’m using so can see it now.