Diary of a Rookie Veteran Racer: March 2011 by Darren Hague

March was a big month in terms of training: I logged over 1000km and 40 hours in the saddle for only the second time since I started riding. You’ll see at the end of this piece why that wasn’t necessarily a good idea.

Back at the start of the month I received another racing licence, this time from the League of Veteran Racing Cyclists, to go with my British Cycling licence. I tried to take a better picture this time – it’s an improvement, but still pretty ugly I’m afraid. I’m really getting revved up to start competing now – only a few weeks until my first ever race!

The middle of the month brought the Spring Onion sportive from Leatherhead, which was a good hilly leg-opener. I managed just over 4 hours, which was good going and well within the top 10% of rider times which is normally my aim for these events. To be honest, part of that was dumb luck in not missing any turnings – the only signage on the whole course was little red arrows painted on the road. Some of the road surface was also red, which didn’t help matters. The conditions were, shall we say, “Belgian” once again – you can get an idea from this pic at SportivePhoto.com.

I also started playing with Strava this month. Strava is a site where you can upload your rides (up to 5 rides a month for free) and the thing that makes it interesting is that you can define segments – typically hills – and the site will then create league tables for those segments letting you know when you’ve hit a PB and also ranking you against other riders. Below you can see the entry for Box Hill (part of the 2012 Olympic road race route) and you can see how far I am off the pace. Of the 44 people who’ve logged a time, I’m ranked number 21. Obviously I need a new and lighter bike…

Another highlight of the month was when my 2011 Team Shutt VR jersey came in the post. It’s a beautiful piece of kit – and the matching Team bibshorts should be here any day now. You’ll have to wait until next month to see a photo of them in action: my first race is on 28^th April and given that it’s happening only a mile from my house I’m sure my long-suffering and patient wife can be persuaded to take some pics.

To finish with: going back to my opening point of why a month of heavy training wasn’t such a good idea, you may have noticed that this blog is a few days late. There is a good reason for that.

The chart below is a training aid called the Performance Manager chart (PMC) which shows how much short-term training stress is involved each week (pink line) and how that contributes to long-term fitness (blue line). To give you an idea of scale, 100 points (e.g. the week of March 22^nd) is the equivalent stress of doing a 25 mile maximum-effort time trial every day for a week.

The difference between the two lines is the “stress balance”, shown as the yellow bars. As you can see, I dug myself into quite a deep  hole by the 4^th week in March. I’d originally planned a fitness test for the end of the month, but got food poisoning the day before (don’t ask – completely my own fault) and because my body was so stressed from the training, this knocked me flat out for a whole week and I lost 2kg of weight through lack of appetite.

I managed to get back on the bike on Monday, and finally did my functional threshold test last night (Wednesday). The results were the same as last time but with a 5bpm higher heart rate. And today I came down with a cold. About the only good thing is that the 2kg weight loss means I have slightly improved my power-to-weight ratio since the last test.

This is telling me I need to ease off a bit, recover and then start training hard again (my goal is to hit 4 Watts/kg) – but perhaps take it a bit more carefully. As luck would have it I’m about to head off for a week visiting family with almost no bike time, which sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered right now.

March summary:

Tags: RookieVeteranRacer