Zane's Blog

Looking back over the last few weeks and months of training I am beginning to see a slow but steady increase in the wattage I’m able to hold, especially for longer periods of time. In the last 6 weeks I’ve climbed from 198 to 223 watts for a 60 minute effort. Hopefully the trend continues!

This morning I was back on the CompuTrainer for the Thursday morning Tempo ride. I was supposed to hold an average of 186 watts for the first 15 minutes and then 224 for the next 45 minutes. I warmed up the trainer like I normally do and calibrated. Started the ride and was averaging about 190 for the first 5 or 6 minutes and felt good. So I picked up the pace a little and was sitting at 202 average watts for the first 15 minutes. Usually they have you reset and do the next 45 minutes, but I just keep going and pick up the effort. The next 45 minutes are supposed to be at an average of 224 watts. I finished the hour long ride at just under that, 223 watts. The immediate wattage reading flunctuates quite a bit, probably because my pedal stroke is not very smooth, but I felt like I could keep it between 230-240 without having to kill myself.

Weight: 166.4

The title of this post should really be something like “A man has got to know his limitations” – Clint Eastwood. It was another tough session on the CompuTrainer. The performance improvement program had me increase the load this week on the intervals. The peaks are now 16 watts over what I tested at and it was a similar ride to the one I had a couple of weeks ago. I managed to keep pace through the first 10 minutes, but could only get 5 minutes into the second interval before I started to break down. I managed to keep pedaling for another minute before I had to stop. That is one of the frustrating things about the coaching software and the load based training. The trainer is continually trying to keep the load constant so if you don’t keep the cadence up it just gets really hard to pedal. If you stop and start again then you have a chance to get the cadence back up before. Once I failed I did a similar thing to a couple weeks ago. I would rest 30 seconds and then hit it hard for 1 minute and rest again. The last interval was even worse and I only managed 3 minutes before having to resort to my shorter intervals.

I haven’t looked at what the program has in store for next week. Maybe I will do this one again until I can finish it. I don’t much like failing, but they say that this is where the real gains are made, when you are pushing the limits. My heart rate was up to 170 again, so I guess I was pushing the limits.

Weight: 167.6

This morning I was on the CompuTrainer once again and doing intervals. If you recall from the last time I did this half way through the second set I just fell apart. The last 10 minute interval was even worse, probably made it 3 minutes into it before I just couldn’t keep pace. All week I’ve been thinking about that, a lot of thoughts running through my head. Was the CompuTrainer not calibrated right for the test that set the interval peaks? Did I really lose that much over vacation by not being on the bike and eating poorly? Was it just a bad day? Not hydrated?

Anyway, lots of things to think about over the course of the week. The one thing I wanted to be for this morning was mentally ready to ride. I kept going over the session in my head, thinking about the cadence I wanted to keep. I absolutely was not going to let my cadence drop because that would be sure failure, it is just to hard to bring it back up. Your mental attitude has a lot to do with what you are able to accomplish, if you don’t believe, it won’t happen for you.

I started out the session gradually building up to around a 65% effort and then there are 5 short intervals, 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy. Then the first 10 minute interval starts and I knew I would make it through it. It certainly wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew I could last 10 minutes and I watched my HR climb to 163 by the end of it. Then an easy 5 minutes and my HR recovered to 141 before the next interval started. Let me tell you, that was a long 10 minutes. I just kept thinking keep the cadence up. This time the HR climbed to 168 and the recovery 5 minutes had it back down to 145. Finally the last 10 minute interval, about 7 minutes in my legs were really starting to burn but I was keeping the cadence right around 88-90. I learned from the last time if I let it drop my legs wouldn’t have enough keep going. That last 3 minutes seemed to last forever, my HR went to 170 (Not sure what Coach/Nutritionist Melinda will think of that 🙂 ) and my legs were seriously hurting for the last minute. Never so happy to just spin my legs for 20 minutes after that.

So the difference between this week and last week was an average of 14 Watts or about 8%. Did my body change that much over the course of a week? I doubt it, I think I was just better mentally prepared for the session.

Weight: 169.2