It’s Sunday, the end of my training week. I screwed up my ride stats today by pausing my Garmin during a water stop and then neglecting to un-pause it when I resumed. I lost a few miles and several minutes of riding, so “officially” today’s ride was just 45 miles. I surpassed 4,000 miles, year-to-date, on Friday, so I can live with a few lost miles today. But if I add back the lost time, then this was a 10-hour week. It might prove to be my last big block of training this year.
The days are getting shorter, the temperatures are trending lower—though there is a nice dose of summer in the forecast for the new week—and the cyclocross season is scheduled to begin on Saturday. My base is very solid and I can afford to drop the volume if I increase the intensity. I’m going to use Mondays as flex days to focus on any part of my game that needs extra attention. (Tomorrow that means mountain biking, as I don’t feel prepared for the WEMS race at New Fane on Sep. 17.) Tuesdays will continue to be dedicated to cyclocross practice at Royal Oaks Park through the end of September. That’s a hard effort, but a short one. Wednesdays will be rest days. Thursdays will be long-steady-distance days. Fridays will be reserved for time trial efforts: hard, short, and hopefully the right workout to take me into the weekend primed but not fatigued. There are a lot of back-to-back races on the cyclocross schedule this season. It’s not good enough to be prepared for Saturday’s race if I’m exhausted in the starting grid for Sunday’s. I’m probably looking at an average of 6 hours of training per week during cyclocross season, not counting the races themselves.
On today’s ride I performed like a big block engine: plenty of power at low RPM. It was a sweet-spot ride for me … and nothing like the effort required by cyclocross. Fine tuning began back on Aug. 2 at Royal Oaks. Now it’s time to take the intensity up another notch.
No comments:
Post a Comment