Fathers day....

This coming Sunday will be our club time trial up Waterfall hill. The statistics aren't very impressive, its a 4km climb averaging around 4.5%.

Whilst it sounds easy, it is actually a deceptively hard climb as the ramps change every few hundred metres from gentle slopes to 10% leg busters.

Last year i managed a personal best time of 12.30 with a NP of 330W. In hindsight, this was a pretty good time. My current best 10 minute power output is around 260W, so I may well be in for a slow painful grind..

I've had a good week of riding thus far, the weather has been perfect and the legs are feeling good.. I'll take it easy over the next few days to let the legs recover and hopefully if i can make it in under 13 minutes, it'll be a good start to Father's Day...

Thats when i fell for, the leader of the pack.

That song replicated life at the criterium today. I felt terrible after a full week back to training. The legs were dead riding to the track, and there was a stiff southerly blowing. Race tactics were pretty simple; keep out of the wind and don't get dropped.

All started fairly well and I was sitting comfortably in the main bunch. Two punters then decided to attack the group - and with no one left wanting to do work to chase them down, the breakaway was gaining time with each lap...

One punter in the bunch decided he wanted to join the break himself and launched off - I went with his wheel and after 30 seconds found myself in a world of pain. Things went downhill from there... The main engine room shut down and i felt myself going backwards... The rest of the bunch caught back up, and i started to drift towards the back......

Energy is being focussed now towards the club 20km ITT later this month. I have built up a new TT rig which is nice and light and has a PTSL with Wheelbuilder Disc Covers...

Keep Safe.

Power Plays

One of the best objective ways i find of tracking my performance in WKO+ is through the Power graph above.. The dotted red line shows my average power versus time at my baseline (beginning of the year) The Yellow trend line is where my `best` power has occurred since that time. Its very interesting to see how the graph changes depending on what type of training has been applied. You can see my short peak power levels are pretty decent - but my longer average powers are quite poor, and dip below my dotted trend line.

The only way to improve that is to build the endurance base substantially. I really need to get some 300km+ weeks into my legs at Z1-Z2 intensity to see some real improvements.

Has been a great feeling getting back on this bike this week...

Back on track... but a long way to go.....

Le Tour is finished for another year, its getting a little warmer in the mornings and daylight is coming earlier.... All the ingredients for increased motivation... Today was my first Sunday club ride for more than a month. And it hurt.

Still the wheels are starting to turn again, albeit painful and slow at the moment. As the graph up top shows - the hard blue line tracks my CTL or chronic training load.. I've let this slip a little too much for my liking, so lots and lots of low intensity miles are needed for a few weeks to get some general fitness back in the legs.

I'll look to start back at weekly criteriums from now on, and try to attend the next Calga time trial to set some baseline times that i can work from.