Hi all,
I’m in my second year of serious cycling - a Master (by age). I have done SS1 + 2 and seen significant progress.
I’m most of the way through SS3, however I have an unexpected weekend of climbing coming up in early December and I’d like to be I good shape.
I have already purchased the Road Racing intervals training plan which I haven’t used in anticipation of my summer rides here in Melbourne and the 3 peaks in February.
I’d be grateful for some analysis of my power, cadence plots (scatter plots for eg) to get my strategy right for hitting the hills and also managing 3 days with over 1,500 vm
First do you have a different power meter you use for indoors vs outdoors training? There are few rides where you power seems really high! You have even had rides where you are doing more than 100 TS Sper hour which isn’t possible. So the good news is you are riding strong and power is higher, but it would help to get that set accurate.
Here is a ride you did a couple weeks ago. Your norm power was 236 watts for an hour! This is 4% over your FTP! So not really possible, however there is a break in there so it looks like it wasn’t continuous. Also your average heart rate on this was lower than your field test just a week earlier.
How long are your climbing rides coming up in a few weeks? What are the climbs like in length and gradient? That would effect how you attack the ride and efforts.
So if you are peaking in February we might want to talk about your timing. Ideally before the biggest peak of your training year you would finish sweet spot 3 six 6 weeks for, just enough time to do the road racing interval plan.
I can help you line up your plans. Depending on the length or type of climbs you have coming up you may want to do some of the road racing interval plan now. Get that type of effort and intensity in before the big weekend. Then maybe you could take a slight break with an easy week, go back to sweet spot 2 to build your CTL back up and finish off with the 6 week road racing plan.
So here is your performance manager chart. You have done a nice job building up your fitness all year. Though over the last few weeks you have leveled off a bit. I believe you can break through this plateau if you did some of the longer weekend rides. Some of your weekend rides have been on the short side it looks like. It will help when you are tackling a big 3 day weekend of riding as well!
Your intervals look good during the week. You have been hitting your targets. I looked at some of your Vo2 max workouts and they were spot on. You also did an FTP test and that was spot on. But was that on erg mode? Or maybe you were just holding the target watts set? Your outdoor power could be great than indoor power which is not uncommon. However it would be best not to do FTP test based on a target but go full gas.
Thanks for getting in touch. I hope you had a good weekend.
Below I’ll go through and answer your questions in turn:
Same power meter indoors and outdoors - don’t always calibrate for every indoor ride - we’ve been locked down here in Melbourne from March until 2 and a half weeks ago! Thankfully we can get out on the road now the weather is improving.
I have noticed my outdoor NP can be higher than my FTP (done on the trainer indoors) - I hadn’t stop to reflect on the significance of the power difference between indoors and outdoors as you’ve highlighted. (The weekend group rides I’ve done my NP is well below FTP largely because of the group dynamics. I’m not sure how significant that will be in the grand scheme.)
Training indoors I just try to stick to the target wattages by finding a comfortable cadence… no ERG mode.
My FTP test: I just tried to pace myself for the power I thought I could sustain for the 20 minutes, without going out too strong, too early…having done that in previous tests and fallen in a heap half-way through - now just sort of finish like I start, and ramping up in the last 5-10 mins if I can manage it, if that makes sense. I do feel toasted by the end of the Field Test However, appreciate your point about going Full Gas and take it on board.
Tomorrow is Day 1 of the new training week (Monday - Rest Day), so I guess I would just like confirmation on whether I should simply swap in my Road Racing Intervals Plan and start from scratch and swap-out my SS3 for the time-being or whether there is some tinkering with intervals to do at this stage now you have a bit more information to work with?
Furthermore, if I’ve missed the point on something you’ve said below, feel free to steer me in the right direction.
I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience.
Thanks
Kind regards
PS: I don’t know if it’s just me but I’ve had problems replying to your email. The Error message is:
Do you use more than one email address? Did you reply from a different email address? Email replies require that you use the same email address when replying. Alternately, the Message-ID header in the email may have been modified.
I would just do the sweet spot 3 plan. Those are long and steady climbs so sticking with the long aerobic work of sweet spot 3 will be good for you. Also with sweet spot 3 you do get a bit more work about your FTP as well. Its advance aerobic work. Kind of mix of sweet spot and interval training so a good mix of both. Then you can take a slight break, one week super easy, sweet spot 2 and onto your road racing interval plan. I can help set that up for you as well.
So you say tomorrow is day 1 of the new plan. Did you load that in yet? It looks the plan you have in now ends in two weeks. Can you plug in the dates of these climbs in? Then I can help make sure you are rested for them and adjust your training around them for you. These climbs can tell us a lot about your FTP! Long climbs like this will be more steady power so we should have a better understanding. Sometimes norm power can skew it a bit because of the amount of power coming anaerobically. But the climbs I’m guessing will be ridden steadier so we can look at your performance after these climbs. Those climbs are no joke!
Just respond in the forum! That is the easiest thing to do and best way to help you out. Also this way we have a nice thread going and can go back and look at things if need be.
I think I might be causing some confusion with my Training Peaks calendar: I am at the tail-end of SS 3 - those are the two weeks that you saw yesterday.
Today I continued on with the first day of the last 2 weeks of SS 3, but am happy to change, or go back to a previous week - basically follow your advice.( I just needed to fill in today’s training session with something and it seemed logical to continue with the current plan until we’d rejigged my schedule.)
(Today it was Diabolicals! They left me wondering if I was underdone with my top-end power conditioning - or whether it was more about developing better lactate clearance/tolerance, or… so many questions!)
As for the dates of the climbs - the December and 2021 3Peaks event are in my calendar for your reference. I placed the 1/20 climb - a local 6.8km 5% climb in there for completeness.
It’s a bit of a local benchmark(albeit a short segment) - every roadie in Melbourne knows their 1/20 time!
The SS2 plan is loaded up after (the 2 weeks of) my current SS3 is due to finish and my Road Racing intervals are in my Calendar after SS2, as discussed before. I hope this makes life easier.
I look forward to your thoughts about lining up my calendar/intervals and also some feedback about not hitting today’s Diabolicals’ NP targets, which was disappointing.
Just letting you know I see this and will make the adjustments leading into your bigger rides. Just a proper taper, rest and then start back up. So I need to rearrange a few of the workouts.
Just continue the plan as is for now! We need to add a rest week between the two plans, take out the field test as you just did one and go from there. But once I make those adjustments I will let you know.
The diabolical workouts are really hard! So hard to take too much away from that. You also did them indoors which makes it even more difficult with indoor power being harder than outdoor power. If you think about it you are doing 1 minute anaerobic efforts which are difficult alone with just riding zone 1 between. But these you are doing threshold. I would recommend you don’t start the 1 minute efforts so hared. You may just need to do 120 - 130% of FTP so lower that target so you can stay in zone 4 and closer to your threshold. Hopefully you felt better today and got through the workout!
I’d like some advice on what next… I finished my SS3 in the lead up to my 3-4 December Mountain Climbing weekend with a couple of decent climbs this weekend.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) is open at this stage - SS2 is now loaded in my TPeaks Calendar and unfortunately, this week is a very heavy week at work.
Should I keep going with SS2 and a couple more 1,500 - 2,000 vm of climbing this coming weekend, or is it time to taper? It’s probably been at least 5-6 weeks since I had a regeneration week from memory.
So I changed up your training the next few weeks in TrainingPeaks to accommodate the transition between the two plans the hill climbing you have on the weekend of December 3-4.
This week does need to be a regeneration week! So I have put one in. You can do some work next week but then you need to rest the days leading into the hill climbing. There is one day of short hard efforts. These are taper week efforts. Perfect for staying rested but also sharp with having the efforts. Keeps you from going flat.
Once you finish the next few weeks we than can go back into TrainingPeaks and adjust moving into your goals for February. Looks like we will need to place another regeneration week in around the new year from what we have in now.
First of all good luck in your rides next weekend! So lets complete those and the ride on December 19th. Then I would recommend a week easy much like the week of December 7th. Then you start with sweet spot 2. That is actually loaded into your plan to start the week of December 28th so we leave that as is.
Then we have you rolling into the road racing interval plan which is great before the falls creek 3 peak classic. It does appear we do need to add a regeneration week in mid February between these two plans. You need that rest as that is when you actually get stronger. So we will have get that added and move things around. Then also as you approach March 7th for the event we have to add the proper taper like we did for this coming week.
A 36 x 34 is a pretty small gear ratio and should be ok for 9%. The only thing I can suggest is you do test it out to see how ti feels. If you have any 9% climbs around you to ride, even if just shorter. Pace them the way you would ride this event. That is fairly compact gearing for a road bike. You could get a 34 on the front as opposed to the 36 so you have a 1 to 1 gear ratio. But you are right about wanting to save your legs early on. That is very important with a long climb and ride!
However, appreciate your point about going Full Gas and take it on board.