Boring training stuff

Rochester Flyers is NOT Rochester Minnesota's bicycle messenger service. Rochester Flyers is NOT a cycling club or race team. Rochester Flyers is NOT a bike shop or a company. Rochester Flyers is just me, going on rides, attempting to return to racing, doing alleycats and spewing my opinion online.

Gunnar Soroos A lifelong cyclist born on the tropical island of Oahu, racing in Minnesota. His passion of cycling is combined with his faith in God to keep him focused on the real mission - the golden rule, love others as you would want to be loved. Peace.

One's first glimpse of freedom, in fact is often snatched from
a bike. By turning the pedals you can move more quickly towards
your most secret dreams.
-Bernard Hinault

If you've been rading the blog you already know that I'm using TrImp scores to track my training. Now I've kept logs before and had some sort of idea of where I wanted to be at certain points in seasons past, but mostly used how I felt, as the guage of progress. This is an ok way of doing things, but ... (I love using the but and three dots for the dramatic pause it creates) but, it can be done better.

Better, is having a plan. Even better is having some goals, but that will come when I can get outside and do some real testing. (Real testing as in personal records for sprints, climbs, and time trials) But today we'll talk about the plan. My plan is still fluid and being tweaked. Alot of books on periodazation use 4 week cycles. Loosly translated at 3 weeks of build and a week of recovery. These cycles are inside of 4 to 12 weeks periods. Each week in a cycle will have different rides and recovery days within it.

My plan is different. I have the benefit of recalling past seasons, my level of fitness, milage and average heart rates at various times during those seasons using memory and my old training logs. It's funny, memory does differ from what the logs say, and even though I've never been one who piles on the milage, it's pretty appearant that I may have been overtrained alot.

So insted of 4 week cycles, I'm working off of a 7 week cycle. Think of it more like two 4 week cycles crammed together, but pull out one build week from the second cycle. So a cycle looks like this: week 1,2 and 3 build, week 4 recovery, week 5 and 6 build, week 7 recovery. I'm no coach or doctor, but for whatever reason this rhythem seemed to naturally happen and when I kind of flowed with it, I performed better.

Goal vs Score

So what you see above ^^^ is my current plan. Right now I'm in week 4 of the second cycle. As I said it's still fluid and can really change as the temps rise and I start to see what I can realisticly pull off as far as training time, and intensity levels, blah, blah, blah. See I still don't really know what a TrImp score for various weeks looks like, so I don't really know if the progression curve is too steep, or not steep enough. I don't really even know what a baseline moderate intensity 7-8 training week looks like as a trimp score.

And I still have to set up goals for the season (besides beating everyone in every race I do) and touching base with concepts of lactate threshold and critical power in training.

Oh, and remember to keep riding fun. I can too easily get sucked into numbers and stupid data, and forget that I just like to get outside and ride my bike.

trimp trimp training training log log heart+rate heart+rate lactate+threshold lactate+threshold power power cycling cycling bike bike racing racing fun fun bicycle bicycle cyclist cyclist ride ride race race goal goal