Training - year to date
Posts have become less frequent over the last month or so. There's a couple of reasons. I've been pretty busy at work lately. That's the big one. More work means less time to post. Simple right. Well the other reason is that I'm riding more.
Finding time to ride is tough. In order to spend as much time as I can with the fam, work, and still be able to enjoy other aspects of life (yes, there is more to life than cycling. Not much, but there is). In order to achieve this I schedule my riding in ways to take up the least amount of 'other' time. This means dawn patrol rides where I wake up at 5-5:30 to get out for a ride before work, and lunch time rides. Some days I attempt to do both.
Morning and lunch rides are great, 'cept they are fairly short. Relatively short. Most road races are about 40-60 miles in length. At 20 mph that's 2-3 hours. If all I did was lunch and morning rides, my longest rides in training would be an hour and 15 minutes. So my endurance would not be that great for even these events. But then throw in an Almanzo, or a century ride and I'd be toast.
So the plan is to do the group ride thing a couple times a month. There's a couple to choose from in Rochester. Monday and Wednesday evenings there are RASC rides. These rides have an easy and a moderate pace groups that vary in length. These are great especially if you are new to group riding or just want an easy spin and be social. VeloRochester has ongoing scheduled group rides on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. I think Tuesdays are supposed to be fast paced on a route that changes each month. Wednesdays are supposed to be slightly slower and the route is decided at ride time. Both rides regroup, though Tuesdays only for the first half of the ride. VeloRochester and RASC both have weekend rides, though thier message boards are used to coordinate those. I've heard that there's also a ride that goes out of Erik's bike shop. But I haven't gotten info on (or ridden with them) yet.
But really, I get my distance riding in on the weekends. If I can get out early enough (rarely) I can get up to 75 miles in on Saturday (though I haven't done it yet) and depending on Sundays schedule I may even get in another 50.
So what's this all lead up to? Well, I guess a check in of my training load. To refresh, I'm using TrImp (training impulse) to quantify my training workload by heart rate zones. I set a schedule with a goal TrImp score for each week and attempt to do that goal. TrImp scores are a combination of intensity (how hard I worked my heart rate) and duration (how long I was out training).
On the above chart (click it for a big version) we are currently in the last week (#7 with no score). What's interesting is that we can see weeks that I overshot the goal because we had some nice days in winter and I was able to get out for a decent ride, as well as see weeks where real life or illness got in the way of training. But as a whole I've been on track.
But this doesn't show how fit or strong I am. but I think thats a topic for another post later.
Some extra notes: if you use the search box you can find more posts I've written about TrImp. I need to send my Garmin Edge cyclocomputer in to see if it's covered under warranty which probabbly means I wont be able to keep track of my training data for a couple of weeks when that happens. So I guess I'll wait till after Almanzo to send it in. And finally I feel fitter on the bike than I have in a couple of years. Weather it's true or if any racing results will come of it is yet to be seen. But it's a good feeling.
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Wednesday 05/14/2008 | 11:05 am
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