carpediemracing 

I missed all the drama.

I wake up pretty early now, 5:00-5:30 is pretty normal. Almost 3 years of having your kid wake you up between 4:30 and 6:00 AM, on a good morning, has done that to me. I used to think 8 AM was pretty early.

On the other hand I still can't ride in the AM. My body isn't awake. I prefer to ride in the evening, even now, like starting at 8 or 9 or 10 PM. When I did the park races in NYC (wake up 4:15, race at 6 or 6:30) I'd be done for the whole day and then some. Saturday races pretty much killed me until Mon or Tue, guaranteed to wipe me out for the weekend.

A sister in law works 3rd shift. She says that she realized when she briefly worked regular hours that she never actually got used to 3rd shift, which is what she thought she did. She said that she realized that she only got used to feeling like garbage all the time. Price to pay for 3rd shift work.

Ygduf

do people care when I get up? I'll post it but only if there's interest, right.

shovelhd

Hey people wanted to know how often you take a Cat1 dump. For a self professed smart guy, you're pretty dense.

hack

45 min recovery spin...hard to go so easy

carpediemracing 

1 hour ride because I started late. Pushed for 10 minutes, sat up once in that time, and did 203w. For me that's pretty hard, believe it or not. In a race I rarely finish averaging more than 205w or so and if I get to the line averaging 205w it's totally debatable if I'll be able to muster up a sprint or not.

It's sort of cold out today and in the unheated basement, with my diet, I felt a bit chilly. Started the ride with a thermal LS skinsuit (thermal shorts on the bottom), windvest, and no fan. Took me a good 5-10 minutes to not feel chilled. Then when I pushed I was pretty hot, esp since I had pointed the floor fan away from me so I only caught the end of the breeze with my head.

Feeling skinnier. 20 lbs lighter than my heaviest 2014 weight. Typing that makes it seem totally improbable but it's not. I hope to shed another 5 lbs - that puts me square in my Cat 2 upgrade weight. If I shed another 10 lbs I'd be amazed. Based on some rough guesses on body fat if I lost 10 more lbs I'd still be at 15-16% body fat. Right now I'm probably 22-23%, give or take.

In 2003 I was 55 lbs heavier than I was this morning (yeah, 55 pounds), it's just incomprehensible.

spdntrxi

got on the kickr and average 214w for a little over an hour.. which included a quick warmup, spin down calibration and a short cool down. That's a decent effort for my cat6 abilities. I threw in a quick 700w sprint at the end.

hack

Recovery week CTL drop makes me sad.

mattm

thats when you get stronger though!

gsteinb

nice work. keep it up.

beatlebee 

Excellent.

TheKillerPenguin

TheKillerPenguin

That's awesome, what's the calorie deficit you're running if you don't mind me asking?

carpediemracing 

I actually don't know my actual deficit. It's somewhat substantial because when I go over 500 cal it says I'll still lose weight. At first, at 179, it said 1800 cal or so, I forget what it was. At 170-ish I recalculated. I initially tried for 1300 cal (2 lbs/week, lightly active, MyFitnessPal) but it was unsustainable. From that point to now I've been on a 1510 cal goal (1.5 lbs/week, lightly active). I just recalculated for 160 lbs as I've dropped to an on-cycle 160.x. At 1 lbs/week it's saying 1690 cal/day. I may stay with the 1510 number.

(I say "on cycle" and off cycle weight, for if I'm dehydrated/empty for on cycle or not for off cycle. Weight fluctuates 3 lbs, give or take.)

On the days I ride if I count 1 kJ = 1 cal I'm typically 500-1100 cal under budget so a net intake of 400-1000 cal. Yesterday was 700-800 cal under budget based on the 1510 goal (site is partially down right now). I figure my ratio should be a bit lower, maybe 1 kJ = 0.95 cal (i.e. most efficient) because my power is low overall and part of it must be pedaling/ergonomic efficiency.

Wylde06

2x15 last night on the trainer ~91%

TheKillerPenguin

That's awesome, and terrible. The times I have dieted like that felt awful, so more power to you for sticking to it, that's serious will power.

-------
Rest week, 1.5hrs yesterday, doing 1.5 today. The past 4-5 days i've noticed that the difference in power between left and right legs has basically disappeared; whereas when I stand up my left leg usually puts out 20-30W less power than the right, it's now exactly the same. Additionally the last ride I did of my block was ~15w higher than usual for the effort I was putting out. This has happened all by complete happenstance - my left pedal broke last week (dura ace, pedal separated from spindle and is now lost), so my left pedal is an older style spd painted in Gerolsteiner colors, and my right is a newer style dura ace; the older spd pedals have a higher platform, leading me to believe that after my new pedals come in I need to go back to riding with shims under my left cleat due to a small leg length discrepancy that was identified by a fitter like 5 years ago.

wens

Are you sure you didn't have an almost failed bearing eating up power that never made it to your crank?

TheKillerPenguin

That's for sure a possibility and likely contributed to the loss in power, but the leg length thing is something I've known about but have ignored for the past couple of years since the shim I was using got chewed up and thrown out and never replaced.

In any event, wooo free power!

TMonk

Correction: It's when you get fresher, or gain form! To me "stronger" implies increased fitness, which isn't the case when CTL is dropping. No one can argue that your performance will increase as the TSB trends toward neutrality, however.

/semantics

TMonk

Also, RE: Rest Weeks:



My unwell feelings from yesterday turned into a full on flu. Fever, aches, sore throat, blah blah blah. This sucks because I never get sick, and I was on the last week of a three week block. Pay attention to you recovery folks! I'm learning about myself that I can sometimes get sick or injured when my TSB is highly negative (wow who knew).

I will def proceed with caution when planning future training blocks - a little bit less may be more for me in the long run because I won't have to take time off.

rkwaki

Weight work yesterday afternoon (chest/triceps/core) then sprint intervals last night. Dinner came up four times and my room smelled like puke. I guess I was successful...

JohnKScott

Flu. Whole house has it. Yay!

carpediemracing 

Thanks. The motivation is here or gone, it arrived suddenly so I took advantage. According to MyFitnessPal it's been 59 days.

The only other time I dieted for real was 2009.

As mikey pointed out dieting allows me to progress in some way while not being on the bike, so there's that. I'm riding a bit more but it's a function of calorie consumption, not training. The Missus is supportive of my dieting efforts as she's seen what it can do for my riding and it's not as much fun watching me race if I get shelled in the first couple laps of a race.

Finally I have no idea what my schedule will be like in 2015 so I feel the need to get stuff done now vs planning on doing stuff later.

grolby

This house-buying thing is crushing my motivation to ride when I get home in the evenings. Happily it's still early in the season and things should settle down, but the last few days have been capital-C Crazy. I guess this post should go in the training failure status thread.

hack

That is not inspiring at all. The wife and are likely going to be going through the same process in the next few months. We've managed to put it off for years by being "too busy" to deal with it, but the time has come...

misterwaterfall

Just got over that. Protip, don't go to a fast race ride thinking you'll be fine. I rationalized it thinking that the weight I lost from not being able to eat would counterbalance the strength I didn't have from not being able to eat. That didn't end well.