Thanks for the advice. I am sort of lucky that i live in a place with wide bike lanes on most roads and things so training at odd hours like after dark or really early in the morning should not be a problem.
One good thing is that I live right at 20 miles from work, and can leave my vehicle at work overnight, so a cycle of riding home from work, then back the next morning, leaving the bike at work and driving home and back the next day, all of this during the week affords me a 20 mile ride per day during work days, plus what I can squeeze in at lunch will help. Cool thing about the bike commute is that with traffic (SF Bay Area), it is only a little quicker to drive versus ride to work (hour versus 45 minutes or so).
I think to be competitive this year I am going to really have to approach training very focused and carefully, not my past style at all which was more just an alternating cycle of "ride as hard as I can one day, ride easy the next, hard the next, and so on"