Been a long time, but it's time for an update. I've had some really kickass winter training and acquired a power meter during the process as well (a steal in my opinion, $250 for powertapG3 lightly used on ebay).

Main focus has been lots of tempo/threshold type work over the winter, but no crazy hard workouts so as to burn out before the important stuff in the summer. Training definitely went awesome. Best 20' power in the fall was 290W effort, a week ago I blew that away with 320W for 20min, with a pretty aggressive start of 345W for the first 5'.

Also had my first race, Lookout Mtn HC TT. While it was a terrible race (295W avg for 4.3 w/kg, considering I had just done 320W) it was a good learning experience. Kinda blew the race going that hard Wednesday (followed up that 20 min power best with another hard 30 minutes of riding) and then was dealing with a cold to boot.

I'm very, very excited for this season though. I've been eating good recently and weight is coming off steadily. Somewhere between 60-63kg is definitely a reasonably target. Combine that with 320-330W ability for 20' power at 7k' and I should have plenty of power as I start racing more, especially in the mountains.

With that in mind, my bike handling is going to need SPADES of work. General handling is somewhere between poor and below average, with a large dose of skittishness thrown in. I probably need to race them, but crit type races seem like an impossibility to me right now given this. I get gapped sometimes around corners on the few group rides I've been on, let alone a race situation where people are pushing it. Descending is even worse. On several local climbs my descent speeds are in the teens when top rides are coming down in the mid 30s. I think I understand the concepts and technique, but just lack the skill and most importantly confidence to really go after it on turns, not knowing exactly how much is too much lean before I go down (even though I'm obviously nowhere close to that point).