Edonis13

I'm not even looking at my bike today....

hack

Truth ... I think I'm at 2 years and 1 week of riding and racing now.

In theory I know more about racing, but in practice it's still tough. Identifying good moves from bad moves from not moves at all isn't easy. I'm finally to the point where I'm trying to think more in races and be alert for "moves", but it is a challenging game for sure.

canuckbelle

35km solo endurance/tempo ride with a hammer up the bridge 'climb' (woo QOM!). 1hr16min, weighted avg pwr 177w, NP 186w. WINDY! Tomorrow night is my first time at Tuesday Night Worlds.

shovelhd

Rest week.

rideaz

It was Mountain Bike Monday. I'm trying to make it a thing. Just rode the trails for 90 minutes or so.

TheKillerPenguin

I was going to give my bike a general tuneup but I ate a snickers bar and blasted melodeath instead.

Duke of Kent

Today was supposed to be 2hrs easy. Thunderheads rolling in from the west resulted in me scampering back to my parents house as fast as I could pedal. Got caught in an absolute deluge which included a bit of hail.

Ended up with 1:20, 45min out, 35min back.

furiousferret

Thanks, I suppose its a post recovery week 'cry like a little *****' moment; several of our guys upgraded to the 3's and looking at my SCNCA results are worse than pack filler....

I'm still confident that I can put it all together in a race; the only thing left really is to train my tail off (hopefully 20 hours a week if my body can handle it) practice and race angry.

TheKillerPenguin

If you're thinking you'll do 20hrs/wk while racing, you should rethink that. You should also consider whether or not the rest of your life is put together well enough to allow you to do that amount of exercise without extra life stress on top of it. You should also make sure you like riding a bike enough to do that sort of volume, because if not that's the highway to burnout right there.

If your life is organized properly and you're aiming for future goals, you should expect your first 20hr week to feel hard, the second one to feel worse, and you'll kind of be braindead the 3rd one. Then you'll take a rest week and go through the dude equivalent of menopause. Then you'll start another block and it'll feel manageable and normal. Just make sure you eat enough.

mike868y

In addition to what tkp said, is advise against comparing yourself to others. some people just have a knack for this stuff. Much better to focus on yourself and maximizing your potential.

TMonk

wise words.

KingShakes

Rest week after A race weekend and 16 week training progression. I could hold onto the fitness for another 2-3 weeks as I just peaked but the race calendar doesn't make sense for it. 2 weeks unstructured including this light week. Then 3 week progression before back to back double race weekends (the first of which is Illinois Road Race Championships and first races as cat 4). Make sense?

TMonk

Over time, I'm learning that my biggest limiter is time - I'm a 7-8hr/week kind of guy, and rarely venture north of 10, save for a month or two during base. Also, I don't like riding both days on the weekends unless one of them is a race.

Even if I had a lot more recreation/free time, I probably wouldn't ride any more than I already do, not interested. Probably play more music - I'm continually dissapointed with how little time and energy I spend playing the piano. I'm way better at music than cycling.

Having said that, what becomes more and more interesting to me as time goes on is efficiency with my cycling, and everything else in my life for that matter. When I'm on the bike, I really want to make it count. Buying a PM last fall was a step in the right direction, and I am loving every moment of training and learning with it.

My goal is to make it to cat2 so I can race P/1/2 and get a taste of the elite level. I know that I'm capable. I've been a bit derailed this season, but my head will remain in the game until I get there. After that, maybe stay for a season or two, downgrade back to 3 and race masters after another 5 years .

KingShakes

Yea like the kid who won my cat 5 road race and was putting up cat 2 level times on the course off the front (he followed me later on strava) in only his 3rd race ever. I randomly chatted with him after the race and he said in an innocent and naive manner, "you just gotta hit the hills and do repeats and your power numbers will shoot up." Hill repeats you don't say? Or..... I need your genetics cause I don't think my VO2max is ever going to allow me to reach the surface you have scratched. I just told him I was out of luck because Chicago is flat.

TheKillerPenguin

I really think anyone can get fast, it's like 90% work ethic and 10% talent. Not everyone can get paid to do this for a living, but few of us work out correctly enough and consistently enough to be able to cite genetics as the limiter.

UmneyDurak

Tuesday OO 10x20s, OO 5x30s
Wednesday 5x6m (3m 250-26W 3m 275-295w)
Thursday rest
Friday SP 3x15s seated SP 3x10s out of the saddle
Saturday 2h easy ride
Sunday hilly circuit race.

Hmm...

UmneyDurak

Well following that theory my genetics are the suck.

KingShakes

There's no reason to claim a limitation of improvement on genetics without a hell of a lot of hard work, but I strongly disagree that success in any athletics is 10% genetic. Athletic ceiling and speed of movement along the performance curve is highly impacted by genetics. I haven't reached my performance ceiling and hopefully am nowhere close, but there is something to be said about being realistic about your goals and how that fits into the balance of the rest of your life.

KingShakes

To steal from Ross Tucker at The Science of Sport, success is 100% genetics and 100% training.

Ygduf

will be more than a week, but yeah

TheKillerPenguin

lol, I was really riffing on the whole "90% of success is showing up" thing. Natural talent is a great thing to possess but at some point you'll encounter dudes faster than you and it will come down to your work ethic.

I agree that you gotta weigh your goals against the amount of time you want to spend riding a bike, and the amount of time it may take to get good is in part dependent upon your genetics, but bringing up genetic ceiling isn't something that really factors into the convo for most of us that post here, besides sprinting, because **** you fast twitch mother ****ers.

furiousferret

Thanks for the advice.

Outside of work, there's not too much. Wife travels weekly and she understands I enjoy riding my bike...but I've learned that if I want my ftp to be respectable, my rides are going to be unenjoyable. It's easy to do 20 hours, but as I learned last winter volume doesn't mean squat if its all easy, so I'm hoping to get 30-40% @z3+

The plan is 20 hours a week for the next 3 weeks than race / maintenance until the season ends. Last block I did 15 hours and had to cut off the last week because I was half dead.

I won't lie, it pisses me off when people say you just need a pulse to upgrade in the 4's or the sport is easy.

tetonrider

Out of curiosity, do you self-coach? The sport is not easy, nor is there any wrong with using a coach or DIY, but finding it *necessary* to train 20h weeks as a 4 is definitely an eyebrow-raiser for me.

"Train more" is usually not the limiter (for a long while at least) for folks who are training effectively. How confident are you that you are spending your current hours on the bike doing the right things?

Dont nut know much about your situation, but when someone says to me "I need to train more" and then reveals their plan I more often than not leave the conversation thinking that person needs to rest more...or train differently.

Nothing about out racing is easy, but volume is not a cure-all and as tkp said it carries a real risk of having the opposite effect of what you want. If 20h a week doesn't work, where do you go from there? Often it is selling the bike.

grolby

Agreed. "I'll step it up to 20h" is a red flag to me. I do not see how training time is the problem here. If doing what you're doing for 14-16 hours a week isn't working, doing the same thing for another 4-6 hours probably isn't going to work, either. Something else needs to change.

canuckbelle

Heh.