I was a little discouraged as I headed out for a ride last evening.  It all happened because of my mistake of looking back at my training time since January.  In that month I had several weeks with 10 hours of training time.  That changed in February and most weeks since that time I have not exceeded 5 hours in all but two of the weeks.

No wonder  I have had such a hard time finishing strong in any of these races.  So, I went out tonight determined to turn over a new leaf and work a little harder at finding the time to get on the bike.  Tonight’s ride was to be 2 hours in Cleveland Park with some tempo riding and sprints.

My discouragement started to melt away as I began to turn laps in the park.  My legs felt good and the climb along Woodland Way almost seemed flat.  The first hour seemed to slip by quickly.

During that hour I did several all out sprints along the flat section from McDaniel to the Vietnam Memorial.  Yes!  I got a new personal best maximum wattage – 1300 watts.  My 5 second peak at 1245 watts was also the highest I’ve recorded since using WKO+ to track my power.  The 10 second peak was still over 1100 watts.

Notice the large orange line on the graph near the top.  That is the 5 second peak power line.  Also the TSB has now moved into positive territory.  If I play this smart and keep training hard and then taking some time off, I could start learning how to manage my effort and peak at just the right times.

I also have to bring out the old Power Profile.  With my new 5 second power peak, I’ve moved that category of the graph into the cat 3 level.  Of course, you can guess I sacrificed my 10 to 20 minute peak times in order to get that high reading.  I realize it is kind of meaningless, but one of my goals is to try to move all of the bars into the cat 3 section before the season ends.

Then in my second hour my teammate Sam came out to the park.  I caught her as she was coming from the Y into the park.  I sat on her wheel for a bit waiting to see if she would notice me.  She glanced back and then did a double-take.  Then she turned to acknowledge me.

We both had iPods going and she appeared to be out doing some fast spinning as well.  So, we didn’t talk much but just traded off leading the other around the park.  After my efforts in the first hour, I have to say that there were a couple of times I thought she was going to drop me.

Then that wonderful thing happened.  I started to feel strong again.  It is as though I had gone through a wall.  My legs still felt a little tired, but it felt as though I could ride right through the tiredness.  I probably could have gone on for an hour more, but Sam peeled off and I needed to get home for supper.

My frame of mind is much more positive now.  The way I figure, I’ve been finishing just outside the top ten in every criterium I have been in – except my DNF in Spartanburg.  Those finishes came with 2 to 5 hours of riding (including the races) per week over the last couple of months.  Hmmmm, who knows what might happen if I got some more time in?

By the way, once again the average power reading on my Garmin 705 from the Quarq CinQo was about 20 watts higher than the actual readings that ended up showing up in my WKO+.  On the other hand, the maximum power reading was about 20 watts lower on the Garmin than on WKO+.  This seems to be consistent every ride I make.  Not a big deal, just interesting.

 

Tags: Cleveland Park, Power Profile, Samantha Hartung, TrainingPeaks, WKO+

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 am and is filed under Racing, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.