Weather cleared up and I got a ride in today. Passed the 5000 km mark according to fitocracy and got my badge.

Time: 1:56
Distance: 33.8 mi
Avg Power: 171 (208)
Avg HR: 146
Avg Speed: 17.5 mph

Weather ranged between 40 and 50 degrees today, with winds at 25 mph, gusting to 35 mph. **** that. Rode the trainer, hated it, fell of it

Time: 1:00
Distance: "23 mi" (lol)
Avg Power: 165 (175)
Avg HR: 145
Avg Speed: 23 mph

Oh, a little funny tidbit.

I was watching a movie while using the indoor trainer, which is the "rollers" kind. You put your whole bike on it and ride it like it's the road. Kind of like a treadmill for bikes. You're not physically restrained and you CAN fall off, I have many times.

Anyway, there's a scene in the movie where a drunk driver is swerving around and then has an accident. This caused some hind-brain panic in me and it was REALLY hard not to fall off the damn thing. Felt very weird.

It's amazing what your brain can do. Visual input can often override other inputs. Totally unrelated to biking so won't embed it, but check out this vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0) for an example of the weird way your brain can work.

Have you tried the DVDs designed for using with the rollers/tt where it follows a riders-eye view or a particular course or race? I imagine if you immerse yourself in it (like park yourself right in front of a 50" screen with surround sound) then you could actually start to feel like you're really riding.

When you're doing that training plan with all the set intervals do you have to try to use a flat road where possible? I'm just thinking like if it says to sprint just as you hit the bottom of a hill (or the top of a hill that's too steep to sprint down), or you're on a winding section of road that requires lots of slowing down and speeding up. I was just thinking when I was out earlier that the rides I've been doing wouldn't really lend themselves to structured training cos the terrain just changes too much on a lot of the sections.

Yeah I use relatively flat sections of ground for the training parts. Often the ride is structured like "ride for an hour and a half and somewhere in the middle do these 20 minutes of intervals". I do the same ride most of the time for the intervals so I know where I'll have 20 minutes of reasonably flat road.

But also - it doesn't have to be flat. I'm going by power or heart rate so terrain doesn't matter tooooo much. You don't want extreme hills because that usually FORCES you to a particular power level. Winding would be a problem, as would stop signs or lights or traffic, but I have none of those. I'm basically riding out in the country on farm roads.

I have never tried using the training dvds with rollers, no. Might be fun, I dunno. Something integrated with the bike's computer would be pretty cool, dunno if that kind of thing exists (like if you speed up, the playback speeds up and so forth)

I think it does exist but likely costs upwards of $1500 - think you have to get rollers/turbo with the whole thing integrated.

Rode a bit longer than usual to make up for not riding tomorrow (travelling home for the holidays, will almost certainly not ride tues either)

Time: 3:15
Distance: 53.6
Avg Power: 150 (196)
Avg HR: 143
Avg Speed: 16.5 mph

Best 5 minute power in this ride was 275 watts, 10 minutes was 260 watts. The "reference" time used by the program I'm on is 8 minutes, by itself. So my best 8 minutes in this ride was probably 265-270 watts. When I started the program my best was 217 watts.

Pretty sure if I did a road test by itself today I could probably maintain something like 280 no problem. Pretty happy with that. I'm on week 3 of the rest period between training, out of 4 weeks, so next week I will do another road test. I would be super happy with 280 - that's a 30% increase.

My 5 minute and 20 minute power ratings are allllmost creeping into cat 5 territory (the lowest racing category).

Hah a guy at work just posted his ride from today. He left from a place maybe a half mile from where I started, within about 5 minutes of my time. Our route was exactly the same up to about mile 27 (my midway point). Where I turned back, he kept going and did a huge loop, a total of about 105 miles. His average power was 350 watts. The guy is a beast (he's a cat 3 racer)

I can hold 350 watts for, like, 2-3 minutes. He can do it for 5 hours.

His peak power was 1,225 watts on this ride. Mine was 650 watts.

That's nuts. I don't know much about my power output, but I'm guessing I couldn't even hold 350W for 30 seconds!

Do you know how much of an effect having a good squat would have on your cycling? I figured it's a very similar movement, and although there's obv a big difference between 5 reps with heavy weight and 1000's of reps on your bike, I would have thought there'd be some kind of carry-over.

I'm assuming for him it's mosty genetics. He also has an abnormally high max heart rate, something like 200.

Honestly not sure. My squat sucks. When I did some squats after having a few months off from it, my legs ached so bad I could hardly walk. Cycling was not a problem, though, so it kinda seems like the overlap can't be that big.

I don't know that much about cycling physiology but my understanding is that for the most part strength is not the issue, just how many times you can do the same motion over and over again. Most cycling programs do include squats though.

Could that guy hang with the peloton in a non mountain TdF stage?

I have no idea.

From what I understand though, a stronger muscle is generally a more efficient muscle. Say each pedal stroke you're pushing down with a force of 10kg (number picked out of my ass as I don't have a clue what it would actually be). If your max squat is 80kg then you're exerting 25% of your max force (1 leg). If your max squat is 120kg then you're only using 17% of your max force. Obv other things come into play but this is definintely something that matters.

The thing I'm not sure on is how this extrapolates out into extremely long efforts when you're doing 10,000+ reps of the movement.

In any case my squat is awful atm and it looks like it'll have to stay that way for a while as my knee's still screwed up.

There's essentially no reliable research that I know of that indicates that weight lifting helps with cycling. But there's none that shows it hurts, either. Basically most coaches recommend it to make the cyclist a more balanced athlete in general (especially upper body exercises, which are part of any cycling weight lifting program). The programs I've seen (such as the cyclists training bible) don't recommend squatting much higher than 1 or 1.5 BW I think. You lift weights in off season and just do enough during the season to maintain.

During my peak 5 minutes I was apparently applying an average of 160 lb-in. My cranks are like 17cm long which is 6.7in which means that apparently I was applying about 24lb of force at the cranks. (My peak 5s had me putting out 1100 lb-in, which is 164lb force applied to the pedals)

In Houston for the holidays. Brought a bike with me since I couldn't ride sunday like I usually do, and probably won't be able to ride tuesday. I forgot how totally flat it is out here, whole 20 miles had about 50 feet of elevation gain (my usual ride of this length is more like 700 feet). Clearly makes a big impact on speed. My avg speed for most of the ride was actually much higher - it was at 21mph before I got back into the neighborhoods and slowed down a lot.

Time: 1:08
Distance: 22 mi
Avg Power: 200 watts
Avg HR: N/A (left strap at home)
Avg Speed: 19 mph

Bought a trainer today and it came with a training DVD with a bunch of demo routes. It only has short sections of routes, but I'll try it out over the next week or so and let you know if it's any good or not. It doesn't integrate with the trainer, but it does tell you which setting to put the trainer on as you go along the course.

Cold today, for here. Had planned to ride in the morning but it was below freezing. Went riding by myself instead at about 2pm, it was somewhere around 48F.

Time: 1:47
Distance: 30.2 mi
Avg Power: 173 (206) watts
Avg HR: 153 (hit my max at one point)
Avg Speed: 17 mph

Coooold this morning. My toes and ears froze on this ride. I bought shoe covers and a hat on the way home (too late for today, but for next time)

Time: 2:34
Distance: 40.0 mi
Avg Power: 156 (208) watts
Avg HR: 145
Avg Speed: 15.5 mph

Well, it's time to start a new cycle of the training program. I took most of last week off in preparation for it (you're supposed to have a few days of no training on either side of your "testing" day.

Did the road test on thursday. Results:

Date	Power	Heartrate	Weight
2012-09-02	226	161	184
2012-01-03	274	163	187

Pretty happy with the result although I was hoping for 280+. This is a 21% increase over my last test result. If I could do that again (maybe impossible) that would be 328 watts which would put my threshold power at almost 300 watts, which is not too bad.

This cycle I moved up to the "new competitor program" (from the "experienced century" program). The new program gets into the more strenuous stuff a bit earlier, less dicking around for the first few weeks. This session I am going to work harder on increasing the length of time I can spend at threshold, as well as moving threshold power up.

I read recently that time trialists spend their entire hour race at 90-94% of their max heart rate. My max is about 183-185. 90% HR is 171 for me - I doubt I could keep that up for 10 minutes. So increasing my threshold power is great, but it's much better if I can increase how long I can hold it for.

I celebrated my first day of training (today) by skipping my ride this morning. I had to take the car in for unexpected repairs. I will try to get in a ride tonight if I get the chance, probably on the trainer.

This week's schedule:

Date	Exercise
Mon	45-60 min EM
Tues	60-90 min EM with 3x8min SS (5 min RBI)
Wed	Rest Day
Thurs	60-90 min EM with 3x8min SS (5 min RBI)
Fri	Rest Day
Sat	Group ride or 90-120 min EM
Sun	90-120 min EM (hilly terrain)

A short refresher on abbreviations:
EM means "endurance miles". Pretty much every ride is some number of minutes of EM. Often there is another exercise (a set of intervals) embedded in the middle. So if you're supposed to do 90 min EM with, say, 30 min of intervals in the middle, then really you do a total of 60 minutes of EM - the TOTAL time you spend is the time listed in the exercise.

SS means "steady state", which is 45-73% of your road test power
CR means "Climbing repeats" which is 95-100% of road test power (usually, like it sounds, up a hill)
OU means "over under" where you switch between SS and CR with a specific time for each. Like you might to 3x9 OU with 2 over and 1 under. That means you do
2 min over, 1 min under, 2 over, 1 under, 2 over, 1 under - then reset (repeat 2 more times)
SEPI means "steady effort power intervals" - you ride at your max sustainable power for the interval
PFPI means "peak and fade power intervals" - you ride at all out max effort and as the interval goes on, your power fades because you can't maintain it that long.

I thought this would be a huge PITA when I started, but really, I start all my intervals at about the same physical place. I generally ride out to there, do the intervals, and then depending on how much time I have left I make a rough estimate of what route to do for the rest. My area has a lot of good options for rides ranging from about 12-30 miles and I've done em all so it's very easy to tailor.

Oh and I have some super sweet charts that I'm going to try to get into a good form soon. These charts more than anything else make me think that I've done the right thing by taking a more focused approach.

Excellent work on the improvements. Looks like this program is really paying off. I'm going to have to get some tips off you when I start training properly rather than just riding.

Have you made any plans for training the swim and run for your triathlon?

Very pathetically. I located a place that does swimming clinics for new triathalon people and I plan to sign up for a few of those. I am going to try to work running into my program, but probably not really strenuously. I could run a 5k tomorrow no problem. Can I run one after busting my ass on a bike? I'll probably find out soon.

My tentative running plan is to run 1/2 of a 5k a few days a week for a week or 2 and then move up to a full 5k, probably 2-3 days/week. My goal is to get through it more than anything else.

Ugh and I just realized I have my MRI scheduled for tomorrow morning. I really need to ride tonight I guess, even if it's just on the trainer.

God damn I hate the ****ing trainer.

Time: 0:45
Distance: "15.5 mi"
Avg Power: 165
Avg HR: 144
Avg Speed: 16.8 mph

Was a very nice day so I left work in the middle of the day and went to a local cycling track. Nice place - it's basically a nice windy track about 3 miles long, 2 lanes wide, bikes go in one direction only so there's plenty of room. Well paved.

Was almost broadsided by a deer. He starts running across the road right as I come up to him and passes behind me. That really would not have ended well I think if he hit me. I've been paced by a deer before, running along side me for 1/4 miled until he sprinted ahead and cut across in front of me. They're not real smart.

So this is the first real interval of my 2nd training cycle on this program. Basically 75-90 minutes of EM, with 3x8 minute intervals of SS, with 5 minutes rest between. My SS intervals are around 240 watts now (they were 200 last cycle) and are pretty tough to maintain, not only because they're physically demanding but because it's hard to keep your nerve and keep pedalling around tight curves, etc. Fun though.

Time: 1:20
Distance: 24 mi
Avg Power: N/A
Avg HR: 156
Avg Speed: 18 mph