I wrote a
post back in March about my winter training. This write up will look back on the three months since.
When planning this season, I decided to opt for a 'twin peak' – one in June for the 100, the other in August/September for a 10 on the A21.
I planned my season out on a macro level. It's a pretty standard way of doing things that gives you an overview of what kind of training to do and when. For example, between October and March the goal was to mainly ride steady – your classic zone two, around 70% max HR or 60-70% FTP base building.
Having built a pretty good base by March, I then wanted to start getting ready to race. One mistake I've made in the past is to be firing on all cylinders in April which inevitably leads to a plateau and gradual decline in fitness; it's simply very, very hard to maintain that peak.
So, by planning to peak in June – and scheduling my training accordingly – I would start racing in May with pretty average legs but, as the training got more specific and my fitness built towards a peak, I should start to see an improvement in the 'C' races that use as training sessions.
Training
Although I sometimes rejigged things, generally the plan was:
Mon – off
Tues – threshold intervals in TT position
Wed – easy road bike spin
Thu – threshold/sweetspot in TT position OR Interclub TT
Fri – easy road bike spin
Sat – some kind of hard ride
Sun – 3 hour z2 TT
I purposefully didn't include much supra-threshold work as in the past I've felt like it's brought to me a peak quite quickly, so I relied on the club TTs for that work and in a way raced myself into shape.
The Tuesday and Thursday sessions were undoubtedly great for a number of reasons, but I think the key session was the Sunday 3 hour ride that was almost exclusively in the TT position with no planned stops or breaks.
In the March blog post I wrote about how few long rides I did last year and how I wanted to rectify that this year. I did a weekly 3+ hour ride on the road bike throughout winter, then switched to the TT bike.
I managed to fit in 7 rides on the TT bike of ~3 hours. Each ride was tough physically, being in the position that long but also mentally taxing. They were the perfect preparation for a 100 mile TT. I had hoped to build up to a 3.5 – or even 4 – hour TT ride but life got in the way so I did what I could.
You'll notice there is very little coasting in the long TT rides. Coasting was something I tried to avoid throughout the winter rides and TT rides. There's a phrase in the lifting lexicon of 'time under tension' which is essentially what your body responds to when you give it a stressor/stimulus. Reducing coasting was my way of maximising my time under tension. It sounds pretty simple but go on a group ride and you'll see how often people coast. Nothing's gonna happen if you don't pedal the bike...
Races
Q10/19 Interclub – 20:13 – 356NP
The first race of the season almost didn't happen at all. The left clamp snapped during a training ride and the bolts holding it in place had rounded off, so I ended up drilling it out. 3T spare parts are like rocking horse shit, so I decided to just order new bars – the above setup is integrated, so not ideal for adjusting position anyway.
I decided to race 'sat up' after a few test runs with this weird setup suggested I could get pretty aero anyway.
Although it was only a few degrees, there wasn't much wind at all and the conditions were pretty favourable.
I somehow managed to equal my PB of 20:13 which blew my mind. My legs felt fantastic and there was just so much more power in them than usual – clearly something wasn't quite right with my position before (hip angle too tight?).
My normalised power was 356 watts – normally I'm around 320-330 – but what I was most happy about was how smart I raced. The picture above shows a long period of freewheeling – my speed was 40mph+ so I stopped pedalling and didn't start again for almost a minute. This let my heart rate come down a fair bit and gave my legs a chance to prepare for the long drag up to Morley's which is where most time is lost on this course.
It sounds painfully obvious, but pushing harder when you're going slower is something I've only just got my around in terms of how much commitment you have to give – to the point where you might blow up in the first few miles if necessary. I'll elaborate on that point when I analyse the EP Interclub later in this post.
Q10/27 Interclub – 22:43 – 346NP
The Brands TT was the first time I rode with the new bars. I literally did 5 minutes of riding on them before I started the race. They felt good but a little wobbly at first as I got used to them.
The race went pretty well – 31 second PB is nothing to sniff at on a slow evening with a headwind on the uphill section – but I did finish feeling like I could have pushed a bit harder particularly on the way out. This race was a learning curve though as I had no idea whether my power would be 320-330 like before or 350-360 like on the A21.
I experimented with a polarised approach on the way back from the Wrotham roundabout. As I mentioned earlier, I've been focusing on speed during races this season – duh! – so rather than stick to an arbitrary figure, I decided to focus on speed, and keeping my current speed as high as possible. This meant pedalling as hard as I could during the flat and slightly uphill sections on the way back, and freewheeling when back up to speed.
A lot of the efforts were 400-500 watts for 30 seconds but because I took so many breaks, it felt fairly easy. You can see the average power was only 311 watts so although my normalised power was 350+ for this section, it felt much easier because of the way I rode it.
Q10/19 Interclub – 21:03 – 324NP
The less said about this race, the better. Had a stomach bug during the week, everything went straight through me, felt okay Sunday morning so thought I'd give it a go. Heavens opened as I queued to start. Got soaked through and had no legs. I could push some big numbers for a short effort but anything sustained was just not happening.
QS30 Interclub – 21:10 – 348NP
SEVEN seconds off the course record. Madness. I'd only ridden the Cudham course once before, although I've used the roads a lot through commuting, so I know them fairly well.
My plan going into this race was to focus on speed like I had previously, pushing hard on the slower parts of the course heading east and backing off during the faster bits, but I was unsure of what to expect from the climb up Cudham Lane.
The climb to the finish is 2 miles @ 2.8%, so nothing major, but it's twisty and turny, the surface in places is shit and it can be quite draggy, so I wanted to get to the foot of the climb with relatively fresh legs to attack it.
The fastest guys do the course in 25-26mph, and the fastest times up the climb (from everyone not just testers) are 21-22mph, so it makes sense to put the vast majority of your eggs in that basket, as that's where the time will be made up/lost.
I got lucky at the Pratts Bottom roundabout when I managed to get into a gap between two cars – completely safely – and got a bit of a tow along the A21. I was only doing 280 watts but managed to fly along there at 33mph. Crucially, this soft pedalling let my heart rate drop a handful of beats into the 170s, giving me a lot of headroom to attack the climb.
Shall we call that 400 watts!?
With a granny gear of 58x25, I knew this was going to hurt, but I didn't anticipate going that fast up the climb. Whenever I looked at the 3s power on my Garmin it seemed to start with a '4' which I would have thought was unsustainable pre-race but at the time it felt right on my limit and I knew I had no other choice than to push as hard as I could, so I did.
The finish wasn't pretty, but I somehow found a sprint to the line and was amazed to have done a short 21 that I later found out was only 7 seconds off the course record.
Q50/11 – 1:53:11 – 303NP
The weekend before the 100, there was a 50 that uses pretty much the same roads as the 100. I wasn't sure whether I would be able to recover in time for the 100, but I thought I would do the 50 and, if it went well, I could ride the 100 knowing I had already got a good Open race in the bank.
The conditions were strangely slow. Although the temperatures were generally warm around that time, that morning was very cold – I was shivering back at HQ post-race – and the wind was coming from the east, which compounded the slowness of the drag from Rye through Camber to Lydd.
The first lap I felt I was pacing things fairly well, my power was about right in the 280s but when I got to the halfway point, the Brenzett roundabout, I saw 26.0mph average speed which was 0.2mph slower than my PB from 2019 which I was confident I would beat.
This majorly pissed me off as I chastised myself for riding too slowly. I genuinely thought a PB wasn't possible now as in theory the second half, with the last 3 miles heading north into a headwind, was slower than the first. I did my best to put all of that noise out of my head and just rode as hard as I could. The second lap felt like I was riding a 25 mile TT, but I had nothing to lose at this point so I went all in.
Somehow, I managed to do enough to get a 90 second PB – finishing the race with 40 minutes @ 320 watts will have helped – so I was pretty happy and, in hindsight, probably didn't leave much more than 30 seconds out on the course.
Q10/29 Interclub – 20:47 – 356NP
Notice something not quite right? Yeah, that's the Hunt 4 season front wheel that I commute on...
Had a puncture on Three Elm Lane whilst riding to the start with Andy. Sophie arrived 15 minutes later with a replacement wheel and 5 minutes later I was on my way. I might paint her car bright yellow and stick a few bikes on top in July...
The puncture was obviously very frustrating, but my legs felt great and I was looking forward to doing a ride on East Peckham that was actually a part of an organised event for once (last time was two years ago).
As with every other race, the plan was to keep the speed as high as possible – am I sounding like a broken record yet? – from mile 3 to mile 5 and then in the last 3.2 miles.
395 watts for 1:45 during the fourth mile of a 10 mile TT is pretty bad pacing on paper when your best power for a 10 is 350ish, but the wind was really strong and my only chance of doing well was if I minimized my losses during this section. That meant riding way too hard and seeking out a rest somewhere else. Fortunately, the many roundabouts provide a chance to catch your breath, which is what I did.
I still managed 372 watts for the final 7 minutes, so I feel like I rode this TT very smart.
How much time I lost by using an inferior front wheel remains to be seen, but I would have thought somewhere in the region of 15-20 seconds.
This ride was the Thursday before Q100, so deep into a two week taper and my legs felt great for it.
The Q100 deserves a race report of its own, so I'll get around to that soon, but for now I'll wrap this post up.
This last three months has been a lot of fun, I've really enjoyed riding my bikes and the training has gone well. My form in this period is the best I've ever seen, the numbers are great but more importantly I'm having a lot of fun whilst racing to speed and it keeps resulting in PBs!
Cheers for reading.
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