Weight program: Core Exercises only
Monday: Off
Tuesday: 1:15h Z2 Indoor Z2 ride
Wednesday: Core Exercises
Thursday: 1:15h Z2 indoor ride
Friday: Off
Saturday: 3:35h Z2 ride (no SRM)
Sunday: 1:30h Z2 ride (no SRM)
Total Bikescore/TSS: 300
Total Training Time: 8:35h bike+20min Core Strength
Weekly Summary
There is something magical and soothing as the kilometers roll hour after hour… you just take the scenery as you go. Even though it’s autumn and the leaves have fallen off the trees and the mountain slopes are starting to look bare, I find riding by myself very peaceful. For good or for worse, the forecast says it is one of the last warm days of the year…bring on the woolen baselayers! But before the mercury drops, what happened last week…
The Big Ride
Something I have really wanted to improve in my training is the ability to do long rides. Coming from a rowing background, where a training session is rarely longer than 1:30-1:45h, I was still having trouble to get mentally ready for something in the realms of 3-4+h on the bike. Even so, without putting insanely long hours (more on that in a separate article) I have been able to record remarkable progress and improvement in power. I am almost 110% positive it has to do with the fact I train exclusively with a powermeter….
So longer rides….
Especially in The Netherlands, where the scenery is not the most diverse, I had trouble to do anything above 2:15-2:30h. Not a problem when it comes to getting ready for TTs and Crits, however, if I want to be competitive in longer events such as road races and/or multi-day events (i.e. The Tour of Bulgaria), I simply need to do similar duration. My goal is to be able to do two back to back long Z2 rides on the weekends.
I believe the extra endurance would help me develop my power even more since this is the type of training stress I have never experienced. Now that I work full time during the week, it is during the weekend that I can put in the long hours on the bike. Not a problem! Plenty of routes, so last Saturday I set of on a course I tried for fun during the summer. The first part is my typical training route. This time with a mid ride coffee/cheese sandwich break and a water bottle refill/banana pause before the last descent, I finished a nice loop without any major hiccups. The last part was a bit too hilly for me and not having power data, I was careful to keep the intensity low since this is the offseason. In summary a very picturesque route, mostly flat (very slight gradient) with some hills thrown in to make things interesting; I just take them slower to keep the intensity low and the power in check.
Still no SRM
Although I changed the batteries of my SRM about 9-10months ago, all the symptoms of my nonfunctional powermeter, point towards dead batteries. From a short response one day, I started getting no response, so until my new batteries arrive in the mail, I am left to training by ‘feel.’ SRM reports 1400hrs or 2yrs between battery changes, probably this is under optimal conditions and not with 1s recording interval, etc… Thankfully most of my riding is done on the indoor trainer or at low intensity/endurance pace outdoors , so I just pay extra attention to my heart rate and perceived effort.
More Volume
Doing longer rides has one side-effect if you can call it that, your weekly training volume skyrockets. I have almost build up to training to my peak training hours from last season (~10h/week). That being said, although my total training time gets higher, my training stress/Bikescore still remains lower than my peak (454 Bikescore) from 2013. Again I am positive the longer rides would push my body to make even bigger gains in fitness, so I would be able to shatter my training stress records when season picks up in earnest after the winter. However, until than…
The Dream is Alive!
You can find explanations of the terms here together with explanations of the Training Zones.
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2 replies on “Weekly Summary November 4 – November 10, 2013: Last Days of Sun and a Big Ride”
Congrats on the job!I haven’t checked in at your blog for a while
Question while you do these big Z2 rides- have you ever calculated your cardiac drift as the rides go beyond 2h?
Hello Dave and welcome back!
To answer your question I do notice a drift in my HR on longer Z2 rides; I have never really calculated it but the files from my Garmin Edge you can clearly see the HR going higher. Golden Cheetah has a term called Aerobic Decoupling – it correlates your power and the HR drift. For me it ranges around 1-4% for outdoor Z2 rides and 5-10% for Z2 rides on the indoor trainer. So HR wise in my experience it is somewhere in the range of 5-10bpm (I get a bigger drift on the indoor trainer) so it brings the total average about 3-5bpm higher. Except when I don’t have power data (like last week..) I don’t rely that much on HR, so as long as the watts stay at my goal in Z2 throughout the ride, my HR is of secondary importance. Week after week I do notice the drift to become a bit smaller: 7-9bpm. However, I don’t have enough power data from such longer rides to really read much into it. In theory you will know you are getting more aerobically fit if your power stays the same ie 220W avg. and the avg. HR gets lower and the drift less. So as you increase the power to say 225W the drift should stay more or less in medium (usual) values. HR can vary depending on how well you slept the night before, how much coffee you had etc., so it is not an ideal metric but you can notice patterns. I do expect as I get more used to longer rides to have a steadier HR.
Overall, the TRIMP (HR based) metrics and performance manager chart in Golden Cheetah follow to the T my Power based metrics (Bikescore/TSS). I find it an interesting pattern so it is actually a great idea for a future post.
I hope I answered your question and if you have more questions, post them here and I’ll be more than happy to answer. Good luck with your training!