Winter of Graft

Now that spring is certainly in the year, and I have had a solid 6 to 7 months of winter training in my legs, it is time now to set about racing more frequently. I thought I would write a little about how the winter training has gone, and the outlook to the next couple of months.

My last event in 2012 was at the end of September, I decided to just ride how I liked for a 2 week period after this, I rode to work most days, so never really took any time off the bike as some racers do (I don't really see the point for an amateur of having month long breaks), most of the riding was just pottering about and enjoying the fine weather we had at this time.

The training for 2013 started in earnest in the middle of October, (actually the day after my birthday, always a nice birthday treat LOL) and being a predominately long distance TTer, this meant building up the aerobic conditioning required for the longer events, it was also a time to try and lose a little more weight as I was happy to compromise recovery with no racing to worry about. Also alot of my training now was going to be on the good old faithful and trusty Tacx Flow turbo, one of the joys of working and only being able to train in the dark, some of the training is just not safe to do on the roads with minimal visibility, at least around Kent anyhow.

Now most of my early training wasn't the usual L1/L2 stuff, when only training for a few hours, it is pointless in my eyes to waste time doing low hours at a low effort, not that I do the L1 stuff anyhow, only on 1 hour recovery rides when I need/fancy them. The L2 efforts were saved for the weekend rides which were in general 4 hours + long. Weekday workouts were varied and challenging, especially on the turbo, and normally split into 2 sessions a day. Weekly hours started off fairly low and built up over the winter.

I had a good couple of months in the run up to Christmas which was nice, and also with minimal down time due to illnesses or the like, it is amazing what a good diet can do when training hard. I did enter a 10 mile TT on New Years Day, the traditional Southborough & District Wheelers event, being the previous winner for the last 2 years, I wanted to try and win for a 3rd year in a row. However training didn't really stop over Christmas, and with me being off work it meant a high training load, this had the effect of being slightly tired for the 10. Things went well though, and I took the win with a new course record, so things were looking good at the start of 2013.

Things were to get a little more challenging however, at work we had a big upgrade programme, which meant going away on site each week for up to 4 days. This could have had serious implications with my training, but work were kind enough to allow me to take a bike and turbo with me to the different sites. I got some very strange looks as I did my turbo sessions in the car parks of various hotels in the mornings and the evenings, but at least it meant very few sessions were missed. I did notice that being on your feet all day, when used to being sat down, played havoc with the higher intensity sessions. The upgrade work lasted until Easter, so although I got some road rides in during the week, again most of the training was done prior to and after work again in the dark on the turbo (it was starting to become my friend). During this period the amount of hours and subsequent training load increased, it was a very challenging time, and most sessions were done on tired and sore legs. I certainly enjoyed the few rest days I got, as although recovery between sessions was good, it sometimes needs a complete break to feel human again, even if it is only 1 day.

As the months went by my cumulative training load was increasing all the time, though to be honest so was my general tiredness, though I guess that is the point of training. Also I noticed recovery was becoming better all of the time, but as the cumulative training load went up, so did the training hours and intensity. There is always a fine balance of upping the volume, whilst also trying to up the intensity as the racing approached, not always an easy thing to do.

My coach and I had decided this year to not race as often, this has the effect of being able to training more, and not worry so much about having to back off for each and every race. Although you don't need to back off, invariably you do, you take an easy day before the race, perhaps don't go as hard in the intervals etc, each of these little things add up to a loss of fitness in the long run. Now if you are happy to go into races with legs that are like lumps of wood, and are happy with a slightly degraded performance you can probably get away with it, but seriously in a race we always want to do our best, so training gets compromised. I did do a couple of early season races, which I have written about below, one was done very fatigued, the other we did rest up a little bit more for, but other than these it has been a continued focus to build up to my main events, the BBAR races and the TT Series races.

Over the 6/7 months I lost most of the weight I wanted to, would still like to lose another 1-2kgs, but with heavier training and racing now, recovery becomes even more important, and this needs to be fuelled correctly, so getting those last kgs off is always incredibly difficult. I have managed to hit new highs in training, highest ever CTL, hours, miles, TSS etc, lets just hope that it all pays dividends over the coming months. To be honest I will probably see even higher figures as I build to my main target of the year, but no doubt May and June the training load will slip a little as I do more racing. As for the racing my next few races are below, hope to get a few solid BBAR times in and after round 4 of the TT series it is the BBAR and the National 12hr TT that are the focus.

5th May - TT Series Round 3
12th May - Norlond TT Combine 50
19th May - TT Series Round 4
2nd June - Icknield RC 100

I might sneak a local 10 in there as well during a training ride, depends on how I feel nearer the time.

Training Hours (since 15th October) - 390
Training Miles - 7270
Highest Monthly TSS - 4052 (April)
Average Monthly TSS - 3344

Days struggling to climb stairs - Far too many

All in all it has been a great winter build up, very little downtime due to illnesses or work/family problems. Lets just hope the summer is as good to me. Big thanks go to Mrs Berry and little Mr Berry for allowing me the time to train :-)