Well, as to be expected on a Monday, I achieved a new 'longest' ride, though I didn't quite achieve the goals I had in mind when I started the ride. Over the past 3 hard weeks (there was one recovery week in there), I've been trying to increase the duration and length of my long rides by 10%. On May 27th, my long ride came on a Satuday and was 71 miles in 3:51. One June 5th, after a rest week, it was 82 miles in 4:40, an increase of 15% in distance and 21% in time, quite a bit more than I had planned. This weekI did 83.5 miles in 4:50, an increase of 2% in distance and 3% in time, quite a bit less than I had planned. I was hoping for 5 hours and 90 miles. Taken all together though, the picture isn't quite as bad, a 17.6% increase in distance and 25.5% in time this week over the ride on the 27th. That is pretty close to the 20% I would expect with 10% increase per week (ok, 21% actually).
My legs were still feeling pretty tired and a bit sore from the past week, and in the first hour of the ride I was sure I'd have to take it a lot easier on this ride. By around the 2 hour mark though my legs were feeling much better and I had some really good long efforts as far into the ride as 3:30 and maybe a bit longer. I'm still thinking I am going to remove one of the BT workouts to let up on the intensity a bit so that I'm not risking over training. Hopefully that will help me stay a bit fresher for these longer rides. We'll see how I feel later in the week though.
In comparing the past three long rides, I noticed that there has been a decrease in average speed in each of the rides. Now, part of the decrease is due to the increased amount of climbing in the past two rides. The ride on the 5/27 only had 2818' of climbing, while last week had 4150' and this week had 4446'. I figured there had to be a bit more too it than that so I dug a bit deeper into the data. The power information I didn't think would account for the difference. Below is a graph of mean maximal power for the three rides:
There is not much to choose from between these rides. There is a total difference of 16W in overall average power, and some of that difference is undoubtedly due to the longer duration of the last two rides. I think the decrease in power does indicate some fatigue building up though, which I'm hoping the changing of my routine will help with. So I did some more looking. I noticed that on the graph for the 27th's ride, the left side of the graph was much lower than the other two lines, showing that there were no huge above threshold efforts on that ride, which had the highest average speed. So thinking that might be a key, I did a search in each of the data sets for periods 10 seconds or longer where I was above threshold. I was thinking, wrongly it turns out, that this was the definition of a match. [A match is actually defined, roughly, as being a period of a minute or more when you exceed your threshold by 20% or more.] At any rate, I still think the data I came across was instructive. In the ride on the 27th, I had only 6 periods of 10 seconds or longer where I was above threshold, and I had the fastest average speed. Last week I had 16 periods that fit the criteria and I saw a 1 mph decrease (from 18.5 to 17.5) in average speed. This week I had a whopping 43 periods that fit my requirements and my average speed was down another .4 mph from last week. So I think it is a workable assumption that on longer rides of 3:30+ in duration, lots of above threshold efforts at my current level of fitness hurt overall performance rather than help it. So I need to try and keep those efforts to a minimum in order to see the best results. I guess that makes sense...you stay within your limits as much as possible and you can finish strongly.
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