A Hard Ride is a Good Ride

My training schedule for Thursday called for a race simulation. This is sort of problematic for me as I don't race, and my main goal event is a long distance (200+km) solo ride. However, my understanding of the peaking process is this is a time to work on speed and do hard efforts but lower volume. With that in mind, I decided to repeat a workout I had last done back in June. (The profile at the left was generated from a ride done in May, so ignore the speed data at the bottom.)

The ride is approximately 30 miles (PowerTap gave 30.8 and 30.04 as mileage for the two rides) and at one time was my 'long' ride. In fact, looking back at what data I have from last year, I see that the first time I did this ride was on August 25, 2005. This was about 2 months after I had started riding more or less seriously. On that day it took me 2:23:18 to complete the ride and my average heart rate was 133. The route covers 2100' of climbing, so is definitely not a flat ride.

The workout I was planning on doing is one where you climb strongly (around LT power) on the longer hills and sprint up the shorter ones (around CP1, or in my case 550W give or take). When I did this workout in June I set my best power levels for up to one hour and got a new LT power level. I also completed the ride in 1:38:23, or 45 minutes faster than it had taken me the first time I did this ride last year. It was that ride in June that gave me a new training goal, which is to make this ride in 1:30:00 or less, or average 20mph or faster. I thought it would be a pretty big stretch, but after seeing my finishing time I thought maybe I could achieve it by the end of this year.

As I got into the ride this time around I found I wasn't sprinting up the shorter hills like I had planned, but I was going at a CP6 pace (around 340W) up the longer hills. When not climbing I was trying to maintain around 270W, though I was generally around 280W I think. Looking at the graph, you can see not too many spots where I was up around 500W. The two bold yellow horizontal lines mark off my LT power (310W) and where I was trying to be for the non-climbing part of the ride (270W). I felt I was pretty consistent at staying near this level until the end of the ride when fatigue and the fact that the last 4 miles is mostly descents with a couple sharp climbs. This made it hard to keep power consistent at any particular level, especially as at times the descents were quite steep. The bold blue horizontal line indicates 20mph and the red one indicates my LTHR of 157 bpm. These are there to make it easier to get a sense of what the thinner lines of those colors represent.

The ride this time took me 1:34:13, or 0:04:10 faster than in June, or roughly 4.3% improvement in 2 months, which is not too bad. One interesting thing I found in comparing the two rides is that in June, my best 30 minutes came from roughly 0:52:00 to 1:22:00, or pretty late in the ride. Yesterday's ride had the best 30 minutes from roughly 0:10:00 to 0:40:00, or at the start of the ride. In comparing the best time period that was the best in June with my performance yesterday, the power output was almost exactly the same being 277W yesterday compared to 278W in June. So while I faded a little over the ride yesterday, my 'faded' power is still as good as my best was 2 months ago.

Finally, the ride yesterday gave me a new best 60 minute power level, which also means my PowerProfile is updated. CyclingPeaks uses average 60 minute power to calculate the FT w/kg measure on the power profile chart, which is a little odd considering they suggest taking the last 20 minutes of a 30 minute TT to calculate your FT, but at any rate, this effort yesterday pushed my FT profile up there so I'm definitely happy with the progress I've been making. The drop in most areas (all?) last month is because the PowerTap was gone for servicing so I had no way to estimate the shorter duration power.