A little further every day

The road to my "recovery" continues. I've been trying to be a little careful in how I'm doing things this year, as I don't want to push too hard and go overboard and get burned out, but I want to push hard enough to see benefits from the training.

The area where I live is fairly hilly with hardly a flat spot for miles. The hills aren't particularly long (generally less than a mile) or particularly steep (6-7% max for most of them, with a couple exceptions), but at my current fitness level they are enough to push me way above what I figure my threshold power is.

Right now my "training plan" is just to increase the outbound leg of my ride (which at this point is generally uphill), letting the return leg take care of itself. So every couple of days (actually, after a rest or recovery day) I'll increase the outbound leg by around 10%. So over the last week it went from 25 minutes, to 28 minutes to 31 minutes today. It generally works out that it will take me 2/3 of the outbound time to get back home, so my ride times have been ~40 minutes, 45 minutes and today was 51 minutes. These may not sound like long rides, but for a 240 lb 42 year old, they mark a good start.

One thing that is different this year from when I started riding two years ago is that I'm on a road bike (as compared to a 2x as heavy mountain bike) with a PowerTap power meter. So right from the start I'll have downloadable information on power, speed, and heart rate. When I started two years ago, I didn't have any of that. In fact, I rode the first couple of weeks without even a heart rate monitor. Over time I got a HR monitor then a cycling computer which were valuable though they didn't allow for downloads. Then last winter I bought a HAC4 cycling computer which is downloadable, and even tracked elevation. So now I could see what my HR did at certain points in the ride and what the profile looked like. Almost a year ago I got my PowerTap wheel and I love it. It is easy to get caught up in the numbers and forget the fun, which I'm definitely prone to do, but it is very nice to have an objective view of whether or not you are improving.

Unfortunately my HAC4 has since died, but I can live without the course profiles, especially since, if I'm really curious, I have most of the local rides on file so I can just take a look.

So for now, I'm doing well on my goals: ride a bit more each week and watch what I eat. Last week I cut out the candy bars and cinnamon rolls that had become a habit over the winter. This week I'm trying to cut out chips, another thing I'm prone to overdo on. Its been fairly easy so far, and I'm hoping it will continue. I'm hoping to lose a couple pounds per week for awhile, but I don't want to go too much faster than that (though it'd be nice to be rid of the weight) to avoid killing my performance.