Winter training: there's still time!

Sometimes I feel I’ve got a lot to say, other times I think I’ll just end up having a whinge so it’s better not to start writing during those times as the resultant ramblings would make pitiful reading!

So what I have I been doing over the holiday period?  Well not a huge amount of riding in all honesty.  Endless family visitors, two small children and diabolical weather really put the stops on extensive miles while I was off work.  I got out for a few rides, some good 4hr sessions with my club mates, but looking back on the time I spend on the bike, it was fairly minimal.  This meant a 3.5kg gain, which has yet to disappear in its entirety, the target date to reach 75kg is the end of February but that relies on losing weight whilst maintaining my training diary.

Since the New Year, I’ve set my base-line weekly training plan, which consists of:

Mon & Fri:               0.5hrs run
Tues, Wed & Thur: 1.5hrs bike
Saturday:                4.0hrs bike

Any other rides I can fit in is a bonus but I’m reading Cav’s autobiography at the moment and my 8.5hrs are a far cry from the 16hrs per week that Shane Sutton recommended to him when he was a junior! 

Some of you will notice a non-bike exercise in there… the running.  It’s there as a result of my recent employment as taxi service on Mondays and Fridays; our 3 year old has started nursery and I do the dropping off on those days, in the summer months I’ll be taking her on the back of my bike, which will be great resistance training!  Until then, I’ll be suffering the boredom of pounding the pavements during my lunch break.

I recently enrolled in a sports testing experiment run by one of my friend’s students,  It aims to discover the effects of smells on athlete’s performance.  This is being held at Stirling University and part of the process is to measure our max. power and VO2 Max.  I have the results from the max. power and currently (at 81kg) I’m putting out 4.94w/kg at max. HR (188bpm, though I’ve seen 192bpm on the road).  If my power stays the same when I reach my goal weight of 75kg, it will go up to 5.33w/kg so it’s a great incentive to get there.  An internet search brought up stats of what Pro Tour riders put out on climbs and it left me feeling pretty under whelmed by my performance but I never had any doubts that I wasn’t even near the same league!

Plans for the next few weeks are to STICK TO THE TRAINING PLAN, keeping up the base miles and adding some sprint intervals on hills.  After doing a lot of training in my lowest heart rate zone, I’m hoping this will get me used to producing some more top-end power, as it feels pretty difficult at the moment to go full gas.