What have I been doing? Since I upgraded to the PowerTap, I have been doing a modified base training period for the last 6 weeks. This plan starts out heavy on the easy stuff and moves to more intense stuff at the end of August, and hopefully I will be able to start the season with condition ahead of last year.
Since I am going to make more of an effort this year, I hope to get through the season without injury and have a ton of fun at the races, including Nationals where I want to do better than 64th.
Coming off a rest week that included a century on Sunday, I was slated to get back into things by doing some sprints today. I have been dissapointed with my sprinting lately but had to remind myself that as the number of sprints increases, the focus should be on maintaining or improving wattage until the last repetition. In a race it will be important to be able to sprint with the same or better power as the race goes on.
Here are my results today in terms of average and maximum power for each sprint. Keep in mind that my best maximal power in a sprint since March is 1294W.
So, the sprint power numbers are pretty low but they are also consistant. My average power over 15 seconds is around 961W which is not too bad. My standing start efforts were very good as they were not much under the flying starts (20mph) and the lower average power it to be expected.
I will be increasing the sprint numbers from 7-12 in the next 3 weeks. Twleve in one workout is about all I can do without a power loss of 20% indicating it is time to quit. But you figure that you sprint many more times than that in a race albiet not at those wattages.
Tomorrow I will be doing 30 minutes of threshold work that will build to 60 minutes by late August as cyclocross workouts take over. I am hoping to improve my functional threshold to at least 320W by October.
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