I'm sure I've said it before but 2015 was a little bit disappointing for me. I had a great summer, traveled a ton, raced a lot, and trained a lot, but I just didn't get the results I was hoping for. There was something missing, something I wasn't doing or getting. I could feel it, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I came away from the summer in debt and a little down on myself having nothing to really show from it.
After coming to terms with the situation I decided I needed to get a part time job, I got a job working at the local regional airport. The job is physical, stressful, has wacky hours, doesn't pay great, and can be extremely stressful. But in some ways it's been exactly what I needed. It has been rewarding, pushing me to work harder and not take what I have for granted. I had a challenging time getting used to the sleep schedule and making sure I was getting enough sleep, but learning to do so has helped me re find my discipline. The physicality and the stressful nature of the work has me coming home mentally and physically tired sometimes, but it's taught me to accept the situation when you're body is just worn out, and made me stronger when it comes to full body strength and forced me to become more disciplined in stretching and recovery. It has put me in a pinch, and I'm adapting. This is something I was missing last year. I was too comfortable, I wasn't challenged. And I wasn't putting in the extra 1 or 2% that it takes to really get better on the bike.
I've also come to terms with the direction my training was going, and saw a stagnation. Something needed to get changed up. I was doing the same things and getting the same results. I thought back to when I first started training. The feeling of training as hard as you could every day. The excitement of new places, new people, new goals, and new achievements, it's really what drove me in the sport. I had lost it and if I was going to continue pursuing my dreams I was going to have to rediscover it.
This little personal quest began with setting concrete goals. I had never really sat down and planned an "end game". I had always just been chasing the dream of being pro. it was an amorphous goal, but it didn't matter because it was so far off. But as I got closer and closer to it, the lack of definition started to hold me back, I needed to set my sights on something real. I wrote a post back in the middle of January about my goals, if you're curious you can read it
here.
Setting these goals helped me work backwards and map out the intermediate goals I needed to accomplish in order to get to where I wanted to go. One of the big goals was to increase my threshold up a lot so 2016 has so far been pretty focused on that. I had always rely heavily on sweet spot intervals and long tempo days to get my threshold up. This year I started things off with a big block of strength in the gym and a much slower build up. Normally, a person would build at between 4-7 TSS per day per week, I was shooting for closer to 3-4 points TSS per day per week. I also planned rides to hit both the longer side and the short side of threshold during base period. It all seemed to pay off. I was able to go from a PR 20m effort of 383w to 400w, pushing my threshold up to ~380w, nearly half of my 4 year goal.
If you'd like to check out the ride, here it is
https://www.strava.com/activities/536073407/overview
So what did I learn from all this? The biggest thing is to mix it up. You have to figure out what works and what doesn't, stick to what works, but also remember that anything and everything will change at some point and you have to adapt and move with the changes. I attribute the gain to 3 main things. First the weight lifting. This is the biggest addition to my training this year. I've never done anything in the gym anywhere near as targeted or as long. I spent almost 4 months in the gym. The next big thing was I got a fit from Brice at B&L. I'll have more on the fit process at some point. what we found was that I was compensating for muscular imbalances and flexibility issues by riding in a certain position, and that position was limiting me. The changes were extremely small, but the results speak for themselves. Most importantly, the knee pain I'd struggled with for a long time has all but dissipated. And finally I think a change up in the workouts played a big role. I went from doing a lot of sweet spots and long tempo rides to flowing through sweet spots, to FTP builders, and now onto Over Under Intervals. The sweet spots are great, but they just aren't hard enough. In the early season they do a great job of getting your body to remember it's capabilities, but to push through, you need to go harder. So the FTP builders are simply that. 10 minute intervals, maximum efforts. I started with 2x10, then moved on to 3x10. They were super effective. The rides only lasted 80 minutes, but I was dead tired after each one. Plus the slow ramp rate had me going into them well rested. I'd always follow them up with 2 days of additional volume and effort. I'm now moving on to Over Under Intervals. These are when you ride above and then below threshold alternating for 10-20 minutes. The FTP builders help build your capacity for power, and the over unders increase you fatigue resistance, allowing you do the efforts over and over.
Besides the above, there has been a clear shift in my perspective. I wouldn't say that I've recaptured that feeling from before, but I would say I've found a new motivation that gives me the same drive.
I have a clear understanding of what I was doing before, and what elements of that I can bring back, what I can't do anymore, and how to get where I want to be. I know how to write the plan, and I know that I can follow the plan with enough focus and hard work.
So what can other riders take away from this? The workouts themselves are a good place to start, but it's more important to realize that we are all different, and we change. The training has to change with us. The training has to work inside the rest of our lives whether we work full time, part time, take care of kids, go to school, whatever it is. There has to be room for us to be who we are and there has to be an environment where we are prepared to challenge ourselves every time we stomp on the pedal or hit the trails. It's also critical to remember that no matter what you do, there are always going to be diminishing returns. The training has to change over time in response to life but also you abilities. There is no simple solution for this or that. The workouts dictate the performance and the performance has to dictate the workouts. There has to be the back and forth, to make sure there is always a challenge.
