Cycling week 16 in review

Well the week ended a little different than planned. This week was supposed to be the hardest of the 4th training block with a TSS of 720. I was well underway to reach that target as on Wednesday already had a TSS of 322. Then on Thursday I fell from a ladder and hurt/bruised my ribs, and had to put cycling on hold for a couple of days.

The training week started Tuesday morning with my regular 30 min run thru Conway. While running thought that probably doing a run and a timetrial race on the same way was not a good idea, duhh. I decided then that while the NCC timetrail / hillclimb series was running, to move the run to Wednesday morning.

Normally I would do the Tuesday's NCC time trial race after work, but since I had taken the week off, had more flexibility for the start time. Looking at the forecast it indicated increasing south to southwest winds during the day. I decided to start earlier and do the race before the winds picked up. I left the house at 11:30 am for the 51 mile loop that included the 18 mile timetrial course. Unfortunately the wind had already picked up, oh well.

Riding to the start in Hatfield, I had picked some roads I hadn't ridden before, one of them was called Rocky road. Turned out the name was very approppriate. The road was gnarley, slippery and... rocky. I was worried my 32 mm tires were not up to the task, but I ended up unscanted and was in Hatfield in short order.

Since it had gotten warmer, I took off my arm warmers, neck gator and cycling hat  at the start. The course was 18 miles out from Hatfield to Whately and back. At this  point the wind had picked up significantly and was a tail wind for the first 3 miles and before the route turned north and from then on was coming sideways. While racing saw a couple other participants, including the event organizer David, going the other direction.

I tried to keep my power up during the attempt but didn't feel it. In the end had an average of 25 watts below my ftp and finished in 28min and 20 secs with an average speed of 22.4 mile per hour. I did however pressed the lap button 100 meter too soon (the wrong interstate sign) and had to report the strava segment time with a 3 seconds penalty and ended in 11th place. My overall after 3 weeks is 4th place (not all riders did all 3 races).

Since Wednesday the forecast looked wet I decided to participate in a a Zwift race. I ended up in Cat B race with 19 other riders on a 12 lap course of 21 miles in the New York world on a loop called LaGuardia. The course is very rolling, the race pace was verocious and after 1 lap had to drop from the lead group. I had then another 11 laps to go.

I decided against timetrialing the remaining laps to the finish. I had just finished a timetrial the day before. Instead turned the remaining laps into an intensity interval workout. I made up a rule that I could ease off when the grade was 0% or lower, but attack any section that was above 0% with a 400+watts effort until it leveled out again.

On this course it resulted in a hard full hour effort, resembling a cyclocross race.Was pretty happy with the training results. Perhaps I can make it a little harder next time by keeping the 0% grades at around ftp effort and only ease off on the descends.

I had planned a ride on Thursday, but that never happened as a result of bruising my ribs in a fall of a ladder. See the full story on drywalling the garage.

After a lot of agony, a short hike on Saturday, decided to give it a try on the trainer again on Sunday. Miraculously it did not hurt at all and I finished a 45 min ride without problems, this gives hope for some more rides this week, a recovery week but still would like to do some riding.

Here the Veloviewer view, not very impressing just the Time trial ride.