How to Get Stronger on the Bike

Or, my life the past 5 months...look here. I put this spreadsheet of my weekly long ride data together at the urging of my coach to take a look at things in a "macro" fashion to see what's been going on and how I got from A to B. "A" being I was a respectable rider but have a ways to go (or as I would call it, I sucked), and "B" being now, where I'm getting close to being a pretty good rider (and to round things out this spring/summer, I'll be riding with a very fast women's cycling team).

You all know by now that I train with power, and you know who my coach is. You've seen me throw numbers out on my blog here with me getting all excited about my FT, or Functional Threshold (really FTP, or Functional Threshold Power, in watts). The number has been moving up steadily through the fall and the winter.

Also during this time, I have lost 2 lbs. that I'm pretty sure were fat. I wasn't specifically trying to lose more weight, but I am always trying to be leaner. I think the weight drop had to do with all the running I've been doing. I am not yet half way through my season, and I'm already well over half the running miles I did last season. In the back of my head, I was after the weight I'm at now for a few years, but being already lean, I'd found it difficult to get leaner, but this drop has been a real gift.

Something else new this fall and winter is the intensity of my strength program. I'm using the same periodization that I've used for the past 5 years, but I am lifting heavier and doing twice as much core work. Still, it only adds up to maybe 1.5 hours per week, but it's 100% quality time. Whether or not you believe strength training is effective in a triathlon program, I will keep doing it because I am a) female and b) getting older, and I believe it helps me maintain my lean mass and keeps my metabolism revved.

Beginning in November, I made a commitment to improving my flexibility. My goal was to return to my former limber self that disappeared 8 years ago when I began endurance sports. I'm not quite there yet, but things have improved significantly, and I truly believe that this has contributed to my ability to manage a rather challenging training schedule for weeks at a time.

Finally, this fall I made an executive decision to remove as many distractions as I could from my training. The most important of these was to keep my "inner circle" comprised of only tough, dedicated, knowledgeable athletes who I believe are on a similar path as me. I have helped plenty of newbies and intend to keep doing so through posting to my blog, participating sparingly in a few triathlon forums, etc., but for right now it's time for me to be a little selfish.

Put all of this together, and it sounds good on paper, but ultimately one still needs to do the work of hard training. Partnering with my coach, Rich Strauss, who at times thinks I choose odd ways to test my fitness, we've built a progressive training program that, combined with my work ethic, self-care and attention to geeky details, has resulted in some huge gains on the bike. Granted, these are all measurements done on an indoor trainer, but we are pretty confident that when I "take it to the road" that I will be faster than ever before. Plus, I know that we will keep this same "character" to my outdoor long rides. I just don't like JRA (Just Riding Around) anymore. It's boring to me, and what is the purpose (except for the odd recovery ride)? I plan to keep updating the spreadsheet as time moves on as a way to motivate myself to keep things rolling, and also because, well, I just like studying my own data!

When you look at the spreadsheet, you will see I inserted some comments about what I think was going on, but they are just off the top of my head. Really, when you look at the numbers, what you see is that I've done progressively harder workouts, and improved my ability to work the entire workout at a higher IF (Intensity Factor, which is the ratio of Normalized Power (NP) for the entire ride to my FTP). The higher the IF you can work at, the faster you become across the board. Ride harder, and you get faster. Sounds easy, right?

Now those of you reading this who are big guys probably laugh at my watts. Keep in mind I am a female, age 49, weight all of 112 pounds. I should have posted my power to weight ratio (weight in kg) out to the right (that will be for version 2.0), so you can make more sense of the numbers. Right now, my power to weight ratio is 3.36, which is up from 2.93 a year ago, and up from 3.03 just 4 months ago. That's a solid improvement, I don't care who you are.

You can see the points where my FT increased--those weeks I did a test to prove where it is.

There's really nothing magical about this, so here I will quote Rich, because my data is like an ad for his words:

The bike goes faster because you do more work. The more work you can do, the faster the bike goes. Watts = work. More watts = more speed = more work. Want to go faster? Do more work/put out more watts. Think of it in weight lifting terms. If your current bench press is 200lb and you want to lift 250, you structure a plan based on your current strength and your goal strength. Most importantly, you put a known weight on the bar. You don’t guess, feel it, take your pulse, etc. You put 205 lb on the bar and lift it.

It really is "that easy." It's taken me about 2 years to really get the hang of this training with power thing, but now I'm deep into it, and that, coupled with my overall fitness and conditioning being at an all-time high, is very exciting. I don't know how I ever trained without power--I never had anything solid to base my self-assessment on.

Now, proof that all of this really works happens once I get outdoors and begin riding with others, and do some timed rides (for example, on the Ironman Wisconsin course) to get some speed measurements. I laugh when someone riding a trainer tells me how "fast" they were going. Fast doesn't mean too much on a trainer, and I'm actually happy that my speed sensor is on my front wheel so I have no idea about how "fast" I am going indoors. All I look at is my watts. And my top tube. Try as I might to pay attention to the TV screen while on the trainer, I can't--it's heads down work. And that is my idea of big *FUN*.