Sick Bike Workout, Workout Levels and Good Stuff

This is the sick bike workout that I did yesterday:
WU: 10' warmup, 3 x SpinUps. Then 3 x 2' (1') Zone 3
MS: FT repeats: 2 x 20' (8' @ 65-70%) @ 95-100%, 2' CD, 1 x 8' @ 105%.
CD: 5' Easy

It was what I call "challenging." I have an internal scale that describes how I think about my workouts. The scale goes like this:

• Wimp: The workout is so easy, I'm not sure I'm working out. Example: Ride easy 2 hours.
• Easy: I feel like I'm working out, but there is no stress. Example: Run easy Z1-Z2 60'.
• Challenging: The workout has some aspects that force me to focus for various periods of time at moderate to high intensity. Example: pick any of my weekday bike workouts, also my long runs for the past 7 weeks (and about 6 weeks leading up to Goofy Challenge), a sprint race.
• Hard: The workout is not only challenging, but because of the amount of intensity or sheer time involved, I know that I need to be extra careful to take in sufficient calories, fluids, and really be sure I do everything right to recover for it and be ready to go again the next day. Example: the long ride plus brick run I did last Saturday (repeat this Saturday), Horribly Hilly Hundreds 200K ride, a HIM or IM race.

There are levels within Hard, like hard, very hard and fucking hard, but I don't dwell on those. I prefer the bulk of my workouts to be Challenging. Challenging is good. It is never boring. It lets me see if I can push the envelope a little bit. Hard once or twice a week is good. Easy once or twice a week is good. Wimp is not something I like to do very often, and in fact I don't, maybe during a taper.

I used to only do 1 or 2 Challenging days per week. Now I have them 4 out of 7 days, plus 1 Hard and the other 2 are easy. But I guess it's a matter of perspective. Stuff that I consider Challenging now I used to consider Hard.

In other news, I did 2 workouts this AM since I'm leaving on a business trip. There were 2 peeps on adjacent treadmills while I was running (after I swam) trying to guess my bodyfat %. They both think I'm below 10%. The guy says I'm ripped. Then he asks me when is my next race. I tell him in about a week. He asks me what is my weakest sport. I told him I'm pretty good across the board for my age group. He asks me what is my age group. I tell him 45-49, that I'm 49 going on 50 this fall. He looks at me incredulously, and tells me I am "quite a specimen." I'm pretty sure I smiled back, and if I blushed, you wouldn't be able to tell because I was running tempo at the time. Both of these peeps are very fit. I appreciate a compliment much more from people like that. Good way to start the day!

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*.

Weekly Workout Totals: 2/27/2006-3/5/2006

What can I say? Another HARDER, FASTER, TOUGHER, LONGER week for the Crackhead. And I got through it with flying colors. I just have to share my weekend festivities, because they were rather intense.

Saturday was a 2:30 trainer ride with a :40 brick run (race pace). The data from the ride is above (click on the picture to see it full-size). You can see the target intensities, watts, and time in the first 4 columns. The rest of the information you might not understand unless you have a powermeter and use CyclingPeaks software. Trust me, though, IT’S ALL GOOD NEWS! Frankly, I had a little trepidation going into this ride, because the HIM time increased from 1:00 last week to 1:20 this week, with :30 right at the end. But, the point was for this to be like a HIM race simulation ride, which normally I would do 1 or 2 of those prior to a HIM race. Considering it’s still snowing here, though, I’m still on the trainer. Even so, I know from the character of my long rides for the past 6 weeks that they are hard, physically and mentally. And this ride promised to put the hurt down. Not only that, but since my FT watts tested out 6 watts higher than before, guess what? I get to go harder.

I had a 2005 TDF tape in (the TTT was on), and every now and then I would actually look up at all the pretty bikes with disk wheels and nice asses (sorry, can’t help it) on them. But as is usually the case with my trainer time of late, I never did focus on what was on the TV, since I had a job to do, and the job was not to watch TV.

The :30 warmup was nice. And then it got hard, and pretty much stayed hard, but I knew it would. The intensity guidelines were given really to represent normalized power (NP) for each interval, but since the SRM (neither does PowerTap) doesn’t show you that number, I try and maintain my average watts within the range, which generally results in at least that much for NP (you can look at both columns if you like to see this). Believe it or not, the FT intervals weren’t as bad as the HIM intervals, just because they were short and sweet. It’s a lot harder to focus for :30 or :50 straight at a decent intensity (and I can pretty much cook on the bike in a HIM) than it is to focus for a measly :10.

The REALLY hard part was the last :30, not just because it was at HIM watts, but because I knew I needed to ride hard and then get off and run, and I KNOW what that feels like, and this was how it was supposed to feel, so let’s get it ON!

I started the run out easy for :10 and then quickly moved up to my target HIM pace. Now it felt like a race! I was on a treadmill, but too bad, I had to make some moaning sounds and the look on my face was not pretty. My legs felt fine, but if you’ve done a HIM and gone hard on the bike, you know the feeling—you are fighting yourself because it just doesn’t feel right to run, your stomach is doing flip-flops (I don’t care how careful your nutrition is—the sheer faster pace of a HIM just speeds up the stomach discomfort during the run), and it’s going to be a mental struggle to hold pace. But I did, and I ended up needing to explain to a woman next to me why I was moaning. I told her I was 3:15 into a workout—her eyes rolled back and all she said was, “That must be why you look the way you do,” as she looked me up and down. To which I replied, “Yes, this is exactly why.”

After I finished, I promptly began sucking down my Endurox R4, and I even managed to stretch another :16 (I had stretched :35 before I began the session). Once I got home, I literally spent the next 4 hours eating, a little at a time. First it was leftovers from dinner the night before (a small piece of broiled tuna, a decent amount of vegetables with butter sauce and some mashed potatoes), then it was a whole pile of Pringles, then it was some string cheese, then it was some jelly beans, then it was 3 eggs scrambled in butter with an English muffin buttered and jammed, then it was one lonely beer, and finally a Pria bar. In the process, too, I drank a whole bunch of water.

I know that sounds like a lot of food, but it really wasn’t enough, even though I hydrated well during the workout with Gatorade and Mountain Dew, had a can of Ultra Violence before I kicked it all off, a Power Bar and banana for breakfast. During last night, I woke up a few times and felt pretty hungry, but just drank water because I didn’t want to turn lights on to go get more food.

This morning my stomach was settled down and I didn’t feel like I needed to eat the entire refrigerator. I had my usual Power Bar Triple Threat for breakfast and about 32 oz. of water to chase my coffee. And I shot an Espresso Love Gu and headed to the Y to run and swim, after stretching for :15.

Other than feeling just slightly tired, I was amazed at how “not bad” I felt. But we would need to wait and see until I began running. On Friday, when I saw I was supposed to run for 1:00, I figured Rich had made a mistake—why would he increase my Friday run AND my Saturday run AND my Sunday run? I was going to ask him about it, but then I thought, “Nah, I am freaking CRACKHEAD, I can do this.” So here comes a 1:50 run on the heels of a race-pace brick workout and an extended run on Friday. That's 3:30 of running in 3 days, for those of you playing at home.

When I started, my heart rate was totally in the dumpster, and my legs felt tremendous. All floaty-like and loose. There really is something to how it feels to be at low body fat and also be stretching a lot. It’s pretty amazing. EVERYONE should try it at some point in their life. All I can say is WOW. I feel AWESOME. The run starts out with :25 easy and :30 steady. That went by rather quickly, and I did have to pee, but I held on and figured I would do my :20 upper steady before getting off. Man, the upper steady felt totally easy. I kept thinking when will my HR go up into range? But I didn’t care; I am super fit, so I’m not obsessing about it. It’s just a number.

Made a quick pit-stop and hopped back on for the remainder: :05 steady, 2x12’ (2’) tempo, and then end with 4’ easy. Gosh, it just didn’t feel that hard. WTF??? There you go, I’ve done MORE than a HIM in 2 days. All I have to do in 2 weeks is do it all in one day. I almost ran a full ½ mary today.

I topped it all off with 1,000 yards pull in the pool. You know, it’s funny, but I was almost swimming at a normal pace. I was smiling, playing YOU SUCK with the woman next to me, especially since I’m thinking I ran almost 13 miles right before I did this!

Well next week I get to do this weekend gig all over again. I sure hope it goes as well as it did this time. Simply amazing that my last 7 weeks of training hours have been 13.05, 14.34, 14.73, 14.79, 15.04, 13.11 and 15.33 hours, respectively. I guess 13 hours is a "rest week" for me. Normally, 13-15 hours per week doesn’t feel like that much to me, but this season these weeks have been really loaded with intensity, so they seem to count for more effort. Whatever. I am way more fit (except for a temporary lack of bike endurance) than I’ve ever been in my life. That alone is very satisfying, and no matter how the rest of my 2006 races go, I cannot be disappointed in my training achievements. I do love training. It seems I do a lot more training than racing :)

As I finish writing this, I have to say I am tired. Not like I didn't expect it, and nothing that a solid 8-10 hours of sleep can't fix!

Here are the details from the week that was:
Swim: 9,750 yards in 3.45 hours; 23% of weekly workout time
Bike: 5.00 hours; approx. 88 miles; 33% of weekly workout time
Run: 5.25 hours; approx. 33.7 miles; 34% of weekly workout time
Strength: 1.63 hours; 11% of weekly workout time
Total Hours: 15.33
Approx. Calories Burned by Exercise: 7,010
Average Sleep: 8.57 hours/night
Stretching: 3.11 hours <--MOST EVER

Goals from Last Week:

• Average 8+ hours of sleep per night. DONE
• Stretch 15' per day. DONE
• HIT 170 watts as new FT in Tuesday’s workout. BEAT IT BY 1!!
• Keep the momentum and mental focus going. YEAH, BABY!!! This week was harder than last week—long run increased by 10’, brick run increased by 10’, long ride intensity bumped way up. Strength is now in maintenance mode, and I could really feel it while swimming—my upper body just didn’t have any excess fatigue. I also naturally spent some more time stretching, which contributed to feeling great and not buckling under a good amount of work stress. I also feel like I’m at an all-time low of bodyfat, judging from my appearance, and I’m working extra hard to ensure I stay adequately hydrated and fed.

Accomplishments This Week:

• Met all goals.
• Assimilated a new Collective member, Scott. He really has it going on, mentally and physically. That's what the Collective is all about. GO SCOTT!
• Got an “AWESOME” from my coach. I tell you, there is nothing like that. He doesn’t coddle me in the least, so when I get a virtual high five from him, it is truly meaningful to me.
  

Goals for Next Week:

• Average 8+ hours of sleep per night.
• Stretch 15' per day.
• Hang tough. Believe it or not, I’ve got one bike workout on Tuesday that is harder than ever (stay tuned). The rest of the week is a repeat of this past week, except I get a day off on Thursday due to business travel. So I just need to stay with it, hold my fitness steady, and then I get to taper down for Ralph’s.
  

Workouts Completed this Week

Monday: Swim 3,300 yards in 1:12; Strength 1:08; Run :50 including strides

Tuesday: Bike 1:15 including 2x20’ FT test—new FT=171 (sorry, I just have to say FUCKIN A’ here)

Wednesday: Swim 2,650 yards in :57; Run :55 including :25 tempo

Thursday: Strength :30; Bike 1:15 including 2x15’ @95-100%FT, watts=168, 168, and 8’@105%FT watts=183 (actually 107%!!)

Friday: Swim 2,800 yards in :58; Run 1:00 easy to steady

Saturday: Bike 2:30; brick run 40’.
Sunday: Run 1:50, including 20’ Upper-Steady and 2x12’ Tempo; Swim 1,000 yards in :20