Planning Ahead

Despite my longer ride yesterday, I was determined get this week's bit of higher intensity training done tonight. I rode straight home and put my bike on the trainer, 21 minutes later I'd completed four 3min intervals at 115% and was feeling good about myself. Surprisingly my legs felt ok and I think that was probably because in a sense yesterday was an easy ride. Yes, there was duration but no real sustained intensity. I finished off with a few sets of squats and seated rows.

This period of "maintenance" riding is nearly over and I've been giving a fair bit of thought to starting my "build up" in the New Year. I am determined not to repeat the mistakes of last winter and to be more controlled. I am in a much better position now as in terms of TSS and intensity I know what training loads I can cope with. I also know what my target CTL and FTP are. There were some aspects of my 2007 season that were more successful than 2008, and visa versa,  and I think that was because of the respective details in preparation. I'm going to try to amalgamate what I think were the successful elements.

I've been playing around with ATL constants too, and have settled on a value of 10. I think that this will help me control my training load more successfully. Overall, I want to use TSB as my thermostat by keeping it sufficiently low enough to be building CTL, but not that low as to run into problems of recovery. I don't have to reach my target CTL until April so I have a fair amount of  time to build an aerobic engine. Each week there will be the usual dose of level 4 and sweet spot training. I'll also keep up the "don't forget how to do" level 5, 6 and 7 sessions. I think these are key to being able move forward when the racing starts as I did in 2007. These, I think, were a missing part of my 2008 winter training.

Joe Friel posted some pertinent  points today. The three things that he highlighted as being important at this stage, aerobic endurance, force and speed skills were all the elements that I concentrated on yesterday.