80km easy- how low can my hr go?

First off weight, Monday morning weigh in has me at 83kg. Looking trimmer, and the legs are getting a bit more defined, still to much on the waist.

Mixed weekened planned, needed to get in some rest time, needed to glue up some tubs, and needed to get in some personal stuff. So decided on one big ish but easy ride, and a run if i felt like it. I didn't.

Saturday Ride:

Plan was for a hilly ride in Wicklow, but the weather was terrible so ja

cked in that idea and went back to bed for 2 hours. Decided to get an IM paced ride in as i knew that once the cross season kicks off proper long rides are going to be a thing of the past. Bar maybe a few 2 hour turbo sessions of boredom.

Was a pretty good ride despite the weather (rain, headwind, grit, pretty standard for autumn about here). Puncture about half way through, not mu

ch i could do about that, but dragged the readings down a bit.

Heart rate was nice and low for the entire day out.Started out a little harder (140bpm ish) then settled into 126bpm for the next 2/3rds of the ride. Overall nice and low, felt good and was happy with keeping the HR spikes down.

Not a huge amount on the climbing on the route, rolling not flat, but was able to stay pretty steady for the ride. Didn't worry to much about being on the aerobars as it was a social ride, and to be honest it was windy and not going to be to much fun on some of the roads we were on.

Power values were pretty good. Rode it at an IF o

f about 0.65 so well well under what i'd be aiming for, but just over the 0.63 for the low end pacing strategy for IM. Aiming for 0.71 for the race myself. Just need to dig through the power data later....*

Nutrition, happy out, felt good the whole way, didnt eat a huge amount but drank more than needed resulting in 3 pee's on route! Not peeing on the bike in training...sorry kids.

~~

*power file breakdown: Graph is on 5mins smoothing

Peak PO: 611W - no power spikes as per normal (usually have a few 1,000W moments on climbs)

Peak 1min: 401W - Nice for the little kickers and a smooth back end to the trial with all my 1,2, 5,10, and 20mins peaks at the same point in the graph

Peak 5min: 283W - Sub threshold, wasn't actively going for it

Peak 10mins: 238W - IM Pace

Peak 20mins: 203W - Aerobic Pace

Peak Hour: 181W - Just above recovery pace at 170W

Q.Analysis: 46% Q3 , 38% Q4 IM ride if i've ever seen one, probably a bit to much low cadence work, but it was all done at low PO's so not minding so much.

Main find of the ride:

No torquing. Very very happy that my relative PO generation was well below the average PO. Looking like the way i want to ride, smooth steady shifting, no loading of the legs prior to the run. Just need to test it on some hilly rides!

Long Ride Recon

Weekend turned into a long ride focus at the last moment. Did a recovery session on Friday to keep the legs fresh then just sat at home and ate and drank to fill up stores. Didn't get to bed as early as i'd have liked but such is life.

6:30am to rise and get some food in. Plan did not work and all i could eat was 2 slices of toast and a cup of coffee and some grapefruit. Body is not used to the early morning rides at the moment so will have to start rectifying that.

Rolled out and rode the 23km to Stillorgan to meet Ollie, held a nice constant 232W on the way and just rolled along waiting for the stomach to wake up. Didn't spend enough time on the aerobars though.

Met Ollie and we headed to Wicklow, struggled up some hills with a 53/40 and 11-21, stupid climbing gears. Muppet. Over all ride came in at just over 130km, which was nice.

Now the nerding:

TSS for the ride 299.5 WOW, big big numbers, so in a 5 hour ride i spent 3 hours riding over threshold. Now i know this was a hilly route, and my gearing was stupid, but that was unexpected. So i think i need to do a re assess on my 20mins time :/

Power sat at a nice 179W Avg (229W NP) but there was allot of free wheeling on the descents. Peak 5 seconds: 820W, peak 10mins 273, peak 60mins 240W.

All reasonable numbers, but being honest it was still a solid ride, no where near max.

September week 1

So first week back training:

13 hour week, mostly bike focused, with one 6hour MTB ride at the end. Felt tired come the end

Weight - 82.9kg (7.9kg above RW)

FTP: 297W (untested in last month)

Peak hour: 254W (untested of late)

Planning a 20 min TT this week on the erg in work (probably Thursda

y) and swim times in pool on Wed.

Stats time:

Just been playing with Golden Cheetah for the last few days as it makes access to some metrics allot easier than WKO+ (thinking of shifting to it for my own use, not coaching). So decided to look at all my data since i've been using power. Then said 'hmm wonder how my FPT has been going',as suspected nice upward trend. But then me thinks, 'well IM needs at least hour or more power so lets look at that, and sure lets look at the speeds too'

Very happy to see this, tight cluster over the last year around the same point, this is all my data not race specific, measured over week averages. Some major outliers in the speed, so kinda ignoring it, but similar trend. Will have a look at some other things, but happy to see its all going well. Even more interesting to see when you look at it over years:

Working with Rich we started to focus on my hour power (red) so hence the increase from 2007 - 2009. This summer i maintained the work i had done with him (needed a personal training break) and started to focus on my main limitation in MTBing which was my 10(Green) and 20mins (Dark blue) (lap 1 on a 24 hr race, or 3 laps on a CX race). Great to see an increase here (and in 60mins) but a little concerned in the 30mins power (light blue).

Something to think about over the coming months. Wonder if i can get a metric for 3hrs.....