The path to Knighthood!

Failing to plan is planning to fail, we have all heard that before and it’s nothing new to me.

As mentioned in my previous post the next goal is the Sufferlandrian Knighthood and following that 6 Hours of Temecula; a 6 hour mountain bike race in June. So between then and now a lot of time is going to be spent on the bike. Given that I was recently appointed as a TrainerRoad Ambassador it seemed the perfect opportunity to use one of their plans. After looking at them in a little more detail I made the decision to use their Advanced Build 1 Plan.

The Plan calls for 5 rides a week maxing out at about 7 hours on a trainer or around 10 hours if I am able to get out on the road at the weekend. With Becca starting her coached training giving her as much room to get her training completed is a priority to me as she is ramping up towards Ironman Arizona in November so having the opportunity to just sit on the trainer and keep an eye on the kids should help her out especially when her training volume increases!

Before I get into too much detail and in case you are wondering what TrainerRoad is let me give you the elevator pitch;

TrainerRoad lets you turn your Bike Trainer (Turbo Trainer) into a Power Meter by way of VirtualPower. Just hook up an ANT+ or Bluetooth Smart speed sensor and select your Trainer from the list of power sources. When you start to ride, your speed will be converted to power based on the known power curve for the Trainer. Based on Power it also provides you with prescribed workouts that allow you to train and utilize visual outputs and optimize training time.

To do this you have to download and install the TrainerRoad Application, I will be detailing how to install and set up from scratch in the future.

The benefit of Power based training has been well documented but here is a good explanation of its benefits; “Coach's Column: Training with Power vs. Heart Rate - What's Better? ”

Of course the other major benefit is for those folks whose view out of the front door looks like this!

So today was the first day which was a FTP test. Terminology alert! FTP, IF, TSS and a whole bunch more of acronyms and terms are coming your way, I’ll be adding a Tab to try and keep all this stuff in one place. In its simplest terms, your functional threshold power, or FTP, is the maximum power you can maintain through an hour’s effort without fatiguing, a good explanation is here.

Different warm ups but both contain the crucial 20 minute test window

Now Day 1 of the Tour was Rubber Glove which was a FTP test, this followed a test that I did on my TT bike, before crashing it which was with my Stages Power Meter so basically in the last month my FTP has gone from;

• 1/5 203
• 1/25 205
• 2/4 206

So marginal gains are being made!

I have also reset my TrainerRoad history to display on the most recent Stages data

My plan is to redo the FTP test towards the end of the plan prior to the Quest ride which will allow me to see what overall gain has been made in the 9 weeks, but right now focusing on executing one ride at  a time. I have also rest all my past

Finally with all this talking of Knighthoods etc I could not post this!