Best Triathlete Follow up + Bike Test #2 of the season a success!

Friends and family,

Welcome back and thanks for catching up. There are a few good links imbedded in this post I encourage you to click to. Some of racing and some of great product (that I am not in anyway paid to endorse!!!!)

As a follow up to my previous post re: Best Triathlete ever; thanks for the few emails. Seems pretty much 50/50 - people say Simon or Macca. I will say this, the best 3 finishes I have seen in triathlon all belong to Simon; Sydney, Beijing, and with $200,000 on the line wins a 4 way sprint in Des Moines Iowa. All 3 finishes Simon was dropped and got back on, then won. Yeah, our boy from Kingston's a stud for sure! And too boot, a really approachable genuine guy.

Training update:

this morning I did my second bike test of the year. I am following the Vision Quest Coaching protocol whereby I get a really good warm up in, hit an interval up to a hard effort, recover then do a "step test" of 3 minute intervals one after the other adding 20 watts each interval. So, 3mins at 200 watts; 3 mins at 220 watts and so on until failure. Below are some snap shots from my CycleOps Joule 2.0 computer to show the progression from this morning's effort. The final interval actually felt pretty good but I don't think another 20 watt jump was available to me, I was getting pretty out there physically.

What's important to for the upcoming season is the improvement from the January 21st test. January 21 my last 3 intervals were 301, 315, and 325 watts vs. here being 300, 320, 350. In other words, I made a 7 to 7.5% jump in 6 weeks. That won't be replicated! It will look more like 1 to 2% increases I suspect through to the main races of the season.

Quite happy with the results, now it is time for some food!!!!

2010 test: power to weight ratio

Tonight feeling tired and lazy after a hard 2 weeks training and run intervals at lunch I decided to throw caution to the wind and test again my FTP: Functional Threshold Power. In lay terms the test determines the tipping point between matching energy supply in the muscles to energy demand. Go over your FTP too much or for too long your body fails you and you stop, it really is that simple.

to test this I follow a simple test provided in the book "Training and Racing with Power" by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan. After a good warm up and blow out of the legs to get them juiced up and ready to roll, a 20 minute all out effort occurs. Take those results, subtract 5%, and then divide by your weight. Voila, FTP.

Because you divide by weight there are actually 2 ways to improve FTP. Train better and get stronger, or lose weight. But, lose too much weight and the tipping point becomes inverse. You actually lose power, so it takes experience to know your magic race weight and you can't be at race weight all year. At time of test I am 3.5 kg's over my race weight (167lbs vs. 159/160 race weight)

So, what was the result? Just slightly less than what it was before Christmas I am happy to report; 4.15 watts per kilo. That is because of the extra kilo!

It felt good given the hard 2 weeks training, the 90 minute run 48 hours before in -20 degrees, and the run intervals in the afternoon leading into it.

So with this we can train and improve the fitness for the season.

My swim test 3 weeks ago was 21:28 for 1500M which given I took 3 months off swimming is good start. My PB is 21:08.

Running - yeah, I hope that gets better building into March! Lots of work to do there!

Training rocks!

Thanks for reading.