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And there’s an ag-contractor yard at the top so a high chance of tractors
The cat farm you mean! Good chance of hitting a kitten as well!!!
May have to leave tools and drink at home and go back when the wind is right to search for 7.5 seconds 🤣🤣 😇 😇
I think it’s a bit late for me on bmx too at 42 lol
😂 Strewth man! What’s wrong with you 🤣🤣🤣
Fair play 👏🏻
hmmm interesting, good interesting though
so there's a 51km loop near me, now I live in lincs, it's flat everywhere! but it loops round the edge of the wolds and takes in a 1.27km at 7.2% climb, as the first of three climbs, I've done this loop loads, and this particular climb according to strava 44 times, 8 of my top 10 are from 2014, and the 8th is from when I kom'd the 51km loop in 2020 (I'm now 3 minutes back) and I was gassed! yet today, out after nights on 3 hours sleep before the school run, on a ride where my NP was 209w, ok I was on a 52/33 so had to keep on top of the gear up the climb, but I just felt like I span up, however I did 347w for 4m to 37s, and I did my 4th best time ever, and I didn't even go after a time, and it was into a headwind
crazy 🤷♂️
Nice work 😎 Flying by the sounds of it 🚴🏻 💨
Z2 ftw 👌🏻
yes very happy with my progress this year all things considering, using the 85% rule of 5min power, that puts me at 295w theoretically, weight is 76 and small change, so what 3.85w/kg, almost there 👀, give it a month 😂🤞
85% of 5 minutes. Ooh I like that number for telling people. All time high FTP would be just over 300w then.
Reality at the time was more like 260w. Mind you it was only that high as I was a good 30 seconds slower than my best time in the Hill Climb race and closer to 5 minutes actual time :0)
That’s actually quite interesting.
.85 of my best 5 min power lately matches nicely with my suspected ‘FTP’.
I've "always" (just don't look at the moment) had a good short power output compared to my longer effort powers.
Current years looks about right but I wouldn't say I've done a specific 5 minute effort.
2021 was also a year of chasing a list of hills for a club competition and involved a lot of single effort rides.
My probable peak with a power meter I'd guess my best 5 minute from the same hill climb but a different year would have been more like 320w (85%) but the effort was short of 5 minutes. Actual FTP about 270w at the time.
I always thought (read it somewhere once!) that if you're below 80% you do a threshold/SS block to potentially push your FTP up.
If you're above 80% you do a VO2 block to raise the ceiling.
Managed 280w best 20 from a 25 minute effort around the local TT course the other night...current weight of 65Kg puts me at a nice 4.1 assuming 95% which backs up my effort up San Salvador in March. I felt that may have been a little on the high side at 295w from 18 minutes but I'm guessing the gradient may have helped.
Happy days anyway, may actually come out of retirement after all!
That’s awesome Haze well done!
I’m 340w/95kg for 3.6. I’m half tempted to give up my racing attempts up until such a time as I’m at 4w/kg.
Let’s say you’ve got 60 racers at a Hillingdon Tuesday night Cat3 race.
20 are Cat 2’s but for not having scored their requisite points yet.
20 are ripe-plum Cat 3’s in the middle, they maybe pick up a point here and there but largely by luck.
And
20 are fresh back to racing or ‘just scraped up’ 4’s who are just pleased to not get dropped.
I’d say last July when I got back into it, I was in that last cohort. Now I’ve definitely progressed to the back-half of the middle group. I’m not afraid of getting dropped but can’t quite mix-it and race how I’d like to.
It’s clearly not a straight watts problem- so I reckon getting somewhere at or nearer to 4 would just stop the accelerations absorbing a lot of my power.
I’m very good for my age by watts:
And a pile of old junk by w/kg 🤣
I used to love a crit until I broke my collarbone a few years back…stuck to road racing after that (vets).
Then broke it again last year in my first circuit since the last time 🤦♂️
I guess your power requirements can be quite specific to the circuit, I don’t know Hillingdon but the circuits around here all seem to be about a war of attrition from accelerating out of corners…so maybe a bunch of race specific efforts rather than pushing for a specific w/kg? Although I guess it could translate across…
5x4m session @ 109% of 279w (305w) this evening, seemed a much harder session the 7x3m from last week
That extra minute makes all the difference! You may also be carrying additional fatigue?
Not over my fatigue issue yet 90 mins Z2 after yesterdays race felt tough! Not help by the stress of 4 attempts of Zwift to do its updates though.
Yeah I think it’s just maths everywhere I ride with other people to be honest 🤣
If they’re 70kg and doing say 9w/kg up the little kicker for 25 laps, that’s 25 x 30s @ 630w = 468kj of work on that feature.
For me that’s 25 x 30s @ 855w = 636kj of work.
Apply that to every little surge and acceleration and even having a big work capacity can’t counteract the efficiency of being a bit smaller 😀
I’m only a few weeks away from ToC so hopefully after that I can refocus on losing some weight.
Well done DR. It’s funny how the mind and body works. I think having a dumb ass chimp brain is helpful 🤣
Just tell it lies until you’re finished.
I can’t cheat the clock though- if I try and do it without time on display, my mind seems to make everything go even slower 🤨
thought I'd replied to this, wonder which thread my reply is in 😂
You may also be carrying additional fatigue?
no doubt, got through the session though, HR only peaked at 179bpm though
I can’t cheat the clock though- if I try and do it without time on display,
I tell myself not to look up, or at the laptop, I'm on watts, it's going fine, then I look up and 25 seconds have elapsed, EVERY SINGLE TIME 😂
Not just me then!
Had a window to ride this afternoon and just couldn't be arsed. I took it as a sign that I needed the recovery. That's the first three day block of no riding this year. And tomorrows weather looks awful!
I will do something though even if only a Zwift spin.
Sunday will be the 50 mile "8 AM" ride, so about a 100k loop from home. It'll be interesting to press on a bit on that and see if the recovery has worked.
I need to plan out my last few weeks into ToC. Even though we're now doing the sportive, I'd like a good time. I guess the most specific work will be group rides (as that's effectively what it is) and Sweetspot intervals. Maybe try and squeeze in one or two more solo centuries as well.
PR's EVERYWHERE
weather looked iffy today, so I thought I'd go to Dalby, don't mind it raining if I'm in the woods, stayed dry but was very wet in sections from the rain overnight, and MTB round here is naff, so have to travel,
fastest ever time for me round Dalby, 1hr 43m 37s, 278w NP
of course Dalbys changed over the years slightly, bikes changed etc, however, Strava matched rides gives me 20.5kph average, best before today was 19.4kph way back in 2014
will take that
Boom 💪🏻 well done 😀
You should have come out on the Banjo ride crosshair, the weather was great and we all laughed so much when the group, led by me, smashed into a water hidden pothole I double punctured and split my front tyre two others punctured and one managed to ruin a carbon rim!!
Ooooof, hard luck.
Rain and family stuff have limited me to a couple of 1 hr sweetspot sessions on trainerroad over the last two days. Found them pretty hard, harder than expected. Steady zone 2 tomorrow if the weather improves.
I did hear 😱
I haven’t ridden today at all 😴 Hopefully tomorrow will flick the switch back on 🤣
I haven’t had a good turbo week - only tried to do one Thursday night but got interrupted and just couldn’t get going again so bailed.
Have bmx’d Tuesday, mtb Wednesday night, bit of turbo Thursday, weight training Friday and mtb again today. Strava saying my fitness is on way up still today.
Biblical rain and mud today - took out the hardtail and got my first tubeless failure with a hole from a rock (even with rimpact in) but an anchovy fixed it. My mate spent most of the time lying in the mud on the floor - maybe my root / mud skills are better than I thought 🤣
🤣 I think I would be the mate slipping face first into the mud Joe.
Was good to get out today. Muggy but otherwise great riding conditions. Because of the weather yesterday, there were a few of the shop-ride lot out.
We stayed together as a group of 7 initially but then 5 of us elected to do the shorter route back. It knocks off ten miles and removes a couple of annoying climbs. Natch, I prefer the flatter route but I also don't like the traffic on the other one.
There's a segment that's kind of Swindon-Aldbourne-Hungerford-Newbury and is 18miles which feels downhill but there is 400' of climbing somewhere as you go. We flew down it today at 26mph in 42mins. It really flatters you, especially as we caught a nice Westerly tailwind on the A4 but then I see my Strava crush Harold did 27.3mph average for 50miles yesterday and you get a reality check 🤣
I felt awful to begin with- the relationship between HR, power and RPE was really out of whack having not ridden for 4 days. But I could appreciate the freshness by the end- I was able to push on when it was hard beyond what I expected.
Anyhow, I need to try and string together three good weeks of Tour of Cambridgeshire prep now. Loosely, I'll try and do Tuesday Chaingang, Wednesday easy spin, Thursday intervals, Friday off, one weekend hard group ride, one weekend Z2 ride and see where I end up. Hopefully the weather and work are helpful.
"took the day off" well didn't ride my bike, it's never a day off, was nights last night, then had the boys this afternoon and caught up on some gardening, rock and roll, so binned off the planned Z2 turbo session, legs felt ok, but my core I guess, has some level of fatigue from hammering it for 2hrs on the mtb, checking back, that was only my 2nd mtb ride in a year, yesterday, February and last May 17th 🫤 so hardly surprising, amazing how a year can just slip by
so just under 5hrs this week, split over three days, couple of hours Z2 outdoors, Vo2 Intervals, and 2hrs Hard
I had a great ride on Sunday. I did 4hrs at vaguely zone 2, and felt great at the end of it. I could have carried on for ages. This is pretty good for me given recent years.
I rested yesterday now I'm looking at doing a 1hr ride Tuesdays/Thursdays and smashing the climbs (there's usually one longer one and three or four short ones) then doing a regular 4hr ish ride on Sundays to get to my 6hrs/week. There's also the option of a short one on Saturday too.
The issue I now have is that if I'm not riding I do bugger all other than maybe walk to the shop. I need to fit something else active in otherwise I won't leave my desk.
Sometimes I can be stubborn. I was really excited about the chainganag today but the horrendous weather ruined it.
However it was dry when I should have left home- so I went regardless.
… And rode through some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever ridden in 🤣
At times the wind was gusting as a 15-20mph headwind too but I never really seemed to get the same strength tailwind coming home 🤔
Anyway, I rode the ‘Hour Crown’- a local 21 mile loop (that we sometimes Chaingang) in 58mins (21.6moh).
I did 295w for an hour straight but it was frustrating as I was trying to hold closer to threshold. I did get pretty numb in the second half mind you as I was only wearing a summer skinsuit and track mitts 🤣
I felt really good on the bike but I’m missing the dry balmy evenings we enjoyed this time last year.
soooooo hard to turn my brain off and tell it everything won't have gone to shit in 3 ridiculously busy days, random night out in Leeds on Tuesday, assignment writing Wednesday and lads birthday this evening, coupled with being on 830-430pm placement hasn't left much time for anything else, however assignment & semester put to bed, will be what will be, scrubbed the night shift I was meant to be on on Saturday just too much, will make sure I get a few hours in between now & the end of the week
Yeah no panic Dirtrider, you’ll probably even get a little bump in fitness 😀
I’ve had a busy week at work and so have just been trying to hit my intensity days. But it went wrong yesterday. I thought I’d eaten enough at the right time to have a really good vo2 session but I fell asleep on the sofa waiting to go and when I woke up I felt almost hypoglycaemic.
I didn’t really want to eat even more carbs, so went out anyway with a plan to start sipping drink once I’d warmed up. And my legs were awful 🤣
I tried a few times to start my intervals but it just wouldn’t happen.
The local shop lot are off to the beach tomorrow but it’s advertised as 20mph which will put people off (who could probably easily sit in the draft and join us) so another long endurance day.
It should be my new longest ride by the time I get home- and if so the old record will have only stood for 2 weeks 🤣
Just finished one of the Zwift MTB plans (lots of low cadence stuff) and got a nice wee bump in FTP (ramp test though) from it, 270w and 3.75w/kg. I'm not entirely sure how accurate it is, given that the last 2 days I've done a couple of B races and had my ass handed to me 🙄
Biggest difference is, unsurprisingly, on the MTB. There's a climb round here of about 300 vert m, straight up, probably mostly around 20%, with extended sections edging on 25%, on loose gravel. It's bottom gear, <60rpm stuff. Rode it for the first time since Christmas and sailed (maybe overselling) straight up. I was genuinely shocked not to explode! Likewise, cruised up another climb I know well, nowhere near as steep, got a PB.
For me, that's what it's about, if I can get up the hill faster, with a smile still on my face, that's more laps in the bag! Almost (almost) makes the up bit as enjoyable as the down bit.
Not sure where to go now with my "training", if you could call it that.
The local shop lot are off to the beach tomorrow but it’s advertised as 20mph which will put people off (who could probably easily sit in the draft and join us) so another long endurance day.
200km at 30-32kmph...no thanks. Can't come anyway as busy...but I wouldn't as apart from anything else my right forearm and wrist still hurts from last week's pot hole incident.
@andeh - that’s the sort of thing I’m really training for - found I minced my mate up a few technical climbs (both on hardtails) which was nice. Part me having more fitness and power / part me handling the tech better as it was pretty wet. Never done that before as mate is super fitness fit and lighter. So all the training is paying off!
Sadly I came down with norovirus Sunday night so I’ve been dead most of this week. Dropped from just over 76kgs down to 73kgs this morning - it’s been a horrendous illness.
Hoping after a weekend of rest to get somewhere back to being a bit more normal next week and then think about so gentle bike sessions to ease back in and hope I haven’t lost too much fitness / power. Feel so weak at the moment.
Dropped from just over 76kgs down to 73kgs this morning
...just think of the W/KG gain!
But really, that sounds shit. Hope you're not laid up for too long. Don't push it too soon or you'll end up feeling worse. I don't think a week will do your fitness too much harm.
Ah bugger Joe sorry to hear that! Friel says two days easy for every day you're off the bike ill when you start back so may be something to bear in mind when you feel better but aren't "normal" yet.
@anagallis_arvensis He is funny like that 🤣 I don't think he could bring himself to admit a ride was going to be slower.
I'm not too worried- my solo all day pace is 18mph now so worse case scenario, I get dropped and get home 30 mins later.
The wind is a headwind coming back which is a little annoying.
I'll be interested to see how they ride it. I was super pleased with my Dirty Reiver pacing so I'm confident I can ride 2x4hr rides with fish and chips in the middle at the correct intensity. I guess I.C. did Strade Bianchi, N.P. did 312, Rich did Reiver with me and D.V. knows his way around a long ride. It's only M.H. who is an unknown as it'll be his first ride over 100miles.
Until 112 miles at any rate, I did enjoy my day out to Hillingdon the other day. There's something super cool about knowing that with a pocket full of food, you can just set off under your own power and transport yourself a long way.
I am sure you'll be fine, just tuck in on the way back!!!
@joebristol sorry to hear you've been unwell. Sounds like you have the right idea easing yourself back in - you'll probably feel a bit on the bike even when you've recovered but the fitness you've built won't have evaporated so stick with it.
I'm off on my annual bikepacking trip next week - this year I'm riding solo to cape wrath from (near) home. Had a random off-plan week this week so just decided to ride what I fancied which included a workout with 1 min on /30 sec off intervals just to see how my legs are. I sort of expected to bin it half way thoujgh as I've not done that kind of work this year but they were actually fine - I think having concentrated harder on the z2 work in my polarised plan has been useful for recovery from hard efforts. My theory is that recovering from short hard stuff is an aerobic process so a better aerobic engine helps. It is, however a theory that I have made no effort to corroborate with any science.
Nice one Stevious 💪🏻
I think you're exactly right. "Anaerobic" is a total misnomer for most of the hard efforts it is used to describe.
I'm trying a bit of an experiment tomorrow. Less carbs in the bottles and more real food in my top tube bag. Probably overkill seeing as I will devour my weight in fish and chips when we get there, but it might be interesting to see if I can keep my power closer to the top of Z2 than the bottom by the end of the day.
My mind says it will be a worse outcome but my heart is saying "yum! a whole day eating 😋" 🤣
And if it saves me having to raid a garage, so much the better.
Phew that was hard. Couldn’t bring myself to round it up to 150 so 148.5 miles with 7080’ climbing for a battered sausage and chips at the beach 🤣
PM battery is going so lost calibration with 25 miles to go which messes the stats up a bit.
It was about 19.4mph with the group and 18.6 from home.
It was actually a stunning route. Bombing across the dead straight road on one of the old airfields on the New Forest at 29mph with a tailwind was just insanely good fun.
Amazingly we had zero punctures despite the awful roads at times.
chapeau 😎
every time I do 100+ I'm just miserable and stop riding for a few weeks after 😂 I've doubled up a couple of times, and I just ride the first 1/2 far too hard and it's a war of attrition to the end, I reckon I could pace it a lot better these days though
anyway, felt like something less structured today after a few days off, couldn't get outdoors and had an hour at best, so I attempted the Epic KOM today, missed all-time PR from 2020 (314w av) by 13 seconds 😩 new Zwift low weight of 77.3kg in kit prior, and did 302w av for 23m 27s, intervals gave a new FTP of 290w, happy with that,
progression this year (via intervals FTP detection) after 6 months off and 2022 where my best 20m av was 265w in mid June
5/2 - 249w (Tacx Neo, Zwift Crit Race)
21/2 - 253w (MTB Quarq, Sherwood)
2/3 - 256w (Tacx Neo, Zwift Race)
30/3 - 280w (Tacx Neo, Epic KOM)
17/4 - 282w (Tacx Neo, Innsbruck KOM)
6/5 - 283w (MTB Quarq, Dalby)
13/5 - 290w (Tacx Neo, Epic KOM)
exactly 100 days between the 1st & 7th - 41w increase 😎, I'd be happy with +10w in the next 100 (takes us to 21/8), I'd suggest the easy gains bump is levelling off, but we move on!
Boom well done 💪🏻
thanks, feeling better than ever, enjoying it, popped out this evening rather than spin the turbo as it was warm in my room, and I just needed the headspace, wondered it was a bit of a 'float' evening, warm, sporadic rain, had a crack at the strava segment I missed by 2 seconds last week, and considering I'd be at five guys not 3 hours before and had a pint on the way home, I obliterated it 😂 despite being held up behind a car on a tight country road junction, who then pulled over and the drove behind me 🫤, knocked 20 seconds off the kom, dropped it to 12m 55s, 8.36km circular loop, average speed 40.1km/h, 313w av, 😎