Truckin'

I took Monday as a rest day because the legs still weren't with it, and rode to work today, along with some L2 orbiting of Hains Point. Shall we review? As of the end of the day today, with 9 rides in over 14 days, I've gone from a relatively untrained CTL of 42, to 69. By the end of this week, with two more 3-5 hour rides scheduled, I'll have built up a decent base on which to start higher intensity training. It will take a few days of rest to recover my legs, and a few days of easy spinning after that, but by next Tuesday, THUNDERBIRD is GO! About 5-8 pounds has disappeared over the couple weeks of heavy riding - a nice incidental benefit, not really planned because you can't ride 300+ miles per week, and not eat like a pig. Not without some world class bonking anyhow. So I've been eating healthy, but lots, with good results.

Carmichael is right on the money with this part of his paln. If you have a couple weeks on your hands to dedicate increased time to training, the Two Week Endurance Block from his Time Crunched Cyclist book - a regimen that has also been published in Bicycling - is a great way to pile on some serious base training. It is a good two week long mini-camp to help you retrieve what you thought would be a lost season, or to build up some base in order to support racing and high intensity training.

The nice thing about it is, if you have a three week block - three days taper before, three days recovery afterward - to dedicate to it, you could use this as a mid-season plan to recover your base fitness. This may be important for you if you, like me, need to have good base fitness in order to race well. I find that I can do well in some kinds of cross races with a CTL around 60 - that's okay riding fitness, good enough to do well on some group rides by mostly wheel sucking and being very careful about where I pull. At CTL 80, I'm fit enough to animate a ride in places, and to never shirk pulls (except on steeper hills), and instead of counting my matches in races, I can burn them with abandon, knowing that if I blow up it will mean three minutes of mere tempo riding, after which I will have some more matches to burn. Some riders do great on lower volume and just piling on intensity. I am not one and am therefore grateful that I stumbled on Carmichael's plan. And forget the numbers - despite my legs being pretty dead right now the increased fitness I'm enjoying is obvious to me and the people I ride with. This will be nice once I've rested a bit...

It's not clear to me whether I will follow the rest of the Time Crunched plan through cross season. I may modify it a bit, picking up an intensity workout at cross practice each week, and making sure I do the optional endurance rides to maintain my base. We'll see about that - I know enough about training now to do a program of my own that will work so Carmichael's broader program may go into the tool kit and not onto the job site for now. But his Two Week Endurance Block will stay in my hip pocket; it would be just the thing to roll out around the time of the race I'm promoting, to build up some base during the two week period before my race, when I find it impossible to summon the mental energy to do high intensity work.

Say what you will about Chris Carmichael and the reputation of some of his clients - the dude has this training thing dialed.