4.0 by 40

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The guy who won did 330 miles last week

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Bad weekend on the bike, super fatigued and no power. Strava stalking reveals the winner of the 3’s did a 1 min 500w attack and then 380-400w for 8 minutes in order to win solo by 20 seconds! Annoyingly, when I peaked in May (before Hayfever June and busy July) I just about did the later (8 mins at 385w) but I can’t get anywhere near at the moment. Also- I doubt it would buy me the same amount of speed as it did him given my lack of aero’s

I have entered the last West Thames on Tuesday so see how that goes. It’s pretty clear what I need to do- basically flatten my power trace. So less time coasting and less time above 550w! Hopefully I can get a little comfier in the bunch so I can position myself in the front third. If I am then staying on the pedals and not surging, I’ll have more top end left for a move or too. Carrying more speed and draft through Brians’ Bend should mean I don’t need so many 900w surges up the hill too.

I’m there for bunch time/the craic so not remotely interested in the sprint unless I find myself there by accident. In the vein of TiReds list- my process goal for this week is to get clear separation from the bunch at least once! Even if it means I then get dropped.

Mission accomplished! With photo evidence of me off the front

Didn’t get dropped, was there at the end but it was a HUGE bunch and very choppy on the last lap so with no power left to speak of, I cruised in on the back in safety.

Was buzzing after.

Rich got into a breakaway in the 4’s for a guaranteed 5th or higher. And then nearly got wiped out bunny hopping an actual rabbit

It shook him up and winded him so he pulled out sadly.

[weeksy]

And then nearly got wiped out bunny hopping an actual rabbit

It shook him up and winded him so he pulled out sadly.

Say what now LOL.

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Rabbit ran across the track! To avoid it going in his spikes, he ‘bunny’ hopped it like we do with the drains on a chaingang and winded himself on landing
By the time he’d clipped in and got himself together, the bunch had come past.
He bailed as he felt winded but had he stayed in- a few others dropped out and he could have probably caught the bunch! Always keep going

[weeksy]

oh man that's all levels of insanity right there lol gutted for him.

if you lads are out this week, shout and i'll ride... i'll bring a carbon superbike too.

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HD probably still loading but…

Racing road bikes! UK Crit racing at HILLINGDON. West Thames rd19 onboard footage.

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Fun chaingang this evening. 25mph for 30 miles

My legs were ace. Attacked a few times and then expected to get dropped but always clung back on.

It’s amazing what a difference a) only one hard session per week and b) a couple of races does for legs.

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Tuesday Night Worlds! Using them as RACE PRACTICE. Making the last 4 miles HARD to suit my goals.

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Probably mentioned already but I follow the Dirty Reiver winner on Strava. Their chaingang’s are INSANE!

25mph felt ripping for us last night but this morning, these Onyx lads went out and did an hour at 29mph!!!
To be fair, one won the E123 race at Hillingdon last week.
But that’s certainly going some out on t’open roads!

[weeksy]

Lol I'm not sure I can do 2 mins at 25!

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Prob be surprised. With a big gang last night, the pulls weren’t too long.

[weeksy]

Prob be surprised. With a big gang last night, the pulls weren’t too long.

I like your optimistic approach for my ability

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Like when we went out the other week- you were surprised how much power you must have been doing at times.

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Not had much mojo lately. A look at the calendar shows why though- I’ve lost roughly 40% of May’s fitness! The only upside is you get a little bump in top end, hence being able to attack off the front of the chaingang and a 28mph Crit. (Albeit for seconds ).

Time to start ramping up for the British Gravel Championships if I’m going to bother going!
Plan this week is to add volume. Some of this will be high Z1 rather than Z2 even! Not only is that definitely in the ‘fat burning zone’ to try and get some endurance back, but it also means when I do add a hard day- I’m not too tired to smash it. “Hard days hard, easy days easy.”

Reset my entire Zwift set up yesterday and it was a disaster. Power meter troubles and calibrating at the last minute (new computer too so had Bluetooth issues) meant I had to quit the first race to get another crank out of the shed

I then did another race and got dropped with massive unexpected resistance up the first climb

Limped home in like 140th place in B- but hadn’t really done any work! So I did a Zwift ramp test

Of course- I was knackered from the few hard efforts in the race so the result was only 295w but it showed me I could at least get my HR up (it was stubborn in the races).

Tomorrow- I need to try some threshold intervals. That old goal of 2h at 300w seems a world away now so that’s what I’ll be working on- hopefully doing something like 3 efforts of ten minutes each at say, 320w. I’ll spread them out over two hours.

That should also confirm or deny my hunch that my current ftp is around 320.

I need to ramp these up quite quickly before the event so if they’re doable, I’ll try 3x20 next week! Then probably drop the watts to 300 and do 3x 30 or 2x 45 the week after.

I may try and knock out a century on Sunday. Nearly 6hrs of low Z2 should give my training score a massive bump in the right direction. I need to average 80 TSS (Training Stress Score) a day to get back to May fitness in time!

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Okay so I did my 3x10's on Thursday and they were like hell on earth. Annoying, slow and only 310w each. So today I tried a little experiment and did 40x 1 min efforts, each followed by 1 minute off. So in total, 40 minutes work V the 30 on Thursday. And it was so much better! Obviously it's not the same workout as you are constantly getting recovery for your HR to drop back down but in terms of Time in Zone for your muscles, it's better!

The average power for these was 323, so much better than the 310 for the longer ones.

Whether it has the same or indeed any effect on raising my ftp remains to be seen But it was a good way to burn 1300kcals.

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Decided to bail on the century and do just enough to get my 560 TSS for the week.
Fascat coaching call this the AmEx ride (instead of ‘don’t leave home without it’ like their old strap line, he says ‘don’t come back without it!’).

It meant spinning up the hill by my house one last time but I got the 150 I was after

[Timmy]

Okay so I did my 3x10's on Thursday and they were like hell on earth. Annoying, slow and only 310w each. So today I tried a little experiment and did 40x 1 min efforts, each followed by 1 minute off. So in total, 40 minutes work V the 30 on Thursday. And it was so much better! Obviously it's not the same workout as you are constantly getting recovery for your HR to drop back down but in terms of Time in Zone for your muscles, it's better!

The average power for these was 323, so much better than the 310 for the longer ones.

Whether it has the same or indeed any effect on raising my ftp remains to be seen But it was a good way to burn 1300kcals.

The 3 x 10's will end up being an aerobic workout as you can't sustain anaerobic intervals ( Vo2 and up) for more than a few minutes each. Yes, you've done more work doing 40 x 1 but you've taxed a different energy system have you not?

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Yes for sure! The 3x10’s are definitely aerobic as I still think my ‘training zone’ FTP is 320. So in theory, they are high sweetspot at that power.

I remember Greg Henderson (the NZ one) talking about breaking any interval up into 45/15’s to make it more bearable on the Turbo trainer so I was just trying the same sort of idea. So from a cardiovascular point of view- it was nothing like the same effect as my heart rate only reached high tempo by the end of the session. But from a muscular endurance perspective- I hacked my way to 40 minutes in zone at “FTP”.

Hopefully, mentally, that will help me push thorough to a better 3x10 (or maybe 15!) performance this Thursday…

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Interesting ride this evening. Chaingang! And to be honest- I had no idea where my legs were coming from.
Sunday ended up a slog, yesterday I couldn’t even bare to look at the bike for a recovery spin and when I felt ‘light’ and got on the scales- I’d put on 4lb

I decided to extend the warm up a little to around an hour and then we were off! And all of a sudden my legs felt great!

As per my vids- the way out is subtly uphill for 12 miles. Enough to mean that for those guys, on fresh legs, they can really punish me with w/kg!
As it was. I had 2 strong guys in front of me in the rotation and then worse, 1 strong one after me! Including the fastest/strongest rider of the evening.

So Nestor and Tom would pull, and I’d be doing over threshold in their draft (cus of the w/kg difference). Then I’d pull- 1 min at 360-400w! And then, just as I was joining the back of the line, Pete would rip my legs off for a minute more.
The result was inevitable and eventually I let a gap go and annoyingly, rather than stay as a bigger, weak group (if that makes sense) who could have still chased two strong guys back- Pete and Ben bledged past me to join the two up the road! That left Rich and Ian who then got dropped too! I was still pulling hard trying to rejoin so I left Ian and Rich and got stuck in no man’s land.

I was holding the gap at ten seconds and was really pleased with how I rode. Blowing out my arse, I didn’t back off and the legs didn’t fade. And the gap stayed constant.

Into the next village and I thought I could maybe catch them on the long (33mph for over a mile!) descent if I kept pedalling the 53-11 all the way down. But then they had to slow down for some horses!!

So I leap frogged them and cleared off down the hill!

I don’t know what my gap got out to but I put my head down and tried to TT along the bottom road as best I could.

After maybe another mile or so, they caught me off guard and came by at speed! But luckily I sprinted back on.

I then skipped every pull for 5 miles and drank as much sugar as I could get down! (I had 120g in a 750ml bottle).

Next up I had to stage manage the first A4 ‘hillock’ out of Hungerford. Counter intuitively- this means doing a monster pull!
I was maybe a minute out from it, so I did that minute and then kept going up the hill for another minute! This meant that everyone else, happy that I’d finally decided to do some work, was sat in at MY PACE! Had I pulled off at the base, they’d have dropped me by accident.

Keeping the watts the same, I then pulled for another minute the other side of the hillock on the slight descent. This got us back up to 27mph and meant that, instead of them suddenly surging +3mph, there was already a lovely 27mph slipstream to drop into.

And bingo! I was safe for a bit longer.

Onwards and I skipped a pull to swap rotation. One guy was fading and getting a bit dangerous (all good but I wanted something a bit more consistent at this point!).
Then all of a sudden, more guys started fading! So I attacked

Only it didn’t really work. Two of the strong guys just welded everyone across rather than attacking over to me. I don’t think Tom wanted to play bikes at 4 miles to go

Anyhow, onwards towards the Ski slope and Pete was going like a train with me in his draft and Tom and Nestor following. Ben dropped off here. I knew Tom could drop me with ease up the slope so I let a big gap open to Pete and then sprinted across to try and drop Tom Again- he wasn’t amused. Neither did it work and he welded it up again.

Probably because they didn’t really try- I managed to hang on up the Ski slope and then comes the single best bit of training on the entire ride. Seriously- the entire thing is worth it for this one moment. Flooded with lactate and maxing out on HR- everyone tries to drill it back up to speed.
Being able to push through, utilise as much of that lactate as possible as fuel and not have to back off is AMAZING training. I would say I cannot replicate that training effect anywhere else other than in a race. I 100% guarantee I can’t make myself push through lactate like that solo.

Anyway- I made it!

Now is my chance to shine. There’s very few other than our resident Cat 1 racer (not there today) who can drop me from here. Sure enough, Tom goes. But gravity is tipping my way now and it’s easy to cover his wheel and then coast in his 30mph draft whilst he’s probably doing 500w.
I out handle most through the A34 roundabout too and now we’re dropping into town. Sadly the cars interfere and we get stuck behind them at the speed camera!
For someone who didn’t want to play bikes five miles ago- Tom perks up and overtakes a couple of cars!!!
Luckily one turns off right so now Pete and I only have to overtake one to get Tom in our sights. Pete opens it up and I’m getting sucked along! He closes in, overtakes and then illustrates his (huge) diesel by having zero kick So I pip him to the roundabout

All good fun and worth it for that one moment of training.

24.4mph for 30 miles and 970ft climbing.

If I can keep these legs and drop back to 85kg next year- I’ll be a very happy boy indeed.

[weeksy]

Lol that's either funny, mental or awesome lol