As I mentioned in my opening post, I had a very specific pre-season goal and that was to take part in the Cape Argus Cycle Tour. This is a 70 mile race held every year in early March in Cape Town South Africa. It is a challenging course with 5 significant climbs, 35,000+ participants and usually a lot of wind. What makes this challenging for us northern hemisphere cyclists is that it comes right at the peak of the southern hemisphere fitness (early fall) and is right towards the end of the base preparation or early specialization period of the northerners. Regardless, it is a stunning ride through the most beautiful coastline you will see on a bike. The whole town grinds to a halt to support it and thousands of fans line the sidelines shouting out words of encouragement to the riders - truly an amazing event….but more on that in a later post.
This year’s Argus was made special by the entry of none other than Lance Armstrong and his Radio Shack team mate and fellow South African, Daryl Impy. They entered the pro race where they ended up in a 9 man breakaway (unusual for the pro field) where Daryl ended up second and Lance 9th.
Training – Determining your base
Since this was my first ever attempt at a race I knew I had to train properly, have a goal and set my mind to executing day in and day out for around 3 months. I faced two significant challenges:
1. How to train indoors for a 3+ hr race and
2. How to train while commuting between Chicago and India (where I was working)
I never really solved the first problem because it is very difficult to go for longer than 2 hours on an indoor trainer (I think I managed this 3 or 4 times). No matter how many movies you have or how interesting the Discovery Channel is, 2 hours seems to be a limiting factor – at least for me. Fortunately I did manage to travel to South Africa three times during this period, the last of which being for the actual race. So I got to ride the course (well, most of it…part of it is on a highway and not open to cyclists outside of race day) about 3 times. I got to experience every climb except for Wynberg Hill which came at the very start of the race and is arguably the hardest climb. It was great to have a picture in my mind of what the course was going to be like and where the difficult spots might be.
Well, back to the training period. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had decided to follow the Carmichael Time Crunched Cyclist (TCC) training program because it suited my travel situation and it fit in well with my long working hours. Usually I would have 1-1.5 hrs before work every morning to train. I ended up setting up my steady steel steed, a Ritchey Breakaway, together with a fluid trainer in my hotel room and that, unfortunately, would be my place of pain for the next 3 months or so. Riding outdoors in India, while perfect weather conditions, was never in play due to the heavy traffic, road conditions, pedestrians, cows, holes and any other sort of object that could ruin your day.
The Carmichael program basically serves up an 11 week power interval suffer fest where you are basically working out at very high intensity and recovering to do more high intensity work. The main focus is on raising VO2Max power (the sustained power you can put out at the maximum amount of oxygen your cardio-vascular system can produce). As we will see, I believe I suffered a bit by not building a long enough aerobic FTP (Functional Threshold Power – equivalent of your one hour maximum power output as measured by a one hour time trial and other methods). In retrospect, I believe that raising FTP is a significant factor in being successful in races longer than one hour. The Carmichael program is good for criterium races (which normally don’t last longer than 40 minutes at my level) and was excellent for having the power to cope with pack surges and bursting up hills. I really believe it paid off significantly in those specific cases. However, when looking at my Argus ride data I can see significant drop offs in power output after 1, 2 and 3 hours.
The whole TCC program is very simple (I like simple things) and is calibrated off of two 8 minute time trials ridden back to back with a 10 minute rest in between. Honestly, I could never manage the second 8 minute effort as I felt like I had pushed my eyeballs out during the first that I could not face another minute at that high intensity. It’s tough! In fact, for me, at my current state of fitness, I rolled off the bike and lay on my back in the middle of my living room thinking I was going to throw up any second. I recovered…
The power and target heart rates for every exercise in the book is now calculated from this 8 minute effort. So it is quite simple to figure out exactly where you should be at any given point. You can use heart rate as a guide to this but training with power data is so interesting and I think better in that it shows your true output to the back wheel at all times. It also is very good at showing you how you have hopefully improved over time.
So, getting to the raw data and exposing my relatively poor fitness at the time, the chart below shows that second attempt (Jan 16th 2010) into determining my baseline for the TCC program. The first was before I had a PowerTap and was on the hotel bike. I averaged 240W then (November 2009). Click on the chart to see full screen.
There are several things to take away and learn from this chart:
1. Warming up is critical – I cannot stress this more and Carmichael hits it in the book: make sure you warm up with intensity. It seems counter-intuitive but you really should have at least 3 max, all out efforts for about a minute each before you race a criterium (I like to do more now) and before you take on this test. Don’t think that you’re going to use up your energy stores or anything like that. What you are doing is warming up your lactate buffers. You are getting your body prepared for dealing with massive amounts of lactate. If you do not do this, you will get dropped from a crit if it includes several hard surges hard during the first couple of laps.
2. Time Trialing is a skill – You can see here that I started off riding at about 330W. I was feeling good, even smiling. Wow, this is easy. All I have to do is keep this up for 8 minutes. Well pretty soon you start feeling it in your legs and your breathing gets all ragged and you cannot maintain anymore and so you start dropping off. Perhaps you even shift down a gear. It’s hard. It’s an art and only after you’ve done it a few times will you know what your target 8 minute output should be and how to ride to it.
So looking at the graph one can see the warm-up (not so grand in this case) and the 8 minute effort. That effort shows that I was at 255W. This would now be the number that I would be using to calculate all my efforts for the next few weeks of the program.
15 Workouts Later…
So a month later and after only 15 TCC workouts, 305 miles and 18.25 hours on the trainer this is what my 8 minute field test results looked like:
1. 8 min FT: now at 273W which is an 18W increase or 7%
2. VO2Max Power Increase: Looking at the final 1 minute in the first FT, my average HR was 172 bpm (this is my “I’m really hurting range”) and I’m only able to average 227W. Comparing the final minute of the second test my HR averages 170 bpm (two beats lower) but my power output has jumped to 275. This is a great indicator that my power is increasing for a given HR.
Takeaways:
1. Poor warm up – I guess I was still not taking the “Warm up is critical” idea to heart. Shame on me.
2. Pretty steady effort – much better job of setting a target, manageable output and then sticking to it. You can see I picked it up a bit at the end suggesting there was a little more in the tank….actually there was. I’m not sure if it was the sheer elation and euphoria of seeing a 4 week increase of nearly 20W but I rested and then felt good enough to push out 9 Power Intervals (PI) of 275-300W.
3. You can still workout hungover – Yes, it is possible for your body to put in a good effort even if you’re hungover. I admit, I probably had a few too many glasses of wine the night before and was feeling pretty bleak but after the warmup I was ready to get on with business. Now here’s the tricky bit: they say that if you are going to perform these 8 min field tests, that you should always replicate the exact conditions as much as possible in order to get a fair comparison. So this week I will go out and buy a bottle of wine and start the preparations for my next 8 min field test … the night before!
That's it for today...look out for more discussion on aerobic coupling, power profiling and other "stuff".
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