Monday, October 18, 2010

24 Hour Rule

Learned this from football coaches. After a game (race) you're allowed the first 24hours to be happy, or disappointed with the result. At the end you analyze what happened. Then put the emo away and go on to the next event. Good rule.

Analysis. The sketch is pretty good. My normalized power is +2w over my FTP. It's usually significantly below my FTP, meaning I've been leaving a lot on the trail. Having an NP this close to FTP means I paced this race well. Not going significantly over my ability keeps me from blowing up, not going significantly under means I'm not toodling.

This was the tail of two races. My HR trace tells a lot. For the first half of the race my HR stays high. But distinctly, it falls as my legs tire. I *think* this indicates my aerobic fitness is good, but my legs fatigued. IOW my cardio-vascular could sustain effort, but my muscular endurance couldn't. The power peaks continued to get smaller throughout the race. This makes sense given that my training refocused on aerobic fitness the last 6weeks.



My HR follows the elevation trace almost exactly for the second portion of the race. I used the downhills to recover, instead of being able to attack them and milk them for speed. I needed to do this, but it would better if I had something left in the legs for the DHs.



More indication of muscular endurance deficiency. Let's look at some hill climbs. The dashed line is my FTP. Each time up the hill, my power level starts out good, but quickly tapers off. This effect is consistent across the race. Improving my ability to crank up the power for say 3min bursts would really help my performance. Losing some weight would help a bunch, too.



None of this is a surprise. It is confirmation. The majority of my training focused on aerobic fitness. Indeed has improved. I've done a bit of power development, but I haven't stick with it. I need to. Also need to improve the efficacy of my training in that regime. In due time. Still need to develop the aerobic fitness some more. As I get close to the spring season, I'll revisit this data when building my plan.

Gawsh I feel like a nerd now!

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