Hi

VeloTron

More tempo riding today, 76-90% of FTP and felt very comfortable, I just wonder if my FTP has risen just a few watts but it's not the time to be testing now and as long as I'm not going backwards that's just fine. I used to fall into the trap of always wanting to be elevating my wattages but I'm now of the view that the most important thing, for many riders, is not the wattage you can produce but how long you can produce it for that matters.

It's very like the situation where someone wants to be able to ride at 20mph which is actually very easy, for a short period of time. However, it's a whole lot more difficult to ride 20 miles in one hour, it's all down to sustainable power output. I'm concentrating not on producing big wattages but on producing decent wattages for long period of time, that's what will get me to Paris.

Instead of doing another FTP test at the moment I'm planning to do some blood lactate tests at the ends of some of my "standard" ergotrainer sessions. The idea behind this is to ensure that when I do say a sweet spot session that my blood lactate is indeed up around the 4mMol level by the end of the session, that way I can be pretty sure that I should be working hard enough to still be stimulating muscular adaptations. If the level was much below this I would need to be increasing the loads for these sessions.

Tomorrow's session looks as if it is the ideal place to start this process, I have a 45 minutes of power session scheduled which won't be much fun but will provide me with a good benchmark test. I'll be riding in my sweet spot for around 45 minutes with no recovery periods and a supra-threshold surge every 3 minutes. This session should put my blood lactate well above the 4mMol level and I'd be surprised if it was much below 6mMol to be honest judging by how my legs feel after these sessions! We shall see.

ATL: 61.8 CTL: 64.6 TSB: 3.3

[Uploaded 12/01/2010 16:14:28]