Jack had a cycling accident last week and passed away without regaining consciousness.
Jack was an avid track rider and it was a rare evening at the track when he was not there.
Jack, we'll miss you .
CTV Article
Province Newspaper
This article by Andy Coggan in cycling forums:
Sorry for the really long post....
provides an excellent counter to the mantra of planning for "time off" to recover.
To summarize planning for time off leads to loss of fitness. The optimal plan is to always optimize your workouts to do the maximum amount of work that you can without over training. As that leads to the optimal adaptation for your sport.
This can be done on a daily basis, if you don't feel up to the planned ride then stop. Don't over extend.
More importantly by monitoring TSB (Training Stress Balance, effectively CTL-ATL (Chronic Training Load and Acute Training Load)) you can plan your workouts to not get to an over training situation.
Especially for us older racers, any loss of fitness (for example over winter) leads to a long period of negative TSB where we try and get fitness back.
I'm going to try and follow this advice later this year. The last two years November and December have been bad for weather in Vancouver and I have effectively gone down to CTL of about 30-40 (3-4 hours riding a week! mostly at the track).
While the track racing was fun in the fall series while coasting the CTL down to 30, the winter series was exceedingly painful and depressing (trailing the B's, not being able to keep up in points races..!!) while building CTL back up.
This year I hope to have a CTL of about 100 by fall (currently 85) and I'm going to try and maintain at least a CTL of 70 over winter by training on the Computrainer. This should allow me to enjoy both the fall and winter Wednesday night races and be in shape for the Escape Velocity Spring series in March.
Waited until evening hoping the roads would dry out, only to have it start raining almost the minute I headed out... so I ended up doing intervals on the local hills.
Normalized power for best 60 minutes was 320, TSS 106.5, with IF 1.032.
Almost an NP buster ride (> 1.06 IF for one hour...) Although it is possible that doing an NP buster simply means that your FTP is set to low.
New best time for Ryder: 11:15
New best average power for this distance (359 watts) as well.
This course is hard to get right, you have to violate the normal TT rules ("Don't start out to hard..."). First it's very short so you have to go for some anaerobic contribution. Second there are four different sets of hills, you start on a hill and finish on a hill.
The start is about 400m of 1.5% grade. You have to push hard to get up it and get up to speed. But push too hard and you may blow up.. I did my best 20 sec there with average watts at 605..
The longest hill is in the middle (Westbrooke Mall). About 1.3km at 1.4 % grade. Best 2 minutes with average watts at 382.
The last climb is possibly the worst as it is the last 700m. Only about 9m of actual climbing, but you first have to get around a 90 degree right turn and then get back up to speed as the road turns up just a bit. And (assuming you have paced things correctly) you are just about to run out of gas, at, the, end, of, the, next, no, the, next, hill... Best 1 minute, 453 watts.
Tried out a set of Bontrager Aeolus 6.5's with Veloflex Record tubulars. Possibly a bit faster than my Bontrager Race X-Lite Aero's with Bontrager X-Lite 21mm clinchers. I did take 10 seconds off two weeks ago. At the very least they are not slowing me down (like the Zipp 404 / Tufo S33 combination.)
Ryder 8K TT
I did the Neaves Road Training TT course (5k out and 5k back) four times for a total of 40km. Moderate 5k wind from south, so average speed was down. Also the seven turn-arounds contributed to overall time. But the emphasis was not on speed but to get a one hour constant effort validate FTP.
Final result was 311 watts average.
This is up 10 watts from last November when I did a one hour test at the Burnaby Velodrome (302 average watts.)
URL: Neaves Rd 8K TT
Ryder 8K TT Combined unofficial results for 2007, Google Docs spreadsheet:
Ryder 8K Combined Results
Official results are at:
Chicks Ryder 8K Official Results
This is our monthly (summer only) club TT.
Nice weather, 14:11 (8 seconds faster than best time last year.)
VeloVets 10K TT
Almost a minute off my best time from last year. This training ride is a rolling course along Barnet Highway with a 2km 3.3% climb to the finish.
Barnet 10K TT Training Ride
Only three in my age group, but one was Mike Secov who is currently leading the BCMCA standings for my catagory. So getting past him in the final sprint was something. The sprint was the both the peak 30 seconds (544 watts average) and 10 seconds (746 watts average.) Very flat with a long (2km) approach. With 200m marker. Treated it like a track sprint. Followed Mikes wheel until 200m, then attacked. This got me 1st in age group and 4th overall.
There was a slight situation at about 400m, Dave Mercer mis-shifted and his chain (apparantly) jammed, launching him into the air about 2 feet. Right in the middle of the field towards the front. I was following Mike at this point and we went around to the left.
The 40 year olds had caught us on the start of the third (of four) lap at the top of the short but snappy climb. Almost got past us, but Mike managed to get on them. So I had to go too. Painful.
The same hill on the last lap was worse. Best (worst) 1 minute for the day (400 watts average).
Weather was good, reasonably cool with broken clouds. Course was clean and dry.
Dove Creek RR
2nd in age catagory (very small field though...) but 5th overall. So not too bad.
Mike Secov was about 22:57, Duane Martindale 23:09.
Dove Creek is 16km course with about 60m of climbing over the first 5km, 3km along Island Highway, then small drops for 4km, and finish with 4km effectively flat (with two 90 degree turns.)
Because of the initial climb this course has to be attacked for the first 5km.
Normally this course would run very fast in the last 4km, but today there was a significant southerly wind. This made the Island Highway portion much faster at the expense of the last 4km. Which meant you had to save enough for the last 4km to keep your speed up there.
This is shown in the chart, peak 10 minutes is the first 6 km (345 watts average). And the last 3km is the peak 5 minutes (350 watts average).
Overall I managed to do 333 watts average for the 23:15.
Dove Creek 16K TT
Anmore Tour today in 96 minutes. This is a hard training ride that alternates between hard up, fast flat bits and some downhill to catch your breath. 40km plus with 1200 meters of climbing.
This takes about five minutes off last years best time.
Anmore Tour
Once again my low anaerobic numbers (5 second and 1 minute power) got me dropped early on as the young Cat 4/5 guys sprinted up the hills on the Atomic course.
Ended up doing a couple of laps with Albert Souza, then off the back as the girls finished.
Part climb before getting dropped
Peak 30s (534 watts):
Duration: 0:30
Distance: 221 m
Elevation Gain: 22 m
Elevation Loss: 0 m
Grade: 10.0 % (22 m)
Min Max Avg
Power: 309 833 534 watts
Duration: 2:16I can do that a couple of times, but slow down considerably after the first few times as it is too close to my maximum numbers.
Work: 50 kJ
TSS: 5.8 (intensity factor 1.235
Distance: 1.103 km
Elevation Gain: 49 m
Elevation Loss: 0 m
Grade: 4.4 % (49 m)
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 833 370 watts
