Well the big event of the month was my trip to Calpe. This was a great week with excellent riding, company, weather, hotel, food and training. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting a pre or post season cycling trip.
This ticked off the first of my targets for April – I managed 1,195 TSS against a target of 1,000. This came with 21 hours of riding, 320 miles and 21,300 feet of climbing – an awesome week.
As planned, Calpe gave me a good boost to my CTL even though I had lower TSS weeks before and after it. I closed out March with a CTL of 72 and increased this to 84 by the end of April. I’m not sure this will rise much now for the rest of the season as I’ll be trading overall fitness for race fitness and some tapering for freshness.
One slightly unexpected outcome of the Calpe trip was that I put on 2kg. The food at Suitopia hotel was excellent and it was all “help yourself” so I certainly didn’t under-fuel. We also had a few beers each evening which I’ve not been doing at home. My weight had dropped to 71.4kg but went into the 73’s whilst I was away and is now at 72.6kg so I achieved and then failed my second April target of getting below 72kg.
I also have failed again to get an improved sprint although to be fair, I haven’t been training it.
One session that Roy has given me repeatedly over the last couple of years as I hit the sharpening phase is one minute repeats with 5 minute recoveries. I’ve just looked back and last year there were 8 x 1 min efforts with recovery at endurance level. This year he is prescribing 6 x 1 min efforts but with recovery at Tempo. In the first set I did this year, I averaged just over 400W in the efforts and hence my April target of improving this to 450W. I all but achieved this in last week’s attempt (445W) and perversely am looking forward to having another bash later this week. I’ve looked back and the best average I managed a year ago was 491W so I’d like to beat that so I’ve set it as one of my May targets.
My final target was to get my max 5 minute power to 350W. I achieved this early in the month when I had a bash up my favourite local hill for such efforts – Edge Hill (No. 136 in Simon Warren’s 100 Climbs) and scored a 362W.
So overall a good month. I’m a way off my best, which was in the second half of 2021 but I’m still improving. Only time will tell how far I can get.
My first race is looming – it is a crit on the Stourport Cycle Circuit on 20th May and then my “A” event, the Tour of Cambridgeshire on 4th June when I hope to qualify for the Gran Fondo World Championships. I’ve been watching the results of races that I would normally have raced and wondering how I would have fared.
OK, so on to targets for May:
- Weight below 71.5kg
- Improve my 1 min repeat intervals from 445W to 500W
- Do some “bash” chaingangs with my local club
I think that is sufficient. It will be an interesting month.