I blog often about my challenge to get into peak form with so much business travel affecting my training. Whenever I get to 80 CTL, I have some type of work travel which takes me off the bike for a week and typically reduces my CTL by 10 points. I am now back to near 80 CTL, but I’m heading out again on travel, so that’ll drop. I was planning to race River Gorge Crit and Labor Day Crit in the P/1/2 Twilight race, so it may be ugly for me, but I will hopefully do a respectable effort. With cyclocross just around the corner, I’m opting for these crits over longer road races due to my increased weight (gained 8lbs back) and focus on shorter races like cyclocross.
As the year comes to an end, I’m realizing that although some non-travel weeks allow me to get in an extra ride or two, it isn’t always helpful to my training. Whenever I try to add a ride or two in a week, I find that I don’t have enough recovery to go hard. So, all my training that week becomes a mixture of level 3 and level 4. When I have full rest days off the bike between my training days, I can ride much harder for longer. While this isn’t rocket science, I find the interesting part to be the total TSS at the end of the week. I can sometimes get more TSS in a week with fewer days because rest days allow me to crush training efforts. So, I’m considering making a new rule for myself that doesn’t allow me to train consecutive days unless it is a weekend. I have to be flexible with work and business travel, but that is the new plan (actually trained this way last year). I’m guessing that my age is likely causing it to take longer to recover which is a common thread I read everywhere. So, while age may not affect my top end or FTP much at this point, it is impacting my recovery. So, I’ll go with quality over quantity in 2012 and see if I get better results. 2012 plan will remain TNC (FTP intervals), Thurs (Anaerobic Intervals), Sat (Long Miles – Kennesaw Beyond Allatoona Ride), and Sunday (Sweet Spot). The total hours will remain around 8h to 8.5 hours in normal weeks, and it will drop down to 4 – 5 hours in travel weeks and often less. This is not how someone should train who wants to improve at P/1/2 races in 2012, but that is the plan, and I’m sticking with it…..
