TRAINING SO FAR

TRACKING PAPER ON MY REFRIGERATOR STARTING ON MARCH (WITH ALREADY 796 KMS DONE) . ONLY TWO LONG TRAININGS MISSED AND LOTS OF INTERVALS.

Little more than 2 weeks for the Etape. It is a good moment to look at the training this year and check how it went and compare to last year training. Overall, much more training was done but even more important lots of interval and focused training for climbing.  A very productive training season that will go until September.

Com pouco mais de duas semanas para a Etape du Tour, este é um bom momento para olhar como o treino foi até agora e comparar com o ano passado. No geral, muito mais tempo de treino que ano passado e mais importante, mais treino focado em subidas. Um ano bem produtivo até agora, que vai seguir até Setembro.

First looking at distance ridden this year. On the left side it is 2013 and on the right side it is the distance ridden in 2014. The colors on the bars indicate the heart rate zones from gray to zone 1 with 100 and 148 beats per minute(bpm), blue to zone 2 with 148 to 162 bpm , green to zone 3 with 162 to 174, red for zone 4 with 174 to 180 and purple to zone 5 above 180.

The first thing noticeable is the amount of kilometers are much higher. Partially is due to the weather being so mild this year and I could start riding straight in January. Last year that was not possible due to snow. Also the issues I had with my lower back that stopped me training at all for the whole month of March and limited April. April went down a bit the trend due to one week of sickness that I had to slow down, but the distances are around 700 kilometers per month, which helps a lot on endurance.

The other interesting point is that I’m riding much more on zone 3 (green). Which means my endurance is much better and I can keep pushing the pedals harder for longer. This is actually the area I want to increase more and more because it means good performance in races and not over burning (red zone).

Looking at time, of course the patterns repeats. Much more time on the saddle this year. Not to repeat the same rationale from the distance review, what I would draw from this picture is again that time in zone 3 is higher, but the red and purple is much more noticeable due to the higher number of intervals sessions I’ve being doing. This shows up related to time as the intervals are done on a spinning bike which doesn’t contribute to distance.

This year I decided to focus the training much more on interval training than on commuting. Interval provides a bigger benefit on being able to sustain harder efforts for longer. Commuting gives endurance. And as the good weather helped with longer training distance on weeekends, endurance would be cover there. In comparison, I’ve done so far 23 interval sessions (ranging from 3 x 5 minutes to 1x30 minutes sessions and 2x 20 minutes).  That was a total of 22 hours or hard effort, with average hr of 155 and usually around 170 during the intervals. A total of 14600 kcal were burned. Last year I had done only 8 sessions with a max duration of 6 hours.

That would explain why  I’m feeling much better on the climbs, shorter and steep or longer. A clear evidence is how faster I’ve climbed the Mont Ventoux this year. I managed to reduce the first climb by 30 minutes and the second one by 45 minutes. Also the way I felt on climbing the hills of Limburgs Mooiste with more power and in a controlled way.

And finally, just to even prove that training volume was much bigger this year, the above graph shows the number of activities from January to June. The shade in 2014 is much bigger which means much more training was done this year. I feel ready to it and travelling one week before the race for some quality training on the mountains will help even more.