67 kms | 2 h 44 m | 25 km/h avg | wind force 5
Finally a full week of training done with a mix of high intensity training and one ride which was supposed to be endurance training with low heart rate, but it quickly turned into a battle against the wind and a heart rate going thru the roof just to keep moving ahead. The total in the week was 5 hours trained with 2 sessions of intervals on Monday and Wednesday and a longish ride Saturday of 3 hours. This is still 3 hours short of the indicated 8 hours of training per week for events such as an ultra-endurance cycling race. The agenda will have to be slightly adjusted adding one extra hour on the week and two extra hours on the weekend.
The ride on Saturday was absolutely crazy. Left home and decided to ride in the direction of a small island in the Northeast of Amsterdam, called Marker. It is a nice beautiful place with open fields and small wooden houses. But I didn't count on a crazy wind coming at force 5 and the route put me on a constant cross wind for the full 3 hours. On the way to the the wind was cross but sometimes helping, but on the 30 kms back which I decided to take a different route, it was either headwind os slightly from the right. It was a real hard training, pushing and pushing against it just to keep a meager 22 kms / h and sometimes going down even to 18 kms / h.
At some point I passed a guy on a race bike hiding behind a woman on a normal electric bike. Later, 3 cyclists passed me on a comical slow motion way, advancing inch my inch and everybody having a blast! Há, blast of wind... not funny. It was really brutal and I got home completely empty and a bit dizzy from all the wind gushing thru my ears! I guess it was a good mental resilience training...
PERFORMANCE - Looking at Golden Cheetah, the software I use to track my training load and how my fitness level is progressing, my performance seems to be going in the right direction. I recorded every training and ride into my Garmin or Tacx and then load into the app. It calculates training volume and based on that your fitness level and fatigue levels which I use to see if the training is going in the right direction and when I need to rest and recover. The graph shows that steady increase in fitness, going around 32 points on Sunday. The higher it gets the harder is to gain fitness but at this moment is pretty low, so I have a lot to increase. The goal is reach around 100 points by August.
The other part of the load is the amount of fatigue one is accumulating (stress balance = fatigue) and that should be used to indicated when to continue training and when to rest and recover. At the end of Saturday, my stress balance was around -24 points, which was a good result of the week but borderline when I need to rest. Indication is at any time below -30, the next day should be a rest / recovery day. Which is exactly what I did on Monday.
All of this is based on Trimp points (See below definition). This is a great way to check how much stress you are accumulating and how much risk of burnout / injury one has.
A good solid week of training and some good preparations in the equipment front. Some decisions made in terms of water system, lights and bags. But that is a new post for later in the week.
TRIMP is an abbreviation of TRaining IMPulse. It was originally defined as the product of training volume, measured in minutes, and training intensity, measured as average heart rate (beats per minute or bpm). For example, 50 min at 140 bpm TRIMP = 50 × 140 = 7000.
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