ARNHEM AGAIN

75 kms | 2 h 58 m | avg speed 25.1 kms/h | 1.636 kcal | 148 avg bpm

Went back to Arnhem today with a colleague to do more or less the same ride from last week. Good ride with good push in the hills around Posbank. A cold day with temperatures of 4 degrees and wind. All in all, a good day in the saddle and I just crossed the first thousand kilometers ridden this year way sooner than in the previous years.

Voltei hoje à Arnhem com um colega para fazer mais ou menos a mesma volta da semana passada. Um bom treino com bom esforço nas subidas ao redor do Posbank. Um dia frio com 4 graus e vento forte. Mas um bom dia de pedal e eu acabei de passar dos mil quilômetros pedalados neste ano. Bem mais cedo do que eu consegui nos anos anteriores.

The good thing about training with only one other person is that there is no place to hide. No wheel to suck. You need to push all the way by your own power. We went first thru the flat areas against the wind in the end of zone 2 heart rate with a good effort. We kept the speed around 32 and 33 kms/h and pushed hard on the rolling hills. The head wind pushed us back but we managed to take over a couple of groups, which always makes you feel good.

After that we went thru to the hills and climbed a couple of them. I felt good and managed to do them in a controlled way. Push the heart rate to 178 bpm in some of them. Posbank is always a hard one but it was good to tackle it with nobody to keep pace or protect me from the wind, but still keep the pace steady all the way to the top.

From there we did a couple of hills and even discovered a new one. The one in the picture. Small but steep and beautiful. Good training to keep the effort high for the duration of the ride.

TRAINING LOAD

This week I learned a bit more about how to read the training load and how to shape my training based on that. The graph above show the effort since I started training in January. The blue line show how I’m gaining fitness. Right now it is around 72 points. The target is to reach 100 points. With the interval training during the week and long riders in the weekend, the line will be moving upwards slowly.

The top green line is the representation of fatigue setting after the stress of the training. The number that shows in the graph is how much physical stress my body is under at the start point of the ride. When I started riding today, because I was resting for two days, the value was in –13 points. On Thursday, when I finished the interval training, the value was around –30. The target here is to keep training but not let it go below –40 or –45. After that I run the risk of getting too tired and getting sick.

The other important reading, or the most important, is the trimp points. They are a calculation of the effort after all the distance and heart rate effort are put together. I’ve gained 324 trimp points with the ride today. My target is to ride accumulate between 500 and 600 trimp points per week to get to the 100 training load points I set for myself. And that is my target now, keep the training mode to gain the 500 trimp points with twice week interval training, mountain bike rides on wednesdays and long rides on Sundays. And keep an eye on the lines to see if they keep on the right trends.