Monday, February 18, 2008

Spending some CTL

Moving into SMSP or V02 work when training in block form causes you to give up some CTL or chronic traning load - what you've done over the previous 42 days. CTL can be viewed as how long you can go hard. Up until February 1, my focus has been building CTL with the idea that as I move into racing season, I would start the backward slide until I started another build to peak later in the season. The plan prior to switching coaches was to build the CTL to over 100 by April as this would bring into racing season with great form and fitness. My goal now is not to focus on CTL but rather raise my MSP - Maximum sustainable power as high as possible as he with the highest power output wins the race. Just ask Fabian Cancellara with his 620+ W average power for the TOC Prologue.

My volume has been cut in half but the intensity has been raised by 30+%. This week, my workouts consist of:

Monday - 2 sets of 4 @ 3 min on 3 min off with 5 min rest between sets. Target power for the 3 minutes should be 315W or higher.

Tuesday - 2 sets of 5 @ 2 min on 2 min off with 5 min rest between sets. Target power for the 2 minutes should be 345W or higher.

Wednesday - 10 @ 1 min on 1 min off at 385W with 5 min rest before starting lead out intervals of 4 sets of 8 @ 15 sec on 15 sec off with 1 min rest between sets.

Off Thursday and Friday with a 1 hour Zone 2 ride on Saturday. The 3 day V02 block starts all over again on Sunday.

First race is March 1st - 30 mile road race that will be won on the last climb prior to heading down the back stretch towards the finish line. All of this V02 work has me thinking about going out on a solo flyer or possibly take the approach of non stop attacks. Not looking for hardware or race results but seeing how I stack up against others and if my form is progressing as planned.

2 comments:

Rich W said...

You may want to check out this post by A.C. on the google wattage list...

http://tinyurl.com/3d59gd

intervals of 1-3min have a high anaerobic component...and are thought to be sub optimal for eliciting VO2.

my bread and butter VO2 intervals are 6x5' (5' rest) at 115% of FTP.

Scott said...

Rich,

Thanks for the comment. I see what you're saying and will keep that in mind when I re-evaluate my season at the end of the year. As I mentioned in a previous, I started with Hunter creating a pure block plan for me and for a Cat 4 racer in my second year back on a bike, he had me doing weeks of 12-17 hours from November to January with a steady diet of Tempo/SST/L4. With a full time job and 2 kids, it was tough getting in the time even with me working out of the home. At the end of January, I started feeling overtrained and quite burned out and just not satisfied with my results to date.

I decided instead of paying Hunter to build me a plan every 12 weeks, I would use that money to hire a coach and actually thought about using the guy in NC that LL uses (we have a mutual friend at ML) but decided to sign on with Dave Morris. For some reason, his approach makes sense to me and being a student of the AC/HA plan/philosophy since 9/06, I felt I was ready for a change.