The Plan

As planned, I sat down Saturday morning to plan The Plan. In just over six weeks' time, daylight savings time will arrive with the beginning days of April and the group training rides outside will start in earnest. Cycling is all about maximizing power at LT, so my goal is to boost my P(LT) as much as possible before those first rides. Unless you're the biggest fish in the pond, group riding frequently forces you to push well above your LT to keep up. Early season miles with that sort of intensity are a recipe for disaster, or at least a recipe for inefficient training. With that in mind, I want to build my LT with many roller miles now, so that I'm more able to stay within my desired zones when the group rides start. Six weeks. I laid out a six week plan that includes many long intervals around LT, with some shorter intervals at slightly above LT. Throw in some muscle tension rides after the first week to get the climbing muscles used to having force on them and some long tempo rides and I should be all set. Well, at least I'll be far better off than I've ever been at the start of any previous season. My first official ride from the plan had me doing 4x10 minute intervals around P(LT) with 10 minutes of rest in between. All in all, I was on the rollers for 80 minutes and it was hard, but I was able to hold my desired wattage fairly well until the last few minutes of the last interval when it became a real struggle, so I think the effort was just about right.

I met most of the other guys on the new Colavita-Spokepost.com CNY Region team at a meeting on Saturday. It's a good laid-back group with some 2s, several 3s, and a few 4s. We started hammering out a preferred schedule of races, and it looks like it's going to be a fun season.

I neglected the drywall sanding I should have been doing in the bathroom over the weekend in favor of building speaker stands for the family room. I had been looking at buying some stands when it occurred to me that they were pretty darn simple construction and I could probably build my own. I snagged some nice poplar pieces on sale at a local big-box home store going out of business and borrowed time on the in-laws' table saw and router. I sanded everything down, drilled holes for the screws, assembled the pieces, sprayed on the primer, sanded the primer smooth and wiped them down with tack cloth, then finished up with several coats of gloss black spray paint and some rubber stick-on feet. With the last few sprays, the paint can which had been giving me trouble really started to clog up and there are a couple areas where the paint looks a little spotty. But, all in all, they came out pretty well for my first "furniture" project.

Sue and I finished off the weekend Sunday by celebrating the first official evening of her week's vacation with cooking up a fine dinner and tackling a bottle of our favorite pinot noir. We're both lightweights when it comes to drink, so we were laughing pretty hard by the end of dinner and my head is still reeling a bit this morning. I'll clear it tonight by punishing myself with deadlifts, squats, and some more LT intervals.

See you on the road.