The Next Step

Leadville was the last event I had scheduled for 2009 and now that it’s over the question is, “where does my training go from here, what’s my next step?”

Over the last couple of weeks I had a chance to sit down and reflect on 2009 and do some goal setting for 2010. I really enjoyed my focused bike training for the State TT and felt I made great progress. My training for Leadville was less focused and I floundered a bit. I’d like to take that same focused, power based, training I had for the TT and turn it towards being a competitive Cat4 Road bike racer and maybe even start picking up some upgrade points by the end of the 2010 season.  Of course, if I have the training time available, I want to go back to Leadville and kick some butt there too!  The problem is, training for the 2010 season here in Utah won’t really start till December and that’s 13 weeks away, so what do I do in the interim?

I mentioned in my Leadville postmortem that I had been reading Chris Carmichael’s new book “The Time Crunched Cyclist”. It’s a great book for cyclists like me who find themselves on extremely tight schedules, but still want to ride competitively. The book has an eight week power based training program that is designed to bring you to peak fitness for 4 to 8 weeks of racing. According to the book, the program increased the CTS athletes Threshold Power by more than 10% over the eight week program and they were able to maintain that fitness for several weeks of racing. If the program works for me, that would be exactly what I’m looking for. But, before I base my whole 2010 season on a training program, it’s probably a good idea to make sure it will actually work for me.

So, there’s my next eight weeks. In the next couple of days I’ll do some testing to establish a baseline and figure out my current power levels. While I won’t post the training plan, that belongs to Chris Carmichael and CTS, I’ll try and post my weekly progress along with my before and after power numbers.

Train Hard and Smart,

Pat