40k Time Trial

Two milestones I'd like to hit in my multisport fitness are doing a 40km time trial on the bike in under an hour, and running a 5k under 20 minutes. Neither of these feats are all that extraordinary in and of themselves, but they've given me good goals to shoot for within each sport. Once my triathlon season was over, it was time to focus on other goals, and these are what I've set out for myself.

Like last year, I plan on doing a run focus this fall. That will culminate in some sort of race. Meanwhile swimming, when I start up again, will be just once a week and biking will be for pleasure only - no more grinding away on the trainer in the basement and no more suffering through intervals. So... now's the time for me to take a stab at the 40km time trial, while I'm still carrying some bike fitness from the tri season.

My parents and in-laws live in Perth, and as luck would have it, the stretch of road between Perth and Franktown is perfect for time trialing. Wide, paved shoulders, no major hills, pavement in good conditions, and just over 20km long. This is where the Almonte Bicycle club does their 40km time trials, and that's how I discovered this route.

So on saturday I set out to try to go sub-1 hour. I knew this was going to be hard, but if nothing else would give me a feel for what a 1 hour threshold effort really feels like and be a good learning experience I can apply to subsequent efforts. The result was a pretty-damn-close 1:01:22 - I made several errors that collectively cost me enough time that I feel like I probably could break one hour if I made another run at it. Not this year though. It's onto my run focus.

Interesting data from this endeavor though. I graphed speed vs. power for this TT and my 3 races this year, and it looks like this:

You can see that I pushed a lot more power during the TT (nice not to have to run afterwards), and this translated into a lot more speed. Interesting that my speed was pretty similar in each of the 3 races. The biggest difference was Smiths Falls vs. Nationals, which produced a variance of only 0.6 km/hr, on a power difference of 20 watts. I pushed another 20 watts higher than this in my TT, but saw an increase in speed of 2.5 km/hr. I attribute this to some different choices in apparel as well as being more diligent holding an aerodynamic position (something I struggled with in races this year).

The impact of aerodynamics is shown even more starkly when I looked at a ride I did earlier in the week with my normal training set-up rather than my race set-up. I did a 20km sort-of-TT (not really going all-out but seeing what kind of wattage I could hold) and averaged 37.4 km/hr on 246W. Compare that with the 40k TT where I averaged 39.2 km/hr on 237W. So almost 2 km/hr faster on nearly 9 less watts. Gotta work on holding that head position better in races next year.

Looking back on some season stats: Part 1

While this season was a bit of a bust for me, I still learned a few things that will (hopefully) help me out next season. One of those things was what sort of tapering works best for me. Unfortunately there's no "one-size-fits-all" approach to tapering for a race. Some people seem to need a longer taper, other respond best to a short taper. Some race best on only a slight reduction in training load, while others need more. There's some basic principles behind the concept, but it does seem as though each person has to do a little trial and error and see what's most effective for them.

This year I used Golden Cheetah to track my bike fitness. I could have used it for my run training too, but I didn't. Here's what my Performance Management Chart looked like for the season:

I've highlighted each of the 3 races I did and where my Training Stress Balance was. You can see that Smiths Falls was a lower priority race for me, so I didn't taper all that much. My form was definitely on the upswing, but I still had a negative TSB. Since Nationals was my "A" race, I did a full-on taper, and was well into positive TSB territory. For Brockville I had an even higher TSB - this wasn't by design, but I had a family trip down to the Philadelphia that week that really impacted my ability to train.

So what does this chart tell me? It's hard to really compare bike performances in each race, since I had difference power targets that I wanted to hit in each. I think the best indicator is actually how well I ran - the more bike-fit I was, the more I should have had left in the tank for the run. And my bike taper is pretty similar to my run taper. So where was my best run performance? Nationals, by far. Not only did I average my best pace of the season there, but I did it on what was definitely the hardest run course. So if this is a reflection of my taper, then the answer to the question "what type of taper works best for me?" is the classic Goldilocks answer of "not too little, not too much". My TSB wasn't high enough for Smiths Falls (not that it was supposed to be at that point in the season) but was way too high for Brockville.

So next season I'll make sure that I plan my "A" race around a TSB that is positive, but only a little, probably somewhere between 3 and 6. What and when that "A" race will be I haven't decided. I'm still pondering next season, and am weighing a few different options. Stick with the short-course stuff? Try something longer? Make another run at Nationals? Try some different races further away?

A disappointing end to a disappointing season

My race report of the Thousand Islands Olympic race is up. Not only did I not meet my goals for the race, but I had to DQ myself due to a mistake made on the run course. After the cancellation of Perth, and the swim-cancelled National Championship, it's almost fitting that this is how my season finished.

I take a few positives from this race in that I would have at least cracked the Top 5 overall, and I did learn a few more things about what type of tapering strategies work (and which don't work) for me.

As of now I'm done with triathlon for this year. I've got a few other goals I want to work on - I'd like to officially break 20 minutes for a 5K run, and am toying with running a half-marathon this fall; I'd also like to try my hand at time-trialing on the bike, perhaps taking a crack at a 1 hour 40km TT.