A week of training with Paddy

I’d come off a hard weekend of lots of miles and some threshold efforts, and despite consuming my body weight in carbohydrate rich food about three times over, my legs were still feeling very reluctant to get moving again.
Each day I end up walking quite a sizeable distance to get to the bus stop, then from the train station to the college, then back again at the end of the day. So, once I finally get home, any kind of physical exertion is the last thing on my mind. However, when there’s training to be done, there’s training to be done, so after a bite to eat, I pretty much just have to get on with it. Early nightfalls mean that during the week pretty much all of my sessions are indoors, on a turbo trainer or rollers – not the most mentally engaging activity in the world, staring at a stem for two hours (much like Chris Froome). 

Rest day! This means I pretty much replace real cycling with watching videos and reading about bikes. I live such a diverse life!

This session was bloody hard. After having a nice rest on Tuesday it was time for some speed and power work. So up went the turbo (as good as rollers are, they don’t really work for sprinting – you’ll just fall off), and on the computer went the 2012 XC Eliminator world championships. 

The session I was doing was a real mix of flat out sprints and longer anaerobic efforts, with a series of intervals, all with 1 minute of rest in between – 15 sec, 30 sec, 1 min, 2 min, 3 min. Once you’ve done this there’s 5 mins of soft pedalling rest period, then it’s back down the set, starting at 3 minutes this time. The power profile should end up looking like the one shown below, which actually was from this session.
Safe to say, this absolutely killed my legs, so I proceeded to consume a lot of food and fall asleep on the floor.

Not a good day in terms of training. The intervals on Wednesday had broken me to the point that I had to have a rest halfway up the stairs on the way to the top floor – I am starting to loathe maths lessons not because of the subject, I enjoy maths, but because of the high altitude location of the classroom.
That evening I had 1 and a half hours of zone 3 training planned, but I knew as soon as I got on the bike that it just wasn't going to happen. So instead, I went to bed, with the plan of getting up at 5 with some fresher legs and giving it a better go. Not before some top quality porridge refuelling though!

So, the plan to get up early and train fell through, I ended up sleeping through my alarm and nearly missing the bus! So I had to move onto plan C – use the spin bikes in the college gym to catch up with my training during my 2 morning free periods.
I always love getting into the gym early, it means I get the choice of radio station, and I get to see people filter in and out, each with their own way of doing things. Seriously, too many people do no warm up whatsoever.
So after I’d attached my Garmin to the bars of the spin bike, firmly asserting my position as that weird person in the gym that morning, I got on with the steady zone 2 session, slowly making a little pool of sweat on the floor.
The plan for the evening was to pick up with the normal training schedule, and do 2 hours of zone 2 (again, to help fix my shoddy aerobic fitness) on the rollers. However, the bus put a stop to my ambitions, arriving at the train station half an hour late, so I got home tired and unenthusiastic, and went straight to sleep again!

So the plan for the weekend was to catch up with the training I’d missed, and do what I already had scheduled for the two days. So this meant 8 and a quarter hours of relatively low intensity miles.
The trails had finally dried out enough to be fast and not worry the race bike’s highly strung drivetrain too much, so I decided it was perfect to go out and do some mountain biking. My ride took me out into the depths of Ipswich, taking in the best bits of singletrack I have at my disposal. This was brilliant fun, and I got back in time for a slightly bizarre lunch of rice pudding, rice cakes and pears. 

Once refuelled, I got the road bike ready and headed out for another 3 hours of steady-ish training. My still legs felt quite fresh after the morning, maybe even too fresh. I was climbing out of power zone 2 too often, so at the 1.5 hour mark I decided to knock myself back a bit by doing a flat out FTP interval. That did the trick, and after that I couldn't get above zone 2 without my legs screaming out in a lactic acid protest. The ride was a success though, and meant I caught up with my training schedule. 

That evening my Dad had helped me out cutting my overly long fork steerer tube, and fitting some nice light Mt Zoom parts, including some lovely 710mm ultralight bars that are new to the Mt Zoom range.

Sunday - the traditional day of rest and recovery. Not for mountain bikers! Today I had 3 hours steady-ish planned, and naturally I wanted to test out my new bars, so I got the train down to Colchester and headed out for a mountain bike ride with some mates. While this would normally be pretty relaxed, the amount of riding that I’d done the day before had left me struggling to keep pace at some points! We got a great ride in, with only a few muddy patches, then went to the pub for a nice lunch in the sun. While this may not sound like a serious training ride, it was pretty much exactly what I was supposed to do, and riding unfamiliar trails with the locals is always interesting.

So this week was quite hard, and I got some really good quality training in, with only a few mishaps! I hope you enjoyed reading about what I get up to, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the other guys post over the coming weeks.

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