[JEP Coaching Scholarship] Report for Week 12 (ending 2012-03-04)

Weekly Overview:

The weather is improving! Training continues to move toward race prep with some shorter, higher intensity workouts. Dieting is getting to be a challenge. I seem to have settled on 180 lbs. I can lose another 5 lbs, and have in the past, but doing so involves being unhappy and being unproductive at work. We'll see what happens.

This was the last week of scheduled Crossfit workouts. I'll continue to have strength maintenance assigned through the season. To this end, I purchased a kettle bell.

Workouts:
02-27 Monday
Prescribed: Day off, rollers option.
Actual: 1h easy spin on rollers in the morning.

02-28 Tuesday
Prescribed: 1h Defiance Crossfit (last session) plus neuromuscular sprint efforts: 2 sets of (15 sec all out, 2 minutes rest) x 5.
Actual: Last day of Crossfit covered move to strength maintenance. Without a gym, I can still do lunges, step ups, planks, squats, and stretching at home. The kettle bell purchase means that I can do kettle bell deadlifts, kettle bell swings, and Turkish get-ups as well. Sprint efforts were okay but not awesome. I think the highest power I saw was 1375W, which is lower than I did the prior month.

02-29 Wednesday (Leap Day!)
Prescribed: 1h30m Z2 ride with 30 min stretching session.
Actual: As prescribed. Ride was on rollers. Did stretching right after rollers ride.

03-01 Thursday
Prescribed: 1h strength maintenance session plus FTP rollers session: 4 x (2.5min Z4 on 0.5min off for 10 minutes).
Actual: Did strength maintenance in AM. Had to improvise weight for lunges and step ups but it was okay. Unable to do prescribed ride in evening, punted to next day.

03-02 Friday
Prescribed: Nothing assigned (!?). Checked later in the day and saw prescribed day off with optional rollers ride.
Actual: Did Z4 effort from prior day. Had a very good workout, punting was definitely the correct step.

03-03 Saturday
Prescribed: Spectrum ride plus 1x Canada Road TT effort, totaling 3 hours, plus 30min stretching session.
Actual: As prescribed. Sat in on Spectrum ride. Riding with a group is a good refresher for upcoming races. First Canada Road TT in a while, broke 25 minutes on road bike on Beat The Clock course not doing anything special. Canada is always a hard TT course for me. I applied a lesson from flight training: the idea of "establishing" a climb or a descent. The road changes but it can be broken down into about 1 minute long sections of constant grade. Thinking this way helped me better pace the effort. Saw a bunch of AV people out today.

03-04 Sunday
Prescribed: Day off.
Actual: Los Altos Hills ride with a friend from out of town. Super low key, just enjoying the nice weather while it lasts.

Weekly summary:
Time: 13 h 38 min
Distance: 191 miles
TSS: 1019

(Distance and TSS only incorporate rides for which I have power data.)

I've copied this report to my blog at http://bikefleet.blogspot.com/, where you can also find past updates, race reports, and more!

Thanks for reading.

--Jose