March 2012

Boonen attacks on pave in the 2012 E3 Harelbeke   

Anticipation building... you can tell it's nearly race season as the chatter on the Speed Theory Forum has definitely picked in recent weeks!
That and steelhill.tv has been streaming the European spring classics! Boonen is looking to be in top form!
Kind of surprised I haven't seen much of my man Thor yet, but I expect to hear his name a lot more during the Paris-Roubaix in a week or so.

Weather has mostly held up this month, with a few opportunities to get in some nice outdoor rides, but enough crappy days to force me inside to get in some solid, focused training sessions.

Some noteworthy events this month:

Minor fracture in my toe. Has reduced me to running only once a week as a tester. Each time it feels fine when I start, but equally painful around the 5km mark.

Kieran's swim class ended last weekend and next session is full, so between that and my Inglewood pool shut down for renos I won't be putting in my swim time in the near future either.

First ride through Bragg Creek.

Couple of testing rides, where I managed to "move the chains" on all 4 of my power profile zones (5 sec, 1 min, 5 min, 20 min).

Like Boonen, Mike attacks on the
dirt trail around Lake Chestermere

Attempted a 5x5 workout on the trainer. If you are unfamiliar with this, you start with a decent warmup or ~15-20 mins. Next you do 5 sets of 5 min all-out efforts, separated by 5 min rest intervals, then cool down. Well, I felt good going into it, and had aspirations to increase my personal best for my 5 min max Wattage.  First set, I kept it hard, but maintainable. 2nd set, I started a little below my target, then increased steadily for the next few minutes. As I got to the final minute, I looked at my average and it was already higher than my previous best. I pushed hard and finished with a good 30 sec "sprint". Looked at my average wattage for the lap and it was about 13W over my previous best! The rest of my workout was shot, but at least I knew I'd killed my P.B. I uploaded my workout to WKO+, and was shocked to see my best 5 minute effort recorded as about 15 BELOW my PB!?! What the heck? Turns out that set I rocked it on, I only did 4 minutes! My mind (under a fair amount of duresse) had convinced me that I was reading it as a full 5 minutes... Man, what a disappointment that was. Thankfully, I had a chance a week later to try it again, and this time did manage to complete the 5 min effort (by 8W).

Before

After

First ride on viaduct pathway to Lake Chestermere. This was a ride I had meant to do all of last summer.  Met up with Mike and this time the weather held up very nicely. A tad bit windy on the South-bound part of the ride but whatevs... Nice overall ride, a few detours, some hard packed dirt roads, some loose gravel roads, good quality bike path, flat highways. Great training for Prarie-Roubaix! Here are a couple pics of Mike going around the lake. 

Stats for March:

• Swim: 3 swims, 2 hours
• Run: 4 runs, 27 kms, 2.25 hr
• Bike: 29 rides (11 indoor, 9 CX, 9 Road), 35 hours, 586 kms. 3600m of elevation; most since September of last year. Also noteworthy that I passed 100 hours on the bike for the year already. On pace to hit my 400 hr goal I set.