I decided to call the end of September the end of the 2007 cycling season. With all of the Jewish holidays, I lost momentum and started thinking about how I’d work to maintain fitness over the winter months. I bought the Garmin 305 GPS/Heart Rate Monitor at the beginning of Febuary, but it wasn’t until the last week of Feb that I started riding regularly. So I count March-Sept as my cycling season for the year.
It capped a year of more consistent endurance training than ever before. I made some large gains between March and June. The summer ended up providing less fitness gains because of travel and my own inconsistencies. I also think that I failed to step up intensity sufficiently during those months. Next summer I’ll be doing more rides around lactate threshold for longer periods.I confirmed my suspicions that consistency is the most important aspect to progressive gains. In order to induce physiological adaptation, you need to stress the system. Once adapted to a certain level of exertion, no further gains are made. In the end I’m limited by time, so only by getting faster and putting in more effort in the same time will I ever progress. If I can start March with the same kind of muscular endurance that I have now, I’ll be riding farther in the same training time, forcing more adaptation.
As it turned out, I averaged about 18 hours a month during the season. It’s less than the 6 hours/week that I had targeted. It still puts me on track for a 200 hr training year which I think is pretty good for a first year’s effort.
April was my best month with 22 hours. I got in a few 8 hour weeks, but there many weeks where I had only an hour or two recorded. Still, it’s many more hours than I put in last year, when I was mostly doing long Sunday morning rides and not much else. With a flexible work schedule, it’s only travel that makes it impossible to train.While I’ve experienced gains they are less dramatic than I had hoped for. My usual 2 hour 15 min endurance ride now feels like little effort compared to the beginning of the season. This morning I did it with an average speed of 13.4 and an average heart rate of 130. At the beginning of the year, it would have been at about 12.4 at that heart rate, but more importantly felt like a bigger effort. Tonight I know that I could easily ride the same route tomorrow, it’s now a moderate ride, not a hard ride. If I can hold that kind of fitness over the winter, I can start in March riding at that speed, putting in more consistent miles with less stress. That is why the training is cumulative year over year, I think.
The Garmin 305 worked. I have a full journal of speed, heart rate and time for the past few months. No escaping the truth about what I’ve done. And there is the evidence of the progress there.
Adding shorter daily rides worked. Getting out for just 45 min or an hour maintains the status quo. If those short efforts are hard and frequent enough to be a training stimulus, gains are possible.
Rest and moderation worked. I had no injuries and little in the way of viral illnesses. Steady incremental additions with every third or fourth week being easier kept me pretty eager to get out and ride.
Having running as a backup worked. When I traveled I either did very long walks combined with photography or morning runs before work. In years past, it was either use the hotel gym equipment or go without. It’s almost always possible to run.