A good session, although a decent amount of HR drift over the three Intervals. Some stats below highlighting Average HR for the session, you can see how each interval increased my average HR, I have a max of 187 bpm.

Sweet Spot Roller Session

(Click the image for full size)

I think I frightened this Duck, is it a Duck? I’m not sure, but I did get a bit concerned that he was flying on the wrong side of the road, and was hoping no cars would come around the bend at the same time. Fortunately he found his escape with a gap into the field

Duck from Dexradio on Vimeo.

Stats for this mornings ride, Average Power 228 Watts, NP 257 Watts, TSS 97, IF .84, Average HR 151 BPM which is more in line with what I think it usually is, so pleased with this. Average Speed 16.8 mph reflecting a windy ride.

Stats for this mornings ride, Average Power 232 Watts, NP 261 Watts, TSS 128, IF .86, Average HR 160 bpm and Average Speed 16.7 mph which is good considering the wind.

This mornings ride………

Another decent ride this morning despite my recent lack of miles on the bike, Average Power 221 Watts, NP 246 Watts, TSS 108, IF .80 Average Speed 17.2 mph and Average HR 158 bpm. I’m feeling a bit tired now, no real surprise after a few weeks of doing very little. So a rest day tomorrow, and since next week is Half-Term I’m taking Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off, so hopefully I’ll get a few decent rides in this week.

This mornings ride……….

I actually felt quite good, a lot better than last weeks nightmare ride anyway. I could feel myself wanting to push along at pace in the first few miles, and had to restrain myself and apply a bit of self-discipline to stop myself from doing that. I knew it would bite me in the butt later on. But I was feeling good. My HR was a bit higher than I might normally expect, but again, no real surprise there given the lack of regularity in terms of training. All was going according to plan and I was just beginning to feel quite pleased with myself. I was approaching the point at which I fell last week, there was no danger of that happening today as the snow and ice has cleared, and its feeling Spring like at the moment. I looked down at my Garmin to check my Power output and as I looked at the screen, the Power numbers went blank! Spookily, in more or less the same place that it happened last week!

As you can imagine, much grumbling and swearing as I conveyed myself through the Kent countryside, and trying to figure out the problem as I went. In the end I just gave up and concentrated on HR as a guide for effort. But underneath my helmet and several layers of lycra, was a seething, angry and frustrated cyclist! Having completed my ride and got home, I just parked it up in the Garage, went for a shower and had breakfast. Caught up with the highlights of the Tour or Oman, and Algarve, before turning my attention back to the Power Meter. It just won’t pair with the Garmin! It’s recently had new batteries installed, it couldn’t be that could it? I got my multimeter out and checked the batteries and sure enough there was something no quite right with one of them (it takes two batteries), so I installed a new set, and its sprung back into life again. Lets hope it continues to do so, as I’m manually updating my TSS scores with numbers estimated by previous rides. Should be accurate enough, but it’s very annoying when your expensive toy decides not to work. Hopefully the new batteries will sort it out for me, if not, it will have to be sent off for proper investigation I suppose.

No real numbers to report as a result of the Power Meter failure, but average speed a decent 17.3 mph considering my lack of fitness, HR was high at 163 bpm, but assuming I can get out more regularly I would expect that to reduce fairly quickly.

This mornings ride……..

Since Christmas I’ve only had a “splattering” of rides as the weeks have gone past, and I certainly haven’t been training consistently by any means! So following a message from Chris, I decided to join him last Saturday morning for a ride over a 52 mile route he had organised. We agreed to meet at 7am, and since it was the first ride outside for a while I was looking forward to it. It was forecast to be cold but dry, however with the cold weather the previous few days of wet weather had not really cleared from the road, so it was wet, sub-zero temperatures and icy frost covered the roads. They say bad things come in threes, so a few miles in the first of the bad things that were going to haunt me that day occurred!

Ouch! from Dexradio on Vimeo.

That fall left me with a lot of pain in my left hip and ribs, I didn’t even get a chance to get my hand down and fell with full force onto my left side. It happened so fast I never got a chance to put a hand out even as a natural reaction you would typically expect to a fall. That said, if I had it might have been a collar-bone, and on my left side I’ve done my collar-bone in a few years ago falling off a motor cycle. Still, I managed to get up fairly quickly, a natural reaction to reduce the embarrassment in case there were people around watching me, but at 7.30am in the morning I needn’t have worried!

So on we went, and after about 10 minute or so, I noticed my Power Meter was not communicating with my Garmin head unit. I started fiddling with the head unit, trying to re-pair the until with the hub while on the move, and turning it off and back on again. No Joy! I started thinking that this is going to be expensive to fix! A quick stop to see if I could figure out what was going on, and I noticed I had a buckled rear wheel, presumably done when I fell. Not bad, but enough to make me leave it in to the shop, to get properly “true’d” up (I fancy learning to do that myself actually). At the time of writing its in the shop and will be ready tomorrow for me. With all the messing around I forgot to turn the GPS on and screwed up my ride by missing over 10 miles of the GPS track, recording only 42 of the 52 mile route that day. Hence the reason I have not add my usual embedded Strava map, or Power Stats this time! I’m had to make some manual adjustments to “guesstimate” the numbers based on previous rides.

Part of the route takes us up a steep section of road with a gradient of about 14% or so, as usual Chris pulled ahead and once I got over the top I started to push along to catch him up. A bird decided to fly out of the bushes and went straight into my rear wheel, and a small explosion of feathers left me thinking, he’s had it! I had to clean the feathers off the frame when I got home later! The rest of the ride happened without incident, more or less, except that the last 10 miles or so I totally bonked! I was just empty and had no energy at all. I had to tell Chris to go on and not to wait for me as I was just going to cruise home and would hold him up with my slow pace. Not training consistently for the last month, combined with an early morning (no food) ride, as well as my fall and everything else was all just too much for me!

So, the plan over the next few weeks is to take it easy and build up again with lots of Endurance work, or as much as the weather allows anyway. My rear wheel is away getting “true’d ” up and should be sorted in the next day or so. My Power Meter seems to be working well again, but will need to keep an eye on it. And although I’m still a bit stiff and sore down my left hand side today (Monday), that shouldn’t impede my cycling!

Lets hope that’s the end of the bad luck for 2013!

Here is a comparison of both Roller sessions taken from WKO+ (click on picture for full size)

Video guidance on how to Harden the fuck up on the link below

Harden the fuck up!!!

Anyway, I decided just to get the legs spinning again and targeted an average of 250 Watts for 40 minutes, which I did, but not without suffering! My HR was through the roof with an Average of 169 bpm!!! This is typical when I’m off the bike for a few weeks, so I’m expecting that once I get back on the bike regularly again, I’ll soon see that drop. But tonight’s session was tough. It didn’t help of course that I started it and forgot to turn on my fan to keep me cool. When I was 15 minutes in I had to jump off and switch it on, I thought I’d get away without it, but I was turning into a right sweaty mess. This may have accounted to some small extent for my exorbitantly high HR, or the fact that I’ve just recovered from ManFlu, or of course it may simply be that I got what I deserved after two weeks off the bike.

Anyway, I need to get a few rides in this week now to get me going again, and need to reinstate Rule No. 5 again!

Looking at the Intervals in WKO+ shows the following statistics for the Interval portion of the workout; (click the picture to see it full size)

Comparison of the Threshold Intervals

My objective was to hit 321 Watts which is right at the top end of my Threshold Power range with an average cadence per Interval of 85 rpm, a typical average for me on most of my rides. As I’ve mentioned previously, doing a workout on the rollers feels like a high quality session compared to riding on the road sometimes when you are trying to hit an objective like I had today. As long as I could keep going, its possible to hit the target with clinical precision. So if you look at all three Intervals, I hit 321 watts each time as an average, Rest Intervals were 5 minutes between each Threshold Interval. My Cadence was 85 rpm, exactly as targeted. And if you look at my Heart Rate, you can see that it increased each Interval as the work load on my Cardio system was stressed at each Interval. So for the same Power and Cadence, my Heart Rate increased by a significant amount over the session, Cardiac Drift in action I guess.

I think I’m going to spend my Indoor sessions focusing on Sweet Spot and Threshold Workouts in an effort to improve my FTP and my endurance at that level of effort. I find it very difficult to hit these numbers on the road, whether its simply because of the variable nature of riding on the road, wind, traffic, corners, downhills or whatever. But on the Rollers, its easy to hit the numbers, although that doesn’t mean its an easy session. I think the quality of the 60 minutes is better, perhaps, than some of my road riding. Anyone care to comment?

Overall statistics tonight for my Roller session, Average Power 240 watts, NP 274, Average HR 152 bpm, TSS 80 and IF .90 The real achievement is in the chart above for my Intervals, but you read that for yourself. Suffice to say, the third Interval was torture, it was all I could do to hang on to the number and hit my 10 minutes to achieve my objective. Feels good now though

For me Lympne Hill was torture to be honest, my cadence is about 35-40 rpm, speed is about 5 mph and I’m grinding my way up in a ratio of 39:25 – my HR is hitting 179 bpm (my max is 185 bpm), averaging 335 watts and maxing out at around 600 watts in places. My glasses are steaming up and I can’t see much ahead of me, so I’m looking at the patch of road underneath my bike. Cars are pulling up behind me as I hold them up in their attempt to get past, engines at high rev until they get a space to squeeze past. Its painful stuff for just over 5 minutes! Mind you, the feeling of personal satisfaction once you get over the top is fantastic and makes it all worth it. I ride it infrequently as there are other hills around to keep me amused, and I was a minute slower this morning than my previous ride which was last September. I had been riding a lot more then of course and am not as fit now as I was during the summer. I think I probably need to add it to my routes once a month or so, and see if I can improve my performance on it before the summer comes back in again.

Stats for this mornings ride, Average Power 208 watts, NP 247 watts, TSS 161, IF .811 Average HR 152 bpm, Average Speed 15.7 mph Overall a relatively easy ride, all the hard work done on the couple of hills we did. Looks like we just missed the rain which is good, it’s getting very dark outside now, and rain forecast for the rest of today.

This mornings ride………..