Friday, May 19, 2006

Ready For The Weekend

My plans are changing a bit for this weekend as I've decided to do two races on Sunday. I'll be doing the Masters 30+ as usual but I'll also be racing with the young guys and doing the Category 4/5 race as well. My first race is at 9:00 and my second race is at 11:00. I'll have about 45 minutes of recovery between races so that will be no problem. I'll probably do better in the 4/5 race if I don't crash because (1) I'll be warmed up and my body will have started the lactic buffering process and (2) I've heard so far that the 4/5 races have been a little slower than the Masters'. The only problem like I said is that there tends to be a relatively high number of crashes in the 4/5 race, hopefully I'll make it out unscathed. Well, last night I did a 2 hour ride with 3 reps of 9 minutes at Steady State pace (92% of max HR). I rode from my house to Whitnall Park and did my intervals on the criterium course and then did a nice leisurely ride home. Today I'll do an easy 45 min Recovery Ride and then tomorrow will be about 1.5 hours with 2 sets of 2 min Power Intervals. Sunday will obviously be the two races and a short recovery ride. Overall right now I feel pretty good, my legs are feeling good, I've been able to get my heart rate up during training which means that I'm not overtrained or sick, and I just feel better on the bike during climbing, pushing big gears, etc.. I know that I'm not where I want to be to be able to win a race, unless I get lucky, so I still have a lot of work to do. My goal is to do really well during Superweek as I have my sabbatical during that time and will get to do a lot of races. In the big picture I'm going to keep doing my muscle building work, my tempo work and work on building more power. June will call for shorter but more intense intervals to build up my lactate threshold and I'll start to incorporate some speedwork in to the program at the end of June. July will be all about SuperWeek (actually 16 days of racing) and working on sprintwork. August will be more of a rest month as I cut back on the speedwork and work on endurance again as there are probably only 3 or 4 races in August. The end of August and September will bring some nice touring centuries through Door County, Madison, and Milwaukee areas. October will be a rest month and then the program will start all over again in November with weights and cross-training.

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