The 9 to 5

A four-day, 20 hour training block is now in the books, and thankfully I have a day of rest to look forward to tomorrow. I'm walking a bit laboriously tonight, treading lightly on my weary bottom-half. I've got the slows so bad I'm finding myself listening to Norah Jones as I write this. Overall I'm actually feeling pretty good about training, mostly just happy to be able to put in this kind of mileage, with the new longer days and the perfect weather.
Here's an outline of what I've been up to for training in the past weeks:

The general format is three to four days on, one day off, then do it all over again. During the three to four day 'block', I'll do mostly long (5-6 hour) rides each day in the hills, with one shorter day of speed work, like sprinting or motorpacing. This usually means that most days you will find me in the foothills up near Nevada City, on one of a few of my favorite climbs, like the 2.5 mile, 8-15% grade from Bridgeport up to French Corral (If you are a cyclist living in the Yuba-Sutter area and have never been up there, you are really cutting yourself short, but that's a topic for another post I guess). Now just because I'm doing all these long rides doesn't mean I'm just toodling around at a "base pace" all day. In fact, most days I'll try to keep up a steady quick endurance pace on the flats and downhills, and on the hills I'll do long intervals at or just below threshold (the level where the body can just barely supply itself with enough oxygen, and has to begin to resort to alternate energy pathways, which means lactic acid in the legs and hurtin for you). I can personally attest to the fact that my legs exploded like tin foil in the microwave yesterday when I did 5 repeats at threshold up the Bridgeport grade, which takes about 12 minutes a pop.

This format will change as the season moves along, and I get into more racing, and get closer to the time of year in which I want to be 'peaking', or in my best form. For right now, the name of the game is building up endurance for riding at or slightly below threshold. Once I build up enough of this foundation fitness, I will start to do a lot more short, harder intervals to train the body to operate anaerobically for extended periods and to recover quickly from such efforts. During this time I will not be doing quite as many hours per week as I am now also. It really is a matter of timing in all this - one can only really be in peak shape for a few weeks, so since this isn't the time of year when I want to be zippy, I'm not doing much anearobic workouts just yet. It must be a slow development - to do these types of workouts all year round would have me riding so-so pretty much all year (at least until I got so tired of VO2 max intervals that I wanted to quit riding my bike).

Well I guess thats the idea...
I wish I had some pictures I could share of my training and all the cool places I go to ride, but unfortunately my cell phone is one of those stone-age artifacts that doesn't even have a camera on it. Makes me feel like a real old-timer.... Ha, wait a minute, I was born in the 90's!!!
Yeah that's right, Believe it.