The Straight Toof
Update on the toothache - was only up for an hour last night but half of that was moderate pain. The other half I was reading the 3rd Murderbot book which I am about 90% done with now. Overall I think I slept 11:30 to 7:00 with an hour interlude for pain alleviation & reading. Called the Mouth Mining Specialist today and made a reservation on the USS Wisdom Tooth, destined for the Port of Extraction. Due date for that baby is next Wednesday. My gosh this paragraph is horrible. Anyway, I never had my wisdom teeth removed before because they are not impacted. I had 1 removed at one point because it needed a root canal and they don't waste effort on that. It was easy. They may take 2 of the 3 remaining out, depending on something or other which I don't really know.
Overall, pain is subsiding but it's still tender. Not on Advil 24/7 now, which is good.
Canada
As I was working this morning a calendar event popped up reminding me we are going tomorrow, which I am flat-out not mentally ready for. But time waits for no man (I assume no clam either, but I really don't know for sure), and at some point tomorrow we will be heading north, time TBD. Plan is to hit Montreal for 1 night and stay in the condo, then meet up with Tony, one of D's friends that we occasionally get together with for food. He is a foodie so he'll figure out where we are going.
Then off to the cottage, Thursday late morning through Monday morning. I guess in the end we're only going to be there 3 full days but also most of Thursday then we'll hit up KT on the way back. I saw on Strava today that the other side of the hidden trails are open, and I'm looking forward to that. So we'll be bringing the mountain bikes with us, which I'll try to ride as time permits. Maybe I'll hit the trails 1 day then just ride MTB-on-road the others.
I don't know what we have any specific plans the 3 days we are up there this year. Eat.
On the Bike Today, Training by Racing
As I have said previously I am looking to train "naturally" and in the case of today it is in the form of a Zwift race in Innsbruck. It was a 17.5-ish mile loop with 2838 feet of climbing. Strava effort was 139 which is solidly high. The first effort up the hill is where the meat of the workout lies. Here's a pic:
* Light blue is speed - you can see where I hit the hill, then crest & bomb down
* Purple is power - you have the explosion at the start, then around 2 miles I settle in and work the climb
* Red is HR - as
@UtahJoe mentions, note how the HR drifts up where the power remains relatively stable
The payoff here is that 2->6.5 mile stretch where the climb happens and the race settles in. In all the first 30 minutes were the meat of this and where I got my main work set in. Pushing up this with other people motivates me. On the second climb (which I did not expect at all) I was out of steam to an extent and I had to lower my output to hang in there.
In all, I was in the middle of the 183 man field almost exactly, around 90th or something. I think I was 26th in the Cs, out of maybe 50? I think I crested the first hill in 15th but then I bled spots on the 2nd. This is a guess.
Today I raised my indoor FTP from 272 to 287. I have not done a test indoors nor outdoors. Typically I will be able to output more power when I go outside. I think before Zwift, 220 inside was approaching mental death. Zwift has helped me address that. And apples to apples, the indoor FTP number is going up. That's all I want.
On a last note, I have always been able to get higher numbers when I do my work outside of a strict training set. I think my best CP20 was when I flatted once on an A ride, fixed the flat, then slaughtered myself to catch back up. In the end I took a shortcut and got help from a red light. But I managed to get them back. That sort of effort is really hard "in a lab" so to speak. I find efforts with other humans involved the best way to hit the highest numbers. On that note, the push method of training your FTP is probably mentally much easier.
Training - the Bigger Picture
I am not going to get into what this means, other than to say this is a graph which represents "fitness" - how this is generated is black magic, and it depends what software you use. Again, it's overly complex. The graph gives you the point, this is my last 6 months:
Observations:
1. Note the graph climbs. This is the volume I have put in. This is building up your base fitness
2. The peak is Kingdom Trails
3. Right now my "fitness" is 86. This is just some number
4. The first Build in my CX plan is the slight rise to the right of the peak
5. Then there is the lull, the rest week
6. 86 is me in the midst of my current Build, the second block
The point here is that these successive Builds will move that "fitness" number more each time. In my years of doing this, 100 is a great number to aim for. It's really hard to hit that. And anything above that is hard to maintain and have a real life. But these are general numbers to think about. Maybe if all goes well, I can get nudge that close to 95. A lot has to go right to do that.
Ok I digress. Let me answer the obvious question you have:
Why don't you just ride a metric shit ton like you did at Kingdom? The answer is that "fitness" is just a generic number which only measures by some arbitrary system to grade your workouts. It does not measure the type of workout at all. So you can get there with LSD (long slow distance) or sharp, pointy efforts like non-stop intervals, A rides, and races. Either will get the "fitness" up.
If you raise that number by doing big volume, you're not going to be working the specifics that make you race better. So you need to combine volume, sharp efforts, rest, and some pot of good luck. All of this is what we call the art of trying to train. There are other metrics here, called "fatigue" and "freshness" which I personally feel are somewhat nonsensical. I have never had any actual correlation between feeling good and this "freshness" number.
Mind you, I have not looked at this graph until yesterday. It's interesting enough and it's a perfect illustration at how this works. And frankly it does help justify that I am moving in the right direction.
Now to
@fidodie - I am not sure if this is what you think you were asking. But I think this addresses a lot of questions you will have when you follow the logical extension of your questions. Because the way to get the most area under the curve is to find the highest power you can do for 3 hours and do that all the time. Your "fitness" will go off the charts. So then it becomes a question of what you are trying to train. Add a lot of fitness? Train a weakness? Train a strength? 1s, 2s, 5s, 15s, 20s? There are all sorts of ways to look at it. What helps you attain the goals you want to attain?
Let me answer for 95% of the people out there - ride like I did at KT. As much as possible, and forget about effort. Your fitness will go off the charts. And everything will get easier. All the rest is mostly overthinking.
I am not sure that training strict CP numbers is actually the best approach unless you ride 15-20 hours a week.
@pearl - when you go with 8s, in the end you're going to have a harder time totalling 45 or 60 minutes of threshold work. By working with 15s or 20s, you end up with more total time in the desired zone.
The Reality of it All
I have to work 34 points (hours) of stories by 1:00 tomorrow. And while I have done 12 of those since my 4:00 call ended, I am not sure I feel like killing myself to knock out the remaining 22. So instead of blowing my night working, I am writing this up while we watch John Wick. It's not really very good but it's mindless enough that I can write this and get the highlights, which is "if you are not named John Wick, you will die." Reeves is a pretty poor actor really.
Now that v1 of this post is done, I will go work on some of those stories I need to get done for tomorrow.
Or maybe I'll read a book.
