131 days until IRONMAN 70.3 Chattanooga
Commentary
Long before I was born there was a guy named Will Rogers. If you’ve never heard of him, go look up his name. He is one of the most beloved men of his time and one of the most influential figures in my life (the other is my father). In the 1920’s Will Rogers had a syndicated newspaper column titled, “Will Rogers Remarks.” He just rambled on about things happening in his life, politics and society.
Will Rogers was, among many other things, a nationally known radio personality.
I’m no Will Rogers, but these blog posts have been a bit like his newspaper columns: rambling. From now on, the posts will be divided into two sections: Commentary and Workout Summary. If you like commentary, then I don’t have to tell you which section is for you. On the other hand, if you like numbers and data, you might be interested in the workout summaries. On the third hand, if you like both… welcome home.
Someday I’ll write more about why I look up to the man who was known as the Cowboy Philosopher and The Unofficial Ambassador of Good Will.
Workout Summary
Workout #1 – Bike
The following diagram will give you an idea of the intervals planned for this workout.
Graphical profile of workout plan
Normally, I would post a plot of my watts superimposed over the workout plan, but Xena, the bike with the power meter, is getting some love from Mitch, the bike shop mechanic this week. (Charlie was busy). Instead, I rode Red, the road bike without a power meter.
So the only thing I had to record was heart rate. The TSS numbers in this table are based on a 166bpm threshold. If TSS and threshold are unfamiliar to you, suffice it to say that they are popular measures of workout intensity. In fact, the next chart may totally lose you.
The performance management chart is a confusing mess if you’re not used to it. The blue line is my level of fitness. You can see that as my fitness increases, so does my level of fatigue (pink line). The yellow line is indicative of my “form” which is the balance between the fitness and fatigue. On race day, I want a high fitness and a high form. Training increases fatigue which leads to increases in fitness and decreases in form. If I were to stop training today (2020-01-07), you can see the blue fitness line will stay level for about a week and the yellow form line will increase almost to 0 before fitness takes a dive. It’s a lot to take in.
This performance management chart has data starting in early December. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any trends. If it interests you and you want to know more, I suggest reading Allan and Coggan’s book “Training and Racing with a Power Meter.” The thing to remember, however, is this TSS model is just a model. There are other models out there, but this is the one I pay attention to most of the time.
Workout #2 – Strength
Focused on glutes with bridges, side lunges, and body squats. Not much more to say on that.
Until tomorrow…
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