the Tour of Sufferlandria

 

Saturday

 

Well…  before we even started I thought it a good idea to go out and do the normal Saturday Group ride…  and normally I ride to and from the ride because…  well…  I see no good reason to bring a car into this:

 

 

Most of the guys who normally do the Saturday Lodge ride were either doing the road Race in Deland or the Ididaride (mountain bike race) in Lake City or just simply decided to stay indoors on this Belgium like day…  overcast, high 30s to low 40s with some rain thrown in…  we ended up with about 18 riders at our peak on a ride that boasts almost 100 on a sunny summer day…  of these 18 only 10 or so hung on for the whole ride and really on about 6 of us took regular turns… 

 

Well that taken care of…  a beer some lunch and a nap later we stared the Tour with a fitness test… 

 

Sufferfest Rubber Glove

 

If you are beginning to think that I'm stupid you are astute.

 

Basically a little warm-up, a few FTP intervals, then an all-out 20 minute test to help you calibrate your FTP

 

 

A piece of cake…  and my 20 minute "consistent" effort is laughable..  I was all over the place.

 

Sunday

 

We had to get up early and knock this out before church…

 

I know…  a 12 hour turnaround from the "Rubber Glove"…ugh

 

Sufferfest ISLAGIATT

 

ISLAGIATT = "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time"  yes aptly titled…  1:57 minutes….  I felt like a bus had hit me…  5 minutes into the workout I figured out how to turn down the target power to 90%... That is why the blue power profile is higher than my yellow actual output… and that is why I survived

 

 

I took a nice nap and really didn't feel like playing golf in the afternoon… but I did…

 

Monday

 

We slept in on Monday morning and opted to do the Monday stage after work… It was a good choice because I think this was the hardest cardio workout of the week… after the second interval I really didn't think that I would be able to complete it.

 

Sufferfest Revolver

 

Tuesday

 

Another quick turnaround because Tuesday is Guana ride day so we did the stage before work.  Since I felt pretty beaten up by this point and I really didn't want to get shelled by the first accelerations by the group at Guana..,.  I turned my FTP down a few notches to give me a bit of a tempoish ride instead of a threshold ride… 

Sufferfest Hell Hath No Fury

 

Guana

 

Only 3 of us showed…  the other two are better riders than I…  yet we all rode down together at a nice tempo… then... on the way back in the cold rain my rear tire blew… seven miles from my car..  blowing out the sidewall of my tire in the process… so I had to pedal back with a flat alone (the guys did wait on me at the cars)

 

Wednesday

 

Started with an unscheduled recovery spin in the morning…  nice and easy

 

The actual workout was a double…which we did after work... yay!

 

 

Thursday

 

I was feeling a bit better by Thursday and had turned my FTP back up a bit… I also think that this was my favorite video and workout…  I pretty much nailed it

 

 

Friday

 

Doubleshot again on Friday… only this time we split them one in the AM and one in the PM

 

 

An hour each of mostly climbing…  I was trying to save energy for Saturday

 

Saturday

 

Once again I dug a nice hole for myself by doing 63 miles on the road

 

 

I took my pulls…  even contested the sprint…  but followed wheels a little more than usual.

 

 

As the name indicates and the profile backs up the Blender workout is a little bit of everything mashed into an hour and 45 minutes… Oddly I felt pretty good for this one…

 

Sunday

 

The Coup de grâce

 

Basically an hour of intervals…  some hard…  some a bit easier…  and one set where I blew up halfway through and just drooled and gasped as I missed 3 intervals in a row…

 

 

We finished just in time to shower and turn on the Super Bowl

 

 

Direct Link: http://www.trainerroad.com/tour-of-sufferlandria/cowartm

 

The great "in-of-doors"

So as I set of in my quest to become a bike racer..  I quickly realized that I needed to do something to help me quantify, qualify, entertain, and edutain me while pedaling indoors this winter…

 

I hear you…  I really do…  and I know that I live in Florida and should simply get outside and ride…  but…  I do have a real job and it is dark a lot in winter even in sunny Florida. 

 

I had heard about the Sufferfest (more on that in a separate post) videos and a google search for the videos led me to http://www.trainerroad.com

 

 

I thought…  hey this looks like it might be intersting…  and a pretty cheap way to train using power and heartrate.

 

I checked out the steps:

 

http://www.trainerroad.com/getting-started

 

and got started.

 

I'd like to begin by saying that I'm no DCRainmaker J

And he has done a pretty in depth review…

Here:

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2011/09/inside-look-at-trainerroad-way-to-make.html

and here:

http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2012/02/weekend-wrap-up-trainerroad-cold-dc.html

 

this is just an overview of how this worked for me.

 

The ingredients…

 

Easy enough to put together

1. Trusty MacBook

 

 

2.  ANT+ Usb Stick (recieves data from other devices)

I actually had one of these laying around from one of my dozen or so dead Garmin devices I've collected over the last 10 years.

 

 3.  Speed cadence sensor

 

 4.  HRM Strap – yep I had this too…

 

 

5.  And of course a trainer:

 

So I installed the software and paired my devices:

 

 

Which took all of 5 minutes….

 

I learned after a workout or two that my favorite configuration while riding was music via iTunes

 

 

Throw in a bike race on YouTube…  with the volume at halfway on each…  so Phil, Paul, or Sean Kelly or whomever was talking over Blink 182…  but that works for me.

 

 

All the while my workout data is displayed atop the video on the bottom of the screen.

 

 

The pain cave

 

 

Baby I'm a blur

 

 

So once you are finished…  your workout is automagically uploaded to trainerroad.com…  and one can geek over their data as much as one wants… and then download (see the buttonJ)

 

 

A nice .tcx file that can then be uploaded to trainingpeaks.com…  just drag and drop baby!

 

 

Where you can geek out some more…

 

 

Well…   that's pretty much it…  I invested about $30 for a speed/cadence sensor…  used some other stuff I had laying around…  signed up for trainerroad.com ($10/month) and I now have a system where I am challenged, measured, documented and entertained…  and since I ride the trainer 5-7x per week during the winter…  I think that it's a pretty good deal.

 

And for just a few dollars more…  I got my cute little training partner set up too

 

 

After doing a couple of rides…  she decided that we should do this:

 

I'll write about that next time.