Tasmania: goals, equipment, research etc.

Goals and objectives

About three months ago when this project began, a typical week would be around three easy rides for a total of perhaps 100 - 150 km. By the end of the project in mid-July I need to be capable of producing six consecutive daily rides of around 100 - 120 km and 2,500 metres climb. So the focus of the training program is endurance (to cope with the distances), strength (for the steeper parts of the climbs) and strength endurance (for individual climbs of up to 1,650 m + consecutive climbs).

This actually makes it a very simple program. All I have to do is go out and ride hills - lots of them - with the added refinement of staying seated and using a low cadence in a big gear (small cog) to develop the hip extensors, glutes and hamstrings, as well as the quads. This all seems to be going to plan. Later I will start doing two and three consecutive hard days to work on recovery.

I set out to build this into a sequence of two harder weeks (300 - 350 km) followed by an easier recovery week (150 km). This is an age-adjusted version of an elite cyclist's three hard weeks / one recovery week rotation. While this is a fine idea it is often disrupted by weather (if I have to ride in the rain I will, but at the moment I don't have to), work (I run a management training business) and domestic activities (my wife and I are restoring an old cottage in a village about 82.3km from Launceston as the bike rides) - so I do what I can to achieve the targets.

Performance tracking websites

A couple of cycling websites are used to maintain training records and track performance:

• Strava is a useful tool to maintain motivation through their monthly challenges - and the feeling that your mates will all see if you cut a session short.
• TrainingPeaks is an excellent tool for monitoring performance and guarding against over-training.

The Performance Manager chart is what Training Peaks is all about. Simply put, the blue line is your 'fitness' - cumulative training stress score from the last 42 days, pink your acute training load from the last seven days and yellow your recovery.

Both these sites have a free and a paid for option. With Strava the free option is probably fine but with Training Peaks a premium account is required to obtain the performance monitoring benefits. 

Equipment

BMC in Australian green and gold colours

I ride a BMC SLT01 that must be about seven years old - it's the one Floyd Landis rode in that disastrous Tour that he 'won' and then lost. It has a Campag Record groupset with compact 50 x 34 cranks and a 12 - 25 cassette. Right at the moment it won't change into the 25 cog and I'm leaving it that way to force me to ride in the smaller 23 cog. For the tour I'm hiring a Bianchi with 50 x 34 and 12 - 30 :-).

The BMC gained a set of Zipp 404s recently. They are the same weight as the DT Swiss hoops used previously but feel quite a bit faster at what I laughingly call 'speed'. They are also surprisingly good in the wind. 

This neat bar-end mirror is unobtrusive and gives a good view of vehicles approaching from behind that might be passing a little too close.

I don't have a power meter and would really like one. The Stages meter that fits on a crank would be good, but they don't work on carbon cranks, the Garmin Vector pedal-based meters can be easily swapped between bikes but are expensive - so I'm adopting a wait and see approach. If you want to read chapter and verse on this topic then DCRainmaker's summary is excellent.

Research

I'm currently reading Faster: the Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists by Michael Hutchinson. It has added useful detail to some things I was already aware of and filled in some blanks that I wasn't. I might refer back to this book in some future posts.