A long winter

The snow and ice have gone (for now) but the thermometre still says zero degrees.

I've still been training and maybe I'm a little fresher for the enforced confinement that the bad weather has brought with it. For most of the winter I've been doing my long zone 2 rides on a fat tyred steel touring bike. The heavy duty seals on the hubs mean you have to pedal to go downhill so it's an efficient workout. I 've done at least on long ride a week of around 4-5.5 hours just spinning and going a little further from home to keep it interesting. With the touring bike and fat tyres I can go anywhere so if a road turns into mud/cobble/field I can keep going.

This has meant I've been able to keep the road bike and powertap on the turbo for more focused workouts. I've set it up int the garage with a TV and fan, so I can just get on and ride with no fuss. I've done shorter intervals at threshold and longer ones just below. I've also mixed it up with some workouts focusing on pushing a really big gear at a low cadence. When things were really bad outside I 've done 3 hours in zone 2 while watching a DVD boxset. I also did some 2 hour rides with some long L3 intervals when I realised that I really don't enjoy watching '24' that much.

Recently I've been doing two interval workouts and two longer rides of between 3-4 hours when the weather is ok. One long ride might start on the turbo with some long intervals below threshold before heading out to finish the ride in zone 2. The other long ride is usually a group ride.

I reckon I'm not going to start racing until mid May at the earliest and maybe not really go at it full bore until  June. I'm in no rush to bring in the real intensity, but there's a chaingang type ride about 20k from my house that ridden by a lot of the pro's that I'll use to build speed. Kevin Seeldreyers is a regular apparently. It's a flat 60k at race speed and I plan to do that once or twice a week from April. When I can hack that I know I'll be ready to pin a number on.

And to top it all I'm going to Mallorca (isn't everybody) for a week of climbing and sun in early April.

Whatever I'm doing I'm going to back off if I'm tired. I'm happy to ride easy or not at all if I'm sore or tired and I've been doing much better when I'm doing intervals as a result. Some weeks I've done as little as 8 hours and rarely over 12. I'm longer a slave to graphs or the though that others might be training more. This is paying off already as I did a FTP test a few weeks ago and it's up to 4.07 w/kg.