Pros: Binche to Épernay, 215km, Hilly

Me: 72km PZ1, 3x5m SST

Nothing exciting. Long hilly day for the pros, long ride for me too. Pace was fine, though the intervals at the end felt harder than they should have. Heart rate was definitely higher, so whether I was doing them too hard, or it was due to a bit of dehydration or fatigue, I’m not sure. I think I’ll do them at the start of the ride in future so I can get a better idea.

One thought that crossed my mind while out on the road was that I’ve been aiming to do one third the distance of the pros, but I figured it would be interesting to compare how that actually translates into work done. I follow Mike Woods on Strava, who rides for EF Education First and finished with the main bunch last night. He publishes his power data unlike a lot of the pros and here’s his ride from yesterday…

The stage took him 4h54, burning 3,400 calories and a training stress score of 206. My ride took me 2h55, burning 1500 calories with a training stress score of 139, so it appears that while I’m only doing one third of the distance I’m getting two thirds of the training stress. This is going to hurt!

Weight: 93.3kg - CTL: 32.8 - TSB: 12.4

Pros: Bruxelles Palais Royal to Brussel Atomium, 27.6km, Team Time Trial

Me: 5 x (2:30 @ 90%, :30 @ 110%)

A Team Time Trial is basically the whole team riding in single file, with the guy on the front doing lots of work and the rest sheltering behind in his draft. The guy on the front rotates off after a set interval and rejoins the line at the back, and so it goes with each team member rotating through to the front position multiple times until the finish line.

Given there’s only me in this lark, to mimic the pros’ efforts I opted for 30 seconds at 110% of threshold to simulate the time on the front, then 90% of threshold to simulate the “rest” portion, repeated five times for a total of 15 minutes. Jumbo-Visma won the stage in 28:57 (avg. 57.2 kmh!) so 15 minutes is reasonable for me.

Woke up feeling a bit sluggish this morning, despite not staying up to watch the stage last night. HRV (Heart Rate Variability) was low too, which can be an indicator of tiredness or oncoming illness, so macro-dosed some Vitamin C just in case (yeah, placebo :-)

Session went OK - no issues, though looking at my heart rate compared to the pros, I probably should have set the efforts a bit harder.

Weight: 92.8kg CTL: 30.3

Pros: Bruxelles to Brussel, 194.5km, Flat

Me: 65km Z1, 5m SST

A bit of a cockup yesterday watching the rain radar! I could see a bunch of rain on the way so kept postponing going out. Turns out the rain was moving much slower that I realised and by the time I figured that out there wasn’t enough time to go out before the rain and also not enough time to go out after the rain and before nightfall. So, onto the indoor trainer 😕

With no distance measured on the trainer I had to adjust the plan. The actual stage took 4:20 for the pros, so a third of that was 1:25 or so, and 65km on flat roads would take me about 2:00 so I opted to split the difference and ride 1:45 while watching a repeat of last night’s stage.

All went well, if still a bit boring. I don’t really ride that much on the trainer, so it still is a harder workout than the equivalent on the road - no traffic lights, no downhills, just constant pedalling - and I was pretty tired later in the evening. Early to bed!

Weight: 93.5kg CTL: 30.1

Third de France is underway, as is the longer term Fat Bastard Project 😆

It’s that time of the year again - Le Tour de France starts tonight!

Rather than my usual winter of sitting on the couch watching the race and getting fat, this year I’ve done all the fat building in advance and will instead do what I first thought of last year - ride my own Third de France, so called because I’ll aim to ride a third of what the pros do.

Very simplified, if you are trying to win Le Tour, it’s essentially a very long ride punctuated with some hard efforts up the mountains and in time trials. Outside of those efforts the aim is to do as little work as possible, so that’s the aim of my stages as well.

The goal each day will be to ride around in Zone 1 (polarised model - mentioned earlier) and to do some harder, sub-threshold efforts when the riders hit the mountains.

The mountains are classified from the easiest 4, to the hardest, HC (Hors Categorie = Beyond Category) and, since a big HC climb could take up to an hour for the pros, I’ll do a 20min SST effort for a HC climb and knock off five minutes for each level below. I’ll ignore Cat 4 climbs as they’re just pimples. I’ll also do all the SST intervals back-to-back, taking five minutes active rest between each, rather than spacing them out as the mountains are. Once all the intervals are done, I’ll continue riding Z1 until I rack up the required distance for the day.

For the team time-trial stage I’ll do OverUnders, and for the individual time-trial stage I’ll do an FTP effort.

I’ll also ride my stage the day after the pros do, giving me the option to watch the stage if I choose to ride on the indoor trainer, so technically I start tomorrow.

Bearing that in mind, how does my Tour look like?

Here’s a quick summary of the plan:

Stages 6 & 8 stand out in the first week, with 18, 19 and 20 going to be a hard finish. Stages 14 & 15 will be problematic for me as I’ll be away that weekend, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Based on my metabolic test learnings, Zone 1 means ‘keep heart rate below 140’. Approximate FTP is 265W at the moment (indoor) so that will suffice for this exercise and I’ll aim for 240W on SST intervals. I haven’t decided yet whether to do them on the trainer or outdoors.

After two weeks’ holidays I’m well rested and well overweight, so I’m under no illusions that this will hurt.

Current fitness: CTL = 29, TSB = 19

Current weight: 92.4kg

Time to shift some lard. Bonne chance!

In my previous post I mentioned how I’d estimated VT1 and VT2 and how they would be useful in the context of polarised training, so what is polarised training?

When it comes to building endurance, there are many ways mix up training intensities to produce a desired result. You can do lots of volume first and then add speed work, you can do speed work first and then add the volume. You can do lots of work just under your 1hr threshold, and there’s many more options behind that.

Polarised Training is a prescription popularised by Dr. Stephen Seiler. Dr. Seiler has done lots of research on how the best elite athletes train. He’s based in Norway, so his research has been with the Norwegian cross-country skiers, some of the best endurance athletes in the world. What he found was that the skiers would spend the vast majority of their training time at relatively low intensities and a small portion at really high intensities, with almost no time in the middle. These are Olympic or World Champion athletes, and on many of their training days he could keep up with them. He checked a few more sports, again with elites, and found that the pattern held.

Now the immediate objection that springs to mind is “if I’m doing 20-30hrs of training a week, then sure, lots of it will be easy” and you might assume it doesn’t hold for those of us with more modest weekly training hours, but no, further research has shown that the polarised model also works for athletes training 7 hours per week.

Pretty much anyone who coaches amateur athletes would agree that one obvious flaw in the way amateurs train is that we typically do our easy sessions too hard, and our hard sessions too easy, so this model makes sense from that perspective too. Take it easy when you’re supposed to so that you are fresh and ready to smash it when hard sessions are prescribed.

Dr. Seiler’s Polarised Training says that 80% of your sessions should be at an intensity below VT1 and the remaining 20% of sessions should be above VT2, or the splits in hours per week should be 90% below VT1 to 10% above VT2. Training below VT1 trains your fat burning system, which improves your fuel use at all intensities and also builds lots of mitochondria, the engines of your cells.

Bear in mind too that this is my summary of his decades of research, but, if you want to hear from the man himself, he has appeared on Velonews’ Fast Talk Podcast a number of times to explain his research in more depth.

Dr. Seiler isn’t the only one talking about this. Dr. Phil Maffetone has been coaching for decades and has a similar prescription, providing a method for calculating your aerobic training heart rate which you should not exceed. The goal also being to build a solid aerobic system.

In terms of my training plans, I can train approx. 10hrs per week, so when adopting the polarised approach nine hours should be below VT1 and one hour should be above VT2. In reality, it will take me a while to build up the fitness required to handle that much high intensity, so any intervals I do will fall a little short of VT2 initially.

My brother and his family are arriving tomorrow morning for tens days holidays, so I won’t be doing much cycling between now and the beginning of July and putting the polarised model into practice will have to wait until then 🙂

The output from my metabolic test last week was a spreadsheet of raw data from the metabolic cart, which is food for further analysis. What do the numbers mean, how can I use them to inform my training etc. etc. Here’s a first pass at what I’ve managed to figure out so far.

Ventilatory Thresholds

There are two ventilatory thresholds, VT1 and VT2, which signify fundamental shifts in what’s happening your body as you exercise. VT1 is the point at which lactate levels in the blood begin to increase beyond resting levels and is usually marked by an increase in your breathing rate. Above VT1 lactate levels will increase as your effort increases, but will stabilise if you settle on a consistent effort. Your body can recycle lactate as fast as you produce it. VT2 is the point at which your body cannot recycle lactate fast enough and even if you are doing a consistent effort above VT2 lactate will keep increasing until you can’t exercise any more.

There doesn’t seem to be a simple formula you apply. Rather you graph breaths per minute and eyeball the points at which the slope of the graph appears to change, so it’s inherently subjective. In the above graph, VT1 appears to be around 138bpm for me, and VT2 is around 172bpm. VT1 seems about right based on experience, though VT2 feels a little too high.

What’s the relevance of VT1 and VT2 for training? Well in a Polarized Training model, which I’ll discuss in the future, the aim would be to do the vast majority of your training below VT1, with a small amount above VT2.

Fat Usage

My current weight is just under 92kg and I know from previous DEXA scans that my lean body mass, i.e: my weight if I were 0% body fat, is about 72kg. That’s a lot of lard to be carrying around, so what’s the ideal way to get rid of it? Well there’s only one way to get rid of it and that’s to get the fat released from your fat cells and burn it off.

Looking at my fuel substrate usage graph, taken from my earlier post, I can see that I burn approx. 0.75g of fat per minute consistently, from 100W all the way through to about 225W, or, in HR terms (going back to the spreadsheet), right up to about 155bpm.

You often hear that there’s no such thing as a fat burning zone and that you should just focus on working as hard as possible to burn more calories. However, as you can see from the graph above, that’s bollocks. There’s definite point at which I start burning less and less fat. It turns out too that my graph is indicative of pretty decent fat burning ability. Many people will never burn .75g/min at any level and may see significant drop off of their fat burning well before they get to 150bpm. Make a person like that train at high intensity and they’ll burn mainly carbs and the fat sitting around their gut won’t be burnt at all.

Even with a decent fat burning ability, at 170bpm I’m burning a total of about 1150kcal per hour, but I’d struggle to last a full hour at that rate, so I’d burn a max. of 46g of fat. However, at, say, 125bpm, while I’m only burning 690kcal/hr I burn a bit more fat at the lower intensity so I get rid of 53g of fat per hour. Significantly, at that effort I can ride for 5hrs or more if I felt like it, so in theory could burn off 250g+ of flab. Even if I only wanted to ride for one hour, I’d still burn 53g of fat at the easy pace versus 46g if I flogged myself.

Back to my weight. Weighing in at a hypothetical 82kg would leave me at a pretty athletic 12% body fat, so let’s do the maths. That’s 10kg of fat to shed, at a rate of 53g per hour, for a total of 188hrs of bike riding! At a max. of about 10hrs/week that’s four months of consistent riding. On the one hand it seems like a long time on the bike, but on the other, four months of work to reverse years of weight gain doesn’t seem too bad.

I went and had a Metabolic Test yesterday. A what, you ask? A metabolic test - you get on a stationary bike, they hook you up to a metabolic cart which measures the volumes of oxygen and carbon dioxide you inhale and exhale. You start cycling at a very easy rate, and every few minutes the rate increases until you’re too exhausted to cycle anymore. The data from the metabolic cart allows you to determine how much of your energy expenditure is coming from fat (FAT) and how much is coming from carbs (CHO) and how that changes as your effort increases.

Why Do This?

Well, it all started last year when I had finished a pretty consistent year of training and I looked back at my cumulative training data. I’d ridden a touch over 11,000km and burned about 270,000kcal but I hadn’t lost any weight. Sure, I have a sweet tooth and eat too much jellies etc. but overall my diet is pretty decent - bugger all processed food, cook most meals etc. etc. so I thought I’d have dropped a few kilos at least.

I’d read a little about metabolic tests over the years and decided I’d like to try one out, but the only place I could find that was offering them to the public was Jupiter Health on the Gold Coast, which isn’t convenient from Sydney. However, since we were moving to Brisbane in May 2018, I booked an appointment for late May last year. I did the test and it showed I was a really bad sugar burner, i.e: I was getting most of my energy from CHO on the bike and hardly burning any fat. This seemed to explain why I wasn’t losing weight - after all, if you’re not burning off your fat stores while exercising, when are you going to burn them off?

I haven’t done much training over the year since, but I have been reading about how to improve your fat burning. Alan Couzen, an exercise physiologist and coach has some informative articles, particularly How to turn yourself into a Fat-Burner, and while reading that I came across his articles on how you go about getting your fat burning tested, i.e: how to do a proper metabolic test, particularly Getting your ‘fat burning’ tested Part 1: Equipment and protocol.

Reading that confirmed some suspicions I had about the test I’d had done on the Gold Coast and the data I’d obtained from it. The two major concerns I had was that the basal rate data, obtained when you’re lying on a bed doing nothing for 15mins, showed me with a heart rate around 90-100bpm, which is about twice what I’d expect in that scenario. There was also a bit more fluctuation in the power data at each level and the time at each level didn’t seem to be consistent. I followed Alan’s suggestion to check with my local University’s Exercise Physiology department to see if I could do a test with them.

Luckily for me, I have Uni of Queensland (UQ) and Queensland Uni of Technology (QUT) to choose from, and, as it happened, QUT have their E3 Lab a 20min drive away, so I emailed them with my requirements and they were able to help.

The Protocol

Alan’s site provides a calculator where you can enter your estimated FTP and it pumps out your suggested starting level and how much the power output should be increased per level. It recommended that I start at 130W, but since the data from the previous test showed I was already starting to burn significant amounts of carbs at that level, I chose to start at 100W instead.

• Each level lasts 5mins.
• Start at 100W, then add 25W per level.

The guys doing the testing told me to tell them when I knew I would not be able to complete the next 5min level and we’d stop the test.

The Test

The test itself isn’t too exciting. As described, you start pedalling at an easy pace and it just keeps getting harder. The first 20 minutes are a bit boring as the work load is quite low and I was just trying to maintain a smooth pedal stroke and consistent breathing, i.e: instead of shallow breathing at low workloads, to try consistent deeper breaths throughout the test.

Wearing the mask take a bit of getting used to - at the start of the test you feel a bit weird as you’re not really breathing very often so it feels like the mask is keeping your mouth shut. Your heart rate is probably a few beats higher as a result too. As you start working harder and breathing more it becomes a non-issue.

The tightness of the straps keeping the mask on my face meant it was tricky to find a comfortable head position. Maintaining a normal riding position as if I was out on the road meant they were digging into the back of my head, so looking down at the bottom bracket seems to work best. I was getting a bit of a headache towards the end of the test too, most likely due to the straps’ tightness. However, tight straps equals tight mask seal equals accurate data!

Results

Here’s the basic fuel substrate use graph, with power output on the X-axis and kcal/min on the Y-axis.

So, when I’m exercising at 100W (v. easy) I’m getting a bit over 7kcal/min from FAT and almost nothing from CHO, and by the time I fell apart at 275W I was getting a bit under 6kcal/min from FAT but 15kcal/min from CHO.

Peak volume of oxygen consumed (not shown on graph) was 4.85L, giving me a VO2Max of 52.8ml/kg at 92kg, which just scrapes into the 95th percentile for my age, so happy enough with that. I can bump it a few points more by dropping a few kilos, plus the test protocol I used wasn’t ideal for finding a true max, so there may be room for improvement there too.

It turns out that I’m actually a good fat burner, which is the complete opposite of the earlier test. The most likely explanation for this about-face is that there was not a good seal around my nose and mouth when doing the first test, so the machine wasn’t only measuring the air I was inhaling and exhaling. That could skew the results significantly. It’s also the case that the equipment available in the Uni lab was much more professional than that in use the first time around, so accuracy was a lot better.

Normally these tests run until you start going anaerobic, at which point you are burning zero fat. However, I never got to that point, still burning a decent amount of fat at the last stage of 275W. I’ll need to read up on that, but I suspect it’s just an endurance issue - I’m just not fit enough to get to pure CHO burning given the 5min/level protocol. I’d definitely get there with shorter levels, and would probably have gotten there if I’d started at Alan’s suggested 130W.

Moral of the story: instead of going to the local physio/fitness place, take the advice in Alan’s article and see if your local Uni will run an experiment on you.

The downside is that I now have no excuse for being over 85kg, so I’ll just have to knuckle down to consistent riding and improve my diet quality as well. No shortcuts 🤣

A couple of months ago, I got a call from my mate, Stu, asking me if I wanted to do the Port to Port MTB Race. When I’d bought my MTB in advance of the move to Brisbane, I’d looked around for some events and this had grabbed my eye, but I’d put it down for next year as I hadn’t been riding much. However, Gareth had suggested it to Stu, who suggested it to me, so with two mates keen it was an easy decision to do it this year, despite the lack of training.

Last week saw me fly down to Newcastle to meet up with the guys for my first MTB event. I was underprepared, but the rough outline was that Stu was the fittest but with the least MTB experience, Gareth had the most MTB experience, having ridden the Scott 24hr many years ago, but possibly the least endurance, and I was somewhere in between. We had four stages to ride, with varying amounts of single track, and we had to maintain 10-12km/h average pace. On my local singeltrack I was getting 13km/h, but that was at a pace that I couldn’t sustain for four hours, so there was some apprehension about how thing would pan out.

Day 1

This looked like the easiest stage on paper. 48km of minimal single track, so the pace should be fine. One large climb near the start, then a rolling out-and-back course before the descent to the finish. Oh how wrong we were! The climb was on a steep, rocky 4WD road, so the pace was super slow. As expected, Stu was quickest up the climb, being able to stop to answer work emails while waiting for us! Once we had the main climb out of the way, we were faced with more rollers with a bias towards climbing, a brief bit of singletrack before a technical descent just after half way. The climb back out was ridiculously steep, with most people walking significant parts of it. Not what I was hoping for and I was getting annoyed. We finally made the top and looked forward to some descending back to the start, but things rapidly went wrong as Stu crashed hard as his front wheel washed out on a descent.

That was race over for him, with a 4WD ambulance coming to take him off the mountain. Eventual diagnosis was a broken shoulder blade and a few scrapes. Thankfully nothing more serious. Myself and Gareth continued on after the ambulance had left, but the downhills weren’t as plentiful as we’d hoped, there were a few more hard uphills requiring more walking and we eventually crossed the finish a man down and completely wrecked. Between Stu’s crash and the stage being way harder than anticipated, we weren’t off to a great start.

Day 2

Lots of singletrack on the second stage, so we were really looking forward to it. Stu had checked himself out of hospital and got an Uber to the start to have a pre-race coffee with us. We were so slow yesterday we’d been added to the final group to start, which didn’t really bother us as we had extra time to get organised in the morning. We’d had a 45min wait after Stu’s crash the day before, which the organisers had subtracted from our overall finish time, but we hadn’t asked them to change our start group. As it turned out, this meant we’d be riding the singletrack with all the slow and inexperienced people, so it took a while to get through the traffic and to be able to ride without interruption. This was definitely the highlight of the event, with almost the full 46km being singletrack, starting with the Killingworth trails and finishing off on the Holmesville network. Another four hours in the saddle, but chalk and cheese compared to yesterday.

Day 3

The longest stage of the race, coming in at 58km, with another huge climb to face. After about 8km of farm tracks we got to the Awaba trail network for some more fantastic singletrack. Fun trails which are really well looked after put smiles on faces and got everyone in a good mood to tackle the 5km climb immediately afterwards. I was slightly quicker than Gareth, so I’d ride a kilometre, stop and wait for him and repeat. Although the claimed gradient was 8%, it felt steeper than that and it was a long slog to the water station at the top. After a quick refuel we took off on the rollers across the top, with 17km to go before the second water station and the long descent to the finish. It quickly became apparent that Gareth was struggling, with his stomach staging a revolt, so we had no choice but to slow down to a sustainable pace. We made the second water station only to be told we were too slow and would be diverted to a shorter finish, so the fun downhill section got replaced with a fairly normal road ride back to the start. Not much we could do about it - part of the challenge of these events is being able to eat and exercise at the same time and sometimes your stomach just gives up.

Day 4

The final day, the shortest at 40km and also a point-to-point stage meaning we’d have to do some car shuffling. Stu waved us off in the morning as he was heading back to Sydney, and Gareth’s partner, Kirsten, got roped in to meet us at the finish. This was another day of mainly singletrack with some nice trails around Whitebridge to start off and the well-known Glenrock trails to finish. Whitebridge was enjoyable, but again, we were constantly getting held up behind riders who were forced to stop at anything technical. Glenrock was OK. I suspect we were sent down some of the easier trails as the organisers figured everyone would be exhausted and prone to mistakes after four hard days. Once off the trails it was a quick road downhill and across the finish line at Dixon Park Beach to a well-deserved burger and beer!

Summary

Overall a really enjoyable event and well run. Trails were very well signposted, so it was always clear where you should be going. I’d definitely do more training before doing another one as you definitely work harder on the MTB than you do on the road. I was pretty shattered but he end of it, despite being able to ride at my own pace all the time. Looking forward to the next one!

Pros: Bagnères-de-Luchon to Saint-Lary-Soulan Col du Portet, 65km, Mountains

Me: 15/15/15m SST, 5m RI

A super short stage for the pros with three solid mountains. Doing my ‘mountains as intervals’ thing saw me well over the usual one third of race distance, with a total of 45km under my belt by the time i finished. The intervals themselves were fine, apart from the last one which was tough.

I’m away for the weekend, flying South to Victoria tomorrow until Monday evening, so that’s the end of my ‘Third de France’. I’ll write up a little summary later, but for now, happy to be done and dusted and wondering how sore my legs will be when we go MTBing or snowboarding at the weekend.

Pros: Carcassonne to Bagnères de Luchon, 218km, Mountains

Me: 73km Z2, 10/15/15m Z2, 5m RI

Not great. Got the first two intervals done, but, during the second, the wind was blowing somke from some sort of industrial fire. Decided I’d rather not deeply inhale that crap so opted to skip the remaining 40km. Turns out it was a fire in a steel yard, so made the right call.

Legs felt OK after the rest day. Intervals weren’t too hard.

Pros: Millau to Carcassonne, 181.5km, Hilly

Me: 60km Z2, 5/10/15m SST, 5m RI

Well that’s the second week over with and not a day too soon. Despite a bit over 9 hours sleep last night, I still woke up tired. The first 100m from my house are slightly uphill, maybe 2% gradient, which is enough to feel the pain in the legs as they get going for the ride. I wonder what the cause of that is? Am I re-tearing damaged muscle fibres or something? It can’t be lactic as there hasn’t been a chance for any to build up.

Anyway, legs were OK once they’d warmed up. The SST intervals were fine, though the final 15m effort was a little bit tiring. Once that was out of the way I’d 30km still to ride and that was a bit of a struggle. My legs were OK, it was just overall fatigue wearing me down.

Totals at the end of Week 2: 24h27m, 642km, 1364 TSS

Not massive totals really. If I was fit that would be a decent, but not extraordinary, two weeks’ training. However, trying to do the same work from a low fitness base it takes its toll!

Rest day tomorrow!

So, a bit of perspective. Above is a screenshot posted by Pierre Rolland, riding the real Tour de France for EF-Drapac. It’s his totals for the second week of the Tour, so will be an interesting comparison to my last week doing the Third de France.

What’s interesting is the relationship between TSS (Training Stress Score) and Work. Pierre did 1907 TSS for the week, or 2.5 times my TSS. However, he did 32,247kJ of work, or 3.9 times the work I did. Work is a measurement, in kilojoules, of exactly how much physical work you have put into the pedals, whereas TSS is an approximation of the amount of stress that work has placed on your body. So despite Pierre doing almost 4 times the work that I did, it only stressed his body 2.4 times as much as my work stressed me.

The reason for this is that TSS is based on your FTP (your threshold, measured in watts), so that Pierre riding 1 hour at his threshold will generate the same TSS as me riding one hour at my threshold. However, Pierre’s threshold is probably 50% higher than mine, so he will do 50% more work at his threshold. He’s also at least 20kg lighter than me, so along with being able to do 50% more work than me at threshold, that work is moving a system (body + bike etc.) >20kg lighter, so he’s even faster again.

The other notable figure above is his Fitness score of 153. Fitness is measured in TSS per day and is the average amount of work he’s done over the previous three months and therefore also the amount of work he can now do per day without getting tired. At 153 TSS/day he’s three times fitter than me, though as we’ve seen above, TSS is based on threshold etc. etc. so he’s actually way better than that.

Pros: 188km, Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux to Mende, Hills

Me: 63km Z2, 10/5/10m SST, 5m RI

Tired today, but the SST intervals felt OK. They were shorter than earlier in the week which helps. However, my HR was quite a bit lower than when I first did them a few days ago. Looking back over the week, each day I’ve done SST intervals my HR has been lower. Not sure whether that’s due to cumulative fatigue, or my body ‘remembering’ how to do SST again. After all, in March I could do a straight 1hr @ 280W, whereas now I’m doing up to a total 1:10 @ 255W broken up into 4 parts. Only one more day until a rest day. Woo hoo!

Totals for the week: 13h 03m, 351km, 768 TSS.

Pros: Bourg d’Oisans to Valence, 169.5km, Sprint.

Me: 58.5km Z2, 5m SST, Sprint.

Had a relaxing start to the day and headed out for a ride just after midday. Nice weather and nice to have a plain Z2 ride again. All went well, legs felt OK albeit a bit tired and slow to get going and it was only when I got home and uploaded the ride that I realised I’d forgotten to do the 5m SST. Didn’t forget the sprint though - happy enough with 10s > 1000W too.

Pros: Bourg-Saint-Maurice Les Arcs to Alpe d’Huez, 175.5km, Mountains

Me: 58.5km, 20/10/20/20m SST, 7m RI

The last of the big days in the Alps for the pros with a mythical finish atop Alpe d’Huez. Lots more sub-threshold intervals for me. I really wasn’t looking forward to this at all as I was pretty tired from the last two days of intervals. Going to bed at 2am after watching the stage, followed by waking at 7.30am for work conference calls, meant I didn’t get much rest/recovery either.

I put if off for as long as possible, but it wasn’t too bad in the end. The first 2-3minutes of each interval were a bit of a struggle to maintain the power, but then the legs remembered what to do and it was OK from then until the last couple of minutes, which were hard work mainly as my lower back was getting tired/tight. Glad that’s over and I’m looking forward to some easy sprint stages.

The hardest part of the Tour is finished for me. There are still intervals next week when the pros hit the Pyrenees, but not the same volume as required in the Alps. My fatigue will still increase, simply from riding every day (and because I was starting from such a low fitness base), but the worst of it is done.

Pros: Albertville to La Rosière Espace San Bernardo, 108.5km, Mountains

Me: 36km Z2, 20/20/10/15m SST, 5m RI

Another big day in the mountains for the pros. The scenery around Bourg-Saint-Maurice was spectacular, so I think that sorts out where I’m going to go after my few days in Andermatt in August!For me, the scheduled intervals put me well over the required third distance, with 56.7km done. The intervals were hard - not the actual effort, but the cumulative fatigue as they went on. I’d dialled the target effort back by about 5W from yesterday, but the last two intervals were tough - had to concentrate to stay on target power. Made them all, so a solid 65mins of SST in the bag.

Another tough day tomorrow and then it’s back to an easy sprint stage ;-)

Pros: Annecy to Le Grande Bornand, 158.5km, Mountains

Me: 53km Z2, 15/20/15/15m SST, 5m RI

No messing around today. Last night got serious for the pros with the first day in the Alps and four big climbs. That means lots of sub-threshold intervals for me. Things went pretty well until the last 15min interval. I cracked half way through - my legs went bang at just under 9 minutes. I haven’t done any intervals in almost three months, so jumping straight in with a planned total of 65mins was perhaps a bit ambitious! More of the same on the cards for tomorrow too!

Pros: Rest Day Me: Rest Day

Well, normal work day, groceries, cooking dinner etc. No sitting around with my feet up getting massages like the pros ;-)

Feel a bit slack taking a rest day when I missed two days last week, but things are about to ramp up now as the pros head into the Alps, so I need the break.

Pros: Arras Citadelle to Roubaix, 156.5km, Cobbles

Me: 52km Z2, 3 x 5 x (1m Z3, 1m Z5, 1m Z1), 5m RI

The pros are riding a mini-Paris-Roubaix, featuring 15 cobbles sections. The dynamics of a cobble section are (very roughly) a fast run-in as the main guys want to be among the first few onto the section, the section itself is ridden at a hard pace and then things ease up when the section finishes. For me, that translates to 15 bouts of a minute Z3, a minute Z5 and a minute Z1, split into 3 groups of 5.

Pros: Dreux to Amiens Métropole, 181km, Sprint Stage

Me: 60km Z2, sprint finish

No riding today. Out for dinner & drinks last night and in tourist mode with visitors today.

Week 1 Totals: 11h23m, 291.1km, 595 TSS (training stress score)