elrasc06 wrote:
Hi Bryce, firstly thank you. I'm a triathlete that is working on turning myself into a road racer after a career ending running injury. This past season I focused on some local time trials. I had a baby in February, and was biking 10-12 hours a week up until the day of. So when I jumped back in a week later I counted that as base training, and went right into the general build, and followed that with the 40k TT plan (both high volume). I PRed in our local 40k and 10 mile time trial so thank you for those plans.
My last TT was over two weeks ago, but I have a 40k rolling road race at the end of October. What I did was I counted back 5 weeks from the rolling road race high volume plan and plugged that in to try to extend my training until that point. In the 40k TT training plans, the harder workouts were hard but manageable. I was able to hold the 95-100% FTP for the longer intervals. Switching to the road race plan, I am struggling to hit the really high anaerobic efforts. For example, I did Guard +1 yesterday, and I could maintain the 107% FTP for the 4 min repeats no issue, but the sprints I couldn't hit the power it wanted me to at all. My latest FTP test shows my FTP didn't drop, and I've been chronically sleep deprived the whole time so it shouldn't be a stress or fatigue thing. I did learn pretty quickly that I have to do the more traditional 20 minute FTP test, the ramp test underestimates my power by about 20 watts. So could it be that I'm just not used to training the more fast twitch muscles? I have 15 years experience in tri's and longer endurance races so I haven't worked on my anaerobic power as much as I probably should have.
Hey there!
First of all, congrats on your PRs! That's so great to hear!
Regarding your difficulty with anaerobic efforts in the Rolling Road Race Plan, there is one main reason for this: the Specialty Phase is designed to be completed after an appropriate Build Phase. Since you have presumably been on a Sustained Power Track when preparing for your TT's, you likely have minimal experience with these anaerobic efforts. At the midway point of the Specialty Road Race Plan, we assume that you have done all of the anaerobic work from General Build and we adjust the difficulty accodingly.
A better approach to prepare you for your upcoming road race would actually be starting at the beginning of General Build. You have 5 total weeks, so ideally your training would look like this:
General Build (Weeks 1-4)
Rolling Road Race (Week 8) (This will be your taper week)
I hope that clears things up, let me know if you have any further questions!
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