Keep it to one thread and post multiple times there. Not separate ones.
Please and thank you.
Love,
Management
Do you expect someone 50+ to know how to use an Internet forum?
Speaking of age, there are frequently now many geriatric threads: weekly someone will post about ablations, about decrease in speed with age, about heart attacks, about value of a 20 y/o tri bike, etc. Seems like half of the posters here are now old-farts as well.
Isn’t it about time for a geezer sub-forum? The AARP-Tri forum?
Lest I seem ageist, I represent everything I’ve said here.
It’s cool to see your cycling data and how you’re analyzing your fitness journey. Your observations about load, rest, and intensity make a lot of sense.
As a general comment - if anyone wants to comment, query, question, challenge or even argue - feel free. I doubt whether there will be any offence taken on my part.
As a 50+ athlete, I can anecdotally confirm that marginal gains drop off after 7ish hours per week, which is what I think I’m seeing here… I also have a good response to HIIT at this point, especially in the pool.
I wish I cared enough about training at this point to do this type of graphing. Would be interesting to see my results.
I am/was a returning cyclist in my fifties and have often visited this forum to pick up tips on how to get fitter. Over the years I have seen a few requests for an example, so I thought I would share mine.
I want to show you the load response of my body, because it turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought it would. I plotted my data in ways I have not seen before and it showed me:
1) That for the first few years my maximum loading rate was ~**5.3 **minutes/week
2) That my easy ride power increased by ~6W for every hour per week of training
3) That my body was sensitive to HIIT
and 2) were evident by plotting the raw data, but could also be predicted with good accuracy by combining certain responses. Once you know these medium term relationships, you can look at things on shorter timescales and start to take a view on them.
How does one add 5 minutes per week? Did you pick a random day to go around the block at the end of a ride or run before pulling into the driveway, or maybe add a minute per day? Seems awfully conservative.
From the first post it is not clear how that is dealt with. One way is to look at it is on an annual basis - 5.3 minutes per week is around 4.6 hrs/week on an annual basis. So if you started your year doing an average 5 hours per week (and also been riding consistently and with the right balance and phasing of load and intensity, so that you body was responding commensurate with that loading), then your annual end of year target would be 9.6 hours/week. That is not a trivial increase. My body responded with 6.4W (easy ride pace) for every hr/wk of training. So that is a ~30W increase of easy ride pace, maybe about 40W increase in FTP. I think that is good for one year (YMMV - I also think that is only achievable in the first few years).
In the next post we will see how that rate influenced response - on the right timescale there are some clear correlations.
In the first 2 years I had no idea about that rate, I was just trying to push volume, and varied intensity on a whim.
When I saw the rate, I actually did try and train at rates very close to 5.3 minutes per week (and yes it was one ride a week where I just road down the road a bit further to make the time within a minute of target time). There were some interesting results. A key question is whether you are in balance with the loading - I think I only spent about six weeks in balance over a ~5 year period. If I could go back I would do it very differently. Depending on how out of balance you are, it could take months or over a year to get back in balance again. That is my opinion, but I think my data backs that up.