DONE, DONE, and DONE! My CritFit 18 Week Pre-Season Plan wrapped up last week before I headed out for mud wrestling my first mountain bike race of the year. 18 weeks of sweating it out on the trainer, staring at the power numbers on TrainerRoad, sometimes feeling strong, sometimes wanting to bang my head on the wall.
Overall, I’m happy with how my training went. During Phase 2 I did struggle, legs felt dead and motivation was at an all time low. It was February and the weather was dreary and all I wanted to do was ride outside. It was a task to stay motivated and drag myself onto the trainer. Then I came down with bronchitis which threw training off for about two weeks. For Phase 3 I came back and attacked, with a heavy balance of outdoor and indoor riding I had motivation again.
The big news is that increased my functional threshold power (FTP) from an initial 195 watts back in November to 217 with my test yesterday! 22 watt increase, woohoo! CritFit works, there’s no denying! There’s also no denying that structured training with interval workouts works… wait, that’s CritFit… I digress! Training with power is also the way to go, so thanks to TrainerRoad for that great software to allow this to happen without the big bucks being dropped on a power meter!
Fortunately, the training hasn’t stopped! My work schedule doesn’t really afford me the time to go outside and ride for hours and hours, so I wanted to stick to two or three days a week on the trainer keep up my fitness, if not continue to build it over the season. So I am now doing the CritFit 8 Week In-Season Race Plan (ISP), which cycles between blocks of threshold, VO2 max, and tempo workouts along with racing on the weekends (with some finagling for weeks I have weekday races). I start next week (I took this week as a week to test and do some road and mountain riding unstructured) and 8 weeks will bring me up to the end of June, and then it’s only about two weeks until Nationals. (EEEK, that makes it seem so close!). Here’s to the continuation of the solid foundation I built!
Heidi Rides Bikes 