Post-Holiday Update time!
So with the last update I posted, I shared my initial two-week holiday plan above, it consisted of ~15/16 hours of riding each week. While I can easily achieve that, and have met that volume without problems in the past, I just lacked really any desire to complete the additional volume rides most days. I still got my workouts in just with a bit less volume than intended, let’s take a look:
I ended up with 11/12 hours each week instead, which isn’t too far off, and as I said, I was nailing the intervals so I was happy.
Things didn’t really go as planned with the ramp test, as I felt under rested and under fueled. I decided instead to try to conservatively estimate where I should be, and just tacked on 5w to where I had been previously. Yes, it goes against most of the advice given on the podcast (sorry @Nate_Pearson and @Jonathan) , but I have a pretty good idea of where I’m at power wise, and would’ve had no qualms about lowering my number if I wouldn’t have been able to complete the workouts.
Since this chunk fell mostly within the days assigned to Rapha’s Festive 500, and they were “allowing” it to be virtual this year, I decided to try an get in at least some of the volume that way. Here’s where I ended up with that:

So while not everything went according to plan, overall the two weeks turned out pretty decently. And if that wasn’t enough, I wanted to highlight one of the last rides I did, from Jan. 2nd, which blew me away a bit. What was supposed to be a simple Eclipse +3 (4x20) ended up turning into a 1x60 and a 1x20. I was feeling incredibly good and set out a personal challenge about 19 minutes into the first interval to see if I could do the hour without the breaks.
And I did it! (except for one random small dropout
). But I managed to do 324 for the hour, which is my highest ever 60m power! Admittedly though, I’ve never really attempted to set a PR for that. Ignore the last half of the final 20m interval as my trainer went haywire with it’s connection and that caused a lot of issues.
But wait! There’s more!!! Yesterday, more out of curiosity and masochism, I decided to see if I could do it again, but this time with Antelope +5 (7x10). So doing the full 70m of intervals in one go, without the rests. Things went… way better than I actually thought they would have. Which is nice, because it confirmed that the above performance wasn’t a fluke!
I’m feeling really, really good about these performances. And honestly thinking that I might test out bumping the FTP up a bit more because of them. But, we’ll see about that.
I’ve got about two full weeks left until my next rest week and then I’ll be starting my first build phase of the season. Let’s hope the upward trend continues 