Friday, September 16, 2011

August Numbers...

Overall the month of August saw less riding that July...though a fair amount of that was due to my crash in the middle of the month that threw everything off.

Speaking of the crash...I'm finally, for the most part, healed up from the crash. I still have some visible areas where the road rash was on my knee and I'm finally bandage free from all areas of my body with my finger having it's final bandage yesterday (more than a month after the crash). My left index finger still doesn't bend all the way but I'm getting more and more mobility in it. I also had a banged up knee that hurt for a while but is feeling better now.

Numbers From August:

My numbers for the month of July look like this:
  • Total hours on the bike: 58:03:24
  • Total miles ridden: 1079.01 miles
  • Total TSS: 3505
  • Kilo joules of energy expended: 46726 kj

Even with the lower hours on the bike I still had over 1000 miles ridden and one stage race...so it was still a good month.

I've been continuing my riding since I'm not currently working, but have decided to stop with the really hard rides as my legs are just tired. Last week a bunch of teammates and I did the Timber route and overall I felt OK, but I had no top end left and I could feel that my legs were borderline dead.

With that said, I'm going into LSD work and just enjoying riding for as long as I can since the rainy season is coming around and hopefully a job will come my way soon. So I'm trying to get in a lot of lower intensity miles right now but am limiting my ride durations to 3 hours or so max to give my legs a break. When I climb, I'm trying to keep it at more of a tempo pace than near my threshold...though during group rides I'll probably push it a little, but I'm not going to hammer like I usually do and will let others ride up the road if my legs are not feeling it at all.

Overall for the race season this year, I'd call it a success...even though they canceled the Team Time Trial and the only real shot at a State Championship I had this year. My results on the year include:

Three road races races: 
  • 3rd place - Kings Valley
  • 5th Place - Silverton (State RR championships)
  • 5th place - Eugene Roubaix
Three Time Trials:
  • 1st place (PIR)
  • 3rd place (State ITT championships)
  • 5th place (Jack Frost)
One Stage Race (post crash):
  • 27th in the prologue
  • 31st in the road race
  • 15th in the ITT
  • 25th in the crit
  • 28th overall
Now to take two months easy then start hitting intervals again starting in the beginning of December. I'm starting these earlier this year because I came into this season without as much top end as I would have liked and felt behind most of the season. I also plan on hitting them harder this year with more intervals in the 5 and 10 minute range instead of focusing on my 20 minute threshold power.