Training and consistent riding has allowed my body to recover from the slump that it was in after my epic scale burnout last fall.
In December I benchmarked my lactate threshold so that I could define my Endurance, Tempo and SubThreshold zones. My test then, revealed I could sustain a miserable 230 watts for 20 minutes. 60 watts shy of what I was pushing in the summer.
However, through the course of the next 30 days, I felt my body respond to the consistent trainer time. Last week I felt as if the zones were no longer accurate, so I called an audible and decided to throw in a benchmark test just to make sure I was training where I should be.
I followed the protocol mentioned in Racing and Training with a Powermeter
During the 20minute TT I felt great for the first three quarters.. (relatively speaking, since this test is VERY uncomfortable) My wattages seemed to be bouncing between 260-290, which was much higher than my last benchmark. Towards the last 5 minutes my wattages dropped significantly as I struggled to keep my effort level up. The steady rhythm of my legs that defined the first portion of the test was replaced with an undulating pulse of efforts where I tried my best to keep my wattages up. The last five minutes i was humming between 210-250 watts...alot of variance.
I probably could have paced myself better, but regardless I was pleased with the results as I averaged 263watts for this duration. A 33 watt improvement over five weeks. Decent.
I think most of this may be due to recouped muscle memory and metabolic efficiency rather than raw gains from training, but whatever. Ill take it.
This puts me at the same fitness I was last March, and this is before any real threshold training. With February designated as a 'threshold training month' Ill hopefully be ahead of where I was last year.
