I'll briefly summarize my Everest Training Plan:

Long hours of riding and climbing for 5 weeks after collegiate. Then, keep the hours and build in some intensity: Thursday la grange rides, 3 x 20 min intervals etc. A typical day might be: up Las Flores, down Piuma, up Piuma, down Las Flores - repeat 3 times.

The biggest thing I tried to focus on was to really hit my zones. I structured the workouts so that a 5 min interval session was early in the week followed by 20 min intervals when I was fresh, with the longer base rides later in the week. I tried to not dig myself into any "holes" by monitoring my Power Tap data.


To summarize the plot: The blue line (CTL) is my "fitness," the Pink line is my "fatigue" (ATL) and the bar graph in yellow is how "race ready" I am (TSB). My goal was to get the CTL number around 125 units in a linear fashion throughout the summer so as to not plateau, or build too fast and dig myself into a hole. You can see I did a big workout for the "training camp" - 21 hours saddle time in 2 days, which spiked my fatigue (ATL) and dropped my TSB.

One great feature with this kind of analysis is to ensure there is always a constant training stress - it's not ideal to maintain a flat CTL (blue line). It would better to eaither be building or recovering. Training is all about adaptation.

Using my training plan for the summer and the Power Tap as a guide, I was able to increase my 20 minute power from 320W to about 345-350W, a pretty significant increase.

Oh, I also ate. A LOT of food. I averaged 50,000 kJ (~calories) and 1300 miles / month for 3 months straight, and 30,000kJ and 800 miles / month for the 5 months before.

Happy Riding!

Labels: Everest, Power Tap, racing, Training