Friel - Making fall and winter training program

Andy SG

Ok, I've been doing this for a while. Some lessons learned: I started doing 4 minutes intervalls, using HR monitor and standard trainer. I thought I were doing things rather 'bye the book' but when a I bought a trainer that can show power, and where I can set the power limit, I realized that the training become much harder. Much! This said, my load was percieved even lower in the beginning of the intervall, compared with the traditional set-up. This must have meant that I were cheating more than I thought. A reality check gives: I'm doing intervalls at 290W for four minutes at a cadence of approximately 90. If I drop the cadence down to 80 by the end of the intervall, I would drop the power output down to 260W. 260 W is a hell of a difference compared with 290, while the drop in cadence seem rather small by the end of an intervall. This probably means that my old trainer allowed me to cheat 10% without giving much feedback. At the same time I wasn't aware of the huge difference in workload between say 290 and 260W. Are you with me?

So. I'm going from a Friel base training set-up to a high intensity program where I even changed the perodization, meaning that I start with VO2max training. What have I learnt?

1) Block training seem to work better than I expected. I get less feel of fatigue than I expected, and even in comparison with Friel's 10-15 hours per week.

2) This type of training is very time efficient. Allowing me to train harder this time of year than I ever done before. This of course give results.

3) I try to ride my mtb during weekends, when it fits with the training plan. I then ride race simulations of approximately 2 hours. I can push my self harder with a couple of months on high intensity training than I've ever been able to do before. I feel as if I have improved my mtb performace significantly.

4) Still I don't see a clear next step. As I said above: Anyone having any ideas when to shift to more MSP style of training, and how do I increase the load over cycles/weeks?

5) Intervalls requires much more mental strenght than just going out and do a nice ride during a nice evening.

6) Using blocks, and power meetering I fast become stuck with figures, watts, intervall lenght etc. It is a risk that it becomes to technical to ride bikes. (It is to some extent compensated for since I ride mtb in a way that is better than ever before).

I have gained say 20 W ower one month, on my 4 minutes intervall, since I started to use the trainer with power meeter. 10 W is maybe improvements in technique of doing the intervalls, and 10 is pure gain. My ability to run hard on my mtb has increased over the approximately 2 months I've been doing this. That was expected, I would say. I didn't expect the same change in 20 minute efforts on the flat with the mtb. I don't have any real measured data, but my speed on the flat for longer fast rides feels (and is indicated by the speedometer) to be faster than ever. I have estimated my FTP to be 230 W and will monitor that moving forward, but I thing it has changed at least 10 -20 W in two months, with only weekend racing and SMSP intervalls in the weekdays.

Thanks for your input so far, and please continue to share your thoughts on my training.

BR