May 2012

This month began with a business trip to Seattle, where I got in many hours of hill walking (from hotel to office/back), my first ever spin class in the hotel, and became reacquainted with Strava by a cycling colleague of mine.

For anyone that doesn't know about Strava yet, you will soon. This is quickly becoming the facebook for cyclists & runners. I reviewed this site about a year and a half ago, right before switching from MapMyRide to Garmin Connect, but found the site to be underdeveloped and the "upgrade" features didn't really entice me either; features I found for free on other sites.
Then again I looked at it last fall. I noticed they had this feature called segments, and a leaderboard on those segments, but it didn't appear there was any usage happening in Canada, and I couldn't really tell how those segments were created (or did they pre-exist?)
Then in Seattle my colleague showed me his recent ride, and how he achieved 4th overall on a particular hill during his commute to work. We did a quick scan of Calgary, and found about 3 or 4 in the city, with a couple more just on the outskirts. Ok, now I could see some value in it.

I went home and immediately uploaded my garmin's previous month data to it. Still not much doing, except that I "followed" my friend from Seattle, and everytime he logged a ride, it would appear on my dashboard. Ok, that's pretty cool too. Compared with Garmin Connect's terrible Explore feature, where you have to know the exact username and location within a certain range in order to find their workouts, this was way more usable.

There still weren't many segments created, and certainly none by any of my various commutes. So I began creating them. And I invited my riding friends. Then my work friends. They in turn invited other friends.
You can comment on other people's rides (or runs). It tracks your personal best times in running distances and riding segments. Segments are merely sections of road that you can isolate on your map, and whenever anyone rides that exact (or nearly exact) route, they essentially take part in that segment. Their name goes on the leaderboard for that segment.
If you have the fastest time, you are crowned the King of the Mountain (KOM)! There is no greater honour!

Now, everytime we ride to work, on any route, we are thinking about these segments. They are often hills, or long sections of contiguous road, and at times it's made it difficult to stick to recovery pace when your competitive juices are flowing!

Nonetheless, I think it's a brilliant idea. Now you don't need a multi-thousand dollar bike, spandex body suit,  racing license, collarbone-cracking-cat-5 mass start road race pileups to get your racing fix on!
You don't need to wait 9 months, drive to Edmonton, race for an hour, drive back, wait another month or two.
Find a segment near you and hammer it!!
I've personally witnessed 2 of my friends mention that they now are thinking about buying faster bikes so they can go for those KOMs, and that they are learning to appreciate how fast some of us can really hit those hills!

Anyway, enough about Strava. Here is a link to my page, follow me if you don't already.

After Seattle, I was home for one night, then Mike W and I drove up to Edmonton for Velocity.
Needless to say, I was rather disappointed with my results despite feeling that my fitness has vastly improved. I also attended all but one of the Wednesday Night Series races.

Suffered some sort of minor injury during the road race 2 weeks ago and have resorted to endurance and occasional tempo rides for about a week after, concluding with the 2-man TTT this week.
Gladly, I'm feeling better, even managed to move the chains on my 1-min max power to 593 last night on the ride home, taking the Cranston hill KOM! Next week I'll resume working on my 10-20 second sprints as I start reducing volume before Banff Bike Fest.

Here are my May stats:

• Run: 3 runs, 23 kms, 2h... weaksauce!
• Bike: 39 rides, 1,250 kms, 44h, 7,975 m elevation.

Other notables:

• Achieved 3 of my 4 pre-season targets (CP1 > 7.7, CP5 >4, FTP > 275W) - CP means critical power, at the number of minutes post-pended to it, so CP5 means the maximum amount of effort you can perform in 5 minutes, measured in watts/kilograms. FTP is Functional Threshold Power, which is essentially CP60, and often used by endurance athletes as a benchmark. In this case I targeted a specific value as I was not interested in losing weight to achieve that value.
• Only one remaining since December is to break the 1200W marker. I have come close, and I'm confident that I can hit that with a bit more specific training this summer.
• Other goals that I've added unofficially mid-season are a) Improve my 10 and 20 second power such that my fatigue profile is less steep, and b) improve my zone 4 to zone 5 power - I seem to do really well if I can sprint out of zone 3 or below, but have a hard time going from 500W to 1000W. I haven't really quantified these goals for this year, but I will for sure for next season, I just know I need to improve in those areas (as well as the existing areas.)

Next up, Underwear Affair 10k running race tomorrow! Sure it's a charity run, but in this case, there's pride, dollars, and pride on the line...