Winter Training Camp (part 2)

Training camp (Part 2)

Training camp is now over, we have done our final ride out here in Tenerife. Yet another amazing day to finish things off, the weather has been absolutely great throughout. Perfect training temperature for me, some might say it is a touch too hot, but I have found it ideal. 26 degrees as a max and 12 degrees at its lowest towards the summit of Teide (the name of the Volcano here).

My Athlete Service maintained training wagon.

The three of us here all having quite a different approach to the 10 days training. Joe at the more “pro” end of things, he has a paid coach, and a structured plan with each day mapped out. Me, a little bit like that (without paid coach), a bit of structure but with more flexibility i guess you could say. I had ideas of sessions I wanted to do but did them as and when I felt good about them. Then you have the animal, Pete, his only real plan was to hurt himself and hurt the mountain as much as he could every single day. They say there are many ways to skin a cat and I think this proved it. As we are all now sat down and all moaning about how shattered we are. We have all come out the other end with success.

My real aim for the camp was to train solidly for the 10 days (if my knee allowed, (which it generally did)). With the hope that I could hopefully see my climbing having improved from the form I had in 2014, so hopefully being lighter would show my times being faster than 2 years ago. Overall this has been proven. I have a different power meter so the numbers there are slightly subjective, but gravity is a fixed variable, you cannot cheat gravity, I proved to myself I am in a better place than 2 years ago. Not by a huge amount, but enough to be pretty happy.

When I say you cannot cheat gravity, well, Pete seems to be able to do a bit of cheating… He uses the method of huge power. On quite a few days he has climbed amazingly well for someone who is a big strong guy, and someone who also swims and runs around his cycling. We often call him Quadzilla, and on most climbs he lived up to this title.

Anyone interested in the training I did out here can have a gander at my Strava page.

https://www.strava.com/athletes/1817412

My final few k's before packing up to come home. The standard blue skies and the arid dessert in the foreground.

A lot of my thinking was just to “ride up hill”. Some people say you cannot reproduce it in the UK, well I feel you can to an extent…. Get in a bigger gear and just plough out power, you get to feel resistance pretty well. Simple. Here, I was more keen to continue to try to learn how to get keep pace up on steeper pitches and continue to work on my Torque Effectiveness numbers that my Info Crank gives me. Around “just climbing up hills”, I wanted to firstly do my FTP test which I explained in my previous blog, and then off the numbers I would learn from that I could put in some “sweetspot” sessions, some Low RPM sessions, some VO2 Max sessions, and a tiny bit of the VO2 Max work with sweetspot to recover.

So knowing my FTP you can work back all your numbers pretty well. Your Threshold starts at 92% (from memory), and finishes at 105%. above this is VO2 Max up until 120%. The zones below that I was interested in were the sweetspot zone. Thats basically on the borderline of Zone 3 (Tempo) and Zone 4 (Threshold). 88-92%. Its a small window, I have zero idea how it works but some say that being in Zone 4 benefits you greatly but puts a lot of fatigue into the body, and being in Zone 3 still puts some fatigue on you but with very little benefits to the body, so this area between both gives you the best of both worlds.

So I mixed up a few sessions with sweetspot, some at normal cadence and some at lower. Me and Pete did a session with low rpm and high rpm. That really was a killer. I was happy enough with my knee and tried some VO2 max work as well, this was fine on said knee but my heart rate was really slow to respond, a sure sign for me that I was fatigued. I eventually blew drastically on this one but still got some VO2 max in. On a few of the massive descents down the volcano I did a bit of recce work for the up and coming Azur cycle tours/Athlete Service training camp. Seeing if I can select the best of the roads of the guys. I did manage to select a segment on Strava for them, I think you will like it everyone….

https://www.strava.com/segments/11292100

So the week panned out really well, every single day was warm or even hot, only one day did I feel “chilly” on the 35k descent. Even then by the bottom I had long forgotten being a little chilly descending down the Alpine type section of the Volcano. I was hot again even easy spinning my way back to our accommodation. Talking of which, the accommodation was very good. We had ten nights there, self catering on airbnb, under £300 shared between 3 of us. We worked out today that we had spent very nearly that much on food between us. And talking of that, the final total of porridge consumed was well over 5kg. I think we could have topped 6kg but we were rationing it a wee bit in the final couple of days as the Spanish prices for porridge are ridiculous!! A rough calculation of 500g boxes of cereal (Special K type copy) was 12-14 boxes too. Us boys do like our breakfasts…. all day long it seems.

I am just sat back in Henley finishing off this blog, I am predicting many spelling mistakes as I am a little tired now. Done nothing apart from sit down and eat all day, tiring stuff!