One of the most important parts of my Ironman build program, over the last 12-14 weeks before an Ironman, is a weekly (or so) 100+ mile time trial. I'm not going full-out racer mode in these rides but I do actually take them pretty seriously and definitely put a bigger than normal effort into them. My overall objective is to get my 100-mile time down under 5 hours (20+ mph) at some point during the 10 or so century rides that I typically do in a build.
I did my first century on 6/29 and yesterday I completed my 4th (so 4 in 26 days). Here is summary of the stats from those rides:
1. My four times have been: 5:46, 5:27, 5:13, and 5:16 (in blue/bold above). Yesterday was the first ride where I didn't get faster.
2. In the main data field are the decimal versions of my 5-mile splits. So, for instance, my first 5 miles on 6/29 was completed in 16.98 minutes or just under 17 minutes, which is about 17.6 mph.
3. The color coding is: if I'm more than 30 seconds faster over 5 miles in a split than I was for the same split in the previous ride, it's shaded green. If I'm more than 30 seconds slower its shaded red and in between is yellow. For the 25-mile splits the time delta is plus or minus 2.5 minutes, for the 50-mile splits its plus or minus 5 minutes and for the whole ride its plus or minus 10 minutes.
4. Lots of green for rides 2 and 3 as I improved considerably from ride1 to ride 3. Yesterday's ride featured a lot of headwind early and that partially explains the red/yellow for the first 65 miles. Coming home this wind became a tailwind and I was faster down the stretch. In the 5-mile split section if I ride faster than 20mph (sub 15 minutes) the times are in bold and you can see that even though the overall ride was a bit slower, I did go 20+mph for 4 of the 20 segments yesterday (21.4 mph was the fastest) and I had only done that in 2 of the previous 60 5-mile segments.
5. The average of the 5-mile segments is displayed on the far right with my 7 fastest shaded green, 7 slowest shaded red and the 6 in the middle shaded yellow. A quick glance indicates that between 25 and 60 miles I'm going slower than I am at the beginning and end of the rides so maybe I need to bring more focus to those parts of the rides.
6. You can also see that my first 50 and last 50 are pretty similar on average with my second 50 being actually about 1% faster than my first 50. Also, my last 25 miles, on average, has been about 4% faster than my 1st 25. So clearly, I'm not fading but it seems its the middle part of the ride I need to work on.
7. Lastly, if you take my best 4 25-mile segments (out of the 16 I've completed), I'm still only at 5:08, so I still have quite a bit of improvement I need to make to get to my sub 5-hour goal.
Onward and Upward!
1 comment:
Post a Comment