Off Sea Son

Yeah this feels better, this feels right. The big difference between this blog and the training blog is that I can just ramble incoherently here, where the 7 Weeks blog was supposed to be on point. Incoherence is my trump card.

With the race season over I can officially go into sloth mode. I don't know what that means exactly but on Tuesday afternoon's road ride I hammered it pretty well for about an hour. I'm stronger than ever and I don't want to lose much over the winter. Plus, if you can go faster often times you do go faster. I did a nice 20 minute warmup, 60 minutes "on", then cooled down for 5. Felt very productive.

I have this list I made for myself of things to do in the offseason a month ago. Here it is and how I can track it.

1. Weigh less than 180, aim for 175. Easy enough to track. Targeted end of February.

2. 20 minute warmup every day. Probably harder to track unless I put this in my riding log. Though I'm really in tune with warming up properly these days.

3. Refine my pre-race warmup. Come up with a routine. Something like: 10 min spin, 5 min hard effort, pre-ride part of the course, tempo, high-end, blah blah blah.

4. Start riding Saturday through Tuesday to get in the 4 on, 3 off pattern. Easy to track but I won't start this until after vacation. Right now I'm in unstructured mode.

5. I need to sleep more. This probably means writing down when I go to bed and making sure I get enough sleep.

6. Make weekend race simulations more like a race. Warmup, race start, etc. This is almost impossible to track except for the fact that any given Saturday ride can/should be a sort of race simulation depending on the time of year.

7. Work on bike handling skills. This can be noted in the riding log as something I specifically went out to do. This is also dependent on my dialing in my bike setup more. The Stumpjumper needs to be made more aggressive. Maybe drop the bars a few spacers and get a longer stem.

8. Add abdominal workouts. Track in riding log. I asked Bill to send me his 20-30 minute routine.

9. Higher cadence training. How to measure this? Almost impossible without a cadence meter.

There you go. 9 things. I guess we all need something to work on in order to get better and these were some thoughts I had a while ago. It probably seems too much to some people but that's how I roll, as they say. The idea is to roll faster and more efficiently.

Off the bike, life goes on. My sleep goal is not starting off well because my daughter is off the wall right now. But she's still sick so you just have to deal with it.