Things have gotten a bit more difficult this week – it means a new mistake has come into play.
Since the plan I have chosen was based on the FTP, not the FTHR, it had to be adjusted to my needs and heart-rate measurement capability, not the power measurement. To do this with some level of approximation you can use the guide from example from TrainingPeaks. This time I made a new mistake in adjusting the plan in TrainingPeaks. You can say it’s partially this software fault, but it’s actually purely my blindness: I selected wrongly the %MHR, instead of the %FTHR. What is MFR you may ask? Instead of the percentage of threshold heart rate, it takes the percentage of maximum heart rate. As you can imagine (or calculate in your head quickly) this does bring a small change to the training routine. Instead of a percentage of around 150 BPM, the training was calculated for 180 BPM. Reaching the required %MHR for values which were intended for %FTHR is really hard. They just lay way higher. This means riding harder. Much, much harder.
The training was waaaaaaaay too hard. Not a walk in the park. Look at my previous post of relation between these two values and their recalculation. I did start this week’s training without taking this into consideration. And you can see a reflection of this in the heart-rate that I had – barely reaching the required values.
In session 2 I had to shorten the middle, regeneration part by a few minutes, so the peaks before the intervals actually appear earlier than they occured in reality. This is how it unfortunately in life – sometimes you have to make ad hoc adjustments. You will see a reflection of in the total TSS number for this week.
This weeks summary:
Having shown that, please find a set of Lessons Learned from this week:
- pay attention to the base value to which you are referring your training zones/measurements (% of Max Heart Rate is definitely not equal to % of Functional Threshold Heart Rate)
- if you exceed some planned parameters by far, be cautious – there is a chance that you are not the next Cippolini, but rather have done something wrong in the training preparation phase
- the same applies to the opposite situation – if you underperform largely, check your training plan parameters one more time. There may be a checkbox you’ve checked unnecessarily or made a type in parameters definition, etc.
Cover photo courtesy of Victor Xok on Unsplash
Caesar's Cycling 