#2025training

On the top, the last 8 weeks of 7d average overnight HRV; below those, my training load. NB the charts have different Y-axes.

In early May, I was keeping myself in the (green) optimum training load zone, but with acute load numbers dropping from 911 to 679 as Helena and Rachel arrived and life became busy.

My HRV numbers began to fall off a cliff the week after their visit. I felt rubbish, and didn't ride for 6 days. The low numbers through the rest of May are short commutes in London to and from joinery classes (and that was scheduled into my training).

I began to ramp things up again on 5 June by resuming my scheduled turbo sessions; but that quickly took my training load through the top of the now-lower optimal range, even though my acute load was lower than four weeks previously. My HRV began to dip again the following week, so I eased off: I get points for not ploughing on.

In the past week or so, the training load chart doesn't tell the whole story. It shows the ride I did today (70 km with lots of climbing, from Gifford) but not the ride I did last Thursday through the Trossachs (90 km, also lots of climbing. In between, however, I've stayed off the trainer, to give me more recovery time. I may be above the green zone again, but I have a recovery / taper week coming, in Wiesbaden.

Both those recent rides were half-day hilly routes, which is reasonable training for the full-day mountain rides coming my way. Of course, there are 6 of the latter in 6 days, not one a week.

Today's ride, though, was encouraging. I was trying to pace myself, not empty my legs, but I got 22 little cups from Strava, including some new best times on segments I've been riding since as long ago as 2013. Yes, I was on a lighter bike today than 12 years ago, and yes, there was a bit of a tail-wind some of the time; but I felt reasonably strong, on a ride that was about 60% of the distance of the Slovenia challenge routes, and about 50% of the climbing. I could imagine myself doing it again after lunch.

At the start of the Build phase, my FTP went up by 2.1%, which was excellent. I completed that week's rides okay, but then fell victim to a nasty UTI, which kept me off my bike for a fortnight. The effect showed up clearly in my Garmin data for HRV (below), sleep and energy / fatigue.

After a course of antibiotics, I felt strong enough to get back on a bike at the start of June, and completed that week's rides with some tweaking down of intensities.

I have a couple of weeks in London next. These were part of the plan, and I'll be able to do some work in the gym.

When I'm back from those, it'll be time to ramp up distance on the road and time in the saddle, to prepare me for consecutive days of hard riding: the average Challenge Route day in Slovenia is 115 km and 2,750 m of ascent: about 6 hours of riding, depending on wind and legs.

I've kept my diary light for a fortnight of road riding, including a ride in the Trossachs (twice over the Duke's Pass). It would be good to build up to riding every other day, and longer rides of 100-120 km. Another good ride would be to start at Gifford and ride to Duns and back over the hills.

I'll then have a week of taper in Wiesbaden before Slovenia. I'll take that as it comes, and regard it as part of increasing fitness through the summer and for Ventoux.

I took the advice of the algorithms, and made this a recovery week. My reflection on it is that fitness is a long game.

With that perspective I like this chart from Strava, showing its estimate of my fitness for the past year (the orange line) and the associated training-induced fatigue (the grey line). The big spike in the middle is Andalusia in early October 2024.

In the long game, I'm now at my fittest for 6 months, and the same level as I was a year ago; and I'm managing the fatigue by giving myself enough recovery time between intense efforts.

My long game for this season began with Mallorca, now a month ago (the first of the group of spikes at the right). There are two months between now and Slovenia. This time a year ago, I let training and fitness plateau and then slide from about mid May. I paid for that in the Dolomites (and went to Andalusia much fitter). If I get the long game right for the next two months, I stand a chance of going to Slovenia with around the fitness I had when I came back from the Dolomites; which would improve my chances for the challenge routes in Slovenia and give me a better platform for the next part of the long game, to Ventoux in the autumn.

Two other things I'm pleased about in this week's training:

I got to the gym again, and returned to cycling-specific free-weight training. My body, especially my legs, is telling me how much more effective that is than machines. It's giving me motivation to keep that up as part of the long game.

I did a loop to Innerleithen today, a good hilly 100 km ride that I've done 15 times in the past dozen years. Though I didn't set many new power records today, with the help of a light but favourable breeze, I did set some worthwhile new PRs on the climbs, including the climb from Innerleithen by the Leithen Water to "the Granites," beating a previous best from 2013. That's a good long game.

Another good week. I was in London, so there was only one turbo session, of hard intervals. I didn't manage to fit in weights, but got some short endurance rides while I was away, and have just completed my longest ride of the year so far, of just over 100 km. That's also given me good progression in TSS and Garmin training load, building on last week.

My two-hour power is about 5% up on my last long ride, just over a week ago; more than 20% ahead of this time last year; and less than 3% behind this time in 2022.

The story of week 2 of base training, in a couple of pictures. In short, it has been good. I've done some hard intervals, a long-ish road ride, a short easy one and a gym session. I took the software's advice to keep Friday and Saturday light after Thursday's ride. Even so, I've more than met my distance, TSS and intensity minutes targets for the week. My Garmin thinks this is productive. It rates my VO2 max at 44, the joint-highest so far this year, and "excellent" (in the top 10% for my age and gender).

Is it making a difference?

Yes, it is. Compared to the same points last year and in 2022, my power curve for this year is essentially the same in the middle of this chart (from about 12 to 30 minutes: that is, up to the duration of a Mallorcan climb). At the start of this month, I was markedly behind the benchmarks of earlier seasons. I set some new season-best short efforts this morning, up to the 80 second mark: not hugely useful to me in themselves, but markers of progress. Since before going to Mallorca, I've lifted my 30 m power by 22%, and my 60 m power by 5%.

Learning from this week to apply to future weeks:

I've tweaked one of the Garmin screens to show me the TSS of the current ride while I'm doing it, to give me another feedback loop.

Doing this week's rides on Skinnymalinky has been fun, and useful. It gives me the option of having one bike on the trainer and one for the road for the rest of this season, and a winter bike for the back end of the year.

Looking in more detail at rides in July's trip to Slovenia has reinforced for me that I need to be stronger at the 2-hour mark, and to develop the endurance for long days on the bike, rather than shorter turbo efforts. I've scheduled 100 km rides in the next couple of weeks, to build on this week stretch to 75 km.

The "bin with no lid" currently is weight loss, which has stalled. I'll use a week in London to put the lid back on that.

I rode from Edinburgh to the Bridge of Earn, aiming to put in a best effort for up to 2 hours. I kept my average power above 150 W to the top of the Cleish hills, about 1:45 into the ride, then ran out of hills, so at the 2-hour mark it was 142 W. That's 19 W better than at this point last year, and only 11 W off the good year I had in 2022. It's also more than a third better than my previous best this year, including all the Mallorca rides.

I'm learning a good deal along the way about different methods for assessing a ride's training effects. "Normalised power" is a way of doing it that highlights the most intense efforts, making rides above 30 minutes or so more comparable, even when on different terrain. On that measure, this was my strongest ride for 6 months. Comparing TSS values, which measure the overall intensity of the effort, it was my hardest ride since the Andalusia Challenge Routes last Autumn, and not far behind those.

So it was a good day's training. The next long ride might be the Innerleithen loop, which is a bit less varied in terrain, so easier to make a sustained effort.

I've been looking at the climbs in my week in Slovenia, to see if I can work out how fit I want to be to make the challenge routes achievable and enjoyable.

The key to that is the time it will take me to complete the routes: not because I'm racing anyone, but because I need to be fast enough to finish in daylight, with the support of the guides and vans, and to give me recovery time before the next day's challenge.

I can estimate my time to complete a day-long ride in the UK using some rules of thumb. For an audax-type challenge, I target an overall average speed of 20 km/h, including stops. For more leisurely rides, I target 24 km/h while moving, and add in time for stops. A hilly route and/or headwinds reduce my average speed, other things being equal. In the UK, however, the reductions aren't huge.

In the high mountains, it's different. I know from experience that my average moving speed on those days is nearer 15 km/h, but it varies a lot depending on the climbs involved. I'd like a better way of working out how long a big climb will take me; or, for training purposes, how much power I'm likely to need to put down, for how long, to complete the big climbs fast enough on the challenge routes.

On the climbs, the challenge isn't speed over the ground, it's rate of vertical ascent. I dug around this afternoon to learn how to take account of that. It took me back to Higher physics, because gravity needs to be a term in the equation:

time (in seconds) = mass (weight of bike + rider) x 9.8 (m/s, to overcome gravity) x elevation gain (metres) + an allowance for overcoming rolling and air resistance (say 10%), all divided by average power (Watts)

Of course, the same formula can be reworked to give the power required to complete a given climb in a certain time. I applied it both ways to a couple of the climbs I did in Mallorca. It gives predicted values within 2-4% of my actual results, which is pretty good.

The hardest climb in Slovenia may not in fact be Monte Zoncolan, even though that's the steepest, gaining 1,204 m at 12.2%. Monte Crostis (on the same day!) gains 1,430 m at 9.8%. Some of the other climbs are much longer, in terms of ground covered (up to 29 km or so), but don't gain as much height.

For comparison, these climbs involve getting on for 4 times as much ascent as anything I did in Mallorca. There, the bigger colls were taking me about 30 minutes. If I can scale my current fitness up to two-hour efforts at about the same intensity, I should complete the challenge routes in good time.

Using this method, I worked out an estimated time for the final, hardest day in Slovenia. On achievable numbers for power and weight, it will be fine: about 6 hours on the bike. I could afford for it to be more than an hour longer than that.

That's a good incentive to achieve the power (and weight) numbers. My training data gives me a power curve from which I can see my best efforts for a given duration. Here's the key bit of the curves for the past three years.

In 2025 so far, I haven't really done rides challenging enough to give me a best effort for 2 hours comparable to that for other seasons: the best efforts drop off quite sharply at exactly 90 minutes (the duration of my longest and hardest turbo session this year so far). I need to work up to road rides like the loop to Innerleithen that gave me my best two-hour power in 2024; and then I'd like to push that number up to something closer to where it was in 2023 or earlier.

My two-hour power was close to 200 W in 2018, and my all-time best is 206 W, in June 2022, riding from Lochluichart to Lochinver (a sub-10 hour hilly 200 km, one of my strongest rides). That was a time when my measured FTP was under 200 W, interestingly. I do seem to produce very good long-duration efforts, relative to my performance at the shorter distances where most measurement happens.

The differences between the curves above look quite stark; but they're not comparing apples and apples. The best efforts in earlier years, not surprisingly, come later in the season, when I'm fitter. The clever software can show me "season matched" curves, showing best efforts up to the current week. That looks closer:

In 2023, I was more than 50% stronger at the end of the season than I was in the Spring. In 2024, the gain was about 30%. This won't just be a function of getting fitter: it'll be because I do more challenging rides as the weather gets better, which creates more chances to put in a best effort.

I haven't included 2018 in these curves, because there's something implausibly high about my power numbers for up to about 2 hours that year, and all the best efforts are in Mallorca, not later in the season. I may have miscalibrated my power meter when rebuilding my bike in Mallorca. Out at 3 to 4 hours, the 2018 curve is much closer to more recent years; and my target rides for this season will be that kind of duration.

So my challenge is to get my two-hour best efforts for this year back up to where I was about this time in recent years; and then push them up further as the season progresses: ideally by a bit more than in previous years.

I rarely do a turbo session of more than 90 minutes, because I get bored; and obviously I can't improve my two-hour efforts without doing longer rides (about 3-4 hours, in fact, because downhill bits don't contribute to the cause of fitness).

Thus, the first pay-off from this bit of self-coaching is that I plan to replace Thursday's scheduled one-hour turbo session with a three-hour ride to Perth, to meet Ursula for our visit to an exhibition there. The training software isn't ringing alarm bells about that plan. I'll aim to get a ride of 3-4 hours into each week's training from here on, providing that doesn't overload me.

I'd like to keep these posts going, as a training diary (tagged "2025 training"), since it helps me understand how things are going. Here's week one. I've completed all the sessions as planned, slightly exceeding targets for duration and TSS.

I've increased the intensity of this week's rides by between 2% and 5%, to lean into continuing that process. The small gold cup on Saturday's ride ("Avalanche") indicates that I set a new power record compared to this time last year: it was at just over 30m.

Good news: the AI worked out my FTP had increased by 3.2%, largely probably as a result of Mallorca's riding. On the other term in the PWR equation, I've lost 0.7 kg in weight this week (ahead of my target), so I've given both numbers a good first shove in the right directions.

My Garmin still rates this as productive training. I've worked out what it means: when I work hard, it's productive if my VO2max increases (as estimated by the Garmin). If that's not what's happening, it'll tell me to back off and recover. The screenshot above is from TrainerRoad, which also keeps an eye on how much I'm doing. It warned me not to be too intense on Monday and Sunday, after hard rides the previous days, and I paid attention.

Today (Sunday) was meant to be an outdoor endurance ride, but my Ultrarandonneur bike is at the workshop being serviced. Skinnymalinky has been rebuilt, awakened, and set in the turbo trainer, which is running much smoother now that I've got the right cassette in it (d'oh). I did a 45m indoor endurance ride, which probably equates to twice that time outdoors (where, half the time, you're not pedalling).