Spring is Still Just Around the Corner

I'm still anxiously waiting for above freezing temperatures to make it to Canadian mid-west. It did look good for a while, but right now we're sitting at -12. Of course the flood is coming too and this means that many roads will be underwater, once the weather actually warms up enough to allow water to stay in liquid form. This whole weather thing is getting to me.

But it's that time of the month that normally I would start ramping up volume as I would start riding outside. My approach is reverse compared to the traditional system where you do more miles in the winter, mostly at lower intensities. I do mostly tempo/sweet spot/threshold in the winter and add the volume once I can ride outside on my road bike. This is because I need more time working on my tempo/threshold than getting myself used to spending time on the bike. I've found out that two or three 4-5 h rides make quite a big impact on my ability to do longer races, but the returns of these rides diminish fast and doing more of these rides seems to not help me much. Once the weather gets nicer and evenings lighter I add volume. By volume I mean that I do 3-4 x 20' instead of the trainer drill of 2 x 20' or 90' tempo instead of 60' tempo and so on.

Sure all this adds the time at "endurance" intensities as well and just getting out of city takes 20 minutes or so. Don't get me wrong, there are no +15 hour weeks for me anymore, 12 hours is a huge week. Would be cool to run an experiment and see what racking bigger hours would do now, but with a job and a family, I just don't have the time to average 15 hours over the winter. And quite frankly, 3 hours XC ski in -25 sucks so bad that I would probably quit the experiment after a week.

And another crazy idea I had the other day. Maybe I will take some coaching classes and look into that area and see if someone wants my training programs. The obstacle seems to be that the competition basic course isn't offered that often. Or maybe I would need to take community initiation course to get started, and that would suck. The new NCCP system seems to be even more warm and fuzzy than before. You know...they all need to feel like winners. It's all good, but I'm more interested in competitive side of things and trying to train to become stronger/faster rider.

But now I need to get back to my morning routines of watching spring classics on my TV. You would think that on this day and age, there would be a reliable pay service that you could watch these races on. Cycling TV I hear someone shout? Yeah right, they don't even cover these races and after experiencing their unacceptable service couple of years ago, they really need to convince me that they are worth my money. Luckily I can get this race, probably in HD, later today.

To lighten up the tone and wrap this post up. I feel much better about my uni-brow now. Shave the uni-brow! I have also seen better choices of business name. No I don't mean the bearing company FAG.

Thanks for cycling inquisition for pointing me to this.