Training continues. After an interruption due to sickness, the workload has been ramped up again.

The result was a slight fall-off in CTL, and now its rising gradually again, up to 88 as of today.

The next two weeks are planned to be slightly heaver, so CTL should gain another 10 or so in the next 10 days. My power at various durations still has some way to go. At 1min I’m about 30w off my best, which isn’t too bad. At 5mins I’m 25w off my best, but at 10mins there’s a massive 45w deficit to catch up. 20mins is only 15w short though.

4 weeks to go until the first race of the season, so I’ll be looking to improve on the 5 and 10min numbers by then. My goal is to match these numbers by 4 weeks, and to beat them before the start of the Cape Epic. Goals are
* 5sec: 20w/kg
* 1min: 9w/kg (currently 7.5)
* 5min: 6w/kg (currently 5.3)
* 60min: 4.5w/kg (currently 4.0. This will come in a race, I don’t generally do 1hr TTs)

Finished my new bike build up (for now). New parts are
* Thomson Masterpiece seatpost to replace the USE Carbon. A little lighter, but more importantly a lot stronger.
* XTR cranks to replace the well worn XT cranks. A bit of a weight-saving, as well as making he bike look a lot nicer. Those XT cranks clashed a bit. They’ll move on to my Kona commuter bike project which I’ll hopefully build up this weekend.
* Eggbeater pedals are back on. I’ve installed the short-length Ti spindles. The main problem I’ve had with Eggbeaters is that the spindles are too long. These new spindles solve that problem, as well as losing some weight with the Ti versions

Total bike weight as you see it in the pic, is now 10.6kg. Future upgrade possibilities are:
* Hope blue seatpost collar
* Hope blue quick-releases
* KCNC blue pulley wheels
* KCNC SC Bone handlebars
* maybe a new saddle

More pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/nic.coyne/GiantAnthemX

My new Giant Anthem X1 arrived last week, so we got all the bits transferred from the Zen across to the new bike. With my American Classic wheels on she weighs in at 10.7kg, which is almost 400g lighter than the Zen.

All the Giant’s bits got moved to the Zen, which is now Nicole’s bike.