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)

We rode another Double Century yesterday, and managed to come in just inside 6 hours. 5:58 I think. My first time under 6 hours, after hitting 6:00 exactly in 2005.

It was a great team effort with 9 of our 10 starters finishing together. The only person to miss out was Frank who had an unfortunate incident involving a musette and his front wheel. Said musette stopped Frank’s front wheel from rotating causing Frank to go flying over the bars. Fortunately Frank wasn’t hurt, but his wheel lost a spoke and our support vehicle was not around to give him a replacement.

Comparing numbers with last year’s race, it seems I went harder despite being less fit. I certainly felt better after last year’s race. This year everybody was completely knackered, apart from Paul who looked like he was ready for another lap.

Still awaiting the results on the PPA site. Hopefully we made the top 10

Another great race today with Garron taking his first win to notch up 4 in a row for Team Vineyard BikeMaxPower.

I’ve been off the bike for 10 days, so I sat in as much as I could to save my legs. We were quite a big bunch going over Hels with Paul setting a very manageable tempo. About 15k’s from the end Team BMP still had 5 riders so we started attacking. First Peter, then Andreas, then Paul. Paul was marked very closely by Shaun and John, so we started again – Peter, Andreas, Paul. Nothing looked like it would stick, but we were tiring out the main sprint contenders while we still had Garron sitting comfortably in the bunch.

About 3k’s out I got away with Alister Arenson on the rise up to Paarl Main Rd. Surprisingly we got a good gap, but my lack of riding in the last few weeks saw me not recovering from the initial attack effort, and Alister did 75% of the work. When it came to crunch time, the final k, my legs were toast, and we were swallowed up with 50m to the line. My disappointment quickly changed though when I saw it was Garron flying past ahead of Shaun, taking a well-deserved win!

And that wraps up a great spring League campaign. 4 wins and 3rd overall for Paul.