Duathlon Vrlika

Tags

duathlon, eindhoven, half marathon, national championship, vrlika, zagreb

Last Saturday I took part in Croatian sprint duathlon championships. There were four of us in the lead group and I was setting the pace for the first 4km of the run. During the last kilometer one guy made a big acceleration. Unfortunately I was the only one from our group that couldn’t match the pace and I was left in no mans land.
Leading trio was 15s ahead in T1. Once on the bike I was very close to catching them. So close that I hadn’t put my feet into shoes until half way point. But I lacked that little bit of extra speed and couldn’t close the gap. By T2 they managed to increase the lead by further 15s. Second run was too short to change anything and I finished in 4th place.
This weekend I’ll race half marathon in Zagreb and I hope to improve my PB which was set exactly one year ago in Eindhoven (1.13.50h). Interesting thing is that booth races are held the day after Ironman World Championship in Kona.

Amazing

Group bike ride

Tags

croatia, cycling, group ride, zagreb

Here are a couple of photos from our group ride this Sunday. There’s quite a large group (large by Croatian cycling standards) which rides together every Sunday. The ride is organized by one of our cycling legends and we often have professional cyclists joining in, some of them riding for Pro Tour teams. Since the disparity in skill level can be quite large the group is usually divided into 3 smaller ones when we hit hillier terrain.

Improvement

Tags

cycling test, ftp, power, time trial, triathlon, watts

I’m in a recovery week now and as usual I’m doing some tests to evaluate progress (or lack of it). Yesterday I did 20 min test on the trainer and got encouraging results. Average power was 345W which translates into 4,93 W/kg. The last test was done two months ago and over this period average power went up by 18W. It was interesting to see my heart rate during the test. There were only a couple of times I could bring my HR over 185bpm while cycling. Until yesterday my maximum cycling HR was 189 bpm (my max running HR is 195). During the last 10 minutes of the test HR didn’t  go under 188bmp, and in the last minute I brought it up to 193 bpm.

Here are the numbers:

Average power: 345W (previous test 328W)

cadence: 88 (81)

heart rate: 183 avg/193 max (178/185)

body weight: 70kg (72 kg)

This year I should also get some free watts due to equipment improvements. I’ve made sponsorship agreement with one big cycling company which developed one of the most anticipated TT frames in the current market. Since I’ve been riding a road bike with clip on aerobars last year I guess TT bike will make me a bit faster. More on this in one of my next posts.

FTP test

Tags

bike power, Flow, ftp test, heart rate, tacx, trainer, training

Since my new bike trainer records power I decided to use power as a guide trough winter training. Power is considered superior to heart rate due to HR day-to-day variations and slow response to change in intensity. So, in order to determine training zones I had to find my Functional Threshold Power (FTP) which is average power that could be sustained for one hour. I wasn’t eager in riding hard for one hour in this part of season so I decided to use 20 minute protocol that could predict FTP. This protocol makes you ride as hard as you can for 20 minutes and you have to keep intensity constant trough interval (no fading). When you subtract 5% from average 20-minute power you get an estimate of FTP. FTP can vary from 92 to 98% of 20 minute power so this is an estimate.
I managed a good guess of my initial effort and I was able to hold almost the same power numbers throughout the test. Average 20 minutes power was 328W, which translates into FTP of 312W. This doesn’t sound too bad for this part of the season. We’ll see how this numbers translate on the road in the spring.