Athlete 1 is a veteran racer who came to Source Endurance on the heels of a less than stellar 2008 season. He was looking for some improvement both objectively and subjectively and has he shown it!
Following his 2009 season Athlete 1 discussed his 2010 goals and outcomes to be addressed. His short term/ off-season goals were to continue to build and keep the workouts dynamic enough where he was still having fun. For his spring campaign, he had a handful of early target events that nearly mirrored 2009. Also, he wanted to be able to continue to capitalize on difficult, epic races and his affinity for racing well out of small groups. Athlete 1 expressed a need to improve on his late race powers as well as Time Trialing (applied to stage racing, as part of multiple stage days) and the ability to recover following systematic attacking.
Athlete 1 battles the same limiting factor that many Source E clients deal with: Time. His profession and family require a considerable investment of time and thus the "ride all day everyday" theme is not practical.
So we get to work......
The first thing we did was to analyze Athlete 1's power files to substantiate his claims, then to set out to correct them. What we found was that in the early "epic" races, Athlete 1 was in need of more kilojoule (pronounced, "aerobic work") capacity for the long road races as well as exposure to threshold+ efforts late in the event. We took some things differently with the training including more focus on efforts that will emulate the 2009 events as well as adding some larger volume when his schedule would allow. The results....
Keep in mind the scale of the graphs as shown by the horizontal lines. Even though in 2009, Athlete 1 did a fair bit of HIT, the volume was no where near what was seen in 2010. Indeed, we did push the envelope of aerobic development and the results are showing as he sets himself up for his first "A" race of the year.
Cumulative March 2009 Power/ Time
Cumulative March 2010 Power/ Time
Mean Maximal Powers: March 2009 (dotted) vs. March 2010 (solid)
As a side note: Athlete 1 did enjoy a substantial weight loss over the winter. That, along with his power increase sets the stage for the story of a veteran racer in the midst of a rebirth is being written as we speak!
