Friday, April 9, 2010

Athlete 4. Overland Park, KS

The last installment of our Athlete profiling and progression series.  Thanks for reading!

Athlete 4 is finding his time more and more crunched by life.  He is married, has a full time job, two 100% active kids, lawn to mow....  He hooked up with Source Endurance to provide some structure to his training and to help him be at his best when it matters.  Indeed, he was in 2009.

Athlete 4 finished the 2009 road season on a strong note at the Gateway Cup, then immediately stepped onto his CX bike and began to make some noise, culminating in some impressive rides at US National Championships in Bend, OR. 

Athlete 4 is a talented sprinter and has an enormous ability to tolerate acute enormous workloads.  Our challenge is to help him utilize his other attributes in order to further compliment his superior short term powers. 

To begin his 2010 season, Athlete 4 was greeted with one of the most severe winters in Kansas history.  With no chance to 'sneak in' those long rides on the random warm days of winter, the focus on his training was shifted from quantity to quality.  His volume was reduced and intensity increased.  After all, it's no fun spending ALL your time on the trainer.  He was given the flexibility to get outside, even on the coldest of days in order to break the monotony of watching old Tour de France videos.

With the onset of tolerable weather, his volume has gone up, and the difficulty of his training has followed suit.  March saw Athlete 4 focusing on exposure to threshold powers with enough training races and group rides to spur some top end development.  Indeed, his only race to date was not the overall level of difficulty expected from a long road race with a good quality field. This skews the graphs below a bit as Mean Maximal powers are typically race driven.

Athlete 4 has been able to use his power meter in order to become "race ready" in the midst of a bare early season Mid-West calendar.  We have taken his peak powers along with his recent race data (newly analyzed) and built a schedule for him that should have him ready to race in his upcoming events.  Despite not "training" his top end, Athlete 4's short term powers have already eclipsed what he was able to accomplish in March 2009.  This reinforces the advantages of having years of data to draw from because we know what he should be doing for this time of year.

Cumulative Powers: March 2009


Cumulative Powers: March 2010

Mean Maximal Powers: March 2009 (dotted) vs. March 2010 (solid)