Winter Training Evaluation: Where are you?

We're about halfway through January and about halfway through winter if we look at March 1 as the official start of the spring season. It really won't be long before we're on the road and competing in our key events. The winter season  is when we want to be doing our most focused and intense training. Racing into shape once we're into our season isn't the best plan. We want to fine tune at that point and not be trying to make major leaps in our power profile. We need to use the current training to push for the improvements in our power. If riding tempo, push to the upper end. If doing short efforts, like 10-30 seconds, try to set new bests for overall average for those as a group. Also be checking the normalized power for those groups and compare to previous efforts. Look for the those TrainingPeaks provided medals for best efforts of 2018 and also all-time. Look at the events you participated in in 2017 and calculate the power that you will need to reach your goals. I can obviously help with that. Settling for what we did is ok but once we start to settle, we usually start to go backwards. There really is no staying the same. Its about going forward or backward. Choose forward! 

In my own world, I have all of my medals hanging on the walls in our basement. The four silver from nationals in 2013 and 2015 were my motivation to ride better than ever in 2017 in Birmingham last June. Nothing wrong with silver but as Jerry Seinfeld said, 'congratulations, you're first among the losers'. And I lost by a little over a second in 2015 in Minneapolis in one event. That bothered me for two years. My training last winter was focused on not allowing that to happen again. My coach and I talked about that a lot. Every time I hit the bike I was thinking that I needed to train harder and smarter than the competition. It worked out well, and I'm already thinking of Albuquerque in 2019. While every workout isn't better than the last, I like to see an upward trend. 

I do realize that embracing indoor training can be tough. It can be boring. I need music or a movie, tv show or sporting event, along with reading material. For intense intervals, I ago with nothing but music. For longer ones, I'll use the tv and reading. I try to hold at least the power I would outside, if not more. The indoor environment is actually great for training given no stop lights, traffic, wind, etc. Its pure power and nothing else. And it's great training on staying focused. Sp, as tough as it use, embrace it. Ask yourself if your competition is training as hard as you. Hopefully they are not training harder, or smarter.