Training Status Week 1

Well, I am currently training for a 24 hour mountain bike race, which is the first weekend of October here in Colorado Springs.  The website for last year is 24hoursofCOS.  It looks fun to me, and rather than running a marathon or trying a triathlon, I thought, why not try something I'd enjoy training for?  So that's what I'm doing. It's 24 hours of mountain biking on a big 14 mile, technical, single-track trail.  You don't have to ride for the whole 24 hours, but I plan on going without stopping too much.  As of right now the goal is 120 miles, but we'll see if that changes as the October date approaches.

Due to the recent snow and -40* temps we've had of late, and another circumstance I'm facing, all of my training so far has been indoors on the stationary bike in the gym.  It's not as fun as riding outside, but it does make it easy to track the training progress with the heart rate, calories burned, exact distance, and time all recorded.  I have started making an Excel sheet, documenting everything I've done, including everything I listed before, along with food and water intake, how I felt during and after training that day, along with what zone I was training in.

Zone training focuses on how hard the heart beats during a work out.  Contrary to popular belief, going as hard as you can, as long as you can, every day, isn't always the best training regime, especially for an endurance event.  Zone training allows me to focus my workouts on both the length of the ride, and the intensity.  Heart rate zones go from 1-5, and are different for every person, based on the Lactic Threshold of each person's body.  The Lactic Threshold, or the LT, is the max heart rate a person can sustain for 20 minutes, without experiencing fatigued muscles due to the lactic acid build up.  I have calculated my LT to be 168 beats per minute, with a max HR of 198.  This is a good site to read on more about the training zones involving heart rates.

I've attached the my workout spreadsheet, its pretty straight forward.  I can already tell a huge improvement in the conditioning of my legs, along with my overall aerobic fitness level.  I hope to always ride at minimum 5 times a week, and put in some good miles every time I do.  When I start riding outside, the miles will drop but both the intensity and fun levels will increase, to make it all worth it.

Here is the link to the Excel sheet after my first week or so of training.  Like I said, it's pretty basic but is definitely a good way to keep track of everything.

I found this hanging in the bathroom on the comic sheet for this week, found it very relevant...



Thanks for reading all of this, I know it's pretty boring to most of you, but I'll keep it going as long as I can.  Take care, Everyone

Matt