Hawkeye Downs 2016 Event Training Report.
The Road to Race day.
On Sept 17th-18th. PluckyBlond and I showed up at the HPRA race at Hawkeye Downs race track in Cedar Rapids Iowa. The event is a long running race hosted by Dennis Grelk. The race is part of the HPRA series; see
http://recumbents.com for the current list of events.
Hawkeye downs is the sort of event that has a little something for everyone. The turnout was about 30 competitors, but around 40 riders with the Rose-Hulman group competing as a team. Simply put, attending the event for us was a bit of a last minute lark for us. We went to measure ourselves against the clock in the 1-hour race on the ½ mile oval and have some fun with the flying TT, Lap race and drag race. You can find the complete list of events here:
http://midwesthpv.blogspot.com
How we got there is at least as interesting as what happened on event day. So I made this training summary to go with the race report.
So to do this summary let's back-up and look at the big fitness picture. We didn't have any plans to attend any events this year at all. Too darn busy; with 2 kids in college; and 3 more in K-12, it gets a bit busy around here more so this year than most. Last November we were forced to changed houses and as such we spent most of the winter recovering from:
(1) no riding for almost 3 straight months during the move. This is what happens to your fitness metrics when you do not ride, it fades fast over 3 months.
(2) Some bad experiments with on the bike fueling last summer that left us both heavier and "fuel dependent" (See the low carb ultra cycling thread in forum for the details). This fueling slip really came home to roost for me as I ballooned back up to 210lbs from living on energy drinks and sleeping 2 hours a day. Meanwhile Tanya had lost most of the fitness that she had built up the previous season when 80 miles rides finally became easier for her. This photo from about 3 years ago shows exactly the size of Jersey I was wearing when I get back on the trainer; I was still fairly strong just really big; and cardio compromised.
In January we "got our house in order" and got the trainers setup. We set a very modest goal to be ready to do something fun at Sebring in 2017, which gave us 13 months to get back into proper shape and figure out how not to lose it gain. Understand we are fairly determined people, with a minor competitive streak; in that if we do something we need to do it right. So trying anything in 2016 seemed silly. Instead we'd set an intermediate goal get in shape to do self-support 100-150 mile rides this summer.
So plan set, we started working the trainers with TrainerRoad while the snow was flying. Tanya got started in December and I finally got back at it in January. I was focused on a weight loss routine with any modest power gains I could get. It's really hard to gain power and loose weight; knowing that and going through it are two different things.
Fitness graphs for the winter shows steady progress; we put a lot of time in but the intensity wasn’t that tough; this is general base fitness building.
Tanya did higher intensity lower volume
and I did long slow miles. Easy stuff but longer duration.
Slowly the weight came off while I managed to get power to stay around 200 watts. Meanwhile Tanya had a goal to straight out elevate her power to something competitive. (see the 4f-training thread if you want to know how to do something similar).
By the end of spring, goal accomplished. Unfortunately for use; May is when things go crazy around here so the training came to screeching halt. Because we got the late start in the winter we had no time to do a build phase here you work to get stronger on top of your base fitness. So instead we just fit in outdoor weekend rides to hold our fitness. This means lots of fading fitness followed by a it spiking back up when going out for the infrequent but super long rides.
Test rides of 100+ miles no problem, base fitness was in place; we aren't crazy strong but, we can go nonstop. We now have a solid wide foundation to build on heading back into February.
When the Portland, Cruzbike retreat came up we had to solve the problem of getting the bikes a long distance across the country, which we did; and surprise now we are mobile. The trip out to Portland also confirmed we could travel for a 4 days straight and still be in ride shape when we got to the destination.
Back down to 170 by the retreat probably about 10 lbs heavy for me to be racing.
Yeah yeah I know get on with it what about the race?
So why Hawkeye downs? Well as August got rolling I needed to start getting our fall training program organized. That requires a reliable measure of how things have worked so far.
There is a lot of data on how to train upright riders for a specific event, but I am not convinced that it maps one to one to recumbent racing and event riding at the high end; so field testing the results to determine when we break from convention is important.
It is hard to plan without an objective measurement. Trainers are all well and fine, but the real world is still subjectively different enough. While working through this thought-line, I spotted the Hawkeye Downs on the calendar, and that would work out for our schedule with some adjustments.
Since FTP, the basis for power training, is about what you can do in the real world for 1 hour all out; puke bucket waiting for you at the finish line, this event could not have been better designed for our needs. The first stock event was a one hour; on a flat track (we have zero flat ground where we live) and there would likely be other recumbent riders, stronger than us, to push us to our limits. At the same time the field of riders would be small enough to not make our zero experience a liability and blow up the results.
Decision made, 7 weeks left until the race; we switched our indoor training, to not get stronger, but to optimize our 1 hour endurance. The long slow training we had done up to that point was not designed for track racing. Fortunately, we then got about 5 weeks of bad weather and rain; so trainer time it was.
We took the Trainer road 40k TT plan and optimized it for the time we had left and had at it.
When we left for Cedar Rapids on Friday, our FTP was in theory the same as when we went to Portland. If you look at the final graphs we didn't add any raw power in 7 weeks, instead we maintained our modest winter gains where are about ⅓ of the strength Larry built this year, and something anyone can do in the winter with a 4 ride a week plan. What we did do was optimize our heart and lungs to be able to deliver that power level for 1 hour. Notice no gain in fitness either; you do not have to continually push the fitness level up in order to optimize.
See the race report to see how it turned out.
I thought you would at least have a couple of pit girls to weigh it down...
