Starting with Joe Friel, and wow my FTP sucks!

My apologies who think the following FTP is good, but believe me when I tell you this will get me annihilated in a pro men's race. Tested my FTP today with Allen and Coggan's method, and it was 253 watts. OUCH!

In other news, I promised to share all my training, and power files, etc. Well, here is my first step in doing that. Here is my public profile and viewing of all my workouts, for those who want to follow.
http://www.trainingpeaks.com/publicview.asp?p=JimVance

Bookmark it, so you can refer back easier. Or you can click it on the link to the right when you come back to the blog.

It seems easiest to do this, than put down every workout here. I will share the big power files here for people on occasion, as well, starting with today's test set. Wow, this is embarrassing though, and I honestly wanted to quit when it was starting to not go well. Glad I didn't, but I nearly vomited when I stopped. Ouch!

So here is the power file.

The workout is saved as a WKO+ file, (CyclingPeaks, so you will need to have that software to follow along.)

So Joe posted the first workouts for my training plan for Ironman Arizona, and you can see it in the TrainingPeaks profile. Here is what he wrote me in an email this morning, describing the general plan...

Here is the general, overall plan going forward. It may well change. I’ll need to set up your ATP to reflect this once I get things nailed down a little tighter…

Dec 10-23 Getting back into training again. Building endurance. Bumping up volume.
Dec 24-27 Back off to make sure we haven’t overextended.
Dec 28-Jan 20 Base 3 training. We’ll “front end load” the week of Dec 31-Jan 6 (don’t plan on too much NY Eve partying!). By this I mean the volume will be quite high. On the order of 5 hours per day. We may or may not do that for the entire week. We’ll see. The next 3-4 days following this high volume we’ll back way off and work on skills. Then the remainder of this period will be devoted to race-specific intensity.
Jan 21-25 Rest, active recovery.
Jan 26-Feb 17 Same as previous block only workouts will be a bit longer and the intensity portion will be more challenging.
Feb 18-22 Rest and recovery.
Feb 23-Mar 16 Front end loaded again. BIG DAY on March 16. This means we’ll do a mini-IM simulation (bfast, durations, intensity, equipment, nutrition) with 90 minute breaks between sessions.
Mar 17-21 R&R
Mar 22-Apr 6 Peaking/tapering
Apr 7-13 Race week.

So that's the plan. We shall see how it goes. I am already more excited than I started the week, and that is the best news of all. You definitely don't want to be struggling through all this without feeling

Vance

PS - Did anyone see Ironman Wisconsin on the Versus channel last weekend? Yeah, I looked like an overconfident ass. If ever I needed something to motivate me, there it was.