2009 Norwell Pro-Am

I trained more in January than I did in June, and the same can be said for July, unless I crack about 100 miles this week- who knows.. My form is systematically being stolen from me week after week by a completely unpredictable, highly demanding and stress-intense career. It wasn't always like this, as you can see from the nice graphic chart I've shared with you showing how my CTL and ATL evolved since January. Look at the blue line during the time between May 20 and May 31, where I can tell you that I was the strongest all year. It comes as no surprise- I did almost 54 hours and over 1000 miles of riding in May. But in June- after returning from Turkey- I was saddled with a new project at work which needs constant nurturing- and it's so large that I'm co-managing it with another PM. Management changes at work make it even more sensitive of an issue because all new eyeballs are looking at this thing extremely closely. There's enough dick-wagging and pissing matches going on that anyone can be violently thrown under the bus at any given moment, even though this train wreck of a project was inherited from a person who drove it into the ground and then got fired. My job is to turn it around, and it has basically consumed me. I've averaged about 100 junk miles a week since returning from Turkey in early June. This is going to change beginning this week, because it's now time to engage in a bail-out plan of my own. I'm going to look very closely at the training I did in April/May and with a few adaptations relative to intensity and volume, I'm going to shoot for a CTL of at least 100 for the week leading up to Chris Thater. That's only 5 weeks from now. At Norwell there were no surprises and I performed about as lousy as I expected to, maybe a little more. The good news is that my 60 minute normalized power has not fallen dramatically- it's still pretty strong even though it's dropped under 300. I was torn between using my light rear wheel and my Powertap, but the need for some quality data made the decision easy- at a race where my participation was purely for enjoyment- who cares about an extra 300 grams at the hub? What's that, half a water bottle's weight? Yes so this is not really a race report- sorry if Google led you here in anticipation of reading something exciting. I finished Norwell even though I was dropped on lap 4. I finished it even though I was lapped.
A bad day of racing is always better than a good day at work!
Thanks for reading.

Above, my son and I at Goddard Park. The bike is a FELT. I bought it a year ago, but never pressured him to ride it- he always preferred scooting around on his pedal-less LikeaBike Jumper. The nice thing is that he went straight to a big boy bike, without falling down once, without ever using training wheels, and without any of the "can only ride in a straight line" syndrome which infects all training wheel users. He corners like he's on rails. After getting on the podium at Attleboro and winning a "nickel", he says he wants to race a thousand times and win a thousand more "nickels". That's what he calls the medal they gave him.