04 June 2012

Just a little note ...

When reviewing my dashboard and weekly summaries in Training Peaks, I noted that the week ending 03 JUN 2012 was the first week of the 2012 ATP that I was able to actually get as many hours on the bike as the ATP called for.

For the unfamiliar, just a quick briefing. First, ATP is "Annual Training Plan," and is one of the really cool things about Training Peaks premium. Basically, what happens is that at the end of the season, or toward the beginning of a new season, you can go into Training Peaks and give it some information about the upcoming season; how many races you will do, what kind of races they are, how long they are, what your personal priority for each race is (A = highest priority, C = lowest), how many yearly hours you want to dedicate to training, and some other little information, and it creates Training Periods complete with workouts for every week of the season, with Base periods earlier, Build periods in the middle, and Peak periods right before race weeks. Then, you go through week by week and add individual workouts to the days you want to do them, and BAM your whole season is scheduled. You don't have to add every workout of every week right from the beginning–in fact, as of right now I've only put in the workouts through to the end of June–but if you wanted to sit down in late December and schedule every training, rest, and race day for the whole year, you could do that.

Anyway, I had created the 2012 ATP just after the 2011 El Tour de Tucson, and did so knowing that I was a fat load and would not be able to match the weekly training load, especially early in the season. I did schedule a decent number of annual training hours (350, I think), with the goal of being able to ramp up to being able to perform the scheduled number of hours as I went through the season, and with the aim of finishing the season feeling like I could schedule 2013 for more hours, and actually meet them. In addition, I have a goal every week, and though the weekly hours can get pretty high I still wanted to have a high bar to shoot toward.

This past week, I met (actually exceeded) my ATP-scheduled hours (by about 12 minutes) for the first time since the start of the season, and I feel like it's not out of reach for me to hit the goal hours every week from here out. For me, that's a huge win.

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