Watts Up?

Now that 2011 is here I’ve been trying to identify some race goals for 2011. To be honest I haven’t had a lot of races tickle my fancy. The funny thing is I still find myself having a lot of motivation to race this year. I just can’t find those races that I’m yearning to put everything towards. The ACA road race calendar is out and I see many familiar races that I’ve been interested in and raced in the past. The Winter Park Mountain bike series has also been something I’ve picked at in the past. I’ve never felt like I’ve done incredibly well at any of those races, they’ve just been fun races to keep the fitness up. Sure they were hard and I buried myself to do well but in the end it was never a focused goal. Cyclocross and its concentrated race season has always allowed me to be a little more focused.

Right now I feel like I’m going to go back and target many of the same races I’ve done in the past, only this time I’m planning to have more fitness and ultimately be able to improve my results. I’m still debating with myself on what the race schedule will be but right now I’m thinking I’ll hit a few of the longer road races and then do a few mountain bike races. Probably do the entire Winter Park series and maybe try a longer endurance event, more for the fitness and to see were I fall out than anything else. To some extent I may be setting myself up for failure by not going all in on a few target races but we'll see. I certainly want to see my power output (aka fitness) continue to rise and above all I want to achieve that without burning myself out or my family's patience.

So this past Saturday I got out for a power test on the bike to see were I was at. I wasn’t super diligent about testing last year but I did have a pretty good idea were my power levels and abilities were. I hadn’t done any testing during cyclocross season and based on the outstanding season I had I was expecting to see some improvement. I went out and tested my all out 12 min, 6 min, 1 min and 15 sec abilities. My goal was my highest measured outputs for this in 2010 (I didn’t use a powermeter during CX so this was basically my Jan through Aug numbers). All of my best performances were produced bay in May of 2010, leading up to the Morgul Bismark Road race and actually my 6 minute power max came during that race. To my great surprise I beat everyone of those 2010 power numbers! (Except the 15 sec number, haven’t been sprinting much in CX or training for it).

12 min average was up 3 watts, 6min average was up 8 watts, and my 1 min average was up 12 watts!

So that gives me a little more motivational fuel. I’m better now than I ever measured during 2010. Now I have to be careful, keep building without becoming a January superstar and blowing myself out. I feel like the early spring races are a crap shoot, I want to be ready a little later in the summer.

We’ll have to see how it goes.