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All posts for the month November, 2016

Season Postmortem – 2016

Posted by hammonjj on November 10, 2016
Posted in: Planning, Racing, Training.

Overall, this season was a bit of a bust.  I only won one race (mountain bike), had one top 10 (cyclocross), several top 20s and a truck load of DNFs, mostly due to mechanical issues. When I was racing and not having mechanical issues, I could feel see the results starting to come in, but, the mechanical issues were so prevalent that it made progress hard to come by.

While results were slowly trickling in, I still had several issues when racing that limited my ability to beat the better guys in my category and they fall in to two categories:

  1. I lacked raw power when riding up extremely steep climbs
  2. I lacked repeatability on efforts above V02 (especially prevalent late in the race)

If I can correct these things, I think the next season will be even better.

On the training side of things, progress was amazing up until the July/August timeframe.  I was predicting that I had an FTP of around 290, took a week off to go to the mountains (did a bit of mountain biking) and, when I came back, I had lost significant power and had a serious lack of energy.  I went to the doctor and had tons of blood work done, but didn’t come up with any results.  I did regain some of that lost ground, but didn’t recover near all of it due to how close to the season I was.  Overall, I think my fitness during the season was OK, but definitely lacking.

Lastly, while my technical skills were above average for my category, I think I need to up my again.  To do that, I am going to add more mountain bike racing to my early season.

Ending the Season Early

Posted by hammonjj on November 6, 2016
Posted in: Planning.

After thinking long and hard about it, I have decided to end my 2016 cross season. I’ve had far too many mechanical issues without the ability to do anything about them to continue going to races knowing that I will likely DNF. I’m going to recharge for another week or so and then move into preparing for 2017.  I’ve got several more mountain bike events and possibly a couple of road events planned, so the extra time in the base phase will help me better prepare for them.  Tentatively, I have the following events planned for the first half of 2017:

  • USAF Road Race (Late March)
  • Buff Gold Road Race (Early April)
  • The Original (Half ) Growler or Koppenburg Circuit Race (May 27th)
  • Firebird XC (Early June)
  • GoPro Mountain Game (June 10th)

After I finish my plan for the upcoming season, I’ll post a bit about how I am going to execute on that plan. I’ll likely also do a post or two analyzing this past season to find limiters that I will address in my annual plan.