Race time: ''official'' start of period II of the season

After quite a while I did a race again. This time it was in Westkapelle. After my holiday I did not do really any focussed training. Basically trying to get 'the ride feeling' back. I see this race as the first in a build-up period towards end of September (time trial) and towards a race end of August in which I want to do well.

 

There were 78 participants and I ended up 11th. In total approximately 25 riders finished. The rest of them were doubled (once or several times) or had to abandon earlier. Why? Because the race (crit) was not that easy I guess. It were 30 laps of 1.73km with a lot of corners as you can see below. Also the pavement was tricky in that it were small stones instead of asphalt. The carbon wheels made quite some noise....

The average speed of the race was  41.5 km/h. Below you see how today's race compared to other races I did wrt some metrics:

Race 1: 1.12h, VI 1.05, NP 297, AP 283, IF 0.928, AR 22%, Anaerobic 11%, Neuro 9%
Race 2: 1.03h, VI 1.12, NP 273, AP 243, IF 0.854, AR 51%, Anaerobic 7%,   Neuro 19%
Race 3: 1.27h, VI 1.14, NP 292, AP 255, IF 0.911, AR 44%, Anaerobic 10%, Neuro 17%
Race 4: 1.28h, VI 1.13, NP 296, AP 262, IF 0.926, AR 37%, Anaerobic 11%, Neuro 14%
Today's race,   VI 1.13, NP 290, AP 256, IF 0.983, AR 46%, Anaerobic 8%,   Neuro 24%

You see that this race was one of the more extremer in terms of %AR and % Aneaerobic, but especally % Neuromuscular. After every corner (which some of them you could not ride at full speed) it was putting pressure on the pedals immerdiately which gives these results.

 

During the race I constantly stayed within the first 10-15 riders. Why? Because with this kind of races it's hard to ride to the front (lots of corners and speed is relatively high and everyone is riding behind one another). This riding in the front also resulted in two premes.

 

I only had one ''difficult'' moment so to say around 7-8 laps before the end. At that time was quite a big group of riders which were doubled and they were in my group. Because of that gaps occured which did cost some effort to close. You can see that below (don't look at exact W balance, just trend)

Although I did not do any of anaerobic / neuromuscular work in my training for a long time I could still do well so I am happy with this ''new starting point '' right now. What I do notice that I feel that I am not able to do a rush and then to go into FTP mode. It's just to hard at the moment. I am going to put in some 'race winning' exercises in my training. If you don't know what those are, let me know and I can explain in an other post.

Next period will be focussing more on FTP (for time trial), time in aeroposition and I will mix in exercises more specifically for the race I want to do well in (means training on the roads of that (hilly) race). Also a combi of anaerobic and FTP exercise (race winning efforts) will be done.