Weeknotes 25-15

Poof, and without warning it was Monday morning and I was back at work. After a glorious year of not being employed and not working at all. I lied about the no warning though, I've had to look a job and sign a contract after all. But the feeling of being back at work came back almost instantly. Sure, I'm still stunned how much time work takes out of your day, it's nine in the morning and then poof it's half six and time to shut that laptop.

I already have been processing my relationship to work this past year, and will continue doing so, making small adjustments, trying to not fall into some previous habits. Although, my work habits have been passable most of the time.

The ever escalating intensity of my workouts have brought me to some limits this week. Out of three hard workouts I wasn't able to finish two of them to the plan. I wasn't able to finish the second of the VO2max 90/90 blocks on Tuesday (VO2Max intervals at seven in the morning are a special kind of hell to put yourself through). And during the Over/Under sessions on Thursday, I couldn't muster up enough energy to do eight minutes of top-end Tempo intensity right after eight minutes of Threshold pace, at least on the third and last repetition. Going straight from Threshold to Tempo intensity is such a mind game, Tempo never feels so hard than right after a stretch of higher intensity.

I'm happy with this first Build cycle though. Compared to the Base cycles so far, the Build ones keep the weekly intensity at an equally high level instead of building on week after week. I've planned in only one rest day over the three weeks too, which worked out well.

Now I'm looking forward to a week of less intensity, and then one more Build cycle before two weeks of tapering (I'm not sure what to do there), and then it's time to cross the Jura mountains in six days or less (I'm still aiming for four, for now.)

Talking about the gravel event in June, next week I finally need to get back to mapping out the various sleeping opportunities and refuelling stations along the route, the latter are really just going to be supermarkets and it's likely that there won't even be any petrol stations without a sizeable detour down into the valleys.

Exercise

• Cycling training sessions (total of 581 TSS, 11 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (90x90 x 6 x 2 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x16mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (4x15mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
  • 1x medium outdoor gravel ride
    
• no utility cycling (ok, a tiny one clocking in at 2km to the shop and back)

Weeknotes 25-11/12/13/14

Well, that's it. Tomorrow I'm starting to work again after a little over a year of being on sabbatical. Let's just say that I am more than ready to be retired as soon as possible.

I haven't kept up with Weeknotes this last month. So here are some of the highlights:

• Spring has sprung ☀️
  
• We bought a few plants at the Königliche Gartenakademie and repotted them, together with what was left of our two coffee plants, which will hopefully survive. This might be the year where we'll have a somewhat green balcony.
  
• In preparation for having a job (ugh), I started going to bed early, getting up at six in the morning, and sitting on the bike at seven for getting the exercise in early in the morning. After work would be too late for the body to recover before going to sleep, and with a training session on almost every day of the week it would be hard to have any social life.
  
• Went to the Museum of European Cultures with V. I wanted to see their exhibition about Sámi heritage. It was wildly underwhelming, a fairly small room with items from their Sámi collection, and a slightly haphazard way of dealing with how these items were acquired without ever using the word colonialism.
  
• This last Friday, on my last weekday on sabbatical, I went out with L for the first proper outdoor ride of the year. We headed to the Döberitzer Heide, just west of Berlin, which is a former military training area, nowadays a nature reserve. The core zone in the middle is fenced off and hosting animals such as bison, wild horses, and deer, intended to live largely unaffected by humans, we didn't see any of the animals though. There's a 22km round trip on a sandy road, sand as deep as 10cm, making it hard work to cycle around it.
  
• This outdoor ride was also the first one after getting power meter pedals fitted on the Surly LHT.
  
• Talking about bikes, the new Surly Karate Monkey is happening! Still a bit unclear when exactly, sometimes in May, it might be tight for the Trans Jura ride in early June.
  
• Talking about the Trans Jura, we have booked a two-week vacation in Switzerland, staying in Biel/Bienne. So far it is one of the top contenders of the cities we might want to move to in Switzerland. Staying there for two weeks, and me cycling along the Jura mountain range, just above Biel, will give us a good idea if that could be a city for us.
  

Exercise

Week 11:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 576 TSS, 11 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (60x60 x 6 x 3 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (4x15mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with a focus on climb pacing (2051m elevation gain over three climbs)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
• 43km utility cycling
  

Week 12:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 346 TSS, 7 hours):
  
  • 3x endurance rides
    
  • 1x FTP ramp test
    
  • 1x long ride with Tempo zone climbs (1485 metres elevation gain)
    
• 16km utility cycling
  

Week 13:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 520 TSS, 11 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (30x30 x 8 x 4 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 86/97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x10mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with focus on climb pacing (1529m elevation gain over two climbs)
    
  • 3x endurance rides
    
• 36km utility cycling
  

Week 14:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 613 TSS, 11.5 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (60x60 x 6 x 3 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x12mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride, first outdoor ride, blowing well past the planned TSS
    
• 47km utility cycling

Weeknotes 25-10

Week 10! Almost a fifth of this year already gone. The days are getting noticeably longer.

It has been unseasonably warm and sunny, in the latter part of the week between 17 and 18ºC. In the first week of March!

Nothing like the looming deadline for the end of my sabbatical to finally get me to start looking at the photos from last summer's cycling tour to the Nordkapp. I managed to do a first selection of about half of the trip. But I'll need to considerably whittle that selection down even further to not end up with the size of a book that could put the Encyclopaedia Britannica to shame.

It's been a great feeling to go through those photos again, remembering small anecdotes, marvelling at the majestic Norwegian landscape, and feeling a bit of pride for having cycled all the way to the northern tip of this continent, bit by bit.

I've tried to rationalise another bike for a while now. The good weather and issues fitting enough bags on my rebuilt Long Haul Trucker (which are solvable, but where's the fun in that) got me to cycle across the city to a shop specialising in custom bike builds, and they are a Surly dealer.
In my imagination I'd have a flat-bar adventure gravel bike with a suspension corrected fork to have the option to transform it into a hardtail mountain bike in a pinch. Lucky for me, Surly has me covered with their Karate Monkey. Or for a few hundred euros more, maybe a Sour Pasta Party, wouldn't it be nice to have a frame made in Dresden.
Anyways, I've talked through the plans with the bike shop owner (1x12, 29er wheels, chunky yet fast-rolling tires), did some gear calculations (that 10-52 cassette paired with either a 34 or 36 tooth chainring), got a ballpark figure (ouch), but am still waiting for the detailed offer.

I haven't started to plan June's bikepacking event yet, will have to finally get on that next week. I'll probably give Ride with GPS another try to map out sleeping and refuelling opportunities along the route.

Really hoping not to have to plan out where I'm staying each night.

I've been working on climb pacing in training these last few weeks, and yesterday rode a 73 kilometres route with 2000 metres of climbing across three climbs. I'd slap another 25 kilometres on top of that and then it looks fairly similar to what I'll be facing at the bikepacking event in June. Now I just need to be able to do this four days in a row. That's what the next two months of training will be about.

That route took me four hours on the trainer, and those are not exactly the funnest four hours to ride something like that, but what can you do when you live in a flat area like Berlin where they call a twenty metre bump a hill and a fifty metre bump a Berg.

I used to be a very impulsive climber, burning all my matches and beyond in the first few hundred metres only to barely crest huffing and puffing. I quickly learned that that's not the way to do it when I rode out of Bergen last summer towards Trondheim on that relentless hilly stretch of the EuroVelo 1. I've slowly been chipping away at the proper way of climbing since then thanks to virtual cycling imitating the elevation profile of mountainous areas. I've even come to enjoy the slow grind up a mountain, dialing in the breathing together with just the right gearing to keep the legs from having to put too much torque on the pedals. But it's much more fun in real life, up a deserted old mountain road somewhere in Norway hearing birds chirping, cheering you up the mountain, getting rewarded with grandiose vistas across the fjords.

Exercise

• Cycling training sessions (total of 520 TSS, 10½ hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (30x30 x 8 x 4 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x12mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with a focus on climb pacing (2024m elevation gain with a half-hour, a one-hour, and a bit-more-than-an-hour climb)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
• 28km utility cycling