Power Baselining

Joseph Vinciquerra | November 23rd, 2005 | Posted in Training | 79 Comments »

Weapons of Mass Destruction

It’s been a good week for gettin’r'dun. Last night, along with the first winter storm of the season, a period of intense pain and suffering blew in; taking the form of an LT test on the bike to establish my power baseline for the next month of training. I hate bike LT testing on a trainer. With running (on a treadmill) for some reason the process just seems a whole lot more tolerable, but testing on a trainer… Argh. However, after all was said and done, I crunched the numbers and am now happy to report a Watts/kg ratio of 3.43 at LT. What does that mean to you, oh faithful followers of The Grind? Likely nothing. But to me, it’s a very important number, and one I expect to see grow over the next 4 months.

This morning, I awoke with an excitement usually not found on a typical Wednesday. But given that Thanksgiving is tomorrow (read: vacation!), today was more of a premature Friday – and Friday’s never feel as good as when you’re only working a 3-day week. So with my dangerously high levels of excitement, I kicked open the front door, whistling a tune and on my way to the pool when I was hit in the face by 27 ridiculously low degrees and gusting winds. SLAM! I shut the door to regroup. Whoa. It’s cold. Let’s try again. I slowly cracked the front door open, winter hat on, hood zipped up and cinched tight over my face, gloves on my hands and some newfound steam in my stride as I bolted for the warmth of my car. And all together, I suddenly remembered why I hate swim training in the winter. Brrrrrrrr.

Needless to say, it will be a while before I’m outside in nothing but a race kit like in today’s blog post picture. Living in the Northeast, it’s always hard for me to look back at pictures from the summer and comprehend how warm it was only a few months ago, when it’s this cold right now in the off-season.

The pool was strangely over-populated this morning too. Apparently someone sent out a memo indicating that if you swim extra-hard the day before Thanksgiving, you’re justified in over-eating tomorrow. Anyhow, I wound up sharing a lane with a pretty strong swimmer who I’m guessing was home on vacation from college. We went our separate ways for about 45 minutes until luck saw her coming off the far wall just as I was going into it. I wouldn’t say we collided, but we certainly brushed. A result of her flip-turning and ending up in the center of the lane, and me preparing to flip-turn and going into the center of the lane. Oops. Both our bads. We stopped, floated, exchanged laughs and apologies, and then finished our respective sets. Such as life in a crowded pool.

Thanks for reading.