Winter Niggles and Power Training

Well that's me coming to the end of my first 3 week block of training. Next week i'm keeping things easy. Got in some fair quality for this time of year, and doing some different stuff in the gym and that has been fun. It's great to be back in shape. I think i'll be killing the upper body stuff in the gym and reducing to light weights from now though, I seem to be packing on muscle up top which is never a good thing for a climber like myself :D

However, along the way I appear to have picked up a little knee injury. My physio (thanks Pete) tells me it's from the Fell running down hill. Woops. The medial ligament on my left knee is inflamed due to the hammering it's had from running down hills, and is rubbing on my knee bone causing some discomfort. I've been told rest and ice until things return to normal. Lucky I have an easy week coming up! On the bike it's pretty uncomfortable, so i'm going to just lay up and do some walking/jogging/swimming and core work next week. You can see the inner Medial Collateral Ligament below. Pesky blighter!

On the plus side, i've got myself a new Turbo trainer with wattage readout. For those of you that don't know, a Turbo is something I mount the bike to and train indoors on those crap winter nights. It's a Kurt Kinetic Road Machine, with power computer and i'm led to believe from reviews and the like the power readout is fairly accurate as it has been Powertap calibrated. It's certainly the best "feeling" turbo trainer i've ridden. Having the numbers in front of you really does give you something to focus on. After doing some 20min "Sweet Spot" intervals the other night (which is where you train just below or at your threshold power), i'm knocking out 350Watts over 20mins. Ok, so that hurt quite a bit, but it's quite a pleasing figure. That means at 145lbs i'm sitting at a healthy 5.3w/kg. Kind of figures for an Elite class rider. If I could increase this to 400W over the winter (not likely but it's an aim), i'm good for 6w/kg which puts me at a pretty darn high level - enough to dice with Pro riders. Something to aim for in the long term at least. Check out my "green" machine... ;-)

Anyhow. Time to lay up the knee and chill out for the weekend. That will be the end of fell running for the time being unfortunately. It was fun, but I can't afford to do something that's going to jeapordise my bike training.

Laters