A Knight To Be

The only impossible journey is the one you never begin. My journey started when I decided to ride the 2020 Tour Of Sufferlandria. I had my hesitations because I'm in the final block of a 12-week training plan and wasn't sure about the ToS' impact on the training load and how it would affect my upcoming 4DP test. The "Focused" option answered my concern with overall slightly reduced intensity across all stages of the ToS, to keep things hard, near impossible at times, yet manageable. And so I plunged in with joy, murmuring a poem by Grunter von Agony to myself. On the morn of the Attempt, my remaining rides for the ToS were 14 Vise Grips (Stage 8b); and Power Station + Angels + Thin Air (Stage 9: Grunter's Gran Fondo). I went right ahead, a wee bit sluggish at 4 am, with muted audio and darkness overpowering. (As an avid reader of The Scrolls of A Knight To Be, you already know all this, of course, so thank you for bearing with me as I recap for the ...

Violated. Quite simply. That's what Violator will do to you, for two primary reasons: 64 sprints. What Rest? The complicated thing about Violator - the 5th ToS stage, is that a sprint is a sprint. Meaning, you go all out. Sure, The Sufferfest app gives power targets, but this session is done in Slope/Level mode because the timings are too fast for my Tacx Neo to respond, so yeah, the target might be one thing or another, but I'm eating stem anyway so whatever. I did reduce the slope for each set to match the reducing slope of the power curve, but it hurt nonetheless. The last set has just 5sec recoveries, so it gets silly. So that was ToS Stage 5... Then came Wednesday. Because of domestic obligations, I can only ride in the late evening after the kids are asleep on Wednesdays. Today though, I fell asleep before the kids :D So while I had the Torture Chamber ready to go for Stage 6, I involuntarily took a rest day. I earned this rest day earlier by riding multip...

Funny how I wrote about wanting to increase training volume... careful what you ask for... Stage 1 kicked off with It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (ISLAGIATT). While I haven't ridden this as a standalone too many times, I've done ISTLA (the extended mashup with Thin Air) many times, so I'm very familiar with it. Mostly, I'm doing these workouts on the "Focused" mode, so they are slightly reduced in their power targets not to derail the training plan by too much. I'm not looking to utterly destroy myself during the stages, considering that I plan on riding into Knighthood on the last day and have a 4DP test coming up in two weeks. So ISLAGIATT was solid tempo fun at ~3.1 w/kg weighted average for the 2 hours. ToS Stage 1: ISLAGIATT Then, stage 2... I was looking forward to The Bat. The new workout that replaced the NoVid "Batman Intervals" with this Mental Toughness themed workouts. Good marketing! There are 6 intervals with ...

The Tour Of Sufferlandria is just around the corner. One week to go. I've decided that it's going to be easy, so I have a much, much better idea. I'm going to ride into a Knighthood on the last day. See? Now, this is an excellent idea, just like winning the Most Aggressive Rider's Award on that snowy Giro mountain stage from ISLTA. The last day of the Tour is 3-stages long. So, if I'm going to be around 3 hours in the saddle anyway, then why not push on for another 7 hours or so? A Knight of Sufferlandria is on my todo list for H1 this year anyway, and the 3-stage jump start is just what I need to give me momentum to keep going. So what I'm thinking is to ride the Tour backward upon completion. Here are the stages:  https://thesufferfest.com/pages/tour-of-sufferlandria-2020-the-stages So I'll start with the 9th and last stage: "Grunter's Gran Fondo" - Power Station + 2. Angels + 3. Thin Air Then, backtrack, replacing workouts f...

More Volume, that's what I want. One of the many joys of being relatively unemployed is that I can "afford" to spend more time on the bike (but not much more than that). Coupled with my overeating tendencies (don't get the wrong idea, I'm ~12% body fat, ~67kg), I still want more training volume to polish off those extra snacks, another serving of pasta and yes, please, I would like to see the dessert menu. At the moment, I'm working on The Sufferfest's all-purpose plan that has me riding about 6-7 hours a week (plus 1-1.5 hours strength and same for Yoga). As such, my longest ride in a block is around 2.5 hours (ISLTA longest session on the plan). So sometimes, I find myself, well, longing for longer. I want to hit off on those 3-6 hour rides, good old quality time with myself, off-limits to the world, off the grid, not to be interrupted. Sometimes, I just go on. I'll finish ISLTA and keep going for another hour. Other times, I might push on ...

Just announced today, the 2020 Tour Of Sufferlandria is going to include 9 stages, starting Feb 15 till Feb 23: ISLAGIATT (1:50 150TSS) The Bat (1:15*) + Fight Club (Remastered! 0:59 84TSS?) G.O.A.T. (0:42 49TSS) Team Scream (1:09 92TSS) Violator (1:03 63TSS) Hell Hath No Fury (1:04 92TSS) Igniter + Joyride (0:20 21TSS + 0:29 47TSS) The Tool Shed + 14 Vise Grips (1:02 96TSS + 0:55 77TSS) Grunter's Gran Fondo: Power Station + Angels + Thin Air (0:49 60TSS + 0:55 81TSS + 1:00 80TSS) So, assuming The Bat* is going to around 30 minutes we're looking at about 12.5 hours in the saddle over 9 stages. *[UPDATE] Version 6.8.0 of The Sufferfest App introduced new training plans to cover the ToS . These include not only the prep, but also: 1. Post Tour Recovery 2. ToS Stages 3. ToS Gran Fondo Challenge Looking at the ToS stages, we get a sneak peek into The Bat : 1:15 of what looks to be a horrid MAP workout: 5-minute intervals [30s MAP | 4m 95% FTP | 30s A...