Tour Route Announced

Sorry I haven't posted here for a while but it is now time to start making a few more entries into this blog particularly with today being such an important day in terms of the Tour de France. Today, in Paris, the route of the 2011 Tour de France was announced and quite a route it is too. I'll not ramble on here about all the details of the 2011 tour as they are widely available now but once again riding the Tour de France is going to prove a major challenge. It still isn't certain whether I will be riding the route in 2011 but I very much hope to do so and I'm going to be commencing my training with that in mind and working towards that objective.

At this time of year I like to perform one of my benchmark tests to establish what my blood lactate is at a fixed absolute workload and I performed that test this evening. I did a sweet spot session at 88 to 94% of my Functional Threshold Power and measured my blood lactate at the end of the session. This test gives me an idea of my physiological efficiency and an approximation of how efficient or otherwise I currently am in terms of energy production and my reliance on carbohydrates when working at intensity close to my threshold.

I was pleased with the results recording 3.1mmol/l at the end of the session which confirms that I was working comfortably below my threshold. When I completed this test last March I recorded a level of 2.3mmol/l but that was following a full winter of pre-tour training. I'm actually very satisfied with my current performance given that I have not been doing a huge volume of training and have essentially just been ticking over.

So, hopefully the road to Paris in 2011 has now started, I'll be drawing up my training plan to take me through to next July and I also intend to make that training plan available for purchase as a dynamic training plan using the TrainingPeaks interface. I don't have the faintest idea whether anybody will be interested in buying a plan to train up to ride the Tour de France but it will do no harm to make it available!

Onward and upward!