Two Wheel Blogs

I am one major tired puppy tonight and I'm feeling pretty darned good about it. I'll remember last two days for a long time to come. Day number one was meant to be a threshold workout that turned into a 1 hour time trial. Today's workout, a 4 hour core strength session - another blue collar epic.

Normally I'd be awfully satisfied just at the two days' accomplishment. The icing on the cake is that I didn't have to back off because of back pain. No, I'm not foolish enough to think I'm out of the woods on this quite yet. But I do think I'm getting somewhere. I have not felt this optimistic about my back problems since the whole thing began nearly a year and a half ago.

What kind of difference does riding without back pain make? Check out this critical power chart:

The shaded blue area covers time durations from just under 10 minutes to just over 1 hour. The green line shows Mean Maximal Power, in watts, for every duration from 1 second out to the duration of yesterday's ride. The red line shows Mean Maximal Power for rides this year. Note that the x-axis is a logarithmic scale.

Yesterday's ride set a new water level for 2007 for durations from 10 minutes all the way out to 60 minutes. Days like that don't come along very often. They particularly don't come along after 5 days of hard workouts and a very negative TSB. The difference was in not having to back off the pedal pressure because of back pain.

Today, rather than relax or ride after work, I put in 4 good hours of hard labor with rake, shovel and hoe out in the back yard. Might as well push my luck... No pain!

I'm tired. I'm optimistic. Now I'm fearful I've also brought the voodoo curse down on myself for speaking about it openly. So do me a huge favor and don't tell anyone, OK?