Nathan Collier: Progress

A friend of mine, Liz Sampey (her blog site: http://www.speedy-lizard.com/blog.html), recently wrote about how hard it is to back off and recover from hard training sessions and races. Us 'A' types are great at pushing the limits, but when it comes time to restrict our limits and save ourselves for the next big training session, we suck. I'm pretty sure I've blogged about this myself a couple of times myself. It's a recurring theme for a lot of us. That's why some of us, like Liz, hire a coach to tell us to back off. Then there are bullheaded individuals like myself who wouldn't listen to a coach if they had one and MUST learn the hard way every time. I use this blog to log these mistakes in order to not make them again. Essentially, this blog is my coach. I do us a cookie cutter training plan from Lynda Wallenfels, LWCoaching.com, who is also kind enough to tell me how to stack her plans around the races I have for no additional charge, but there is no other consultations to guide me along through the season. Blogging about how training is going and doing a self analysis to correct mistakes is the best way for me personally to progress as a rider. After a four week training block with three progressively harder weeks and one recovery week, I completed another performance test. Looks like my method is working because once again I beat my performance test record. I made a 2.6% improvement during a fairly windy day so it could have been more. Thank goodness too, because coaches aren't cheap.

In other news, the old race bike has been sold and the new one is on it's way! A review of the Scott 910 will be coming soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures from my training rides from the last four weeks.