This Saturday’s Tour of the Battenkill has been my targeted event for the past 8 months. A variety of awesome life occurrences last year took precedence over racing or serious training and I went all of last season without turning a competitive pedal. When things finally settled down in August and I decided it was time to get serious on the bike again, I became fixated on Battenkill as a race that I wanted to contest seriously—I loved the difficulty of the course and all the climbing—and decided that this would be the winter where training never got put on the back burner, but would remain a primary focus. And it worked. I rarely missed a workout during the off-season and also completed a serious resistance training program in addition to my work on the bike. And I’ve had some good results so far this season, including a couple close finishes.

So since this weekend’s race is such a big deal to me, I thought that each day this week I’d post about my preparation, which obviously will include relevant power files. This is a peak week so I’m going hard on Monday and Wednesday to prime the pumps and keep the intensity up. Above is yesterday’s VO2/AC step-up ride. I felt good.