2009 Year-end review season stats

Definitely my best season ever thanks to a growing strong team, some good luck, and a lot of hard work! Here is the summary statistics for my 2009 season racing as a cat 1 for one of the top amateur teams in the South. This year I am reporting my statistics from January 12 – October 4. January 12th was my first training day back from a two-week mission trip to Nicaragua at the beginning of the year, where I also had the opportunity to race and win a local criterium on a borrowed bike. October 4th was the date of my last race for this year’s season. So over the course of those 266 days, I logged these statistics:

Statistic	Avg	Max	Min	Total
Weekly training time (hours)	14.72	20.77	8.7	559.72
Weekly distance (miles)	268.4	369.4	187.9	10,197
Workouts per week (#)	9	13	4	443
Weekly climbing (feet)	14,124	29,275	4,062	536,772

Just for fun, I’ve also included my yearlong stats from 10/5/08 – 10/4/09:

Statistic	Avg	Max	Min	Total
Weekly training time (hours)	13.3	20.77	1.82	691.65
Weekly distance (miles)	237.5	369.4	31.5	12,350
Workouts per week (#)	9	13	4	493
Weekly climbing (feet)	13,261	29,275	4,062	663,032

2008 – End of the year review

Personally, this was definitely my best season ever. Also, as a team we had our strongest year yet and things are looking absolutely amazing for next year. I am in the middle of a Windows Vista installation so I thought I would take a minute or two to report my 2008 statistics. I’ll report from January 1st to October 12th (last race of the season) even though a lot of the pre-season training happened in December 2007 and won’t be included here.

Statistic	Avg	Max	Min	Total
Weekly training time (hours)	14.65	20.18	9.6	600.5
Weekly distance (miles)	252.2	337.1	159.7	10,339
Workouts per week (#)	11	15	5	443
Weekly climbing (feet)	12,848	20,348	6,158	526,785

2008 Season review - total weekly mileage

2008 Season review - time spent in heart rate zones

Ivan Basso, Doping, and Redemption

Ivan Basso is riding again very soon.

Ivan Basso will be racing again very soon at the Japan Cup on October 26. I personally am glad that he is racing again, and I hope that he really has put the temptation to dope behind him. I like his plan of publishing all of his workouts, power data, etc… online so that people can see how much he is training and how realistic a given performance is. This is similar to the approach by Greg Lemond to address the doping problem.

Greg Lemond is proposing that riders be more transparent with their power data so that an abnormally large spike in power output that cannot be attributed to physiological peaking for an event would be better evidence of doping than blood urine tests. This is a very good idea, but the accuracy and reliability of power meters would call this into question. Plus, how could one define what the upper limit is if you are having a really good day? Also, what if a rider’s power meter were to “break” on the day(s) that they dope? I am guessing that some of this would be combined with regular testing too. Still, Lemond’s idea is good because the more transparency we have, the harder it will be to cheat.

So that is why I like to put all my power data online. Coming soon (probably early next week) I will post my season statistics. I can already tell you that my mileage and time on the bike was up from last year:

	2008	2007
Hrs/week	14.65(avg), 20.18(max)	13.62(avg), 18.01(max)
Miles/week	252.2(avg), 337.1(max)	241.5(avg), 358.3(max)

2008 Totals (1/1/08 – 10/12/08)
10,339 miles and 526,785 feet of climbing (12,848 feet per week)

I’ll do a more complete post with graphs later!