Back in the pool again.

So after only a little over a month break I got back in the pool last week. It's amazing how much swim fitness you can lose in a month. I did my 200 meter time trial and 400 meter time trial to see where i'm at. My 400 meters was 6:09 just before the Ironman it's not gone back to 6:37. I had the 200 meter down to 2:54 that's gone back to 3:09.

Lots of work to do. I'm not going to spend as many hours in the pool this year as I did last year. If I can get into the pool twice a week I'll be happy. I suppose ideally if I could swim twice a week and run and bike twice a week that would be a good week.

Did the old power test on the tubo trainer my computrainer which is pretty much what i'm going to be using seems to measure the power slightly different that my power tab hub. I am doing a slightly different test to get my FTP (functional Threshold power, which is basically how much power you could hold for an hour). The old test I did before was warm up then a series of 30 second intervals then easy spin then 5 minutes as hard as you can, then 15 minutes recovery then 20 minutes as hard as you can. Once you have the average power from the 20 minutes you assume that is 95% of what you could hold for an hour. The newer test i'm doing is similar enough you do a bit at the start think there is a one minute all out effort. Then there is two 8 minute efforts. You then add these together and get the average power. Then your FTP is 95% of this.

Anyway without boring you too much there is a big enough difference between the test results on the Powertap and the Computrainer. The power tap bascially gave me an FTP of 255 but the Computrainer only reckons it's 207. I suppose for training it really doesn't make much of a difference I'll stick to what the computrainer says and work the improvements off that. The only bad news is according to the computrainer I'm an untrained person. The below chart lets you work out where you stand as a cyclist. You get your FTP then divide it by your weight. so 207/86. Hopefully I'll be able to work on getting that score up a bit.