Project Syd: Starting
Periodically, we'll post progress on one of our Development riders, Sydney Cooke, as she starts training and racing. The best place to start is the beginning, so here is it:
Starting. It is sometimes the hardest part of almost any event, activity, or project. In traditional project management, you mark a task as 50% complete when you have started it. Especially with cycling after a long day at work, or getting back on the horse after a long lay off, 50% seems like a conservative estimate. I know if I just roll out the door on days when I hear the couch calling, I'll have a perfectly acceptable 
workout. Starting, in general, has you evaluating what you can do, and sometimes involves difficult trade-offs (like sitting on the couch eating a bowl of cereal versus riding for a couple of hours at tempo). Such is the case with Sydney, one of our Development riders. Syd is newish to cycling, and a neophyte when it comes to racing. For Syd, getting started is hard from a time management perspective -- she's entering the back-half of a demanding nursing program, and she has little time outside of school and volunteering. Fortunately, like many of the riders on our team, Syd has a solid sports background, and juggling the demands of sports and the rest of life is not a new experience. She grew up as a team sports athlete, competing in anything from Tennis to boy's little league (until they forced her to quit).
She doesn't have a specific endurance sports background, and her main cardio at her start was being late to class. She'll need to dust off some of her old sport life balancing act, and learn to fit training for cycling into her routine.
Starting a more formalized training program for Syd meant establishing a baseline. For that, we decided to do a 30 minute test with a PowerTap. The test was simple, warm-up for about 30 minutes or so -- she favors a long, hardish warm-up -- and ride a flatish road for 30 uninterrupted minutes of suffering. We would examine the resulting 30 minute average watts she produced, and use this as a start in understanding of her fitness, and what she could and should do.
The result? A great start. See the video.
She heeded the warnings about going out too hard, and dosed out her effort quite well. In the end, she turned in an impressive performance, one that is hopefully indicative of future 2010 season performances. Syd did 30 minutes at ~3.5 watts/kg. For someone without any training, that's a great result. Doing some quick estimating based on a slightly flawed assumption and using Andy Coggan's power profiling chart, you can see that her untrained status is quite high up the ranks -- she's nipping at the heels of cat 3 men if the terrain goes up.
We'll check back later on Syd's progress, and hopefully show what happens when someone goes from owning a bike to racing one.
--Joe Laltrello
