Staying healthy and being quicker

Continuing my theme of prioritising your own health and fitness to train and ultimately to race.
Keeping your immune system up to speed should be at the top of the list. 
If you succumb to an infection or a head cold then any training plan will also suffer as a consequence. You are never going to train out ill health.
If you do have a run of health related incidents then analyse why that is the case.

I am not going into the murky world of what to do and what to eat et all. There are plenty of resources that are more than happy to spell out why you are going wrong. Just use your common sense to weed out the spurious information from the usually sensible.

Using a training management system throughout the season will help you gauge the status of your training input.

For amateur racing where the focus should be quantified on participation, enjoyment and success, a chart detailing important aspects is very useful.
Using Golden Cheetah the chart below is a breakdown of rides and power over a 5 minute period. I have used a 5 minuute block quite arbitrarily but 5 minute power can have good indications for aerobic and glycolytic based energy systems that hold up well for a road racing cyclist.
A time trialler may well use a 20 minute block.





Winter training more than anything is ALL about consistency.
My chart displays very few gaps from November to mid March. The red line of 5 minute power is slightly skewed on the high side until January where I was able to calibrate the training hardware for a more realistic figure for power.
The training load (CTL) shows a rise and then a slight levelling off.

The next graph




shows the first part of my season. 5 minute power does trend upward hopefully as a consequence of the racing!
However, charts do not tell all the story. A good race performance is never to be predicted.

My last target for 2013 is the National Road Race TLI championships around Audlem on the 15th September.

 
 Current training / racing is showing a consistent rise in CTL and underpinning this is my continued good health. The graph displays a fall off and de training curve if I was to stop all training from tomorrow. 
Obviously that is not the best thing to do and will continue to manage my daily training on as required basis to combat signs of fatigue by modifying the training plan.