Road To Powerman: Zofingen Day 1 and 2

Well after a quick 50min train trip I arrived in the race town of Zofingen. Its a old walled town founded in 1201 with a population just short of 11,000 people. Now that's enough of a lesson for now. I’ll upload pics of the town in later post.

Not a great deal to update here today. Monday for me was a rest day and was about settling into my room. Im staying in the Hotel Engel here in town, about 500m away from race HQ and transition. Got to the hotel the 2 main staff members here that run the hotel remembered me from last year and even put me in the same room! Now thats service you don’t get every day but sure makes life a hell of a lot easier.

Tuesday was my first ‘training‘ day here in town. A 25km ride to the top of the first climb and back into town. The main focus of the session was to start opening up the legs a little. 2 5min effort at race pace, then 2 2min efforts at threshold. One thing I have learnt over the years on the bike is my legs need a little intensity during the taper after I have around 5 easy days just to loosen the up and make sure they remember what they are doing. They other focus of the session was really starting to work out benchmarks for the first part of the bike leg. By benchmarks I mean how slow i should be going in those early stages. This is done by riding at around the lower end of my HR race zone for on the bike fresh. I’ll use this number with some speed guidelines as well as my HR is usually 10bpm higher across the board on race day. Add to that a 10km run before hand , your HR could end up anywhere. My race plan relies pretty heavily on getting the early sections of the race right so this is key.

Today another ride is planned as well as a short run. Below are some pics of what the first km of this race looks like. All I can tell you is this hill starts solid and gets stepper as it goes.