Tonight, despite a few regulars being missing, we had 22 people attend our spin session at the Blackburn velodrome.  This is a new record, I'm glad I made a big bolla sauce and brought extra pasta this week, as no-one went hungry at the end of the night.  We had a slight problem with missing whiteboard markers, but thanks to Alex, that was quickly sorted.

We must be doing something right, more people keep coming and they keep coming back.  Compared to last year, where we had an average of 8 or 9 per session, this growth is amazing.  I'm not counting myself and Nathan as we're coaching the session, but also doing the 'sprinters stream' which is a 40 minute block, while the enduros generally suffer for 90 minutes.  Nath and I are tagging at half time, with him taking the warm up and I take the main body of the session, and we do our ergo sets when the other is looking after the session attendees.

I'm amazed by how well it's all going.  So far the Sunday DISC sessions have been sustainable, they're just at break-even point and we have a good core of trackies who make it regularly, it's not growing as quickly as Spin, but it's growing and we're happy with it so far.

In other news, my new weight training shoes arrived, and I was keen to use them, squatting (full) 3 x 10 @ 130kg (2 mins recovery between sets), then a couple of sets of jump squats (2 x 10 @ 90kg, 2 mins recovery), then some very feeble chinups and finishing with lunges.  The reason for the 3 x 10 for the full squats is that I'm still finding my limits.  I can 1/4 squat 5 x 210kg, but full squats are harder and I wasn't sure where to start.  Once I find some sort of limit the reps will drop and the sets will increase to work on strength.  This fairly hard leg session did steal a bit of thunder from my ergo set at Spin, peak power was down at 1318 watts from last week's PB of 1348, and I was stuffed for the last 15 seconds of our 45 second HCLR's (on the 2, quick, find HRMax!) so my power dropped away quite quickly during those efforts.

For anyone interested, here's my graph from Cycling Peaks

To make sense of it, what we did tonight was :

1. 10 min E1 warmup
2. 2 x 10s big gear slow start sprint on the 5 (the two big peaks, this is where we're hitting Pmax)
3. 5 x 10s sprint on the minute, these are in a medium gear from a rolling start
4. 5 min E1 recovery
5. 2 x 45s HCLR on the two
6. E1 warmdown

And that's the sprint session for the night. I wish we had some way to incorporate weight training and non-power work (the track bike has a Polar S720 and a speed sender so I get time, HR and speed, but not the great god, watts!) completely into Cycling Peaks. My charts for TSS etc are feeble, but it's not because I'm not training! 

Finally (I can't sleep for hours after running Spin ...) my accountant says I'm getting a tax refund for '06-'07 which I did not expect, so I might be able to spring for a good video camera to use for the Summer Sprint Series and for pedaling and weight training analysis.  I'm looking at a Sony VX2100 which is a good quality camera with all the fruit as recommended to me by Nick Bird from Media Production House/Waterbyrd Filmz.