Towards the Duo Normand (and Grumpy Bob's dubious turbo training soundtrack)

Grumpy Bob has blogged a preview of this year's Duo Normand two-up team time trial (2010 Duo Normand Preview) - and about a week or two ago, began thinking about ramping up the training for the event.  GrumpyBob's been something of an afficionado of Pete Read's turbo training manual - The Annual Manual a.k.a. The Black Book. This presents a straightforward and progressive month by month training programme.  It's safe to say this was behind Grumpy Bob's (and indeed "Grumpy" Art Vanderlay's) time trialling successes of 2000-2003.  Since then, as he's written, his ability to stick to a programme of training has been compromised by the demands of the day job.  Over the time GrumpyBob was following the programme, he was able to fine-tune and tweak the programme to suit his strengths and weaknesses.  this was made easier by the collection of turbo training sessions that Pete Read presented in The White Book. [Apologies for the lack of web links to Pete Read, but last time Team Grumpy looked, his web presence had vanished]

So the programme Grumpy Bob has adopted fits in some turbo sessions of short hard intervals around longer low intensity road rides and some time trials (Grumpy Bob has a '50' on 5/9/10 and a '10' on 12/9/10, the two weekends before the Duo Normand itself.  This morning's session was a set of 10 x 1 minute intervals at slightly higher than race pace, with 1 minute recoveries.  Quite a difficult session, albeit quite brief.  This, coupled with another variant, are progressive as the Duo looms on the horizon: in one case by doing more intervals, in the other by extending from 1' to 2' to 3' (and so forth) intervals.  Grumpy Bob thinks these, together with the remaining time trials will be enough to peak for the Duo, ideally with a few days easy beforehand.

This morning's music accompaniment was provided by Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO.  This unlikely sounding mob are a Japanese psychedelic inprovisational group, and the album in question was Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!).

Even more unlikely than its applicability to an interval session is its cover, pictured right (click to link to Amazon).  Still, it provided an amusing distraction as Grumpy Bob pounded away in the garage at 6am this morning!  (The music, not the cover).  It's something of a celebration that the iPod is now behaving itself, and scrobbling to last.fm.