Training frequency fluctuations

[KWalker]

So I'm not on a time crunch every week, but I can be. I have to travel out of town on some weekends and not on others. So, my weekly riding schedule allows for the following:

Weeks in town:
Sunday: Longer ride up to 4 hours, usually around 3
Monday/Tuesday: One day can be up to 3 hours, the other has to be 1.5 to 2. There is no set time when which day will be which, it depends on when I get out of work.
Wednesday: Off because of class
Thursday/Friday: Same as Monday/Tuesday, but Friday usually ends up being the shorter day
Saturday: Off, recovery day

Weeks out of town:
Same, but minus the Sunday ride and potentially minus a Friday and/or Monday ride.

So lately, since I haven't had my download cradle, its been tough to manage, but I thiiiink I finally have one on order from the states and it should arrive in a week. I have only had the powermeter for one season and unfortunately lost 90% of my training data when my external hard drive crashed. So, I have no real CTL data.

In short, I want to try and figure out a way to plan for these fluctuations a little bit better with my training. I usually know my plans a week in advance so its not hard to plug in things as necessary, but essentially my weekly riding can be anywhere from 8-9 hours a week up to 13 hours a week with no real set pattern. If I'm in town I see no reason to not get a nice ride in on Sunday when I don't have to worry about getting back to work on time and commuting so I'd like to keep that.

So far I've just been substituting workouts depending on availability. For example, last week I did 4 hours with an hour of tempo/sweet spot on a local sustained climb instead of my normal 2.5 hours with my 2x20s in there. On a week without that much time, I might do more tempo and 2 days of 2x20 instead of one.

This plan hasn't been too sound and has just burned me out, thus driving me towards scrapping the power meter and using PE and general legfeel again. Until my download cradle arrive, does anyone have any suggestions or anecdotal evidence for dealing with this problem?

 

[DancenMacabre]

I've noticed you asked a variety of similar questions in several forums.

While this may not be the answer you are looking for, nor am I putting myself up as a candidate, but it sure seems like you would benefit from having a professional coach to help give you some guidance in reaching your goals. Assuming you have some clear goals, if not, then add "goals" to the list of things a good coach can assist you with.

There's no doubt whatsoever that self-coaching can be highly rewarding, not to mention successful. Plenty of riders do so with aplomb.

Yet not everyone is well-suited to be their own coach. It takes a great deal of time to plan a proper training routine and of course, that assumes you've already put in the many hours to educate yourself and learn about the training principles, periodization, and all the background that's needed.

Presumably you've already spent some time doing plenty of training, spent some money in getting a powermeter and other training equipment, as well as the effort of keeping up with a routine. If you've done that and still have a lot of questions, which is perfectly fine by the way, then why not give yourself a chance to have the best results and reaching your potential by hiring a good coach.