Sprints are working?

I think my September Sprints experiment is working.

It makes sense that your body can only do what you have trained it to do, but I didn't fully appreciate it until I saw the numbers. After only two or three weeks of very unstructured sprint workouts (in some cases that means just throwing in a few sprints on my endurance rides), I can already see a difference. Yesterday I was doing a just tool around town kind of recovery ride. I decided to give one big effort up Persons Street to open my legs. I went hard, but didn't feel like I was hell-bent. My 30-second power from that spur-of-the-moment effort was 575 watts, 30 watts higher then my previous 30-second best power. That info nugget along with the data from my Grant Park crit on Saturday (best 40-min normalized power ever by 20 watts @ 295w).

Based on this preliminary anecdotal success, I'll continue the experiment into October to see where it takes me. I'll never be a sprinter, but I think this type of workout could really help me race crits better next year.