Tour of Missouri Time Trial: watch out for Jani Brajkovic!

Friday’s Time Trial should be an exciting stage at the Tour of Missouri, featuring several serious contenders including TrainingPeaks member Jani Brajkovic, who was fourth in this year’s long Giro Time Trial and 8th at last year’s Worlds Time Trial. Leading up to the Tour of Missouri, Jani trained at altitude in Colorado, where he discussed the benefits of training with power and how he expects to perform in Friday’s time trial. Watch the video interviews here, and check out some highlights below.

Discussing why he keeps track of his training data, Jani explains, “I love to see the numbers, I love to see how my training goes, my improvement, and also sometimes you can not really tell just by how your body feels, how recovered you really are, so many times with this software, you can really see when you need to rest and when you need to go harder.”

At only 130 pounds, Jani is also very interested in keeping track of his nutrition data in TrainingPeaks, making sure he is eating enough to keep up with all his training. “I also use the nutrition side, I really like it, to track my calorie intake, macronutrients, and all that stuff.”

Jani uses a power meter in both training and racing, since there are different benefits to each scenario. “It doesn’t really change my bike weight, it doesn’t affect performance, but it’s a lot of information you can get from racing with it… training with a power meter, you can do much more specific workouts. It doesn’t give you false data, like sometimes maybe with heart rate, you can get a higher heart rate, or if you’re doing short intervals, there’s not enough time to reach that target heart rate.”

The real benefit of tracking so much data, however, comes not with each individual workout, but in analyzing cumulative workouts over time to target your training towards a specific event like the Tour of Missouri. “Once you get your threshold power right, it’s amazingly accurate. You can see your TSB, TSS, IF, just so much data, it’s incredible. The best results I had was when I was just a little about zero, maybe ten points plus.”

Looking past this week’s race, Jani confirmed that he has signed with Team Radioshack and speculated about his future. “I always said, if Johan goes somewhere, I want to go with him, of course, if he wants me, because I think he’s the best in the business, and that’s never going to change. I think I’m very safe with him and I love his system of work.”

At the Giro this year, his first grand tour riding in support of Lance Armstrong, Jani rode well, and hopes that he will get the chance next year to ride in the grandest tour of the all: the Tour de France. “I thought it was going to be harder, but I felt pretty good, so yeah, I had a good Giro. Ideally, I would like to do the Tour, of course, but there’s another 20 or so riders that want to do the Tour, so we’ll see how things go… if I do the Tour I’d also like to do Tour of California.”